Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist 9781472542496, 9780826443700, 9781441110220

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For my parents and In loving memory of Mary Dove

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Acknowledgements

As with all books, many people deserve a note of thanks for their time, patience, help and encouragement, in this case over the past five years that this has been in production. This monograph is the culmination of a great deal of research and so my first note of thanks must go to Mary Dove for her unstinting support during that time: she has been a source of great wisdom and her recent sudden death has been keenly felt by many. Norman Vance encouraged me to take up the challenge and consider Murdoch’s status as a philosophical novelist – an inspiration to many. Others who require a note of thanks for their support and guidance whilst at Sussex are Charles Conti and Brian and Valerie Short; each gave readily of their time. Bran Nicol, now thankfully a colleague at Portsmouth University, set me on the course to publication providing detailed criticism of the manuscript. His enthusiasm for the project helped to make it a reality. The Iris Murdoch Society has provided many discussion and friendships which have added to the scope of this work; Maria Antonaccio, Anne Rowe, Heather Widdows, Peter Conradi, Frances White, Pamela Osbourne, William Schweiker and Amy Smith all made suggestions and gave advice. Simone Roberts and Alison Scott-Baumann helped the development of Chapter Four which was most necessary. I am also in debt to John Bayley for his kind permission to reproduce the material from the Murdoch archives, especially Iris’s unpublished work on Heidegger. I should like to thank Katie Giles, the Murdoch archivist, as well as the staff of The British Library and Sussex University Library. I am grateful to Colleen Coalter, Anna Fleming and all at Continuum for their editorial guidance; thanks are also due to Gabrielle White at Random House UK Ltd for granting me permission to quote from the works of Iris Murdoch. Finally the most important acknowledgement must go to my friends and family for keeping me on course and providing distractions when necessary;

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Emma has been a great support throughout. I dedicate this book to my parents who have given me so much and have made this book possible. Chapter Three has recently appeared in a condensed form in The McNeese Review. Chapter Four will appear in Iris Murdoch and Moral Imaginings published by the McFarland Press.

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Introduction

I assume that the reader is already familiar with the basic facts of Iris Murdoch’s life and there is therefore no need for us to revisit that welltrodden path except, perhaps, in refining and developing areas crucial to this book. A consideration of the critical reception of her work, however, is certainly of major importance; not least for the fact that the contemporary judgement is that Murdoch’s work is unfashionable. Antonia Byatt states that ‘I get a sense at the moment that Murdoch is at that stage where the initial revelation/enthusiasm has worn off and people are wondering whether they overvalued her’.1 If we turn to some of the earliest criticism of Murdoch this was certainly not the case. Graham Martin goes as far to say that ‘Iris Murdoch comes to literature as a philosopher; her own novels reflect her philosophical interests and her general statements about the novel connect it, not with literary tradition, but with the history of philosophy’.2 This is where this work begins: the notion that the history of philosophy is more prevalent within Murdoch’s fiction than is usually given credit and is therefore both a valid and academically sound approach for this investigation. In her work Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), she comments that it is both right and proper for a philosopher to engage with fiction: It is not surprising that such a thinker [as Sartre] should use the novel as one of its modes of expression. The novel, after all, is itself a typical product of this post-Hegelian era . . . The novelist proper is in his way a sort of phenomenologist. He has always implicitly understood what the philosopher has grasped less clearly, that human reason is not a single unitary gadget the nature of which could not be discovered once and for all. The novelist has had his eye fixed on what we do, and not on what we ought to do, or must be presumed to do . . . He has always been what the very latest philosophers claim to be, a describer rather than a explainer; and in consequence he has often anticipated the philosopher’s discoveries.3

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Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

Although we could pass over this statement merely by dismissing it, as some critics surely would, as an apprentice’s first critical work, it is by no means unimportant. What is of primary importance here is Murdoch’s statement that the true novelist is, in some sense, a phenomenologist, certainly in the same sense that Husserl would have used the term; fiction then must be concerned with the inner life and is, as a vehicle of promotion, of most relevance to a promotion of certain philosophical ideas. It is from Sartre, along with other existentialist fictional writers such as Queneau and Beckett, that she develops her earliest fiction; certainly her first two published novels4 Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) can be said to fit this description, as I argue in Chapter One. What then is the scope of this book? It is primarily concerned with the synergy between Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy examining specifically, but not exclusively, Under the Net, The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), The Time of the Angels (1966), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) and The Green Knight (1993), along with her philosophical work. There is also detailed discussion of her arguments with Sartre, Plato, Heidegger, Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and the philosophical culture she found herself in at Oxford. Most importantly, however, I shall investigate the positioning of Murdoch’s fiction into an all-encompassing area marked either as ‘moral realist’ by Peter Conradi in The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (1986), or a kind of fictional rationalist, which has been suggested by Elizabeth Dipple in Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (1982), Antonia Byatt in Degrees of Freedom (1965), and others. The rationale for discussing these novels thematically rather than chronologically is clear: if we view Murdoch as a novelist in constant development we notice that her philosophical development is not linear, from continental existentialism through to a neoPlatonist position, but rather a movement in harmony with the experiences of her life. For example, her interest in Sartre was triggered by her work in France and not through the courses that she took at Oxford – far from it. In fact it would appear that Murdoch became disillusioned with the Mods and Greats course and opted instead to embrace Marxism and existentialism for a time (this is discussed in greater detail in the first chapter). Her interest in Heidegger, which resurfaces later in her life, also begins in this period. Conradi has argued that Platonism was the only philosophy which remained with Murdoch throughout her life and that she never disowned or discarded it; which is obvious when we assess her later work in the final two chapters. In this early period, however, we see that although Platonism is never far from the surface of almost every novel discussed, it is in competition with other, more contemporary philosophies. Perhaps this explains

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why this period of Murdoch’s work is the most discussed and most interesting to those discussing the influences on her philosophy and subsequent development later in her career; in order to understand her development of the ‘Christian mythology’ in The Green Knight and the return to the Nietzschean enchanter figure in The Philosopher’s Pupil we must have a firm grasp of her earliest work. I should also state here that Murdoch’s own philosophical writings are not limited to the same time frame as her fictional writings. In order to discuss fully Murdoch’s earliest fiction we must allow ourselves to examine her later philosophical work; and naturally the reverse applies: indeed it has been suggested by Hilda Spear and others that in order to fully appreciate The Green Knight we need to understand it in relation to Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) which also clarifies her earlier philosophical essays. In particular the recent discovery of an unpublished manuscript by Murdoch concerning the work of Martin Heidegger is of primary importance, as she refers directly to philosophical influences upon her fiction; this is discussed in detail in the third chapter of the book – the first time parts of this have been commented upon. The work that interests me most as a starting point for arguing the case for Murdoch as philosophical novelist is Guy Backus’s Iris Murdoch: The Novelist as Philosopher, the Philosopher as Novelist (1986) which, while focusing on one specific novel, The Unicorn (1963) is trying to widen the debate concerning Murdoch as philosophical novelist. This notion was first developed by Peter Wolfe in The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and her Novels (1966), but has since fallen from favour to be replaced by constructs of moral determinism or realism, a view engendered by Murdoch herself and developed more fully in the works of Conradi. Wolfe was the first to suggest that in order for critics to understand Murdoch’s fiction they must have a clear understanding of her philosophy; he states that ‘the thematic dovetailing in her work of philosophy and social comedy justifies a theoretical-descriptive approach’.5 Backus is of importance to this study of Murdoch’s early work, as he is the only critic (since Wolfe, although Hilda Spear comes close at times) who argues the case of Murdoch as philosophical novelist; indeed he goes further than this by suggesting that Murdoch is more philosopher than she is novelist and that her fiction was the best medium in which to express her philosophical ideas. As Alasdair Macintyre states: ‘Iris Murdoch’s novels are philosophy: but they are philosophy which casts doubts on all philosophy including her own’;6 the primary motivation of this work is to assess this statement. The ‘philosophical novel’ is a central part of this book and as such must be defined accurately so that Murdoch may be seen not only as a philosophical

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Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

novelist in her own right but also in the development of the philosophical novel as a whole. For Murdoch, the philosophical novel was a crystalline form that she wished to avoid as she believed it would impact negatively on narrative development. However, if we see her as conforming to this guideline – that in her early fiction a significant amount of space was allowed for the discussion, and ramification of the sorts of questions usually reserved for development in a philosophical text – then the case becomes clear. I argue that the impact of a range of philosophers, and the writing of her own philosophical works, moved her narrative into this area. So where does this fit in with the prevailing criticism of Murdoch? In order to answer this precisely it is necessary that we revisit both the earliest critiques of her work, namely those of Antonia Byatt, Peter Wolfe and Rubin Rabinovitz, as well as the second wave of criticism that arises in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the publication of both Guy Backus’s work, and that of Peter Conradi – seemingly at opposite ends of the critical spectrum, although there is some agreement between the two of them, which is discussed in the third chapter. This also marks the turning point for Murdoch studies, as the area grew and developed throughout the 1990s and beyond. Let us begin, however, with some points concerning Murdoch’s earliest work. The mere fact that Murdoch’s professional duties were, for at least 20 years, concerned with the analytic school of philosophy (as was her higher education) makes this examination of her fictional and philosophical work a worthwhile venture; indeed, no serious work has been completed on the discussion between, for example, Murdoch’s arguments against Stuart Hampshire and her fiction even though she dedicates The Sovereignty of Good (1967) to him and concerns herself with his work in the essay; part of this work is concerned with redressing this specific issue. Murdoch’s enthusiasm for analytic methods is clearly demonstrated in her first work on Sartre; so why is it, then, that despite her frequent references to Ayer, Ryle, Hampshire and Wittgenstein, critics assume that whereas Weil or Derrida may provide a coherent critique of her work the ‘analysts’ do not? Perhaps this is not only the fault of critics. Murdoch herself insists that ‘the novel is the novel and philosophy is philosophy’,7 and this could be taken to mean that any philosophy that concerns the self with hard-nosed argument or structured description is ruled out of court as an influence: or at least as a positive influence. Her elevation of a set of terms in which the novel can be discussed, the ‘crystalline’ and the ‘journalistic’, is relatively conservative in that the terms could be incorporated into the work of a literary critic, such as her husband, without discomfort being felt. Perhaps we

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should first look at how we define the philosophical novel before we look at the critical arguments for and against Murdoch being yoked with this title that she wholly rejects. How then does Murdoch face the Wittgensteinian problem of language and the self? The great difference between the language and the philosophy of Murdoch’s novels and that of her philosophy resides in her method of construction. Although it may be argued that her fiction embraces the same values as her early essays, contained in Existentialists and Mystics (1997), it requires a much more graphic and dramatic literary technique; her use of philosophical terms and Latin or Greek, although necessary for her philosophical essays, would be intolerable in a sustained novel created for a general readership. Two caveats should be employed here: one, that Murdoch uses less ‘technical’ language in her essays and reviews as opposed to a great deal of contemporary philosophy in order to open her writing to a greater audience and, secondly, that she only uses terms or archaisms when absolutely necessary rather than displaying her extended vocabulary. This necessarily serves her well in her fictional writing and is partly the reason why she sustained such a high readership. It is interesting to note that Sartre employs the same technique in La Nausée (1938) to develop the same practice: by using systematic language that he exploits to greater effect in L’Être et Néant (1943). Another interesting similarity occurs between her writing and that of Bertrand Russell. Russell argues in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) the necessity of studying the material world without the intervening barriers of behavioural theories or psychological biases. The human point of view, Russell insists, is an arbitrary and limited standpoint from which to interpret reality; it is, in addition, only one point of view. In relation to this is what can be termed Murdoch’s philosophical attitude in her fiction; with specificity of moral outlook. Like Russell she aims to be objective when appraising the world as a phenomenon existing independently of our concepts and desires; what is stark, however, is their varying stance on method. Russell’s reliance on logical formulas and equations to describe facts, propositions, and matter is in contrast to Murdoch’s belief in the novel as a more social way to convey ideas of morality and goodness. Murdoch naturally inclines towards the novel over philosophical treatise simply because it can convey various aspects of social reality by means of description, argument and character interaction. This influence of scepticism from Hume through to Russell and Wittgenstein allows her to concentrate on an individual reality rather than one which seeks to create a set of dogmas, much like the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) tried to. It should be noted here that Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

disagrees with much of what British scepticism promotes and only later in her career determined that Wittgenstein’s focus on language as the key to our understanding of the inner life was correct; this is discussed in the final chapter. The method of describing moral questions at their origin, the individual mind, creates opportunity for both comedy and social criticism, both of which Murdoch develops within her early fiction and beyond. The major challenge that Murdoch faces in her fiction, then, is that in order to fulfil her criteria of both a reflective and a dramatic narrative, along with implicitly expressing a moral ideal, she must develop her own fictional method which makes this work. Peter Wolfe claims that ‘Unlike L. H. Myers, or Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, she does not openly discuss philosophical ideas in her fiction. When her characters consider problems in ethics and morals, the problems are never presented as abstract doctrine’.8 It is unfortunate that Wolfe did not have the chance to read The Time of the Angels (1966) before he published his own work as they were published in the same year. I highlight this work at this point as it is useful for two reasons; that it is only the second book-length work of criticism to appear (after Antonia Byatt’s Degrees of Freedom) and the first work to pronounce Murdoch a philosophical novelist. In her work Iris Murdoch’s Paradoxical Novels (2001) Barbara Heusel remarks that: Wolfe’s point of departure is that Murdoch’s philosophical essays are always the first line of interpretation for critics who want to understand the complex depths of her novels. His argument is that ‘the thematic dovetailing in her work of philosophy and social justifies a theoretical descriptive approach’.9 This is a line of argument which I pursue here. Wolfe expands on this when he says that ‘Her philosophical essays make clear that without theory there can be no morality; with Socrates, Buber, and Marcel, she believes that the clarification of thought must precede man’s redemption’.10 It appears that since 1970 the philosophical influences on her fiction are reduced to one all-pervading influence, that of Plato: she refers to herself during this period in interviews as a Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist – clearly at ease with the critical conflicting view of her work as she believed that there was little she could do to stop speculation by literary critics. This is not to say that she does not use the work of other philosophers within her fiction but this is discussed later. Backus believes that ‘her description of herself as a ‘Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist’ refers to the tension in Murdoch’s work.11

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However, during the early part of her work, from her work on Sartre in Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) up until her conflict with Nietzsche and Heidegger in The Time of the Angels (1966) it appears that the whole history of Western philosophy, from classical Greek through to her contemporaries such as Stuart Hampshire and J. L. Austin, is channelled and debated within her fictional work, as well as the philosophy she was writing, often at the same time. There is, of course, an exception to this rule: The Red and the Green (1965), Murdoch’s complete immersion in the history of her homeland. Although it contains elements of the Platonic ideas of goodness these are shown to far greater effect within The Bell, so The Red and the Green was disregarded for this monograph. The same reason, that various philosophical views were better developed within other novels of this period, meant that The Sandcastle, The Italian Girl and An Unofficial Rose are almost absent. The Flight from the Enchanter, being noticeably similar to Under the Net, is included within the first chapter but is not discussed at the same length. The Unicorn is sidelined for three reasons: one, that it is already the subject, by itself, of a monograph by Guy Backus, and has been deconstructed paragraph by paragraph in his work; second, The Time of the Angels is a more explicitly philosophical work of fiction, and third, that The Time of the Angels functions more securely as a philosophical novel than The Unicorn which, being a rather sprawling creation, is more confusing and contradictory in its narrative. There are, however, common themes running throughout the four major novels of this period as well as significant differences. I also admit that there is little, if any, comment on the works of her middle period, those works since 1969, often considered to be among her very best. It would be very interesting indeed to draw out the impact of philosophy within The Black Prince (1973) or The Sea, The Sea (1978), for example, as Murdoch uses both the Shakespearian and Platonic to create fascinating narratives; for the purposes of this study, however, I have decided to focus on the more obvious philosophical novels in her oeuvre.12 Although she was occupied with the writing of philosophy until at least 1993 it is clear that her views had settled, after her early experimentation, into a firm neo-Platonism which is used as the basis for her later works. Unlike Conradi, Heusel or Elizabeth Dipple I propose that the title of ‘philosophical novelist’ can be applied here; although the nature of the philosophical impact on her later fiction differs from that on her earliest work. Conradi believes that Murdoch deserves to be known as a ‘moral realist’ or ‘moral psychologist’13 and secures the backing of Bayley for his work: ‘Peter Conradi’s book is by far the best introduction to Iris Murdoch’s work that has yet appeared, and as a critical study it will never be superseded’.14

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Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

High praise indeed, and a little worrying for all those attempting to reassess her legacy either in part or in full. This is not to detract from the work that Conradi has done in this particular area of literary criticism. His work The Saint and the Artist (1986) is rigorous and well argued, even though he is more inclined to focus primarily on The Bell as an example of Murdoch’s early fiction than to discuss other novels of this period at length; indeed he focuses his attention on the novels of her middle period. His biography Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001) is a wonderfully concise and entertaining study of her life, and does much to bring together both the personal and academic sides of Murdoch. However, his biographical work is not in question here. What is at stake, and most interesting for us, is the amount of guidance (and the friendship that resulted) he received from her during her lifetime. The problem of distance is bound to arise, as Heusel says: Presumably, Conradi knew Murdoch better personally than did any other critic treated in the present study. With such knowledge comes power but also potential problems of distance. He asserts that much more is going on in Murdoch’s novels than a philosopher might notice – or, if a philosopher did notice, he or she might not call Murdoch’s literary playfulness ‘philosophy’.15 This does not take into consideration the differing phases of Murdoch career because as Heusel says ‘He [Conradi] says that critics should read her entire canon in the light of her later novels, where she ably combines “myth with psychology”. Her philosophical development, he argues, began with existentialism and moved towards a more religious view similar to Buddhism’.16 This may well be the case if we intend to have a holistic vision of Murdoch as simply redefining her Platonic viewpoint throughout her career. However, as we shall discover, to create this unified view a great many paradoxes and contradictory statements must be overcome, justified and reconciled; a feat, I would argue, that is simply impossible. Indeed, it is difficult enough to break down Murdoch’s fictional career into three separate stages (why not two, or four?) and then to investigate the philosophical and fictional problems that arise when one tries to create some sort of harmony in her vision. One point of agreement on all sides of Murdochian criticism, and perhaps the most telling, is that Murdoch is replete with contradictions and borders on what both Conradi and Backus call the ‘anti-philosophical’.17 With a novelist such as Murdoch it is a major part of the challenge to separate out her philosophical words from her fictional actions, that is, to

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make the distinction between two different forms of writing and allow them to enhance each other, or rule out any such influence. The philosophical influences upon Murdoch are certainly not debatable – they are only discussed here because she either includes them explicitly in her fiction (Heidegger, Sartre, Plato to name just three) or refers to them numerous times and has written or argued with them in her philosophical essays (Wittgenstein, Weil, Nietzsche and Freud). There are others on the periphery, such as Derrida, who appear on the scene towards the end of her career. Furthermore there is Elias Canetti who could loosely be termed a philosopher of sociology, and who merits, by way of his relationship with Murdoch, some discussion. It has been a conscious decision to limit the discussion to the most significant influences on her narrative to prevent this book from becoming fragmented and obtuse. Suffice to say then that it is the impact of philosophies rather than novelists upon Murdoch’s narrative that concerns us here. The main question is not whether philosophy impacts upon Murdoch’s work, for even Dipple and Conradi are sure that the major philosophers mentioned above have some bearing on her development; it is the scope of this impact, her movement between philosophical schools of thought and the depth of philosophy within her own writing which is of paramount importance. As I argue in the third chapter, Heidegger and Nietzsche, for example, are both a tangible presence within The Time of the Angels: Heidegger explicitly through the long quotation from Being and Time, placed at the beginning of chapter 15; whereas Nietzsche is present implicitly throughout, indeed in human form in the character of Carel who embodies the very essence of the übermensch, the superman, the one alone. The Freudian symbolism and comedy within A Severed Head is indisputable, as I argue in the second chapter; and Murdoch herself has referred to The Bell as Platonic allegory and Under the Net as a Wittgensteinian comment on language,18 with major parallels with Sartre’s La Nausée. Indeed, Under the Net is an attempt to defy the barriers that language puts upon us; an attempt to be alone in the world, as it is only then that reality enforces itself and the novel ends in self-realization. Murdoch’s own comments about the novel’s possible status as a philosophical novel are discussed in an early interview: Murdoch: Under the Net has in fact got its own myth, but I think it probably hasn’t emerged very clearly in the story. Kermode: Is it a philosophical novel? Murdoch: In a very simple sense. It plays with a philosophical idea. The problem which is mentioned in the title is the problem of how far conceptualising and theorising, which from one point of

10

Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist view are absolutely essential, in fact divide you from the thing that is the object of theoretical attention. And Hugo is a sort of non-philosophical meta-physician who is supposed to be paralysed by this problem.19

Murdoch both expressly denies being a philosophical novelist and confirms that her early novels express philosophical ideas. Rubin Rabinovitz states that ‘a category – philosophical novelist – seems ready-made for her, but Miss Murdoch does not feel that she is a philosophical novelist in the sense that a writer like Sartre is’,20 and although he recommends that the reader of his critique study some of the philosophers mentioned above, as well as G. E. Moore and Stuart Hampshire, he mentions that: The futility of Miss Murdoch’s masking of the ideas in her novels, of her denials in interviews that she is a philosophical novelist, should be obvious to the reader who has managed to get through the necessary background material. Miss Murdoch is as involved with ideas as Conrad was with the sea. The reason for these denials is perhaps that Miss Murdoch has a fear of her own tendency to be dogmatic. In her philosophical articles, for example, she often overlooks gaps in her theories and possible objections to them.21 This is certainly true; any objective view of Murdoch’s writing must contend with these tendencies, as well as her lapses into subjectivity, which are perhaps most common in her earliest work whereas her later work has been caricatured by some as being rife with repetition. Rabinovitz is building on the work previously done by Antonia Byatt where she quotes from an interview from The Times in 1964, perhaps Murdoch’s most famous repudiation of the title of philosophical novelist: I suppose I have certain philosophical ideas about human life and character, and these must somehow find expression in my novels: but for the most part I am not conscious of this process and I think it would be destructive if I were.22 However, Rabinovitz believes that ‘rather than attempting to conceal the ideas in her fiction, Miss Murdoch might avoid didacticism better if these ideas were more overtly expressed and a better case made for opposing ideas’.23 This argument can be put against some of her early fiction, specifically An Unofficial Rose and The Italian Girl which are passed over here

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as the Platonic vision is more concisely seen within The Bell and, later, The Green Knight. There was, and still is, much debate as to what a philosophical novel is, and how it relates to other forms of fiction; especially realist fiction. I suggest that the ‘philosophical novel’ would have to contain the expression of philosophical ideas within the narrative, ideas that recall their academic setting, even when they are presented in a more general setting. I should add that the author of a philosophical novel must fluently express complex philosophical ideas which could include, but are not limited to: a discussion of morals and ethics, the role and function of society, the role of art in human lives and the development of human knowledge through personal experience (loosely ‘metaphysics’). All Murdoch’s major critics would agree that Murdoch tackles all these subjects within her early fiction. How she does this, however, is open to debate. Murdoch’s most famous essay concerning the nature and future development of the novel, ‘Against Dryness’24 (1961) is a definitive shift away from her earliest views (influenced in no small part by Sartre), and as such is considered as her manifesto for creative writing; ‘dryness’ being, for Murdoch, ‘smallness, clearness, self-containedness’25 I discuss this essay in detail in the first chapter, but it is worth mentioning here the impact it had upon early critics of her work. By ‘crystalline or journalistic’ Murdoch means that ‘[it is] either a small quasi-allegorical object portraying the human condition and not containing “characters” . . . or else it is a large, shapeless quasi-documentary object’.26 Murdoch criticizes both forms of the novel: the ‘crystalline’ for being overly restrictive to character growth and concerned only with the inner workings of the narrative, and the ‘journalistic’ for being too sprawling and incomprehensible. Lorna Sage notes that it contains Murdoch’s ‘aesthetic of imperfection’,27 as although it distinguishes between two types of novel, the ‘crystalline’ and the ‘journalistic’, it does not create a workable theory. Murdoch longs for a return to nineteenth-century realism: If we consider twentieth century literature as compared with nineteenth century literature we notice certain contrasts. I said that in a way we were back in the eighteenth century, the era of rationalistic allegories and moral tales, the era when the idea of human nature was unitary and single. The nineteenth century novel . . . was not concerned with ‘the human condition’, it was concerned with real individuals struggling in society.28 This was what Murdoch was aiming to create throughout her career with her desire to emulate the fiction of Dickens and George Eliot. She berates

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Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

her peers, William Golding in particular, for falling into neither one camp nor the other, presumably with herself recreating the glory days of the last century. The ‘dryness’ comes from the smallness of the prose, the inability for characters to develop naturally throughout the narrative. Byatt, however, does not take Murdoch at face value and argues instead, in the introduction to Degrees of Freedom (1965) that she is overly influenced by existentialist fiction throughout her early work (at least her first seven novels) and is herself a crystalline author. Byatt also has, as Conradi had, the problem of a lack of distance from the subject being discussed. Murdoch, Byatt admits, read Byatt’s work both in stages and as a whole before it was published and made comments and suggestions as to how it should be changed or re-worded.29 It is surprising, however, how much Byatt deviates from the myth, perpetuated by Murdoch, that Murdoch was a realist novelist. Byatt contends that Murdoch’s purpose in the creation of her earliest novels was the formation of impenetrable human beings. Murdoch believes that Dickens, Eliot and Dostoyevsky grant their characters enough freedom within the narrative to convince the reader that they could almost exist within the real world. Conradi, being a noted critic of Dostoyevsky, favourably compares Murdoch to him and suggests that her range of interests is subtly Dostoyevskyan.30 The major critical differences among Byatt, Conradi and Rabinovitz at this point in Murdoch’s career are the aims that she has in mind for her fiction. Each is concerned with either the artistic merit of the work (Conradi) or the philosophical overtones (Byatt and Rabinovitz). Elizabeth Dipple suggests that all of Murdoch’s fiction is overly concerned with the moral and what Byatt is really pointing to in Degrees of Freedom is the freedom of each of the characters to discover a Platonic moral life.31 Although this is certainly true as regards The Bell it falls apart under scrutiny of Murdoch’s other works, notably The Time of the Angels. Dipple is so concerned with Murdoch’s later pronouncements on the Platonic that she relegates Murdoch’s earlier shifting of position to a lower form of theorizing; this is the ‘work for the spirit’ that she envisions. One thing is clear: Murdoch is consistently inconsistent in her approach to fiction being ‘paradoxical, ambiguous, ambivalent, and indeterminate’.32 If we examine the critical reception of Murdoch over the past 30 years, as Barbara Stevens Heusel has, it is clear that Byatt’s work has remained of significant importance to literary scholars, whereas Rabinovitz and Wolfe have been largely passed over in favour of more recent works. Indeed the most contemporary work now being produced in the field of Murdochian studies is concerned with the finer points of her work and her links to

Introduction

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specific philosophers.33 It is unlikely that any more works by Murdoch will be published and it is therefore now possible to evaluate the impact that she had upon British fiction (as well as the issues that arise from her work). Critics have many more of Murdoch’s philosophical essays to refer to than Byatt or Wolfe ever did, and their contribution must be seen in this light. Byatt’s work is now considered to be the most concise early criticism and it is attention to Murdoch’s statements on aesthetics within ‘Against Dryness’ and ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ (1956) that sets her apart. Anglo-centricism also affects current attitudes to earlier criticisms of Murdoch. Had Wolfe and Rabinovitz written and published their work in England no doubt they would be more highly regarded. The same is true of Guy Backus’s work. Published in 1986 in Switzerland, it has registered little serious interest within Murdochian studies. The reasons are twofold. First it was printed in very limited quantities34 and it has, therefore, not fully entered the debate either in the United States or Europe. Another reason that has yet to be fully explored is what could be termed the ‘Conradi effect’. The hold that Conradi has over Murdochian studies at this point in time is obvious as he is both official biographer and eminent and authorized critic. His works have been widely read and commented upon, almost entirely favourably. Heusel makes the point that: Whereas Conradi’s book [Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist] has been reviewed widely since it was first published, the most readily available critique in the United States of Backus’s book is the entry by Cheryl Bove in her and John Fletcher’s Iris Murdoch: A Descriptive Primary and Annotated Secondary Bibliography New York: Garland (1994): it is a ‘detailed and thorough study (in English) of the correlation between Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy as seen in The Unicorn’.35 Heusel goes on to say that: Conradi’s book is: ‘An outstanding and comprehensive guide to Iris Murdoch’s works, this volume provides a detailed analysis of the characterisation, myths, allusions, and themes in Murdoch’s fiction and drama and relates her aesthetic and her novels’.36 These two references sum up the attitude of the critical community surrounding Murdoch’s novels: Conradi’s book has been much more widely read and appreciated.37 I would go further and say that Backus’s work has been systematically overlooked by contemporary debate, which does a great disservice to critics

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Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

of her work. Even though Conradi has written extensively since the publication of both critical texts over 20 years ago, he has never critiqued Backus’s work or even mentioned it in passing in an article or essay. Heusel suggests that ‘Backus is the most negative and controversial of the critics who have written substantial studies of Murdoch’s work’.38 However, she argues this point as Backus questions Murdoch’s aesthetic and presents Murdoch’s work as that of a working philosopher writing a novel, which, of course, she was for a time: it is certainly right that the majority of Murdochian critics comment on this subject. Although Backus focuses specifically on The Unicorn he asks a great deal of questions about all of her fiction: What is her value to the tradition of the novel? What makes it a philosophical novel? Is she overly influenced by both her husband and Canetti and does she hold sway over her own critics? His arguments are dealt with at length in the third chapter, but it is worth mentioning some areas of major discussion and disagreement. Backus assumes that because Murdoch’s early critics, especially Dipple and Byatt, had little or no grounding in philosophy they are naïve and cannot see the real issues within her work; they are too concerned, he says, with listening to Murdoch and pleasing her. Authors, he informs us, are not the best judge of their own work. So, whom do we have in the picture? Murdoch, her detractors, her supporters. Three camps; each with its own narrative. But none of these narratives, it will be argued, does justice to the real merits and defects of Murdoch’s fiction.39 I do not fully agree with Backus’s statements relating to Murdoch’s lack of judgement concerning her aesthetics, nor do I subscribe to his theory that a meta-Murdoch exists and that in order to fully understand her novels we must first use a code to decipher her fictional message. However, as Heusel points out, he raises questions which are central and his grounding in philosophy is sound.40 Perhaps his major fault is that he spends so much time in close textual analysis (each chapter and line is squeezed dry of meaning) that he fails to see The Unicorn on a larger scale. His failure to note the scope of her Platonic goals, and his whitewashing of comedic elements within the novel, is to his monograph’s detriment. His noetic line of argument highlights the lack of human engagement with the text. Backus accuses Murdoch of ‘critical imperialism’ and states that her aesthetic is at fault in two specific ways: ‘it appears surprisingly rigid and unfruitful for a thinker whose emphasis falls always upon the “uncomputability” of the real’41 – this is what has determined how Byatt and Dipple have

Introduction

15

read her novels, perhaps then it is not their fault but Murdoch’s. He also says that ‘it is as if a trained philosopher must be right about the theoretical space in which her own novels are situated’,42 suggesting that Murdoch had a problem with distancing herself from her novels when she wrote her philosophy, which she was doing throughout this period and up to 1993 at the earliest. Backus also argues the case that Murdoch’s ‘awareness of the informal nature of her “proofs” . . . clashes with her apparent doctrinaire conclusions [and her] description of herself as having been strongly influenced by Plato and Wittgenstein [which] highlights all her volte-faces and contradictions regarding form’.43 This seems to be rather missing the point of what Murdoch’s fiction is all about to the majority of her readers; if he had added that she was a developing novelist at the time of writing The Unicorn and so would surely have had differing philosophical influences one would feel more able to accept his critique. As it is Backus believes that no serious philosopher has given Murdoch any serious critique and he is, therefore, in a unique position. This assumption is clearly false as Murdoch’s relationship with Stuart Hampshire, as well as that with Gilbert Ryle, was based on a mutual respect but also on a continuing critique of each others works. Richard Rorty also expresses his interest in The Sovereignty of Good as he believed it to be a ‘determined rejection of appeals (in ethics) to foundational principles, rules, or axioms’.44 In the last 20 years serious philosophers from Oxford, Cambridge and further afield have engaged with both Murdoch’s philosophy and morals.45 This part of Backus’s argument has never been taken seriously. Maria Antonaccio, one of the most erudite philosophers to critique Murdoch, relaxes this tension by proposing that the novelistic and philosophical sides of Murdoch actually emanate from the same point and that the novels really are metaphysics as a guide to morals. Nevertheless Backus is important as it is rare for a Murdochian critic to veer away from the firmly held view of Murdoch as moral realist and this is precisely the area which I challenge. Backus’ systematic critique is useful in not only philosophically dissecting Murdoch’s fiction but also in suggesting that one critical line is impractical for a reassessment of the totality of her fiction. However, the major critic discussed here is Conradi, and it is useful to outline his basic argument. Backus is in a useful position to comment as he is trained in philosophy and understands Murdoch’s philosophical work more clearly than any other major critic writing regarding her fiction in the last 20 years. I believe that this area of Murdoch’s work has been overlooked and it is necessary for a literary critic with a philosophical background to reassess her work in this light.

16

Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

Conradi is concerned with Murdoch’s public statements concerning the relationship between her fiction and philosophy because such statements reflect her worldview. The problem with this, outlined above, is that of distance from the subject; he takes Murdoch’s pronouncements, for example that of Caen in 1978,46 at face value. Being her close friend towards the end of her life also allowed him unparalleled access, so we should not be surprised that he holds fast to the line that Murdoch claims in her interviews. However, if we look more closely at interviews with Murdoch throughout her life47 we can see that she is rather contradictory in her statements; this is explored in greater detail throughout this book. Suffice it to say here that she both claims not to be a philosophical novelist in the same sense that Simone de Beauvoir or Sartre is but also freely admits that moral philosophical ideas are clearly present within The Time of the Angels, Under the Net and The Philosopher’s Pupil. What this book aims to do is to expand on these statements and reveal exactly where in her fiction these ideas manifest themselves. It also argues the view that Freud should be accepted as a literary philosopher in his own right, and examines his overwhelming impact upon A Severed Head. Through this discussion the primary goals of the novels may be shown to be the moral and at times religious philosophy which pervades her early fiction. Conradi, however, believes that her primary goal is to make ‘the strange seem familiar . . . and the familiar seem strange’,48 a narrative strategy, I would argue, that is, at its heart, Freudian. The challenge that Conradi makes to those critics who claim that Murdoch is a philosophical novelist is to move the argument away from this area and towards more theological ground. Only here, he believes, will we be truly able to hear Murdoch’s voice in her fiction: ‘religion, in Murdoch’s view, is a recent invention. Spirituality and nihilism alike are ancient’ and that Murdoch moves towards ‘a Buddhist world-picture’49 in her later fiction, abandoning her inner Christianity; this is explored through the narrative of The Green Knight, especially the character of Peter. Although she claims to be interested by Eastern philosophy she never commits herself fully to it despite Conradi’s claims. Perhaps the most interesting claim by Conradi is his bringing together of Murdoch’s aesthetic world and her pronouncement that she was a moral psychologist, rather than a philosophical novelist. The distinction between the two positions is not irreconcilable, as I believe that in the later stages of her life Murdoch does move away from the myriad of influences on her fiction to a Platonic world view which embraces art and the moral life as the ultimate good; her pronouncement that we need a religion which can continue without the need for a deity is a classic

Introduction

17

neo-Platonist remark. Conradi argues that the influence of Freud (for the understanding of human behaviour), Plato (for the philosophical grounding in goodness) and Simone Weil (for her theory of unselfing and mystic vocabulary) come together in Murdoch to create a paradoxically unworldly writer with a base in the real world. This, he says, irrefutably leads one to the assumption that Murdoch cannot be anything but a moral psychologist. This refutes the notion of Murdoch as philosophical novelist at any point in her career. It is time for a re-assessment and a re-statement of the scale of Murdoch’s achievement. Does her fictional career rely solely on her being a moral psychologist, or is there still scope for an investigation into the phases of her career? I believe there is, and thus I intend to provoke more questions into the nature of her fiction. For example, Conradi claims that Under the Net is a ‘Buddhist quest to get beyond the duality of self and the world’50 which is interesting but ultimately immaterial as Murdoch would not have written it with Buddhism in mind; she was imaging the novel as an argument against Wittgensteinian constructs of language and as an attempt to better Sartre’s Nausea. Conradi, in his eagerness to re-place her fiction, allows too many of his own ideas to influence the real background of the text. What seems to be the case now is that, with Murdoch’s fictional writing beginning to fall out of favour with the academic establishment,51 there is a definite move away from seeing her work in toto to specific issues of gender, sexuality, power relations and her impact on the next generation of fiction writers. It would seem as if the need for reassessment of her fiction and philosophy is now overdue although Bran Nicol52 raises some new and timely questions concerning her relationships with Freud and Derrida, which are discussed in the second chapter. Barbara Stevens Heusel comes closest to imagining Murdoch’s work in stages when she positions her critique of Murdoch criticism into three distinct phases: 1954 to 1976, 1977 to 1986 and 1987 to the present: The critics’ analyses represent the stages of their understanding, which have relied to some extent on Murdoch’s progress in visualising and determining her own direction. Whatever the arguments and conclusions of these critics may be, each of them struggles with three major questions about Murdoch as a creator of fiction. These questions – To what extent is she a philosophical novelist? Is she concerned with realism? Is she a postmodernist novelist? . . . while decrying the act of categorisation, as did Murdoch, the study admits that categorisation remains an activity . . . which is common to all human beings.53

18

Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

Heusel allows others to argue the case and, while seemingly on the side of general consensus, with Conradi, she makes it clear that Murdoch’s work allows for contemporary critics to explore new avenues of investigation and reassess past theory. This book seeks to extend and enhance the knowledge of Iris Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy and the close links between the two. By using unpublished material from the Murdoch archive at Kingston University, I intend to disseminate knowledge of Murdoch’s interest in the ideas of Heidegger, made public here for the first time. By discussing the role of other philosophers, I will argue that throughout the early development of her fiction Murdoch was heavily influenced by Freud, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Plato, Sartre and Wittgenstein and how this found its way directly into her novels and, later, how she confirms her belief in Platonism. The first chapter therefore deals with Sartre’s impact upon Murdoch’s earliest fictional and philosophical writing, and her first attempt at creating her own distinct fictional world.

Chapter One

Murdoch’s Earliest Work and the Existential

Iris Murdoch’s early intellectual life, from her later school life at Badminton to Oxford University, was exclusively concerned with classical philosophical texts rather than with the twentieth-century continental literature and philosophy which influenced her first major works. What is of primary interest here is how she moved from one philosophical school to another and the subsequent impact of this upon her fiction writing. This chapter discusses her early fictional work Under the Net (1954) and, to a lesser extent, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), as well as her criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953). Although Murdoch sympathizes with Sartrean philosophy, she never classifies herself as an existentialist, nor at any point does she embrace the title ‘philosophical novelist’. As I have discussed in the introduction, a philosophical novelist is one who uses a fictional text to relate to their reader a certain set of philosophical ideas and this, Murdoch claims, is not her chosen form of literature. Her decision to refute this label may be partly explained by her wish to write in the tradition of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf,1 or, and perhaps more realistically, her reluctance to place herself in any grouping: I suppose I have certain philosophical ideas about human life and character, and that these must somehow find expression in my novels: but for the most part I am not conscious of this process and I think it would be destructive if I were. Certainly I am not a philosophical novelist in the sense that Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir is.2 Indeed, during the middle period of her fiction (1967–1978) she states that: I don’t think he [Sartre] has had any influence on me as a writer or, indeed, as a philosopher. I’m very anti-existentialist. I can’t be sure, of

20

Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

course, but I don’t feel any wave of influence there. I don’t think philosophy influences my work as a novelist.3 Murdoch’s reasons for denying the title, as well as the influences on her fiction, are explored in this chapter. Other notable influences upon Murdoch for this period of her work (the mid-1950s) were Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti, Samuel Beckett and Simone Weil. Towards the end of this period she uses Platonic theory to develop her fictional ideas. The traditional view of the development of her philosophy and fiction is described by Peter Conradi thus: ‘the received approach to [Murdoch’s] work has been to ask what is marvellous in the theory, and then look to the books to find the shortfall’.4 Conradi uses ‘marvellous’ to suggest that Murdochian criticism usually centres on the notion that Murdoch was a great philosophical theorist, but generally failed to construct the fiction to express her ideas. While the secondary criticism, which follows this line of debate, is useful in questioning Murdoch’s application of theory, it does not provide sufficient material to discuss the creation of the theory. It does not allow, for example, a lucid view of how she arrived at her moral constructs for literature – some of the earliest developing from continental philosophy. However, it is true to say that what she aspired to theoretically could never be made into a popular work of fiction for the simple fact that it would be almost unreadable. This will be debated at length in this and subsequent chapters. Murdoch’s interest in the existential was formed by her readings of Sartre and Camus and it was to Oxford that she applied although she was originally accepted to study English. No record exists which shows the precise date when she changed to study ‘Mods and Greats’, although it is probable that this occurred in her first term, but it is worth noting that she wished to revert back to studying classical Greek literature rather than the established English literary texts. This is where her dedication to philosophy begins to take shape. Indeed, she was one of the first to recognize the achievement of existential philosophy in relation to contemporary British thought, although this was not the fashionable stance within Oxford, or indeed British philosophical circles. The force of sentiment against her was overwhelming as her colleagues and tutors were concerned with linguistic analysis and viewed continental discourse as of no intrinsic value. There was an early rejection of existentialist thought in Oxford, developed in part by A. J. Ayer’s articles on the subject in January 1945. Ayer was the only British philosopher of note to engage with existentialism at this time, and he did so to dismiss its claims, stating it to be ‘morally reprehensible’.5 This was due

Murdoch’s Earliest Work and the Existential

21

primarily to the fact that it did not move forward from Heidegger’s flawed Sein und Zeit (Being and Time); Murdoch referred to his later work as ‘demonic’6 and ‘possibly Heidegger is Lucifer in person’.7 Ayer notes that: Sartre does make a point of claiming that freedom is not subject to any logical necessity, but whatever he means by this it does not withdraw the discussion of freedom from the grasp of logic; it does not entitle him to make simple logical blunders.8 In effect Ayer is arguing that Sartre’s negation of logic does not create a useful philosophy, merely a linguistic mistake as you cannot get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ and neither can you get ‘something’ from ‘nothing’. For those wanting to understand the French existentialists as a philosophical movement matters were particularly tough. The reviewer of Sartre’s L’Age de Raison writing in Horizon is very tentative in her treatment of the philosophical themes of Sartre’s novel: ‘It would seem that the central theme of Sartre’s book is to reconcile the solitude of man with the solidarity of society’.9 This is an extremely vague, generalized description of Sartre’s theme. No elaboration of what either the solitude of man or the solidarity of society may entail is forthcoming. She then accounts for this inadequate attempt to deal with the meat of Sartre’s thought by commenting ‘It is doubtful whether reading these two books [Nausea and L’Age de Raison] will give the reader a clearer idea of what the tenets of existentialionalism [sic] really are’.10 A. J. Ayer took the case a stage further, arguing that these novels were incomplete without the philosophy: It is arguable that his plays and his novels, however interesting and impressive in themselves, cannot be fully understood except in the light of his philosophical views.11 This claim conveniently placed Ayer in a position of considerable power as we will see below. The novels were all most English intellectuals had to work with when judging the existentialists: Sartre’s main philosophical text L’Être et Le Néant (1943) was very difficult to find in England, unavailable in English, and forbidding in the original French. Ayer, one of the few to have read it, writes in 1945 that ‘L’Être et Le Néant . . . is exceedingly long, over 700 large and closely printed pages, always difficult and often obscure’.12 Of course he, and other observers, would later note that L’Être et Le Néant did little more than rehash the ideas of Heidegger in Being and Time. Cyril Connolly also describes Sartre’s philosophy as ‘obscure’;13 Raymond

22

Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

Mortimer describes L’ Être et Le Néant as a ‘forbidding tome’.14 Meanwhile Sartre’s more approachable Existentialisme est un Humanisme (1946), which caused such a visible sensation in Paris, remained untranslated, and apparently unread in Britain, until 1948. Moreover, Sartre’s principle philosophical influence, Martin Heidegger, despite writing his central philosophical text in the 1920s, had also not found his way into English translation – so only limited detective work was possible. Ayer finally dismisses the entire existentialist school: . . . in spite of my extensive use of quotations I am not sure that I have summarized it correctly, and I certainly do not flatter myself that I have made it intelligible. To the extent, however, that I have understood it, its effect upon me at any rate has been to increase my suspicion that what has been called existentialist philosophy has become very largely an exercise in the art of misusing the verb ‘to be’.15 This development of the traditional approach of British Empiricism, formulated by David Hume, towards existentialism, developed first through Ayer and, shortly after, in the works of Gilbert Ryle and Richard Hare. Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) had an immediate impact upon philosophy, and nowhere more so than in Oxford. The major thesis was a complete rejection of the mental apparatus associated with Descartes and Cartesian thought: this being the self as a crowd of facilities, of metaphysical comings and goings which could not be accounted for, nor limited by any specific rules. Ryle held that Descartes’s division of experience into ‘mental’ and ‘bodily’ forms was a fiction – one which was systematically misleading as it proposed that the self is ultimately a self-propagating fictional state which we perpetrate upon ourselves. We could now, Ryle believed, free the self from the ‘dogma of the ghost in the machine’.16 His proposal of a proper modern philosophy would discard any talk of the inner theatre and concentrate on empirical knowledge of the knowable world, a visible world where language, gesture and physical action were primary to knowledge. Murdoch, although disappointed with Ryle’s insistence on language as paramount in philosophical investigation, was clear that to return to Descartes was impossible: ‘much of the criticism of traditional metaphysics, which modern philosophy has made its task, must stand’.17 Although this appeared irrefutable to Murdoch, she proposed that even if we recognize the developments of reforming the way we speak, by adopting a language of ‘observable action’ and ‘patterns of behaviour’ in place of the Cartesian ‘faculties’ or, indeed, ‘feelings’,18 we should not mistake a reform in speech

Murdoch’s Earliest Work and the Existential

23

for a change in human experience. The very notion that experience has not changed is central; although the self may have changed, the motions of living life itself remain static. Murdoch believed that in reviewing Sartre’s Being and Nothingness Ayer did not fully grasp the extent of the argument as he was too rigidly attached to logical positivism to allow for any deviation towards the metaphysical. However, in an early essay, ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’ (1950), Murdoch discusses the similarities between Ayer’s and Sartre’s positions concerning objective value judgements, first by quoting from the Horizon review: There is nothing to be done about it [a choice], except look at the facts, look at them harder, look at more of them, and then come to a moral decision. Then asking whether the attitude that one has adopted is the right attitude comes down to asking whether one is prepared to stand by it. There can be no guarantee of its correctness . . . but counting something as a guarantee is itself taking up a moral standpoint;19 and shortly after, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being so is incidental.20 It is clear that the fundamental question exists for both Ayer and Sartre. They have to react to Wittgenstein’s work and by doing so they have reached the same point, albeit by dissimilar routes. By revealing this, Murdoch emphasizes the negative within the thinking of the linguistic philosophers, and promotes the differing values of the existentialists, about whom she was currently writing (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist). From this essay, it appears that she wishes to recreate the phenomenological loneliness inherent with La Nausée. This can be seen as a framework for the future development of Under the Net as it is here that her main character, Jake, has withdrawn from the world and creative processes, although he returns to the world by a realization of his finitude and by doing so obtains a kind of humility. Her critical reception of Sartre a year earlier outlined the improvements which she believed could be conceived in existentialism. In spite of this uneasy relationship with Sartrean philosophy, Murdoch nevertheless held existentialism itself in fairly high regard until at least the middle part of her career

24

Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

(the mid-1960s onwards). This ambivalence was grounded in the liberal tenets of existentialism; the intrinsic value of the individual and its freedom. Murdoch believed that although existentialism did not adequately support these values it did place the correct value upon them. If we look at Murdoch’s position in relation to the Marxist critique of existentialism it is clear that the freedom of the individual is foremost in her mind. Zohreh Sullivan believes that: What Murdoch finds lacking in the modern age is a clear perception of external reality as independent, unique and worthy of loving exploration. If the sickness of the age, as Murdoch contends, is solipsism, lovelessness, neurosis, a fear of history . . . she would hold that its manifestation in philosophy and art, for example, could be cured by a therapy of perception, a rebirth of imagination.21 She agrees, in part, with the Marxist critic George Lukacs that existentialism amounts to a ‘politics of adolescence’,22 and criticizes Stuart Hampshire’s Freedom of the Individual on the same grounds: ‘As a political argument his views are better (than as free-standing philosophy)’.23 Does this show that neither linguistics nor existentialism has the answer to the value judgements concerned with individual freedom? Not entirely. Murdoch agrees with the Marxists on one important point concerning existentialism: A powerful reason for the popularity of existentialism is that it makes a universal myth of the plight of those who reject capitalism but who cannot adjust themselves to the ideal of socialism and who seek a middle way . . . so they are left in the middle, empty and lonely and doomed to continual frustration.24 To summarize the above: a workable philosophy of freedom and political expression cannot be founded on a hypothesis of perpetual rebellion against the state. Murdoch concludes by writing that ‘The general impression of Sartre’s work is certainly that of a powerful but abstract model of a hopeless dilemma, coloured by a surreptitious romanticism which embraces the hopelessness’.25 It is her internal philosophical argument which stimulates my interest in the development of her thought at this time. The central importance of both continental philosophy and analytic linguistic philosophy to the formation of both her writing and thought is of high importance here. This is the angle from which I approach the early Murdoch.

Murdoch’s Earliest Work and the Existential

25

The end of the Second World War in Europe, the defeat of Nazism, and more importantly the liberation of Paris in 1944, created the philosophical vacuum which existentialism filled. The disillusionment of the French, Dutch and Polish after the Nazi occupation and the fall of Germany as a self-regulating power created a void which needed resolution. Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir were all writing during a time of occupation and, for Murdoch, the romantic vision of struggle against oppression during and after the war stimulated her interest in both continental philosophy and humanitarianism. In 1946 she was in Belgium and France with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and it is here she met Sartre, attending two of his lectures in Brussels and meeting him briefly afterwards. She stated that in 1946 ‘Oxford was more “logical positivist” than ever, and anyone interested in psychology, history or religion is regarded as “romantic” and ergo unsound. Sartre is mentioned with derision and no one reads Kierkegaard’.26 She complained that the world envisaged by the positivists, but especially by Gilbert Ryle, ‘was not one in which people fall in love or join the Communist Party’.27 This ‘philosophically’ hastened her departure for Cambridge in 1947, although the original plan was to depart Britain for the United States, a plan demolished by her previous membership of the Communist Party. The annoyance this caused her did little to stem her socialist views. I shall return to this later. Her research studentship at Cambridge brought her closer to the work of G. E. Moore (1873–1958) with whom she identified. He was one of the ‘Cambridge Apostles’, of a generation previous to hers and a guiding figure to both Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. Moore was an early leader in the revolt against absolute idealism. Moore supposed that common-sense beliefs about the world are correct and need no philosophical debate. The purpose of philosophy then, for Moore, is not to debate their truth, but rather to seek an appropriate analysis of their significance. The members of the ‘Cambridge Apostles’ were consistently naturalistic in their approach to moral problems and to the definition of morality. To quote Stuart Hampshire, ‘[being] free from transcendental cant . . . [they] dismissed the idea of salvation whether in this world or the next’.28 The condemnation of Moore’s philosophy by those such as Hampshire and Ayer, who refuted the indefinable and placed what Murdoch dismisses as ‘the false whole’29 at the centre of moral philosophy, is an injustice which she believes must be rectified. Her engagement with continental philosophy is her reaction against them, although the fact that she was concerned with teaching ‘analytical’ philosophy for 20 years makes it strange that she begins her teaching of this area from such a negative standpoint.

26

Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

Her early writing professes a strong affinity with Moore: Moore believed that good was a supersensible reality, that it was a mysterious quality, unrepresentable and indefinable, that it was an object of knowledge and (implicitly) that to be able to see it was in some sense to have it. He thought of the good upon the analogy of the beautiful; and he was, in spite of himself, a ‘naturalist’ in that he took goodness to be a real constituent of the world . . . let me say in anticipation that on almost every point I agree with Moore and not with his critics.30 Murdoch agrees with Moore in relation to morality and aesthetics (goodness and beauty) being analogous with each other; they both insist that to analyse the concept of goodness is to destroy its very nature and it is, therefore, indefinable. They both believe in the notion of goodness being primarily concerned with vision, and they are both philosophical cognitivists who agree that goodness is an object of true knowledge, not a function of the will. Murdoch also championed Moore for shifting the emphasis away from the question ‘What things are good?’ towards ‘What does the word “good” mean?’ (a move in the direction of linguistic analysis) causing a shift within applied approaches to ethics. ‘The philosopher is now to speak no longer of the good, as something real or transcendent, but to analyse the familiar human activity of endowing things with value’.31 This marks the dichotomy within Murdoch’s thinking. One would expect her to side with the first metaphysical statement because of her ideal of returning to Platonic ethics.32 Murdoch believed that Moore was essentially correct on the value of analysing the human activity of giving things value; it is this which later critics such as Conradi and Dipple pick up on and use as the basis for their notion of Murdoch as ‘moral psychologist’. The responsibility for such an outcome lies partly with Murdoch herself. Her insistence that ‘the novel is the novel and philosophy is philosophy’33 would appear to imply that she believes that neither of her professional modes of writing impact on the other. Murdoch’s debt to Moore is revealed in her fiction; Under the Net’s Dave Gellman is both homage to and parody of Moore and David Pears.34 In the novel Gellman is writing an article for the journal Mind: . . . 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 [Jake] his solution but I had not yet got as far as grasping the problem.35

Murdoch’s Earliest Work and the Existential

27

The link to Moore is clear. The ‘good’ could be perceived in empirical experience, but it must always be grounded transcended experience. In deploring the state of moral discourse after Moore (the 1960s onwards), she says: A great deal has happened since he wrote, and when we read him again it is startling to see how many of his beliefs are philosophically unstatable now. Moore believed that good was a supersensible reality, that it was a mysterious quality, unrepresentable and indefinable, that it was an object of knowledge and (implicitly) that to be able to see it was in some sense to have it. He thought of good upon the analogy of the beautiful and considered goodness to be ‘a real constituent of the world’.36 The earlier Murdoch of the 1950s would have agreed with Moore on these points as she too did not believe that one could define beauty; to do so, she believed, would have rendered it worthless. In another early paper ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ (1957), Murdoch explains that Moore ‘in spite of himself was a naturalist’, in the sense of ‘realist’ or ‘descriptivist’37 though it was Moore who coined the phrase ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Murdoch would disagree with Moore in his citation of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature for the view that values cannot be derived from facts.38 Murdoch fears that Moore’s seeming endorsement of the Humean separation of value from fact may lead to a ‘diminished, even perfunctory account of morality . . . and with the increasing prestige of science may lead to a marginalization of the ethical’.39 With no substantial vision of the good, the moral becomes a matter of will’s choice. Murdoch believes that Moore might have been citing Hume merely to counter a logical fallacy committed by the utilitarian J. S. Mill, who had held that ‘what is desired is what ought to be’.40 In her 1957 paper Murdoch is emphatic that the Is-Ought or fact-value separation – often called the logical argument – has had a baneful effect on ethical thought. She argues that it had a faulty pedigree, as well as its implications: Why has it been so readily assumed that the stripped and behaviouristic account of morality which the modern philosopher gives is imposed on us by philosophic considerations? I think this is because the anti-metaphysical argument [re. Hampshire, ‘Fallacies of Moral Philosophy’] and the logical argument (‘naturalistic fallacy’) have been very closely connected in the minds of those who used them with a much more general and ambiguous dictum to this effect: you cannot attach morality to the substance of the world. And this dictum, which expresses the whole point of modern

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Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

ethics, has been accorded a sort of logical dignity. But why can morality not be thought of as attached to the substance of the world? Surely many people, who are not philosophers and who cannot be accused of using faulty arguments since they use no arguments, do think of their morality in just this way? They think of it as continuous with some sort of larger structure of reality, whether this be a religious structure, or social or historical one.41 What have the major Murdochian critics, and by this I mean Byatt, Conradi, Dipple and others, taken from this? It is clear from Conradi’s perspective that Murdoch is a ‘reflexive’ moral realist who does not easily fall into any category, and therefore does not, at least full-time, inhabit the role of the philosophical novelist.42 Indeed, he goes further and along with Gabriele Griffin43 argues that she simultaneously rejects both existentialism and linguistic analysis. In reference to the rejection of linguistic analysis this argument holds its ground as she constantly argues for vision and choice within morality and this necessarily negates a linguistic approach. However, when Conradi and Griffin try to negate Murdoch’s early immersion in existentialism, especially at this point in her career, they do not consider the full effect of it on her fiction. If she were not, why would she write both a book of criticism concerning Sartre’s work as well as two novels concerning elements of his philosophy, her first novel being almost consumed by Sartrean and Wittgensteinian existentialism on the one hand and Irish modernism on the other? Sartre may appear as a spokesman for the indomitable human spirit. A philosophy cannot be a total system because the world is contingent and infinitely various . . . this is true of Sartre, thinker and artist, so versatile and so committed . . . whatever the fate of his general theories his fiction must survive as one of its most persistent and interesting critics.44 Little attention has been given to Sartre: Romantic Rationalist from Murdoch’s critics. I believe that this text has been (somewhat) overlooked and wish to reassess it as not only a work of criticism but also one of personal philosophical development. It has been suggested that it is a full rejection of existentialism, which it is not; the truth of the matter is much more complex. Although Murdoch does reject parts of Sartrean existentialism, and argues that a great existentialist novel could never be achieved as it is riddled with philosophical faults, such as being flawed by the rejection of any form of authority, in this sense it is hardly uncritical, but she does agree with the

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overall development of the individual alone in the world in a solipsistic existence. As she says, we need a religion that can continue without God, an anti-religion, which finds form within both The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels. However, whether this can exist within a fictional form without complications is certainly debatable. The last three chapters of Sartre: Romantic Rationalist make it clear that Murdoch’s rejection of existentialism is founded upon it not being able to communicate with her on a personal level as it both negates the notion of society and leaves no space for the development of women. The (male) individual is posited at the centre of the world, free to make choices, as both agent and subject in his own world, but this world is based on a vision which excludes women. One paradox of early Murdoch is that although she claims to subscribe to feminism she does not exhibit it within her fiction.45 Although she pays lip service to it in The Flight from the Enchanter with the inclusion of Miss Wingfield and her associate lady reformers, she does not follow through by providing either a female narrator, perspective or even a female protagonist until we reach The Bell. It is true that Nan in The Sandcastle (1957) is of central importance to the narrative and at one point seizes control of the first person perspective from Mor, but she is a clichéd wife; a type which inhabits light fiction of this period. Anthony Burgess states that ‘this story is contrived to make a point: ordinary people cannot deal with freedom’46 as he believed that The Sandcastle is constructed as a morality play rather than a magazine short story, even though it contains elements of characterization which would not be out of place in women’s fiction of this type. Nan is cast as the villainous wife, not wanting to allow her husband to develop in the way he sees fit, namely towards a longing for a political life. Perhaps something can be said in Nan’s defence; her character is not properly developed in order to inhabit a truly villainous role. Although Mor’s desire for a life outside the academic community is accentuated by the inclusion of the politically active Tim Burke and the discussions by Mor of the nature of freedom, the novel does not move towards a political statement at its climax, although it does have an overriding socialist tone which is highlighted in the sermons of the ineffectual Everard, the incumbent headmaster. Although the nature of freedom is at the very core of The Sandcastle, it is ultimately rendered obsolete in the return to the status quo at the end of the novel. Nan allows Mor to stand for parliament, Don is allowed to train with Tim and Rain is allowed to finish her painting and disappear from the novel without causing any major upheaval. I use the word ‘allow’ as I believe that Murdoch creates a plot in which each character does not have sufficient

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space in which to develop fully. Murdoch herself has suggested that she did not amplify the character of Nan enough. She could have emphasized her ideas and dreams.47 This would have created a larger diversity of characterization and possibly a more effective morality novel. Through her rejection of existentialism Murdoch defies the notion that males must be at the centre but this is not followed through in any meaningful way in her fiction as her major female characters, at least until Honor in A Severed Head (1961), are impotent within the narrative and of little real consequence (except, of course, The Bell). Murdoch wanted to create a house fit for characters to inhabit, a view restated later in ‘Against Dryness’.48 Gabriele Griffin believes that Murdoch ultimately rejects Sartrean thought as a workable philosophy as it denied Murdoch access to the world, and her experience of it as a woman: Positing the individual as at the centre of things, as free to make choices, as subject and agent in his world, is based on a vision of the world that excludes women. Through her rejection of existentialism Murdoch defies a philosophy which takes the male, and male’s experience of the world, as norm.49 It is true that existentialism could feasibly be seen as masculinity writ large as it does not deal with the problems inherent in the traditional role of women either biologically or socially. Their status in early twentieth-century Europe, their need for equality and their natural disposition to child rearing, all of this is overlooked, with man, as is always the case, at the centre of the philosophical argument. Murdoch does not help her case by creating her first two novels from a male-oriented view and focusing the aspirations of women, although not solely, on the contingency of the male characters. Sadie and Anna, for example, are both orchestrated by Hugo Bellfounder in their chosen careers; Madge is over-reliant on Jake or Sammy Starfield. Even so, Murdoch criticizes Sartre for his interest in issues rather than humanity in general which Murdoch believes ‘is not appropriate for a novelist’.50 It would follow then that by an amalgamation of high-minded existential thought, including the addition of human interest, one could create a perfect philosophical novel which would elucidate the movement from existentialist thought to a fictional work concerned with contingency within the world. It is interesting then that she relegates women to lesser roles in her early novels, drawing instead on her earlier experience of powerful and mysterious men. Murdoch believes that what Sartre gives us in his fiction is essentially his philosophy, and (of course) she is right; his fiction is obviously

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the epitome of the French philosophical novel going back to Voltaire, dealing, as it does, with questioning the very nature of existence of its major characters (e.g. Roquentin in Nausea). Her argument, however, is that this does not allow for the individual to shine within the novel. In other words what Sartre gives us is his own reflection of consciousness: ‘What Sartre requires from art is analysis, the setting of the world in order, the reduction to the intelligible. [This is] not appropriate for a novelist; [his] impatience, which is fatal to a novelist proper, with the stuff of human life’ is marked by the failure to apprehend ‘the absurd irreducible uniqueness of people and their relationships with each other’51 and this prevents him from creating a great novel in her view: Sartre seems blind to the function of prose, not as an activity or an analytical tool, but as creative of a complete and unclassified image. It is only Sartre’s practical interests which keep him in need of speech; his ideal is not the actual silence of Rimbaud but the intelligent silence of Mallarmé.52 In order to distance herself from Sartre, Murdoch pits ‘human life’ against his didacticism, drawing a distinction between ‘proper’ novel writing and philosophizing. Although this line of development (being concerned with narrative structure rather than evangelizing a philosophical ideal) is not followed through to its ultimate end (her novels of this period are, with the exception of The Red and the Green (1965), fiction laced with a philosophical argument) it does provide some pointers towards what Murdoch was trying to achieve in her early writings. Conradi notes that Murdoch once referred to Sartre’s La Nausée as ‘the instructive overture’53 to his work and that it set the tone for his later ‘Roads to Freedom’ trilogy. I argue here that Murdoch’s essay ‘Against Dryness’ and Sartre: Romantic Rationalist are the philosophical basis for her earliest fictional writings. This is not to say, however, that Murdoch fully relates to Sartre as an overwhelming guiding force behind her early fiction. The influence of Queneau, Beckett, de Beauvoir and Camus, among others, is also present within her thinking: Hobson: You admire Beckett? Murdoch: Enormously. But why did he stop writing in the best language? I discovered Beckett long ago, at the beginning of the war. I remember . . . hearing someone recite a passage from Murphy . . . I was immediately enslaved. I got the book and

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Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist read it. The influence of that book, together with Queneau’s Pierrot, upon Under The Net should be obvious. I imitated these two great models with all my heart.54

The major example in Under the Net is of course Finn, who comes to embody the spiritual influence of Beckett. He shadows Jake who himself has no direction in life, although he eventually decides on a course of action which removes him from the negative influence of London and places him in rural Ireland, the homeland of both Murdoch and Beckett. Murdoch goes so far to mention in interview that ‘I was copying them [Queneau and Beckett] as hard as I could!’55 The parallels between Murphy (1938) and Under the Net are clear. Both contain elements of the metaphysical and artistic and both are partly set in medical environments but the major factor is the similarity between Murphy and Jake. Both are racked by the existentialist fear of human contact and both refer back to the hero of Nausea in their longing to find a firm foothold in reality, and not succumb to the abyss: both come to realize that insanity is no form of freedom at all, one must live in the real world or else fall to nothingness (as Murphy later does): For Murphy had such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it. Inspected, palpated, ausculated, percussed, radiographed, and cardiographed, it was all that a heart should be. Buttoned up and left to perform, it was like Petrouchka in his box. One moment in such labour that it seemed on the point of seizing, the next in such ebullition that it seemed on the point of bursting. It was the mediation between these extremes that Neary called the Apmonia. When he got tired of calling it the Apmonia, he called it the Isonomy. When he got sick of the sound of Isonomy he called it the Attunement. But he might call it what he liked, into Murphy’s heart it would not enter. Neary could not blend the opposites in Murphy’s heart.56 Beckett’s work is attractive to Murdoch in two ways: it both converts a form of comedy to the fear of non-existence and speaks to her on a nationalistic level. Beckett, having roots in Ireland and links with England, provided a template by which she could judge her work and aim to attain the same artistic achievement. The patriotic draw of Beckett should not be underplayed as Murdoch clearly thought of herself as an Anglo-Irish writer although this line of argument does not overly concern us here. The existentialist nature of his fiction, however, is of primary importance, alongside that of Sartre, himself an influence upon Beckett.

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So what are the constituents of a philosophical novel? Although we discussed a range of possibilities within the introduction it is useful to remind ourselves of the core arguments for Murdoch. The early Murdoch would certainly agree that a firm basis in both literature and philosophy is a necessary requirement, as is the focusing upon the human condition. ‘Against Dryness’ suggests what is crucial: . . . we have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread–out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society . . . we need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth.57 If it is indeed the case that Murdoch rejects the English intellectual thought of her time, certainly including a rejection of linguistic analysis, then it may well be that her longing for ‘other’ leads her back to Ireland and the continent, associated in her mind not with caustic linguistic analysis but a focus on human development and selfhood. There appears to be no British author who inspires her to write in a certain style; she rejects the work of Woolf and the modernists, focusing instead on Dickens and George Eliot. Although Murdoch notes the literary value of works by William Golding and Graham Greene she dislikes their reliance on the ‘crystalline’ nature of fictional writing: ‘Most modern British novels are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner . . . like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right’.58 By this Murdoch means that Beckett attains a form of modernism which she felt lacking within Woolf and her contemporaries. Beckett’s fascination with the metaphorical and the artistic nature of chess (in Murphy) for example is not only a narrative device but a comedic one as well. This combination of the philosophical, artistic and comic is Murdoch’s idea of perfection at this time and her appreciation of it draws her to imitate this art. By bringing language and the comedic closer together Beckett avoids the ‘crystalline’ nature of the novel which Murdoch rails against. Nevertheless her best early novels can be described as tending towards the crystalline. Under the Net reveals this to be the case, as do her notes written during a lecture she attended that was given by Sartre. Here she describes the philosophical situation in England as she sees it: In England a Husserlian phenomenalism has never been popular. Re. The ‘external world’ – we are in the hands of Russell and Whitehead and of the logical positivists from Vienna and relying on Language analysis

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[it must be remembered that] no coherent theory has yet been derived from Kierkegaard.59 The response to Under the Net when it was first published was varied. The Times Literary Supplement believed it to be an excellent first novel, although slightly flawed: She can create character; she has a light hand with dialogue. She can evoke the different parts of London and Paris . . . Set against this dazzling array of virtues, the weaknesses of Under the Net pale into their proper significance. They are faults of construction and design . . . If characters are to make more than a fleeting appearance in the crowd they must be mortised into the framework of the plot. They cannot just stand about.60 Although Murdoch did rectify these faults, and I am not suggesting that Under the Net was a better existential novel than Nausea as it fails to come to any substantial conclusion (except perhaps that the world is filled with amazement), it would not have been through reading criticism of her work as she made a point of never reading reviews. Although Bayley confirms that this is the case61 it seems a little strange that she would not be interested in the critical response to her first novel which she herself had termed ‘bad . . . romantic and sentimental. If anything saves it from a complete wreck it is a sort of vitality and joy which lifts it a little – perhaps’.62 Conradi argues that Under the Net performs for Murdoch what La Nausée did for Sartre. I believe he is mistaken. Although Under the Net is a instructive guide in the creation of a British work of existential fiction – as it involves enchantment with form, theories and concepts as they appear in philosophy, art and politics – it does not serve as a guide to Murdoch’s later work of the 1970s and beyond; it is only of use in relation to her earliest novels (as these are overly concerned with existentialism); I am thinking here of her first two novels as well as A Severed Head and The Time of the Angels. It is certainly the case that a more nuanced philosophical mode is used in The Green Knight. Murdoch’s shift away from London and the more individualistic life in her first two books towards family life and morals in The Sandcastle suggests a wholly new approach to fiction writing which contains little existential angst. A useful example of this would be to contrast the fictional structure of Under the Net and The Bell; which is commented on in Chapter Four. Murdoch’s purpose with Sartre: Romantic Rationalist was to produce a work of clarity which did not dismiss Sartre with disdain but instead judged him fairly by his merits as both a writer and philosopher of some

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depth. The writings of Ayer and Ryle, negating Sartre’s influence out of hand, along with her discussions with Sartre in Belgium, would have spurred her on. This is not to say that she did not disagree with him: As a European socialist intellectual with an acute sense of the needs of his time Sartre wishes to affirm the preciousness of the individual and the possibility of a society which is free and democratic in the traditional liberal sense of these terms. This affirmation is his most profound concern and the key to all his thought. As a philosopher however he finds himself without the materials to construct a system which will hold and justify these values.63 In effect Murdoch believes that even though Sartre is arguing for the individual in the face of any totality he cannot justify this position through his philosophy as a whole. As she goes on to say, his fictional art allows for less rigid terms to be applied to individual freedom – terms which are, by their nature, more variable and contain the possibility of synthesis for the ‘foritself’ and the ‘in-itself’ conditions of man. She describes this in an early essay: What we want is the impossible; that is to be a living transparent consciousness and at the same time a stable opaque being; to be both pour-soi and en-soi at the same time. This, says Sartre, is the aspiration to be God, to be ens causa sui [the ultimate cause] and it is innately contradictory. This . . . is the fundamental form of all our particular projects and ambition.64 In seeking this we naturally place ourselves in a philosophical black hole by using freedom to negate innate freedom which is, of course, ‘patently unobtainable’.65 If one were to take Murdoch’s critique of Sartre as a whole it would appear that Griffin’s and Conradi’s earlier statements are essentially correct, that she rejects existentialism in the first monograph of her career and immediately embraces Simone Weil and Platonism before she begins her fictional writing. So why does Murdoch place so much store, at least in her early development, on placing her thinking within these boundaries? Maria Antonaccio believes that ‘in spite of Murdoch’s persistent criticism of Sartre, her attitude towards existentialism remained ambivalent’,66 mainly due to her love of existential fiction, her personal attachment to pre-war France and Belgium and the vast differences between continental and British fictional and philosophical writing. Nevertheless one cannot remove the philosophy from the cultural impact, as well as the form, of existential

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literature. Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir were philosophical novelists in the traditional sense which Murdoch refers to, and as such related their ideas more easily to a mass audience through their fiction. This view is reflected in British literary society at the time: M. Sartre’s novels and articles, or M. Gabriel Marcel’s plays, being more widely read than their metaphysical treatise, have done much to support the opinion that French Existentialism is, at bottom, a literary movement – and, by their success, have given to people at large the impression that French philosophy is existentialism.67 Murdoch also had great sympathy for the underlying libertarian assumptions in Sartrean fiction and philosophy, namely that freedom and individuals are uniquely valuable in the world. Even though she believed that he had ultimately failed to form a cohesive philosophy she still sided with the ideals which he had developed. Indeed, it has been suggested that in writing Under the Net Murdoch herself was trying to create the perfect Sartrean novel; something of a paradox if she believed his philosophy to be fundamentally flawed. Conradi, a fervent critic of bestowing upon Murdoch the title of ‘philosophical novelist’ agrees that Under the Net is ‘her least unphilosophical novel’.68 Most of the major critics, including Conradi, Byatt and Antonaccio, who have published the most comprehensive literary and philosophical analyses of Murdoch to date, would agree that it was her upbringing in a fiercely individualistic environment, as well as her previous membership of the Communist Party, which fuelled her interest in continental thought. Although this phase of her life only lasted a few years (and she was never a fully fledged Marxist), she agrees with the Marxists on one point when they claim that ‘a powerful reason for the popularity of existentialism is that it makes a universal myth of the plight of those who reject capitalism but cannot adjust themselves to the ideal of socialism . . . those who seek a middle way’.69 This places existentialism not in a stable political position but rather in limbo, never being quite sure of what path one might take next. Murdoch, however, goes on to stand behind Sartre on one crucial aspect of his philosophy as ‘what Sartre wishes to assert is precisely that the individual has absolute importance and is not to be swallowed up in an historic calculation’.70 By removing the metaphysical, social and historical framework of the individual Sartre hopes to protect him from any kind of ‘totalising’ which would negate his innate uniqueness and value. The failure of Sartre to do this is ‘a symptom of a dilemma in which we are all involved’

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and it is impossible for humanity ‘either to live unreflectively or to express a view of what we are in any systematic terms which will satisfy the mind. We can no longer formulate a general truth about ourselves which shall encompass us like a house’.71 Murdoch wanted to create a house fit for characters to inhabit, a view stated later in ‘Against Dryness’. What then of the influence of Queneau and Canetti? Both were major influences on her early life, both being two of her sporadic lovers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A novelist and a philosopher respectively, they held views contradictory to the prevailing mood in British intellectual circles; both were mysterious objects of desire for her and also indulged her fantasies of an older guiding force, one which allowed her to create ‘good’ fiction. Murdoch mentions that her early life at home was like being ‘in a perfect trinity of love’72 (which posits her as a potential messiah figure) although after the death of her father, it lacked a core element. In some respects Queneau, Canetti and ultimately John Bayley, became her paternal replacements; a proposition which although she may not have immediately agreed with would seem to be the case.73 It should come as no surprise then that Under the Net is dedicated to Queneau and The Flight from the Enchanter to Canetti. Canetti in particular (along with Franz Steiner) despised England, associating it with everything which was inaccessible, second-rate and philistine. He had the highest view of his own intellectual accomplishments and demanded that others, including Murdoch, view themselves as his intellectual inferiors. Murdoch’s glowing critique of Crowds and Power (1962) being the foremost example of his early influence on her philosophical thought, it appears now as a rather obscure and dated work of little relevance to contemporary thought, according to A. N. Wilson74 and I agree with his assessment. Canetti, however, held Murdoch in low regard and described her as ‘the bubbling Oxford stewpot. Everything I despise about English life is in her. You could imagine her speaking incessantly, as a tutor, and incessantly listening in the pub, in bed in conversation with her male and female lovers . . . Nothing draws me to a person more than the feeling that they want to listen to me’.75 Bayley replied that Canetti was not worth listening to and that he was ‘pathologically conceited and jealous of her [Iris’s] success’.76 Murdoch expressed the desire in February 1946 that ‘Part of me wants to be Raymond Queneau and the other part Thomas Mann’;77 this was a shift away from her early lovers from Oxford and London; European influences were now beginning to impress her more than those of her undergraduate years. As she could speak competent French from her school life and earlier interest in Sartre, Murdoch and Queneau understood each other and discussed

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literature and psychoanalysis. Murdoch then began to translate some of Queneau’s work. There is an interesting parallel here that just as she is translating her soon-to-be lover’s novel Pierrot mon ami the principal character in Under the Net, Jake, is translating a French novelist called Breteuil. Soon after Queneau’s death in 1976, Murdoch wrote ‘I knew RQ well, he was a friend . . . I think he (especially Pierrot) influenced U[nder the] N[et]. He was a natural, absolute philosopher’.78 Indeed, she was planning to translate him first and request his permission to do so later but she later changed her mind as she was unsure of her proficiency in French obscenity. Queneau’s influence on the philosophy of Murdoch was not as marked as that of Sartre but it is worth mentioning that his views on surrealism and psychoanalysis are incorporated into Under the Net; for example the ‘love square’ of Jake, Anna, Sadie and Hugo is just that, surreal and psychologically riddled with flaws. The interlinking chain of professed love accentuates the comedic nature of Jake’s pursuit through Paris and the scene in the storeroom of the theatre is replete with Freudian overtones, these consciously placed by Murdoch. Murdoch’s later infatuation with Canetti was certainly more intense. Like her earlier lost love Franz Steiner, Canetti was also East European (Bulgarian), which made Murdoch’s love affair all the more poignant. Much has been made of the connection between Canetti and Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter – Mischa is the ‘enchanter’ of the novel and holds, at least in the beginning, all the other characters in a remote but firm grip.79 Conradi argues that: ‘Canetti, in one of his “transformations”, touches all her male enchanter figures, from A Severed Head and The Unicorn to The Sea, The Sea. He would sometimes proudly claim to be her discoverer. If he helped “make” her a writer, it was not quite in the manner that he assumed: an argument with him is latent throughout’.80 This latent argument with Canetti is commenced in her second novel, but is arguably not dealt with sufficiently, thus becoming, along with her fascination with freedom and the saint/artist dichotomy, a central theme throughout her fiction. Murdoch does not deal fully with Canetti at this point as she still believes him to be sufficiently powerful to exert control over both her and her fiction. Unlike other enchanters in her novels, for example Peter Crean-Smith and Gerald Scottow in The Unicorn who are written out of the book via their deaths, Fox and his accomplice Calvin Blick in The Flight from the Enchanter merely leave England for another country, perhaps viewing England as vulgar and without intellectual worth, much as Canetti did. The threat of their return is still a real one as they are beyond reality without boundaries and societal norms. Perhaps Murdoch’s fascination with the machinations of power, and

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her obsession with Canetti, could not be fully resolved within one novel; indeed, his presence can be felt throughout her writing. Under the Net is a novel primarily concerning quest and flight and in this respect it has much in common with its primary descendant The Flight from the Enchanter. The hero of the novel, Jake Donaghue, is perpetually concerned with questioning his individuality and that of those around him. He is caught in a ‘love square’ (a common Murdochian fictional device), pulled between opposing views of self, and confused by the actions of those around him: ‘I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason’.81 Take for example the opening sentence of the novel: When I saw Finn waiting for me at the corner of the street I knew at once that something had gone wrong. (1) This immediately immerses the reader within the novel. We know that an urban environment is going to be of primary importance, as are Jake’s social and romantic relationships. The most overwhelming subtext, though, concerns the uncanny. The sense that all is not as it seems in Under the Net, and that ‘something had gone wrong’. Here the ‘wrongness’ is associated with Jake’s living arrangements being radically altered, but the emphasis leads the reader to believe that a central component of the novel will concern the fundamental problems of existence. The displacement of Finn out of the normal environment that Jake usually associates with him is related to the ‘familiar’. Jake and Finn appear inseparable, but Finn’s action of standing in a street instead of waiting in their flat troubles Jake. Why should this be so? It is so obviously out of character for Finn to do this that Jake immediately assumes something is seriously wrong either with Finn or their accommodation – and he would be correct. This creation of conflict immediately draws the reader into the narrative – the fact that Jake knows Finn so well ‘I knew at once’ also creates a questioning which makes the novel work as fiction. The parallels between the displacement felt by Jake and Roquentin in Nausea are not there by chance. Murdoch deliberately sets out to create the same emotion felt by Sartre’s main character, and in doing so sets up a deliberate existential setting for the narrative to take place in. This sense of something going wrong is a direct example of the queasiness Roquentin, and to a lesser extent Jake, feel in relation to the contingent world, one in which the reader can understand themselves through both fiction and real experience. The fictional use of the sense ‘to see’ makes the uncanniness of

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the displacement of Finn a more potent fictional device than merely mentioning his presence in passing. This certainly allows the first sentence of Under the Net to be both immediate and realistic. A form of resolution is agreed upon at the end of the novel when Jake ceases trying to explain the metaphysical in linguistic terms and simply states, in relation to the genetic specifics of a cat’s offspring, ‘“I don’t know why it is,” I said “It’s just one of the wonders of the world”’.82 Frank Baldanza believes that this is reason enough to suggest that on her first attempt Murdoch has succeeded in the celebration of the ‘non-metaphysical, nontotalitarian, and non-religious . . . transcendence of reality’83 which was partly what she wished to achieve, as she stated, in ‘Against Dryness’. It is fanciful to suggest that in her first novel she achieved all these objectives, and it is doubtful that Baldanza believes she managed them to the full extent that she wished. What is clear is that Sartrean literature provides the base for her work; indeed Sartre’s statement concerning ‘good’ literature is almost exactly the same as Murdoch’s when he admits that in order for a work of existential fiction to have any resonance it must be based firmly within the sphere of human experience.84 Although the text and title share a fascination with the existential (the net in question being Wittgensteinian) the narrative has parallels with this also. Murdoch herself is most forthcoming about these: ‘Jake’s ancestors are Beckett’s Murphy and Queneau’s Pierrot’.85 She makes no attempt to hide this, even in Under the Net, when Jake places Beckett’s and Queneau’s works as two of his most sacred possessions. This, however, is not the extent of her influences. Linguistic philosophy and those who practise it also influence the tone of the novel, with Dave Gellman actively involved in what Murdoch sees as the fruitlessness of pursuing linguistic analysis of the self. On the other extreme is Lefty Todd, a champion of the New Socialist Party; a man of action against one of words. These two characters are a distraction from the real action between Jake and Hugo Bellfounder, and it is arguable that they are the only real players in the narrative, Lefty and Dave being static figures with little input to the fictional structure. If we return, briefly, to the image of the net surrounding each of us, it is obvious that Jake and Hugo are the main pillars of structure which hold the novel together. The other characters, Mrs Tinkham aside, are merely used as props by Murdoch to establish a setting and narrative that actively engages with both existential philosophy and the reader himself. Ironically it is Hugo and Anna’s mime theatre which uses props to engage the audience, but is ultimately a commercial failure. This theme is central to the novel – the attempted escape

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from language towards a more innate form of communication through art; one which is tied to the love square within the book: ‘There’s something fishy about describing other people’s feelings’ said Hugo. ‘All these descriptions are so dramatic . . . ’ ‘But suppose I try hard to be accurate,’ I said. ‘One can’t be,’ said Hugo. ‘The only hope is to avoid saying it. As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for . . . ’ ‘All the time I speak to you now [said Hugo], I’m saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond . . . the whole language is a machine used for making falsehoods’. (137) If this is so, how do we then escape falsehood and deception? As Byatt argues we must not take Hugo’s final statement on the subject, even though he ultimately rejects the trappings of wealth and fame and becomes a watchmaker, an allusion to a higher form of being (258). Murdoch is suggesting is that in order to struggle under the net we must negate our ego: The novel could be easily described as a philosophical novel very precisely, since there is clearly a very conscious attempt to pattern the events in Jake’s story in terms of ideas of freedom, of philosophical approaches to reality, to what we know and what we cannot know. But it is nevertheless a novel, and not simply a philosophical game.86 La Nausée is unarguably a philosophical novel, a philosophical game; Roquentin is constantly developing his view of the contingency of the world. He comes to the conclusion that what life without God really means is that we all have a responsibility to use our godless freedom to make life meaningful. But as our own choices inevitably harm others, this means that free choice always involves feelings of guilt and remorse. Simone Weil’s notion of ‘attention’ may be of use here to access Murdoch’s thought, and to form a critique of it. Weil’s strength for Murdoch was that, unlike Sartre, she did not create sentimentality around the fact of being placed outside society. Weil’s argument in Need for Roots (1949) states that the outcome of degradation suffered by a loss of roots within society is such that only the ‘saintly’ person is able change or ‘unself’ from the inside. All others will not have the means to do so; only for the saintly is virtue easily obtainable, and this is certainly the case with early Murdochian fiction. Murdoch does not hold the view that existentialism in itself is wrong to attack the self and the ego, rather that the assault is bad form. In believing that the essential self does not exist

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the formalist would therefore create a self which would become an ‘egoistwithout-an-I’. Murdoch finds Weil’s work so compelling because not only does it come from a Christian mystic, mystics always being held in high esteem by Murdoch, but also because on a philosophical level she fully understands what Weil means with her focus on ‘attention’; this will be more fully developed in Chapter Four. As a primarily moral philosopher Murdoch’s issue with linguistic analysis is that it abandons ‘the mental event’,87 which both she and Weil consider unretractable as the basis for investigating morality. Instead a set of ‘identifiable activities’ (use of language) is used choice guiding words leading away from the real issue of the personal self towards what Murdoch would term an un-reality. Murdoch believes that: We have got used to the idea that the region of personal ‘experience’ or ‘consciousness’ resembles the silence of the law in Leviathan. Here anything may go on, it doesn’t matter what, so long as the public rules are not broken; and what goes on is of no interest to the individual.88 The basic reasoning behind this is, according to Murdoch, the desire of the linguistic analysts to bestow upon their work ‘the prestige and neutrality of logic’89 which would be a function of regarding philosophy as a science. We must not forget that Murdoch was trained in this school of thought, even though she rebelled against it, and taught a form of linguistic analysis at both Oxford and Cambridge; a certain paradox within her work. Murdoch fictionalizes the notion of attention in Under the Net in three specific ways: through the narrative, through the style, and through certain ‘mystical’ demands upon the reader; the notion of things not having a coherent explanation much like the cat’s kittens. Another example within Murdoch’s early work would be that of gender differentials which we have discussed earlier. Value, for Murdoch, lies in the immersion in life, in its acceptance rather than its manipulation. This mirrors not only the development of Jake as a character, but also the philosophical arguments and conclusions which occur in Under the Net. Hugo, as opposed to Jake, is the centrally ‘good’ figure in this novel. Dipple describes him as possessing ‘a reliability which has nothing to do with consoling sentiments but with a firm movement forward in a consistent direction’,90 which is presumably why Jake finds it necessary to steal his ideas and present them as his own in The Silencer. By ultimately recognizing Hugo’s otherness, Jake realizes his own supersensible destiny when Hugo retreats to obscurity from his work as a film director – the ‘enchanter’ of the novel removes himself from the lives

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of Jake, Anna and Sadie and allows them to develop independently. The love square has been broken. We have considered the differing philosophical outlooks of Jake and Hugo, and to a lesser extent Dave Gellman, but what I find of further interest is Murdoch’s fascination with both London and Paris. She develops clear water between the two cities in terms of philosophical outlook, creating them, one could argue, as characters in their own right. Much has been written about Murdoch’s ‘London novels’91 (Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter, A Severed Head, The Time of the Angels) and I will talk about these later, but for now I would like to draw attention to the development of both cities as opposites. Murdoch applies a different style for London and Paris; London as a detailed intricate form, Paris as an illusory façade which assumes for Jake a greater emotional attachment, though one which is ‘nauseous’: Arriving in Paris always causes me pain, even when I have only been away for a short while. It is a city which I never fail to approach with expectation and leave with disappointment . . . Paris remains for me still an unresolved harmony.92 Jake goes on to contrast this with London and we immediately notice the difference: 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 this desolation the coloured shells of houses still raised up filled with blank squares of wall and window.93 It is clear that there is a certain difference for Jake when he views London as opposed to Paris. Indeed, it is possible that it has parallels with Murdoch’s view when her initial excitement concerning existential thought was dashed when she gave it close scrutiny. This is in direct relation to the emotions that Jake feels when imagining London and Paris as distinct characters in his mind. It is this remote viewing that allows Paris to be associated with unresolved harmony, whereas London is too well known to her to be anything but stylistically ordered. The irony is not lost on Murdoch that London is now associated, at least in this first novel, with linguistic explanation; all points of reference are fixed, they do not exude the dream-like quality that

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Paris does, which is perhaps why Jake is perpetually disappointed with it. Murdoch returns to London frequently within her novels; it is interesting to note Murdoch in her brief autobiography at the end of the Reprint Society’s edition of Under the Net: ‘I like to be alone in big cities’94 as it is clear that her, at least early, heroes not only live in what has been termed ‘Murdochland’ but are also going through the motions of discarding a solipsistic existence. Martz calls Under the Net ‘Dickens-cum-Sartre’,95 but I think this rather misses the multitude of influences bubbling under the surface. Beckett, with his influence of absurdist comedy, Weil, with her concentration on ‘attention’ to the human condition and Queneau, with his development of the existential novel which Murdoch so admires and the rejection of linguistic analysis in the creation of Gellman – a critique of the Oxford analytical set (Ryle, Ayer, Hampshire for example) provide a great deal of the influence upon the narrative structure. Louis Martz is quite correct when stating that Sartre is her chief philosophical influence. Under the Net is in the deepest sense a paradoxical work: the point is made that reality is incommunicable, just there, and at the same time a whole, highly conscious and sophisticated novel is devoted to saying this.96 The philosophical development of The Flight for the Enchanter, Peter Wolfe tells us, is little different to the major narrative contained in Under the Net: ‘The theme . . . is human freedom and the obstacles we must overcome in order to be free’ or more directly, the way in which people allow others to be their false gods and idols. He goes on to say that ‘Where Under the Net traced the dangers of subscribing to various mental categories or prejudices, The Flight from the Enchanter studies the social dangers which inhibit our freedom’.97 Is this a true assessment of either novel? I would argue that it is, from the view of her Under the Net; freedom and the contingency of the world are very much at the heart of the novel. However, the narrative development in her next novel suggests a slight turn in her philosophy. The major argument proposed by The Flight from the Enchanter is that no one person must allow themself to be over-influenced by another; Mischa holds the other characters in his grasp because they allow him to – they are voluntarily enslaved to his will. The alien god may only rule if his subjects surrender themselves fully to his will, much as Murdoch did for a time to Canetti. The case is that the ‘social dangers’ proposed by Wolfe are merely the creation of one man, Mischa Fox, whom Murdoch conveniently splits into two, the ego and the superego – Mischa and Calvin Blick – to produce greater friction within the novel. As far as inhibiting freedom is concerned, the individuals outside the Mischa–Blick dimension are flawed and weak. Murdoch merely allows them to fall prey to their own inner doubt. Whether

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this is caused by Mischa or a lack of development by Murdoch is unclear, although they are developed from the Platonic image of chained figures who mistake the firelight images on the cave wall to be reality. Indeed the cause of greatest excitement (and confusion) for the early critics has been the relationship between Calvin Blick and Mischa; one which is resolved if seen as a form of demonic parody. The parody is introduced early in the novel by Annette Cockeyne who decides to leave her school after mentally debating the plight of the Minotaur in the labyrinth during a lesson: Annette disliked the Inferno. It seemed to her a cruel and unpleasant book. She particularly disliked the passage about the Minotaur. Why should the poor Minotaur be suffering in hell? It was not the Minotaur’s fault that it had been born a monster. It was God’s fault. (34) The novel goes on to place Blick in the role of the Minotaur in the maze which is the house of Mischa Fox. Blick then becomes the embodiment of evil, always prepared to act out his master’s desires – but Blick himself is only evil through his loss of self. Mischa, although outwardly charming and gregarious, is the one holding the will of Blick and others in his hands, and becomes the true demon. One example of this is Annette Cockeyne who, through a lack of a father figure, latches onto John Casement and then later Mischa himself. The parallel with Murdoch’s private life cannot be overlooked; her psychological attachment to older men evidently reveals itself here. It is assumed by all the major critics of her work that Mischa is quite obviously a direct portrait of Canetti and, by implication, Murdoch must have some personal input into both Annette and Rosa Keepe, the confidant and lover of the Lusewitz brothers. Although this appears to be a very generalized view of Murdoch characterization it appears fairly consistent with the text. The danger comes, though, through seeing the novel as merely a ‘psychological play’, with Mischa as a ‘nice’ man whose evil is merely an illusory device used by the other inadequate characters to create a sense of meaning and adventure within their own lives; hence the enchantment. This is of course not the case as it would compromise a central tenet of Murdoch’s early philosophy, the existential reality of evil as a necessary consequence of power. Within the text are two notable additions to the Platonic undertone; one is the development of the notion of a demonic source for the ‘enchantment’ and the second is the inference that the ability to see the truth – which is only present within Mrs Wingfield – requires an arduous self-reflection and the removal of the ego. These are both closely related to the ‘unselfing’

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suggested by Weil, and the first is almost certainly the beginnings of an interest in Nietzschean individualism. The opposite within the novel is the downfall of Rainborough who becomes easy prey for Fox because he has no innate will of his own; Rainborough’s self-reflection is missing and he becomes a moral void. If only he had been more developed he would become a figure of pity. As it is he merely generates farce and little else. The major critics mentioned earlier in this chapter place Mischa as a demonic creature only concerned with his own well being and ego. I believe this is not the case and Murdoch repeatedly demonstrates this. Mischa’s horror at the death of his pet fish and his saving of Annette from a halfhearted attempt at suicide reveal a more humane side to his character that Murdoch is obviously adding to make him a more believable entity. Baldanza relates him to a Proustian archetype by noting that he takes particular care to preserve his past.98 The Times Literary Supplement’s reviewer says: She writes in a style of prim propriety that would not come amiss from the pen of Jane Austen and yet it proceeds to sweep away most conventional ideas of morality and of conduct as easily as if they were ninepins. Her world is blatantly unreal, yet carries a deeply felt reflection of the real world, showing a particular consciousness with cruelty . . . None of the characters dominates the others to the point of being distinguishable as a central character, nor are they linked into any design more noticeable than that of chance acquaintanceship.99 I have several disagreements with this review, particularly what it says about the conventions of morality, the unreality of the world created by Murdoch and the ‘consciousness of cruelty’ which is inflicted. My main point, however, centres on the creation of a dominating central force; it is quite obvious that this would be Mischa as he not only has a separate alter-ego but also is the major character of the work. The chance acquaintanceship revolves around him and he is central in almost every part of the novel. It is fairly elementary to criticize certain parts of the novel: even Murdoch herself believed that it was not her best work: Another failure. If I imagined I now knew ‘how to do it’ I was wrong. Not a great writer in training, but a mediocre writer who has a single stroke of luck? (I will not believe this) . . . A terrible haste has infected my work. Not exactly that I grudge time to the writing of each piece – but a sort of metaphysical sense of rush. Be quieter in the soul.100

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But even the Hunter/Fox dichotomy and the use of other clichéd fictional devices does not detract from the novel’s positive attributes. It is Mischa who stands out as the unknown other and it is he who holds the novel together. There is a tight structure for the narrative but the price paid for the patterning is the incredulity of some scenes, especially those relating to Annette and the Lusewitz brothers. If Mischa is the alien god, unloved except by fawning assistants and impressionable young girls, then the Lusewitz brothers are the brutal demonstration of a different culture: East European against West European. Their mutual and amoral seduction of Rosa and their placement within a middleclass environment, which is orchestrated by Mischa, enhances their ‘otherness’, although they do not act out of malicious intent, merely an ignorance of culture, and of gender differentiation in England. Gender relations frequently appear in the novel, mainly re-treading the ground of Under the Net. There is, however, the appearance of female self-awareness for the first time and this manifests itself with Agnes Casement and Annette Cockyene. Although these are of lesser interest in the development of the novel (Agnes and John Rainborough could quite easily be missing and the novel would not suffer unduly) they do begin to make clear Murdoch’s intention for women characters in her future novels. Mischa himself proclaims that women are of two types: unicorns or sirens, those who wish to be taken to the dragon’s lair and consumed and the second who has poison secreted on her skin, much like a toad.101 It is perhaps a little odd that Murdoch uses this imagery and it seems dated and derogatory. Murdoch does this to highlight not only Mischa’s attitude towards women, who he believes should be enslaved to his will, but also to refer back to the Platonic allegory of the cave; women need to escape the confines of the cave (and of men) in order to realize themselves as ‘self’ and obtain enlightenment. It is clear that Annette and Agnes are the two types of women being suggested. ‘A woman’s love is not worth anything until it has been cleared of all romanticism. And that is hardly possible. If she can survive the destruction of the heart and still have the strength to love . . .’102 It is clear that Mischa wants to discover if Rosa still loves him in some way, and her flight from his villa, out of shame and horror that he may have seen the photograph of her with either Stefan or Jan suggests that she may still be infatuated with him. The suicide of Nina the dressmaker highlights the difference in moral decisiveness in relation to Rosa. Nina kills herself as she cannot face deportation back to her country, and perhaps more strikingly, she cannot face life without the influence of a paternal overseer to guide her

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through life. Her death represents not only the power of Mischa over his associates but also the evil inherent in such power. Elizabeth Dipple argues that ‘The desire for knowledge is aligned to [Murdoch’s] persistent presentation of all characters in a state of metaxy and longing where they despairingly contrast their limited and all too particular present with various grand ideals towards which they aspire – innocence and romantic love’.103 Nina’s is the first death that Murdoch deals with and it certainly not a fairly honourable one. Much as Nick’s in The Bell, it suggests that weakness of character cannot always be overcome with insight into oneself and that redemption is not always available. The moral development of Under the Net where Jake moves from a work of little value towards the creation of original writing is not present in her second novel. Although The Flight from the Enchanter contains personal development and ongoing self-discovery, not all characters are able to experience it. The development of Mischa for example may have echoes in the development of Hugo as they are characters out of step with the rest of the players: A successful flight from oppression requires plain luck. The enchanter we must flee dwells very often within ourselves in the form of mistaken notions about personal responsibility and social equality. Unless we define our moral obligations, we face the prospect of a corrupt social creed that can only be aggravated by the romantic ideas of power and isolation.104 Murdoch has certainly moved away from contingency towards a more realist view of human interaction, being based firmly within the world rather than the world of dreams. In her first novel the romance of the shift between necessity and contingency is developed in such a way that every character has potential for goodness and insight, whereas in The Flight from the Enchanter this is less apparent as the removal of Mischa forces the other characters to dislocate from each other. This sense of failure is particularly well displayed in Peter Saward who devotes his life to discovering the meaning of ancient hieroglyphics only for his work to be negated by the discovery of a bilingual text near the ancient ruins: ‘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’.105 This explanation is the closest Murdoch comes to giving an overriding moral within the novel. This reflects the narrative structure; the destructiveness of power, and the lack of real connection among people caught in an enchanter’s

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web. The Artemis survives as it is championed by Mrs Carrington-Morris, the only major character not to be directly affected by the enchanter’s spell. It is obvious that there is a definite link between the fiction and philosophy of the two novels, and also the philosophy which preceded it. Clearly Murdoch is beginning to move away from existentialism towards a more Platonic view of life and embracing a rational outlook; The Sandcastle marks a far more defining departure for Murdoch from Sartre than either of these two novels attempt to do as it deals with smaller family-based issues in a smaller environment. Why is it then that Murdoch begins to reject existentialism? I shall indicate in which way she does this and although it deviates from her rejection of linguistic analysis it is based on the same premise: the emphasis on the moments of choice. According to Murdoch, existentialism provides us with an image of self within the twentieth century – a world without God which is known to be contingent. Sartre says that ‘there is no sense in life a priori’.106 Without a central focus point (telos) every individual becomes the centre, ‘sees the meaning of the world as a function of the consciousness of the individual’.107 The self therefore becomes the focus point, the sole negotiator of value within the world competing against other selves and their values. All individuals have to rely on their inner ‘morality’ for a source of meaning as there is no outwardly known source of right or wrong. Given this state of affairs the self can either choose between courage and action, or give in to despair and inaction. Either he fights for his own values or negates himself to a state of angoisse. From either point he is lonely; the ‘loss of an actual background’108 held together by an external source of value, such as a god, makes him a solipsistic being. There is the danger that the individual will allow himself to fall prey to self-deception which will fulfil his yearning for logical contingency. However this is not freedom as Sartre sees it, merely a mirage created by the weak self. Freedom is obtained through a constant meditation on the self in order to liberate it from illusion and insincerity. Murdoch believes that Sartre’s representation of the world is created (as regards moral value) through a process which starts with reflection and is then followed swiftly by an action; it is through the choices the individual makes that he confers meaning on the world around him. Murdoch appreciates Sartre’s ‘last ditch attachment to the value of the individual’109 but she is vehement in her rejection of his notion of the sovereignty of the individual consciousness. Equally she objects to the imaginative solipsism of Sartre’s individual which she describes as a function of the alienation of the self from his environment. She criticizes his inability to see emotion as a

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creative force within both his philosophy and his literature110 and his view of the imagination as a tool of self-deception. In Sartrean terms, the world is populated by selves expressing their consciousness, and struggling for dominance as they truly believe that their values are of value to humanity. His is a competitive struggle rather than a Marxist co-operative of shared ideals. In this context ‘being-for-others’, the way in which others perceive us, presents the temptation to succumb to the image the other has of us – the theme of The Flight from the Enchanter: Our consciousness of how other people label us . . . and how they see us is often very acute. This concern is our être-pour-autrui . . . To see ourselves through the eyes of another is to see ourselves as fixed and complete; and we may well be tempted to accept such a valuation as our own, as a relief from the apparent emptiness of self-examination. On the other hand if we disown that which we apprehend the other as seeing, the experience may be distressing or maddening.111 The existentialist hero, such as Roquentin, will fight being fixed by another – there is no sense of equilibrium, no-one is allowed to obtain balance with Sartre’s system and this is ultimately what Murdoch objects to (and which is discussed earlier in this chapter). What is the case is that these two novels are highly engaging, both as fiction and as philosophical statement. Under the Net in particular, with its insistence on a satisfying ending, permits all the major characters to develop and inhabit an ending which allows for freedom of selfhood, in a more fulfilling and creative manner. Although Murdoch has rejected the title of ‘philosophical novelist’ early in her career I do not believe that she could have dismissed the notion that much of her earliest fiction is considerably indebted to the continental schools of thought and those who have been influenced by it. Indeed, in the next chapter we see how Murdoch’s growing fascination with Freud illuminates this still further.

Chapter Two

A Severed Head: The Impact of Freud and Nietzsche

Before we begin to examine the philosophical beginnings of A Severed Head (1961) we should first turn to Murdoch’s later essay ‘On “God” and “Good”’ (1969) to understand exactly what caused her to move from a fictionally mediated philosophy, in Under the Net (1954) and The Bell (1958), to an introspective moral psychology. This is not to say that the novel does not exhibit philosophical ideas, far from it. It replaces, to an extent, Murdoch’s early concerns with Plato and returns, in part, to Sartre. The novel’s area of discussion is Freudian psychoanalysis in regard to moral decline and progression; indeed, it goes beyond this by reversing the Kantian notion of freedom residing in attention towards moral law. In her 1969 essay ‘On “God” and “Good”’ Murdoch says, ‘it is always a significant question to ask of any philosopher: what is he afraid of?’1 or, what barriers do philosophers erect to protect their own philosophy from attack and judgement? Murdoch dismisses the notion that she is a philosophical writer in the same way that Sartre and de Beauvoir are. Her question suggests what we could regard as her own fear as a writer, encompassing both her philosophy and fiction, the fear that she exhibits both as a predisposition to moral questioning and the difficulty of presenting fiction from an objective position rather than a personal, and subjective, point. To redress this fear Murdoch used this novel as both an ethical and a comedic narrative. Byatt has commented that Murdoch envisages A Severed Head as a discussion primarily concerning an individual’s approach to life. She returns to Murdoch’s first work on Sartre and quotes her: Sartre, like Freud, sees life as an egocentric drama; ‘the world is my world’ in that it is shaped by my values, projects and possibilities. Sartre wishes, however, while attempting to lay bare by a pure reflection . . . the nature of consciousness, to preserve the sovereignty of the individual psyche as a

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source of meaning. For him the psyche is co-extensive with consciousness. Whereas for Freud the deepest impulse is sexual, for Sartre it is the urge toward ‘self-confidence’ which is key to our being.2 Byatt’s critique develops from Murdoch’s earlier statement in Sartre: Romantic Rationalist where, in a footnote, Murdoch writes: The striking symbol of the petrifying Medusa is interpreted by Freud as a castration fear (Collected Papers, vol. V). Sartre of course regards as its basic sense our general fear of being observed (L’Être et le Néant, 502). It is interesting to speculate on how one would set about deciding which interpretation was ‘correct’.3 I believe Byatt is correct in her critique, and interprets Murdoch precisely when she says that A Severed Head is primarily concerned with ego and the pursuit of the negation of the ego in order for an individual to become fully adjusted to the world. This is, of course, a hopeless task but one which Murdoch attends to throughout her early works. If Martin Lynch-Gibbon, for example, is able to attend (to borrow a Weilean term) to both himself and those around him, then he may move towards the good; if he does not and remains firmly attached to his ego, he will surely remain static.Murdoch claims to be an opponent of Freudianism and, from a superficial perspective, this appears to be the case.4 Although Freud cannot be described as a philosopher in the classical sense, he certainly informs every aspect of the debate which is included here. Indeed his pervading influence is felt throughout twentieth-century literature and, for the purposes of this essay, is the major impact upon A Severed Head. Although Freud has been left behind by contemporary psychoanalysts and psychologists, it is right that he be accorded the title of philosopher both in this study and in a wider literary context. Murdoch claims that in order for us to develop a moral concept of love we must be able to converse with both Freud and Marx: We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx, and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.5 These are the moral concepts which are necessarily central to both this essay and the novel in question. Peter Conradi suggests that the above

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quotation equates to the development of Murdoch as a ‘moral psychologist’ in this period of her fiction, a term she uses to describe herself in her Caen lectures of 1978. Conradi goes on to persuade his reader that ‘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’,6 which although possibly true for her post-1966 work is certainly not the case concerning her early fiction. Murdoch’s development of the description of the ‘crystalline novel’7 to express her fictional philosophy is pronounced both in A Severed Head and in The Time of the Angels (1966). It is not enough for Conradi to have a generalized position on Murdoch’s early work having focused so specifically on The Bell in The Saint and the Artist (1986). It leaves little room for a detailed development of the central novels of the period in question and his critique would be of greater use to other critics of her work if he examined a wider range of her early fiction. If, however, we examine his assertion of Murdoch’s role of ‘moral psychologist’ as regards A Severed Head we see that it holds water. Conradi’s main difficulty is his refusal to see Freud as a philosopher. Were he to do this he would develop a continuous argument concerning her early work, a view that would prove invaluable to other critics of Murdoch’s work: Moral philosophy, and indeed morals are undefended against an irresponsible and undirected self-assertion which goes easily hand in hand with some brand of pseudo-scientific determinism.8 A fictional development of this is the irresponsibility we find in Palmer, a self-asserted Freudian psychologist. His scientific determinism leads him to seduce his patient Antonia for pure gratification and to develop an incestuous relationship with Honor, the joke being of course that Freudian psychologists cannot escape that which they are trying to cure others of, namely the baser human drives and ego which lead them into wrong moral choices. He also needs Martin in a supporting role to give him permission to be with Antonia but also to be a subservient ‘son’ in their developing three-way relationship. Murdoch points out the failings of the ego-obsessed in ‘On “God” and “Good”’: Briefly put, our picture of ourselves has become too grand, we have isolated, and identified ourselves with, an unrealistic conception of will, we have lost a vision of reality separate from ourselves, and we have no adequate conception of original sin.9

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By doing so she criticizes Stuart Hampshire’s Freedom of the Individual (1965) for promoting the will, and necessarily the ego, as the ultimate ‘god’ to which an individual must attend.10 Murdoch wishes individuals to attend to others in order to free themselves from their egotistical desires; which are at the centre of the novel. The problems of neurosis will not be cured by a general theory of psychoanalysis. She also disagrees with Hampshire when he develops his concern for individuals insofar as he sets up psychiatrists as the ultimate authority for moral behaviour as well as deities in their own right.11 There is also the question of the influence of Nietzsche upon the novel. Although the various drives to power and the submission of power to others is an obvious comment upon the exalted position occupied by psychoanalysis in A Severed Head, and (Murdoch would argue) at the time of publication, we must also uncover the influence of Nietzsche upon the narrative. Further to this, there is also the issue of the linkage of the will or drive to power with the subjugation of the individual; I am thinking here specifically of Martin and to a lesser extent Georgie. This goes beyond the work of Nietzsche into the work of Foucault, who links power to subjection as well as to the developing formation of the individual. He explains that there is definite linkage with this and the confessional nature of Freudian psychoanalysis: The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships and love relationships, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles. . . . One admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell anyone else about. The things people write books about . . . Western man has become a confessing animal.12 The extent of the influence of Foucault upon Murdoch’s writing is unclear. She never mentions him by name in any of her interviews or philosophical essays although, being an academic, she would have been aware of his ideas and would certainly have read a little of his work. Indeed, I believe it is the case that her later work (post-1970) was directly influenced by his appropriation of Freudian psychoanalysis. However, in order to fully understand Murdoch’s thinking behind the love triangle of Martin, Antonia and Anderson we must look to Nietzsche, who is the major influence behind this part of the narrative as he claims that Jewish redirection of spiritual values dissipates with the advent of Christianity; even the Christian

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god is willing to dispense with the letter of justice in order to sacrifice himself to others. D. H. Lawrence borrows Nietzsche’s basic precepts in his Fantasia of the Unconscious (1921) and directs them to the question of what he believes to be the inversion of roles in modern marriage and contemporary society: Instead of becoming assertive and rather insentient, he [modern man] becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings – nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the original role of woman. Woman meanwhile becomes the fearless, inwardly relentless, determined positive party.13 Murdoch would not concur with either Nietzsche or Lawrence that man can transcend himself through obedience to instinct. A Severed Head is set in contemporary London just as British society was about to undergo massive cultural change. The beautiful Antonia and the radiant Anderson need Martin’s acquiescence in their scheme to justify themselves. Martin remains a higher source of authority even though they wish to debase him to the level of a child; the irony being of course that he has wronged Antonia equally by sleeping with Georgie, except that Antonia is unaware. Life requires structure, discipline and organization; unable to supply themselves with these, Antonia and Anderson look to Martin to provide for them – naturally they become offended when Martin’s secret lover is announced to them. As Antonia and Anderson lack the specific principles that derive from their own inner convictions, Antonia is positively revivified by Martin’s disclosure. If we envision this situation in purely Freudian terms, which Murdoch wishes us to do albeit with a sense of humour at the movement of the narrative, the impulses deriving from the brute authority of (laughably as a psychiatrist) Anderson’s id clashes with his moral code and the superego assumes control. In satisfying his own psycho-rational needs, however, Anderson violates Martin’s freedom to act or to choose. Underlying all this is, obviously, a satirical but accurate version of Freud’s evolutionary mechanism. Absent from Anderson’s program are the accidental, the contingent, and an awareness of the human personality – what Simone Weil would note as a lack of attention to the ‘other’: this underlines the comedic element of the novel, and is its philosophical core. Anderson overlooks the equal validity of these other points of view and the countless ways in which people confront the world; consequently, he cannot understand Martin’s deviation from the emotional needs of his own underdeveloped relationship with Antonia.

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The balance of discordant public and private interests in our own lives is, contrary to Freud, often so delicate that a sudden shift or dislodgement in one area can upset our entire moral stability. This is partly the reason why psychologists have, to a large extent, ridiculed the work of Freud in the last 40 years or so. However, for the literary critic his work provides a useful tool for examining the work of authors, especially if they themselves refer to him explicitly or implicitly. Murdoch believes that rather than functioning as the mechanical constituents of a depersonalized social network, we are virtually involved in each other’s lives; everyone in the novel is in some way unsettled by the decision of Antonia and Anderson to live together. This lack of a Platonic unselfment and the ignorance of the ‘other’ in preference to selfhood is at the root of the characters’ strife but also the dramatic element of the novel – this is the crux of the narrative itself. Unfortunately for Murdoch the novel received rather tepid reviews when first published. Suffice it to say that the novel marks a real departure from the narrative of The Bell: the move from an ‘open’ to a ‘closed’ novel is noticeable both in the difference of style and the philosophy which informs them. Furthermore, from the change of direction, away from the pastoral setting of The Bell back towards London, comes a sense of darkness which we have not experienced since The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), which is mirrored by the revisiting of some existential concepts such as the growth of the individual apart from society and the absence of any religious belief. However, I wish to demonstrate how Freudian constructs not only informed Murdoch’s early philosophy but also influenced her early fiction in general and this novel specifically. As Peter Wolfe says, ‘The various drives to power portrayed in A Severed Head are the natural products of our unnaturally specialized age and the exalted position occupied by psychoanalysis’,14 and although much has changed since Murdoch wrote A Severed Head, the decline of professional Freudian psychoanalysis for example, the issues which she deals with are still relevant to contemporary literature as she is grappling with the question of the universal truth of self in much starker terms than in her first novel. The truths she wishes to discuss are, naturally, Freudian and Sartrean. Martin has to realize his own predilection for the use of sexual violence, intimidation and fear, and decide whether his ego leads him or whether he has control of his own will. Byatt and Dipple both label Martin as the protagonist15 but it is more useful to see him, as I believe Murdoch does, as a narrative device with which to expose the ultimate indestructibility of the true protagonist Honor Klein. She becomes an anti-hero and remains static throughout the novel; if she were to develop some form of

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self-knowledge and vision of others then perhaps this stasis would not pervade either her or the novel. Byatt links her with a ‘vaster and vaguer and more general truth who combines in human form . . . respect for the individual . . . and that love we have discussed in terms of The Bell, and which is both inevitable and truth-seeking’.16 The reading of the novel that I wish to explore projects Honor as the embodiment of the darker side of Freudian psychoanalysis and, although this is diffused somewhat by the comedic value of the text and Honor’s role as the equal of the male characters, she inhabits the same area as Carel in The Time of the Angels. The sexual relationships of the major characters are (necessarily for the narrative to work) certainly immoral and occasionally illegal. If we examine Murdoch’s use of Freud and sexuality it becomes clear that sexuality is symbolic of the power struggle which pervades the novel and the development of the narrative. The totemic icon around which the narrative develops is Honor. Without her the male characters have nothing to align themselves with and the novel would fall apart. She is, of course, the collector of severed head(s) of the title, the uncanny enchantress figure who, once revealed in her nakedness, is to some extent demystified. As a professional anthropologist she is only too aware of the history of ‘savage’ tribes collecting severed heads as trophies to prove their own worth in their communities, the joke being that even within polite society in London primal lusts and urges are never far from the surface. She styles herself as ‘a severed head such as primitive tribes and alchemists used to use. And who knows but that long acquaintance with a severed head may not lead to strange knowledge’ (182). The unravelling of this ‘strange knowledge’ hinges on this moment in the novel. The novel continually evokes the image of the uncanny severed head. It is used to good comedic effect but it also reflects Freud’s original discussion17 which places the uncanny notion of a severed head at the centre of what can be thought to be certainly peculiar and at times nauseatingly disconcerting. Alexander produces a bust of Antonia which ominously suggests to Martin, when he views it at the family home, how she may appear to another who not only sees her more objectively than he does but specifically someone who may also be in love with her: There was a clay head in the first stages of composition, the early stages when the wire framework has been roughly filled out and then the clay laid over it in various directions in long strips until the semblance of a

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head appears. This particular moment has always seemed to me uncanny, when the faceless image acquires a quasi-human personality, and one is put in the mind of making monsters. All the same heads are us most of all, the apex of our incarnation. The best thing about being God would be making the heads. (41–2) Georgie, having been pushed out of the window by Martin, and subsequently out of his life for the time being, feels aggrieved and rejected and so sends him a box with her shaven hair in it; if not a ‘severed head’ in the physical sense, certainly a rejection of Martin’s hold over her – a severing of control. When Martin lifts the lid he, along with the reader, feels a sense of dread, believing that her severed head may lie below. Honor Klein is described as being ‘like a headless sack’18 as she is driven by Martin to meet Palmer and Antonia. He is disconcerted by the way she looks at him and her eyes follow him round the room but she does not move her head. Martin’s fear of decapitation is tied strongly with the fear of castration, much as it is in the Greek myth of Medusa and Perseus, along with other myths which are interspersed throughout the novel.19 In Freudian terms20 the severing of the head primarily denotes castration and in this respect is a short-hand term for the disempowerment Martin feels when Palmer seduces Antonia. Martin’s position is first usurped and then his mind is ruled by his body (and low eros) when he decides to become attached to Honor, although this desire is developed more out of fear than it is out of (true) sexual wanting. According to Jacques Lacan, the subject is himself an object of the symbolic and a distinction must be drawn between what belongs in experience to the symbolic and what belongs to the imaginary.21 This argument between the symbolic and the imaginary is at the centre of Murdoch’s narrative. The ego of Martin, for example, is negated when he discovers the duplicity of both Antonia and Georgie but is reignited when he discovers Honor in bed with Palmer. These events lead him to realize that the ‘other’ is in fact real. Murdoch plays on the reader’s discomfort with this imagery to form the basis of the novel’s uncanniness and comedic value, both coming from the inability of anyone but Honor (however falsely) to control his environment, but at the expense of a deeper awareness or development of the self. Martin’s (and Murdoch’s) strange obsession with incest goes together well with his other fixation of being ‘mothered’ first by Antonia and secondly by Honor. He notes how Alexander resembles his mother, how he married Antonia because she reminded him of his mother, and is sometimes mistaken

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for his mother as well as mothering him, and Honor who resembles the fearsome matriarch – three types of mother-obsession which add to the comedic structure. Honor is also the forbidden, what Jacques Lacan has titled ‘the thing’ which must not be touched – the forbidden object of incestuous desire, the phallic mother.22 Here Lacan veers away from Freud and represents his own take on Melanie Klein’s work – namely that of the cannibalistic fantasies of devouring, and being devoured by, the mother. He links this in with Freud’s theory of the death drive, bringing it back to a nostalgic yearning to return to the mother’s breast, even if the mother no longer exists. Honor fills these roles both for Martin and for Palmer, the uncanniness and comedy emanating from Palmer’s role as a psychoanalyst and Martin’s supposed mastery of his inner self. Although it is Palmer who initially is incestuous, Martin is merely acting an immoral rather than illegal role. It is clear to see how much simpler this novel was than any of Murdoch’s earlier works in being rewritten for the stage, having a small set of characters and a limited set of locations.23 It seems as if all the characters in the novel are merely acting out the roles to which she assigns them and they do not realize any independent movement of their own as they go through the motions assigned to them; a perfectly crystalline example of the form which Murdoch sets out, and condemns, in ‘Against Dryness’. It is precisely this type of novel which lends itself so well to extolling the virtues of a ‘philosophy’ or a set of philosophical ideas. It needs to be stated here that the influence of Lacan on Murdoch’s fictional and philosophical writings, in relation to the period discussed here, is difficult to ascertain as it is uncertain how much of his work was available to Murdoch. It is certain that his thoughts contained in the articles which made up ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (Écrits), would have been known in Britain, even though they had not been translated from French. Murdoch certainly had a good grasp of written French as her war work and attendance at two of Sartre’s lectures would have been futile without it. However, Écrits was not translated and published in English until 1968 which, chronologically, prevents this book claiming that she had definite views on his philosophy as a whole at this time even though she may well have had a sound grasp of his major ideas. Lacan’s argument is that the fundamental psychological ‘gain’ from the fundamental fantasy is the following: the fundamental fantasy represents what occurred at castration in the terms of a narrative of possession and loss. This fantasy thus consoles the subject by positing that s/he at one point did have the phallic Thing, but that then, at castration, it was taken away

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from him/her by the ‘other’. What this of course means is that, since the Thing was taken away from the subject, perhaps It can also be regained by him/her.24 It is this promise, Lacan maintains, that usually structures neurotic human desire. Lacan thus asserts that the fundamental fantasy is there to veil from the subject the terminal nature of its loss at castration. This is not simply a speculation, however. It is supported by telling evidences that he produces. The key point that supports Lacan’s position is the stipulation the objet petit à is an anamorphic object. What this means can be seen by looking at even the most well-known exemplar of the Lacanian objet petit à: the ‘object gaze’. Contrary to how it is sometimes read, the Lacanian ‘gaze’ is anything but the intrusive and masterful male gaze on the world. For Lacan, gaze is indeed a ‘blind spot’ in the subject’s perception of visible reality, ‘disturbing its transparent visibility’.25 What it bears witness to is the subject’s inability to fully frame the objects that appear within his/her field of vision; the classic example of the object-gaze from Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the floating skull at the feet of Holbein’s Ambassadors. What is singular about this ‘thing’ is that it can literally only be seen from ‘awry’, and at the cost that the rest of the picture appears at that moment out of focus. From this point on the canvas, Lacan comments, it is as if the painting regards us. What he means is that the skull reminds us that we, with our desires and fantasies, are implicated in how the scene appears. Here then is another meaning: objet petit à for Lacan, as something that can only operate its fascination upon individuals who bear a partial perspective upon it, is that object which ‘re-presents’ the subject within the world of objects that it takes itself to be a wholly ‘external’ perspective upon. If a subject thus happens upon it too directly, it disappears, or else – as in psychosis and the well-known filmic motif of what happens when one encounters one’s double – the cost is that one’s usual sense of how the rest of the world is must dissipate. What this indicates is that the objet petit à, or at least the fascinating effect the object which bears it has upon the subject who is under its thrall, has no ‘objective’ reality independent of this subject. The logical consequence of this though, as Lacan stipulates, is that this supposedly ‘lost’ object can never really have been lost by the subject, since s/he can never have possessed it in the first place. This is why Lacan argues the apparently chimerical position that the objet petit à is by definition an object that has come into being in being lost. Surely this is at the centre of the novel for Murdoch: Martin has lost objective reality and this is why his world, so neatly created, falls down completely and he is left with very little, except what he was looking for from the beginning – the all-encompassing Honor who not only mothers him but becomes a sexual object. Murdoch, as

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a practising philosopher at Oxford during this period, would surely have understood his arguments. Indeed she seems most interested in his fictional writings and how these related to Lacan’s promotion of structuralism: Early structuralism does not seem to have been aware of Wittgenstein. Lacan produced novel, in 1956, ideas (for instance about ‘inner processes’ and words not being names) which were current in Cambridge before the 1939 war. In general, for those trained in the analytic philosophical tradition, structuralism writings seem singularly lacking in detailed philosophical reflection.26 The relevance of Lacan then is twofold: firstly, that Murdoch’s reading of his work impacts on her view of continental philosophy; and two, that he crucially related the work of Freud and Sartre and by doing so highlighted the existential (and unconscious) linkage between the self and the other. If we return to A Severed Head we will see how these ideas are underlined in the swirling sexual relationships of the characters. The crystalline nature of A Severed Head is reminiscent of her earliest novels and as such it is a return to a format which Murdoch claims to have rejected in ‘Against Dryness’. Whether this matters or not is debatable. Critics such as Conradi believe A Severed Head is of lesser value than The Bell and the post-1971 novels as, although it is ‘the best of the restoration comedies of manners’,27 it is rather ‘over-plotted’,28 much like the original restoration comedies, and fulfilling all the necessary requirements of a ‘crystalline’ novel. What is of concern is the reversion to the crystalline structure of Under the Net when Murdoch believes her best work in the preceding years was The Bell.29 Perhaps some answer to this can be found in the work of Freud and Murdoch’s interpretation of him in her fiction: Psychoanalysis has taught us that a boy’s earliest choice of love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones – his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them. Thus incestuous fixations of libido continue to play (or begin once more to play) the principal part in his unconscious mental life.30 We are drawn from this immediately to Palmer and his neurotic obsession with his half-sister and this is certainly where Murdoch leads us for comedic

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effect when she introduces Martin to Palmer and Honor’s semi-incestuous bedroom scene. It is from this immoral depiction that Martin finally regains a sense of self and realizes the dangerous extent of his obsession with Honor, a scene which will be mirrored in The Time of the Angels. Unlike that novel, however, the relationship between Honor and Martin is not one of father and daughter but object and obsession for the object, teacher and infatuated pupil or, to return to the roots of the mythology of the novel, gorgon and monster hunter. At first glance it seems as if the first and second descriptions are sound but the third is at odds with them both. A careful consideration of theoretical Freudian psychology, however, reveals to us the extent to which Martin must neuter the powerful female obsession in order to regain control of his life and assert power over Palmer. The beheading of Honor is intrinsically linked with violence against the female which is echoed earlier in the novel: With one hand she tossed one of the napkins high in the air into the darkness of the high-ceilinged room. As it descended the sword was already moving with immense speed. The two halves of the napkin fluttered to the floor. She threw up the other napkin and decapitated it. I picked up one of the pieces. It was cleanly cut. (96–97) Not only does Honor symbolize the splitting of Palmer and Antonia by her deftness with the sword, but she also repeats earlier splits between Martin and Antonia and the split between Martin and Georgie. The symbolism is rather overdone but perhaps necessarily so; the severing of the napkin is replaced in the stage play by the decapitation of a small figure of Bishamon, the Japanese god of war.31 This act of severance comes at the critical point of both the novel and play as the descent into the near-farcical sexual merry-go-round. Underlying the abstract concept of the individual in the novel is Murdoch’s belief in individuals’ claims to ownership of their inner lives, and this is the major function of the narrative – to discuss this idea in detail via her psychoanalytic take on fiction. It is upon this belief that Murdoch’s moral philosophy is based, a belief in an individual’s conscious behaviour and personal moral experience. This is where she comes into stark contrast with the beliefs of both Stuart Hampshire in her disagreement with his Freedom of the Individual and the linguistic arguments of Ryle, Ayer and Wittgenstein. For Murdoch these philosophies disregard the moral development of the self and the ability of the self to exist as a functioning part of the will.

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The concept of the self which Freud develops is the forerunner of Hampshire’s work. The basic assumption of this concept is that the person is an energy system in which all mental processes are thought to be an energy flow of some kind. The goal of all behaviour is to reduce tension through the release of this energy which will ultimately lead to pleasure, Freud’s pleasure principle.32 Even though society and civilization reject the pursuit of pleasure, the individual demands it; therefore the individual and society come into conflict leading to a repression of the self in order to become part of society. Sexual energy is diverted into the creation of art thereby bypassing and repressing the true self. Murdoch believes that Freud’s version of the fallen man is useful in examining this concept: Modern psychology has provided us with what might be called a doctrine of original sin, a doctrine which most philosophers either deny (Sartre), ignore (Oxford and Cambridge), or attempt to render innocuous. When I speak in this context of modern psychology I mean primarily the work of Freud. I am not a ‘Freudian’ . . . but it seems clear that Freud made an important discovery about the human mind . . . One may say that what he presents us with is a realistic and detailed picture of fallen man. If we take the general outline of this picture seriously, and at the same time wish to do moral philosophy, we shall have to revise the current conceptions of will and motive considerably. What seems to me, for these purposes, true and important in Freudian theory is as follows. He sees the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or control. Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings.33 Although Murdoch claims not to be a Freudian, Freudian psychology is a useful device to inform her fictional writing and moral philosophy. But does this necessarily mean that she becomes a ‘moral psychologist’ of the kind that Conradi believes she is? I believe this is not the case. How can one, Murdoch argues, have a unified self, or indeed a ‘solitary knower’ which can clearly identify ideas and from them come to reveal the true identity of the self? Even if we allow for historical changes in the relationship of individuals to themselves and others, and also to the Freudian development of the ‘stream of consciousness’ which brings us to greater knowledge of the solitary knower, we must return to the concept of the self

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for philosophy to regain its prestige as a useful and living subject.34 If we prioritize the notion of the self in philosophy we are doing ourselves a great service as we are asserting that, no matter how difficult to define, the self is an important source of moral experience and cannot be overlooked. When this disappears in the work of her contemporaries, she says: There is of course no mention of sin, and no mention of love. Marxism is ignored, and there is, on the whole no attempt at a rapprochment with psychology, although Professor Hampshire does try to develop the idea of self-awareness towards an ideal end-point by conceiving of ‘the perfect psychoanalysis’ which would make us perfectly self aware and so perfectly detached and free.35 This is exactly what she is arguing against in A Severed Head, the lack of control inherent in any form of psychoanalysis. We can see, then, that the obsession with obtaining ‘the perfect psychoanalysis’ and its development in moral philosophy (Murdoch may think it laughable to call it a philosophy of the self) provides part of the inspiration for her to return to the darker side of fiction first visited in The Flight from the Enchanter, and a darker and murkier side of London which she again returns to later in her career. In her essay ‘On “God” and “Good”’, Murdoch relates modern psychology to what she believes to be an accurate picture of fallen man: ‘In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego’.36 The question asked at the end of the novel is: Has any one of the characters eradicated or lessened the effect of the ego so they may come to a realization of themselves and each other? Indeed, ‘can one have fulfilling human relations with a severed head?’37 Murdoch’s moral philosophy is based firmly on the actual reality of the individual self, which at this point emanates from Murdoch’s broader philosophical position and depends on the capacity of the individual to have a meaningful inner life and to discriminate between the ego and other levels of human consciousness. This is all very well in viewing A Severed Head alone, concerned with the dangers of a lack of self-introspection and little attention for others, but in order to understand Murdoch’s vision of the self we must look to the ideas postulated in The Bell and her earlier fiction. Murdoch’s use of the higher form of eros enabled her to create an open novel with room for the characters to develop their own sense of self-awareness (or not as the case may be) and inner vision experienced by Dora and Michael at the end of the novel. A Severed Head, being chronologically next in Murdoch’s oeuvre, tries to obtain the same result but by means of low (sexualized) eros in a closed environment. There is, Murdoch realizes, some

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crossover between Platonic and Freudian ideas concerning the human condition; Freud’s references to original sin and ‘fallenness’, for example. Murdoch is starting from the conviction that we are all, by nature, selfish and egocentric beings who need the authority of non-human and independent absolutes such as beauty, truth and goodness to draw us away from a desire ‘to de-realize the other, devour and absorb him, subject him to the mechanism of our own fantasy’.38 The most relevant elements to emphasize are the use of ‘energy’ which is portrayed as ambiguous, almost exclusively sexual and defiantly resistant to both will and reason; and the discussion of ‘mechanism’ which also describes a range of impersonal forces which are necessarily impervious to the will and therefore to understanding. This idea of a mechanism is repeated in the shorter quotation taken from The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977), both written in the same period. This repetition is repeated throughout A Severed Head and is uncannily similar to that expressed in her philosophical writings of the late 1960s and early 1970s as we have seen above. Murdoch notes the similarities Plato shares with Freud, saying ‘partially similar views have been expressed before in philosophy, as far back as Plato’.39 In fact, Freud has only updated Plato’s central concept of eros to include modern terminology, which without Plato’s central idea of vision and the ‘seeing’ of the other would be redundant. This repetition of ideas is necessary for Murdoch’s moral psychology and, naturally, this novel. The Freudian libido then is, for Murdoch, a direct descendant of Platonic eros, albeit one which is reduced to a lower psychological plane due to its inherent links with the ego and the diminishing of will independent from the ego. This is where Weil’s concept of attention is most important: attention to the ‘other’, be it another human or God. The impingement of Christianity upon A Severed Head is noticeable by its virtual absence. Unlike The Time of the Angels which follows this novel there is little mention of the worship of a single unifying god. Instead we are exposed to real ‘god’ Honor Klein, one of the ‘dark gods’ she herself refers to, who is worshipped by all the other characters at one point or another. Murdoch acknowledges this: Mischa Fox and Honor Klein are both power characters. They are Gods who are deified by their surrounding followers . . . I think there is in some sense, which I don’t mean to be religious or metaphysical, demonic energy and that there is a great deal of spare energy racing around, which very often focuses a situation and makes a person play a commanding role. People are often looking for a god or ready to cast someone in the role of a demon. I think people possessed of this kind of energy [demonic] do

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come in and generate situations. But then there are always victims to come forward.40 It is interesting to note that her enchanter figures only ‘work’ when placed in a closed novel. In her open novels of this period, The Bell, The Sandcastle, and Under the Net for example, there is a lack of an enchanter figure and, for better or worse, the narrative seems less contrived. Dipple comments that A Severed Head ‘plays entirely to a fast high comedy, evocative of Under the Net but lacking its texture’,41 suggesting that something is missing from the text; by closing the novel and using it as a vehicle for restoration comedy, specifically the sexual element, Murdoch loses the necessary ‘attention’ that the players need from each other to make the novel work as a moral fiction. For example, the interaction of Honor and Palmer is not informed by another character outside of the sexual circle portrayed within the novel. This is understandable as a larger group of characters would detract from the comedic elements of the narrative and it would not make for a range of ‘free characters’ which Murdoch wished to develop. By doing so she prevents Honor, Palmer, or indeed any of the other characters, from being one-dimensional. Indeed, Murdoch echoes the love-chases and post-marital relationship breakdowns which informed the greatest restoration dramas. This is not to say, however, that the ideas essential for it to be termed a moral and psychological novel are missing, but we must discuss why the fundamental goal is not reached; why Martin does not come to a fuller awareness of others or himself. The problem of egoism, in Murdoch’s view, is not merely a redirection of vision but also a transformation of psychic energy to allow for progression of the self. The central issue for moral philosophy at this point is thus: ‘Are there any techniques for the purification and reorientation of an energy which is naturally selfish, in such a way that when moments of choice arrive we can be sure of acting rightly?’42 Murdoch’s normative theory of the good is therefore more than a movement from a low to high eros or the developing of ‘attention’; it is also the use of the will to overcome a loss of vision and create a truly holistic growth of the inner self or indeed what Plato terms the soul. As we know, Murdoch only relies on Freudian psychology in this novel where his diagnosis of human selfishness and ego are central to the text. She follows Plato rather than Freud in the understanding of the technique for its cure, but does not implement it here; it is partly the reason why she believes that it is unsatisfactory in explaining her own philosophy. The overriding reason she experiments with this is that Freud’s account of the psyche is, she

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believes, ‘in the context of a scientific therapy which aims not at making people good but at making them workable’,43 whereas for Murdoch any kind of psychotherapy should have the explicit aim of ‘making ourselves morally better’.44 ‘Cure’ should provide a form of creating modes of attention which can ultimately break the psyche; ‘it is an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism, and not a scrutiny of the mechanism itself, that liberates. Close scrutiny of the mechanism often merely strengthens its power’,45 as it does for Antonia’s vision of Palmer. Martin’s vision of Palmer is also inhibited by this until he sees Palmer as a man, like himself, laden with ego and unethical sexual drives. Palmer and Martin are revealed to be what Murdoch describes as typically ‘twentieth-century men’ and they find that their ‘religious and metaphysical background[s] [are] so impoverished that they are in some danger of being left with nothing of inherent value except will-power itself’.46 All that they have left then is will-power and the ego to drive it forward. Martin begins the novel in a state of complacency, borne out by his sexualized relationship with his mistress Georgie and his marriage to Antonia, which has more in common with a mother–son relationship than anything that is founded on equality. Martin finds Antonia valuable to him as she is based within society but turns to Georgie as she appears to be apart from it. He refuses to expose Georgie to his life outside their liaison as he cannot face the reality of his adultery; her desire to see New York is rebuffed as he musters real courage in facing his other life and what a mistress would mean to his marriage – much as how her exposure to his family would undermine his reputation: ‘I want to meet Alexander, and I shall go on and on at you about it, just as I shall go on and on at you about that trip to New York.’ Georgie had an obsession about seeing New York, and I had rashly promised to take her with me. At the last moment, however, I had some qualm of conscience, or more likely some failure of nerve, at the prospect of having to lie on such a scale to Antonia.47 As Martin realizes that this is the case, he is not oblivious to his predicament, merely too weak to change the situation. Antonia’s later revelation that she is in love with Palmer and wishes to be divorced from Martin comes as a body blow, as he never suspected that she, like him, could be so weak as to fall for someone outside their marriage. This is a double blow for Martin as he relies on Antonia not only for sexual love but also for a higher form of eros, a parental love, one which he shares: ‘Do I understand you? If you

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mean you’re a bit in love with Palmer, I’m not surprised. I’m a bit in love with him myself’.48 Antonia uses this to place Martin in the role of the child to his surrogate parents Palmer and Antonia. This is misplaced attention to the development of the individual and does nothing for the progression of Martin into a self-reflecting being. Instead, it objectifies him into a role he necessarily rebels against and leads him to a sort of realization when he falls in love with Honor. This element of the novel seems contrived, and although essential for the narrative, does little for Murdoch’s reputation as a moral realist. She expresses as much in an interview: Haffenden: I imagine you feel dubious about imposing form on the novel for both artistic and ethical reasons, in that form might become a libel on real life? Murdoch: A strong form tends to narrow the characters. I felt it particularly about A Severed Head, which was the end of a certain road, because a strong mythology can issue in mechanical unsurprising writing. Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don’t expect. The idea of the myth and the form have got to be present, but one has brutally to stop the form determining the emotion of the book by working in the opposite direction, by making something happen which doesn’t belong to the world of magic.49 This is why the novel ends pessimistically with Martin lacking in personal development, Georgie infatuated with Palmer, and Honor replacing Antonia in the role of Martin’s keeper. What does this tell us about Murdoch’s development of Weilean philosophy or of the movement she wishes to see in the growth of the self? The novel fails in both these regards as low eros (sexuality) is never advanced into a higher form of regard for the other and there is a distinct lack of progression. A Severed Head brings us almost full circle to an endpoint which is a repetition of the beginning.

Chapter Three

Martin Heidegger and The Time of the Angels

‘I am a little worried about how far one should let the philosophy come in. I think sometimes it comes into the centre of the plot, as it did in The Time of the Angels.1 Murdoch’s earliest work is preoccupied with the relation of her fictional writing to the work of some of her greatest philosophical influences and can be neatly summarized as a philosophical discussion of language:2 she admits as much. This is surprising when viewed against the polemic nature of ‘Against Dryness’ and an interview of 1978: ‘I have definite philosophical views, but I don’t want to promote them in my novels or to give the novel a kind of metaphysical background . . . I don’t want philosophy, as such, to intrude into the novel world at all’.3 This chapter aims not only to assess the impact of Heidegger upon Murdoch’s work, with specific regard to The Time of the Angels (1966), but also to discuss Murdoch’s unpublished manuscript concerning Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and her rejection of Germanic existentialism. It is my firm belief that Murdoch’s concern with Heideggerian philosophy – and existentialism in general – stretches for the length of her career and had a greater impact upon it than has been given attention before this point: indeed Peter Conradi, Elizabeth Dipple and Barbara Stevens Heusel either omit Heidegger from influencing ‘Murdochland’ or mention him briefly in a passing footnote. Thankfully the work of Stephen Mulhall and Justin Broakes is beginning to reassess his influence to some degree – although this is only a philosophical redress, not an interdisciplinary one as this essay will be. I should state at this point that I am not an expert on the intricacies of Heideggerian philosophy, nor should it be thought that this chapter attempts a reductionist reading of it. It intends to explore Murdoch’s engagement with Heidegger; it falls to others to assess the merits of her work in toto. For Murdoch the ‘trinity’ of Plato, G. E. Moore and Simone Weil was counterbalanced throughout her career by Kant, Sartre and Heidegger (and, to an extent Nietzsche): opposing forces from which her best fiction seemed to emanate. The Time of the Angels concerns the development of world secularization in relation to an enclosed community (of sorts) as well

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as the abuse of power and sexual domination. The central issue is this: can one be a theist without succumbing to the lure of a false idol or the consolation which can be found within religious belief? Marcus Fisher, the figure of the ‘good’, is in the early stage of planning a book concerned with (and titled) Morality without God. The main theme of his work is an attack upon those who believe that moral judgements are expressions of the Will, or of Choice, a concept which Murdoch argues against in her own philosophical writings. Her own creation, however, and a much later work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) can be seen to wish to achieve the same purpose, namely replacing god with ‘good’ in much the same way that Fisher imagines but via a different route. Certainly this is something which had been developing in Murdoch’s own mind since the 1960s. The opposition to this view is taken by Marcus’s brother Carel who marvels at his control over the inhabitants of his rectory: The author of the book of Job understood it. Job asks for sense and justice. Jehovah replies that there is none. There is only power and the marvel of power; there is only chance and the terror of chance.4 From this view amorality is justified; for the Nietzschean and the Heideggerian (not that the two are mutually exclusive), will to power is everything. If there is no longer a valid moral choice does vision therefore become all? Is this perhaps the only option? Murdoch sees ‘vision’ thus: What must here be clearly separated is the notion of inner or private psychological phenomena, open to introspection, and the notion of private or personal vision which may find expression overtly or inwardly . . . morality is a choice, and moral language guides choice through factual specification.5 The vision could clearly be one in which God is placed at the centre; but if there is no God does it follow that there is no morality either? This is the main issue debated in the novel – the updated Hegelian notion (present within Dostoyevsky, another influence upon the novel), that ‘God is not only dead, everything is permissible’, or, what morality might mean in a world without God: Suppose the truth were awful, suppose it was just a black pit, or like birds huddled in the dust in a dark cupboard? Suppose only evil were real, only it was not evil since it had lost even its name? (170)

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It is Carel who speaks these words but his brother holds the same to be true: Suppose the truth about human life were just something terrible, something appalling which one would be destroyed by contemplating? You’ve taken away all the guarantees. (103) Murdoch, although in conversation with these notions, does not hold any of them to be true. Her vision still holds Platonism to be the ultimate philosophical doctrine. This Platonism finds form within the novel in the philosophical writing of Marcus Fisher. As Mary Warnock argues, ‘She [Murdoch] holds that goodness has a real though abstract existence in the world. The actual existence of goodness is, in her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God’.6 For herself, Murdoch says that ‘Our general awareness of good, or goodness, is with us unreflectively all the time, as a sense of God’s presence, or at least existence, used to be for all sorts of believers’.7 So, in the widest sense The Time of the Angels serves as a functional philosophical debate, quite unlike anything she has attempted previously in fictional form; indeed it would be true to say that Murdoch never did come to full knowledge of Heideggerian philosophy as she rejected her work on Heidegger and left it unpublished in 1993.8 She allows the awfulness of her emotion towards his form of existentialism to find form within the novel when Pattie (literally) stumbles upon a copy of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Pattie exists to service Carel who refers to her as ‘Pattie beast’ or his ‘black Madonna’. In death, Dasein (being-there) has not been fulfilled nor has it simply disappeared; it has not become finished or is it wholly at one’s disposal as something ready-to-hand . . . Ending, as Being-towards-the-end, must be clarified ontologically in terms of Dasein’s kind of being . . . The existential clarification of Being-towards-the-end will also give us an adequate basis for defining what can be possibly be the meaning of our talk about a totality of Dasein, if indeed this totality is to be constituted by death as the end.9 Patti recoils in horror at reading these words, not because she understands them but because they fill her with dread as ‘the words sounded senseless and awful, like the distant boom of some big catastrophe’,10 and this is how the words affect both Murdoch, who did not truly understand them herself, and the vast majority of her readers;11 death is the natural end but to dehumanize the language makes it an unimaginable act of ‘unbeing’.

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Heidegger is arguably the most difficult philosopher to engage with securely as his focus on being and language can at times be impenetrable. One of Murdoch’s later projects was to write a definitive account of his philosophy, but she abandoned it once the proofs had been written: ‘Iris decided that this book, on which she had been working for six years, was no good and should be abandoned’.12 She had written in her journal several years previously that ‘I am spending a lot of time at last trying to understand Heidegger – all his ideas, and his development. Wish I had thought of this earlier!’13 It was Gilbert Ryle who first introduced her to Heidegger and she viewed both men as lacking a Platonic view of the world, which, if they were able to obtain, would greatly enhance their individual philosophy. Even so, she came to devote a great deal of time to Heidegger and became firm friends with Ryle.14 It is clear that Murdoch uses a highly technical (and typical) quotation from Heidegger to bring the reader into the narrative from Pattie’s perspective to elucidate Murdoch’s rejection of his philosophy. As Conradi states: ‘her foes are Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and a collective hydra-headed monster she terms “structuralism”, all hostile to transcendence’15 – which I agree with entirely. She believes each of these philosophers to be actively engaged in separating the self from any concept of the transcendent other. Indeed her unpublished work on Heidegger was an attempt to fully integrate herself within his discourse – sadly a failure. As she mentions towards the end of her manuscript ‘I am not a scholar, and I have of course no theory of my own about obscure matters recently discussed’16 which rather lends itself to the idea that if this work were to be published in its entirety her reputation as a philosopher of significant importance could be called into question. Although this may well be an ironic aside it would be doubly so if it were to be the lasting impression of her later philosophical works i.e. that she was no longer capable of forming a useful theory of her own. I believe that it is necessary to publish such a work not merely to stimulate discussion about Murdoch’s relationship with Heideggerian theory but also for biographical reasons. I do not believe her reputation would be seriously called into question if it became apparent that she could not argue against a philosophy she did not truly understand. She certainly is a scholar by any definition that we may use but this rather damning conclusion, and the subsequent rejection of this work by Murdoch herself, and latterly by Conradi’s decision not to publish it, is certainly not to be taken lightly. Few readers of her fiction, unless engaged in philosophy, would be able to grasp the subtle relationship between Dasein’s Beingat-an-end and the notion of Being-towards-the-end which is why it engenders a feeling of the uncanny on first glance; this is discussed in greater depth later in this essay.

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In order to understand the reader reads the text with Pattie and does not fully grasp the meaning of it even though they have understood all that has come before it in terms of language if nothing else. In doing so the reader’s focus is firmly renewed upon the prose. Murdoch refocuses the attention of the reader via this literary device by suddenly allowing our brain to have to question what we have already read. Murdoch’s use of language up to this point has been understandable to anyone with a standard education. Now she moves into another realm entirely and this very conscious effort (on her part) is felt immediately. Pattie is the innocent in these proceedings. She has only had a limited education and cannot comprehend the situation around her, until it is exposed to her by the discovery of Carel and Elizabeth entwined on Elizabeth’s bedroom floor; Carel and Elizabeth being involved in an incestuous relationship of Carel’s devising. Dipple has said that she finds the narrative progress here ‘very simple and natural’,17 which seems a little odd given that it describes developments which are, by any normal idea, unnatural to say the least. Patti then reveals to Muriel that Elizabeth is in fact her sister, which is the catalyst for the end of the novel and the death of Carel; and with his death the rejection of the philosophy that he embodies. Muriel’s negative action, the permitting of her father to die from an overdose, allows the novel to conclude on a Platonic overtone. Murdoch came to believe that although Wittgenstein and Heidegger were the two most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Heidegger was too convoluted and obscure and she lamented the lack of contemporary philosophers and writers who were willing to engage with both of them. She believed that Heidegger’s development of Kant (to produce a godless universe) made him ‘the devil himself’. Although how a philosopher who could (twice) call for a demythologization of the New Testament, and connect moral philosophy with religion, could make a viable argument for this seems, at best, insubstantial.18 She develops this in her unpublished work on Heidegger: What Heidegger denies is the . . . heart of religion. His crucial omission is not that of a personal God, but of the concepts of duty and goodness, and of love as the enemy which connects the black nothing with the radical advent of being.19 This demythologizing of religion, especially Christianity, is at the core of The Time of the Angels. I am thinking here specifically of abstract symbolism being reduced to actual influences upon human behaviour. The symbolism used in the novel to achieve this is quite apparent from the beginning; first

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by the development of Carel as the priest of no parish and no god who uses the promise of salvation to seduce Pattie; secondly, by the use of the swirling fog around the rectory and the annihilation of surrounding London, and, thirdly, by the imprisonment of the rectory’s inhabitants and the distance between Carel and the Bishop, the master no longer controls the servant through any sense of goodness. This enables Murdoch to criticize not only the hopelessness of a philosophy where the self is everything but also what she designates in ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) as the ‘modern neurotic novel’: We need to be able to think . . . in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality . . . We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy.20 The Time of the Angels holds a mirror to the self-centredness which Murdoch believes pervades modern society: a sure distinction between the Platonic and the Heideggerian. It is of course a development which has been taken to an extreme but it does, as Under the Net did with Sartrean values, expose the limitations of such a belief system. In that novel she created a west London suburb which was the scene of an unfolding comedic drama concerning the development of the self towards a greater understanding of the other. In The Time of the Angels Murdoch’s central character has progressed so far towards a complete infatuation with the self that it is only through his death that the other inhabitants of the novel are set free. How is it then that Carel actively promotes Heideggerian theory? I would argue that it is through his action and development as Heideggerian-Man that Murdoch sets up her most convincingly evil character since Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956). It falls then to Murdoch to set up an idea of transcendence within the novel which illuminates both the ‘fallenness’ of believing in any Heideggerian notion of inner development towards the Platonic ideal of a vertical transcendental shift. For Murdoch transcendence is ultimately caught up with two separate propositions, perfection and certainty: Are we not certain that there is a ‘true direction’ towards better conduct, that goodness ‘really matters’, and does not that certainty about a standard suggest an idea of permanence which cannot be reduced to psychological or any other set of empirical terms?

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In broad terms then, Dasein (being), composed of its ontological and existential dimensions disclosed as Being-in-the-world (the self in relation to an ‘other’), must be understood in the context of Selfhood, which we can relate to The Time of the Angels. Carel Fisher must have ownership over his household. It is he who wishes to remove the inauthenticity of the other and assert the total being of the self. Murdoch wishes it to be known from the very beginning of her evaluation of Heidegger that his is ultimately a valueless philosophy: ‘I shall argue [that] Heidegger portrays it [Dasein] as curiously bereft of values’,21 and therefore of little use to how she views the world. As mentioned earlier, the lack of the transcendent in his philosophy is of grave concern to Murdoch; it is certainly possible that Heidegger’s rejection of it may have led to her abandonment of her critical work on his ‘Dasein’. It is certainly true to argue that Murdoch must surely have known that to tackle such a project was dangerous as Heidegger is set against any argument contrary to ‘vertical transcendence’ but it would appear that her confidence to try to argue against Heideggerean theory won through. Perhaps with hindsight she would not have attempted such a challenge. It was certainly a brave attempt; perhaps if more philosophers and academics had access to her – so far unpublished – work a more reasoned conclusion could be sought. The major difference between the two is this: Murdoch is proscribing whereas Heidegger is describing. For Murdoch one must develop beyond language: she refutes Heidegger’s view in Sartre: Romantic Rationalist and remains resolutely against existential thought: In his [Heidegger’s] system, moral insight or inspiration is a later, or farther, or special, or specialised, narrowly defined achievement. Sartrean existentialism and the morality of Marxism also display this pattern . . . Heidegger holds no theory of a transcendent systemised order of spiritual reality, or true knowledge, which it is man’s proper destiny to realise.22 It is this lack of ‘spiritual reality’ that immediately concerns Murdoch here. Heidegger expounds on another structural element in the ontological constitution of Dasein, that of ‘fallenness’; an interesting term implying some form of past transcendence that one would not normally associate with Heidegger. Murdoch comments thus: His [Heidegger’s] account, perpetually suggests that value, moral orientation, virtue exist only at a level markedly above that of the day. So it is not

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even worth examining the idea of Gerede [idle chatter], which Heidegger uses in a disparaging sense but also denies that he does.23 At this point, we must clarify what is meant by Dasein’s falsehood, or, what Murdoch believes to be its failings with transcendent reality. In his essay On the Essence of Truth, Heidegger explicates the Greeks’ understanding of aletheia as disclosedness or unconcealment. Murdoch has this to say: As I have argued earlier, I think such theorising is important and welcome in philosophy. However, Heidegger’s concepts and distinctions in this field seem to me too much influenced by an idea of phenomenology as a definite philosophical method, and also by Heidegger’s final metaphysical aims, especially his prime desire to establish ‘the authentic’ as against the ‘inauthentic’. To put it crudely, Heidegger wants to exalt his ‘hero’ to use a word which recurs at intervals in his writings.24 The Dasein who has fallen into falsehood closes itself off from authentically Being-in-the-world and even more significantly from Being-with and Being-towards itself. In psychoanalysis this might be given to the defence mechanism of denial, that is, people need to deny the ontological obligations of Dasein in the service of more primordial psychological needs or conflicts, such as psychodynamic motivations surrounding security, attachment, and as Heidegger points out, ‘tranquillity’.25 Murdoch’s relationship with psychoanalysis is one fraught with contradictions. As we have seen, her novel A Severed Head is intimately connected with the idea that the development of Freud’s ideas concerning the ego, and their application in psychoanalysis, lead us to consider not the form of the good, but rather an inward-looking ontology which does nothing to either free us from the Platonic cave or engender within us any concept of ‘attention’. Even though she calls Freud ‘a self-styled modern disciple of Plato’26 it is clear that he dismisses the possibility that the ego may be tempered by art: ‘a problem [which I consider later] for Freud and those whom he inspires, is whether such analyses can be devoid of radical value judgements’.27 It is Marcus’s neurosis and Carel’s fantasy of controlling the household that hold the narrative together, and these are not only Freudian but also Heideggerian – neither has realized the extent of their respective egos and Marcus only finds consolation in Carel’s death as it frees him from his compulsion to save his brother. This is necessarily the same for Heidegger: his assumed value judgements concerning transcendence, the ego and

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the nature of the self do damage, Murdoch believes, to understanding the internal struggle of the individual. The point is therefore quite a simple one: does Heidegger have any lingering understanding of a human’s intuition for the transcendent? If we concern ourselves with Carel being a caricature of Murdoch’s view of Heidegger’s stance it is clear that she believes he does not and will not yield to any notion of a secondary ‘other’, neither the realization of uniqueness among individuals nor the notion of a metaphysical ‘other’. Carel’s failure to comprehend the desires and needs of the rest of his household lead to its destruction, the absence of freedom within the novel is tangible: this is certainly not a house fit for free characters. Perhaps Heidegger’s Dasein is too concerned about the absence of freedom which it does not engender. This was also a concern of Murdoch’s, as she believed that the individual must be conceived of as a whole: although one must aspire to self-realization (for Murdoch) we must also not remove that which is propelling us towards it.28 By using an existential critique of the false Dasein it appears that Dasein is structured in such a way as to actively promote fallenness. This is its ontological structure and it is certain that Heidegger is, in the broadest sense, an existentialist philosopher. Murdoch, being trained at Oxford in linguistic analysis, has assessed this philosophical idea and used it to create Carel Fisher, who in turn inversely reveals Murdoch’s vision that being-for-self is not a worthy state of being. It is only through being good-for-nothing that we can actively approach an idea of perfection; this is connected with ‘good’, not necessarily with god. Here, as in her earliest work, Murdoch approaches the domain formerly occupied philosophically by Simone Weil. This is reflected in her pronouncements on the need for moral change: Human beings are far more complicated and enigmatic and ambiguous than languages and mathematical concepts, and selfishness operates in a much more devious and frenzied manner in our relations with them . . . Our attachments tend to be selfish and strong, and the transformation of our loves from selfishness to unselfishness is sometimes even hard to conceive of.29 Carel then is ultimately a selfish creation by any standard, no matter if he believes in the mantra that ‘God is dead – therefore all is permissible’ which is a curious quotation, being an amalgam of Hegel, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. For Murdoch, the antithesis of her moral vision. Carel’s deceitfulness and lack of respect towards the other members of his household

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stem from his need to fill a void in his life: for example, the seduction of his own daughter, the seduction and subsequent rejection of Pattie and his refusal to acknowledge Muriel as an individual. Here we can return to the idea of the artificial (and superficial) notion of Dasein and relate it to psychoanalysis, in particular a psychoanalytic view of the morality of both The Time of the Angels and Carel Fisher. Here we should consider Murdoch’s view of the perceived shift in the value of the united self; from a central concept to a peripheral vision in mainstream philosophy. The rejection of the self stems, she believes, from the shift away from the religious. Although Murdoch is not theist, in any academic sense, a worldview of religion is central to her philosophy – whether it is to be rebelled against or not. Although Murdoch believes that this shift brought about the beginnings of the rejection of the self, and rightly brought about critical vision to theistic concepts which had gone unchallenged up to that point, she nevertheless was far from the view held by Richard Dawkins (in conversation with Garth Wood) that religion is one of the great evils of contemporary society ‘[being like] the smallpox virus, but harder to eradicate’.30 She challenges the almost automatic assumption that ethics are removed from and autonomous of religious claims and beliefs. Murdoch always held the religious life in great esteem: ‘Our general awareness of good, or goodness, is with us unreflectively all the time, as a sense of God’s presence, or at least existence, used to be for all sorts of believers’.31 For Murdoch, then, the filling of the void left behind by the absence of god in general and the ideology of Christianity in particular is central to both The Time of the Angels and her moral philosophy. She believes that we must reject the current denial of the inner and establish a working concept of the self, one which is not fragmented or misaligned. Through the development of Marcus, the elder brother, whom she connects with paternal instincts (and has long since departed from reality as he and Carel have been estranged since Carel’s departure from both his previous parish and Christianity), Murdoch fictionalizes the split between the two opposing sides in the debate; Carel as Kantian man and Marcus as a (albeit flawed) model of the Cartesian ‘solitary knower’.32 This is not to say that Murdoch is at one with the Cartesian world view. As we have seen earlier, she commends post-Cartesian thinkers for the proper assertion that ‘thinking is not a mental composition repeated aloud verbatim, spoken words do not have to have mental equivalents, words are not the names of things’.33 By rejecting the Cartesian picture of the self, one which places too much emphasis on the all-knowing knower, Murdoch places herself in a precarious position; she no longer seems to be on any side (which is not only Heidegger against Descartes) of the

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argument, merely waiting for the next move from the empiricists. Not so, she argues. Her assertion is that: . . . it is one thing to present sound anti-Cartesian critical arguments about sense data, momentary inner certainties, or the role of memory images in remembering; it is quite another to be swept aside as irrelevant a whole area of our private reflections [that are] the very substance of our soul.34 This argument appears convoluted and does not, at first, seem to offer any hope for self awareness; this is perhaps just her point. Hume is, for Murdoch, the beginning of the erosion of the concept of the self that was first formalized in philosophy. It was he who announced that the self was an illusion of the mind; fragmented memories and experiences which were held together by imagination and dreams. Heidegger maintains that some non-transcendent force must be at work in the development of being. In encountering others, we commit a series of individual acts that impact upon us at a specific moment; and it is this perception of an ‘other’ which forces development. Both, of course, hold that the other is vital but Heidegger refutes any totalizing system. Murdoch believes this to be partly true – the notion of self as a series of interlocking units of the mind – as it closely resembled her own belief towards the foundation of a human’s moral awareness.35 Where she vehemently disagrees concerns the lack of a unity within consciousness, an area upon which Kant focused. Hume and Kant, Murdoch believed were the foundation for the negative opinions of the self held by Hampshire, Ayer and Ryle. We must also remember that she rejected structuralism with its closed language system and disregard of the referent, the real world. She believes that Kant was discontented with much of Hume’s work as he was not prepared to allow to rest scientific determinism upon a psychological association of ideas. Kant’s model focused instead upon ‘discrete units of experience’ which Murdoch interpreted as lacking in an approach to ‘moral experience, or moral consciousness as a “morally coloured” awareness’.36 Consciousness, and moral development in particular, are, for Kant, not an active individual experience at all but rather ‘an empty consciousness, a structure of intuition, understanding, reason, which is the same in every rational creature’.37 Murdoch is wary of placing too much emphasis upon psychoanalysis in general and Freudianism in particular, certainly regarding the construction of psychoanalysis as a ‘life philosophy’ (derided in A Severed Head). She is

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again caught: Kantianism is too far removed from human experience; Freud makes too much of it. Heidegger for his part was apathetic towards psychoanalysis but his philosophy impacted upon it. However the main point is this, Murdoch employs both Freudian analysis and Heidegger’s philosophy to enable her narrative to function. Without the impact of these, occasionally opposing, factors The Time of the Angels would have little sense of purpose: the conversation between Carel and Muriel concerning the mental state of Elizabeth is useful here: ‘I think she’s perfectly alright’, said Muriel. She found that her hands were still gripping the desk, her fingers pointed toward Carel’s fingers. She removed her hands and clasped them tensely together. ‘Of course she’s all right Muriel, and she’s going to go on being all right. Only we must take more care of her, extra-special care of her. We must protect her from shocks. She must be allowed her thoughts, her dreams. There must be no shocks and no intrusions. These could have the gravest consequences’ . . . ‘I don’t agree. I think she needs to see people. She’s just a bit bored . . . all this loneliness makes her sleepy’. (142) It is important to take the entirety of the conversation in context and it is, unfortunately, beyond the scope to reproduce it here in its entirety. While potential conceptual quandaries between the ontological discourse of Heideggerian theory and the ontological discourse of psychodynamic approaches exist, Heidegger’s existential ontology has profound implications for understanding the ontology of the unconscious and the question of authenticity. So Murdoch is therefore drawn to link both Heidegger’s notion of the Being-for-itself and Freud’s analysis of the self in the world. She reveals this in her unpublished manuscript when discussing human moods: His [Heidegger’s] theory of ‘moods’, another philosophical way of characterising consciousness, is a more dubious and arbitrary matter. I like the idea of speaking, in philosophy, about moods. But what exactly is a mood? In reading novels we have no trouble with the concept . . . here (it seems to me) Heidegger creates his primary (descriptive) concepts with a view to his later (evaluative) ends.38 Although psychology is not a true insight into ontology some linkage between the two is apparent. Therefore reason is contingent on some prior

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form of consciousness that necessarily requires an underlying ontology. This for Murdoch is the key to Carel, and the reverse is true for Pattie. As Pattie plays the innocent, caught up in the terrible turn of events through no fault of her own (except perhaps her lack of self-development) she becomes the antithesis of Carel. In this sense she is also the gateway through which the reader can begin to react to the novel; underlying Patti’s willingness to please is fear, ‘Fear, for instance, is a mode of state of mind’,39 directly paralleling Heidegger’s Being and Time; where he claims that fear is not a state of mind itself but engenders itself upon the mind, which she criticizes here in her unpublished work. If we enlarge on this concept of fear within The Time of the Angels we begin to understand the enchantment Carel holds over the members of his household and those beyond it. It is an obvious echo from The Flight from the Enchanter and it would not be unreasonable to find elements of Mischa Fox within Carel Fisher – the most ominous moments echoing Mischa’s basement with Carel’s study with the emphasis on the ‘blackness’.40 This notion of the ‘false self’, and the uncertainty it creates within Murdoch’s early fiction, is directly paralleled within the work of both Freud and Heidegger. Dasein’s psychological structures, for example, become more lucid with the assistance of a psychoanalytic explication of the self, which in turn enhances Heideggerian philosophy. While Freud does not offer a systematic theory of the self, the notion of the self is implicit in his final tripartite-structural model of the mind; the self is the unity of the id, ego, and superego and must be so or psychological issues follow. So to be alienated from your true self would be disastrous for any sense of purpose within the individual. If we relate this back to the text can we find any parallels with the major characters? There is, quite plainly, the obsession with Canetti in The Flight from the Enchanter and his influence is to be found, albeit to a lesser extent within Honor Kline of A Severed Head and Gerald Scottow of The Unicorn. Carel, however, is a clearer cut creature who has no foil or ambiguity – he is a godless man who fears no one (a device trait borrowed from Nietzsche). Echoes of Canetti remain not least, I suspect, because Crowds and Power was still an influence on Murdoch’s work and she was unable to shift him from her wider circle of friends. In The Time of the Angels myth and psychology come together to create Carel’s enchantment of his household, but it is his relationship with Patti which is the most central to the narrative: When Carel had said ‘Will you suffer for me, will you be crucified for me?’ she had thought he had meant ordinary suffering of the kind she was

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familiar with. In all her imagination of what she might suffer for Carel she had not conceived of this . . . After all there was no salvation, no one to call the lapsed soul or weep in the evening dew. The house had fallen down . . . She would have to go, she would have to leave him at last . . . she could not love him enough to save him, not that much, not with that suffering.41 Pattie is both a narrative device in her placement as a ‘black Madonna’ and also as a sign of her innocence, honesty and ultimate salvation through the death of Carel. This then is the outcome of the suffering to which Carel has subjected Pattie, she rejects him and with this comes his death. In some respects The Time of the Angels is a tragedy, one replete with fear; fear for the future and the fear that the other characters feel for Carel. Murdoch explains this in greater depth in her unpublished work on Heidegger: Such an analysis [of states of mind] is seems to me, cannot but be arbitrary, and in this case are designed by Heidegger to offer primary support . . . for his later theory of ‘authentic’ being, which consists of higher and enlightened forms of whatever are already represented as fundamental structures. A good novelist can more accurately describe these fugitive aspects of the human condition, but of course that is not philosophy, and the novelist too has his formal purposes.42 If we return to the novel in question the links to continental writing are apparent. Murdoch’s linking of The Time of the Angels to the Germanic mode of fiction is not limited to her use of philosophy.43 She has referred to it as ‘a tight metaphysical object, which wishes it were a poem, and which attempts to convey, often in mythical form, some central truth about the human condition’ in effect being ‘a novel like The Stranger of Camus, which is a small, compact, crystalline, self-contained myth about the human condition’44 in the French existentialist style. Louis Martz goes on to refer to it as ‘Miss Murdoch’s only truly “philosophical novel”; the allusions to Heidegger [he says] provide an accurate clue to her theme and design’.45 However, Murdoch’s attachment to the ‘devilish’ work of Heidegger can only be appreciated by understanding the earlier works of Kant. Murdoch believed that the existentialists, such as Heidegger, who claimed to be following Kant and developing his philosophy, have clearly misunderstood his intent; hence the creation of Carel as Heideggerian-Man. Kant, as she understood him, did not hold that ‘the Good’ was created by human

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reason; least of all that it was a creation of the individual will. Thus she says that: Reason itself is for him [Kant] an ideal limit: indeed his term ‘Idea of Reason’ expresses precisely that endless aspiration to perfection with its characteristic moral activity. His is not the ‘achieved’ or ‘given’ reason which belongs with ‘ordinary language’ and convention, nor is his man on the other hand totally unguided and alone [existentialist]. There exists a moral reality, a real though infinitely distant standard: the difficulty of understanding and imitating remain.46 Murdoch would certainly, at this point in her career, point to both Kant and Plato as her two philosophical masters, although it was Plato whom she always regarded as the greater of the two and to whom she would return later in her career.47 It is certainly probable that her early study of Plato would have directed her towards Kant rather than towards Aristotle, whom she actively disliked.48 For Heidegger she says that: We may start to see how Heidegger’s bane is theological. We are to start from ‘thinking the truth of being’, an idea never explained, but rather posited by Heidegger, and admitted by him to repress something new, difficult. Only from these can we experience holiness, and be able to discover ‘God’ and presumably to think the new thoughts and achieve the new being toward which it is pointing us. Although Murdoch warmly welcomed the shift away from religious doctrine – which in turn was part of the religious worldview of the time – because it brought with it useful criticism and debate concerning religious concepts, she was concerned with the movement away from not only ‘God’ but ‘good’. In this respect it is Marcus Fisher who most clearly characterizes the philosophy of Murdoch; his own philosophical writings mirror her thoughts on Heidegger. In the novel she writes that: Those who thought to rescue the idea of Good by attaching it to the concept of will intended chiefly to prevent the corruption of that sovereign value by any necessary connection with specific and ‘too too human’ faculties or institutions. Since a good conceived of as absolutely authoritative was deemed an insult to human freedom, the solution in terms of action was tempting.49

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It has been suggested by Conradi that Murdoch is not averse to mocking her own philosophical point of view, portraying Marcus as weak and ineffective in both his relationship with Carel and his inability to create a publishable work of moral theory.50 I think this is a relatively safe assumption as it is a theme that she returns to in her later works (for example The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) and The Book and the Brotherhood (1987)) in which mystics and philosophers are consumed with existential doubt while writing philosophy. Indeed the latter can be neatly described as a book written by a philosophical novelist about a philosopher writing a large book of philosophy. What is central however is the evident concern that Murdoch had for not allowing her philosophy to impinge on her fiction. We should perhaps remind ourselves of her thoughts on this subject: ‘I am not a philosophical novelist in the way that Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir are’.51 This seems to be a fair assessment as it places her within the sphere of the French existentialists, but not close to them – being a philosophical novelist but not writing her fiction to promote an existential world view; however, it does not rule out the fact, inherent within the statement, that she is, and considers herself to an extent, a philosophical novelist, or, to further define or crystallize the notion, a novelist who deals with moral philosophy and realism. It appears that the end of her work on Heidegger mirrors that of her earlier essay ‘On “God” and “Good”’ where she states that: At this point someone might say, all this is very well, the only difficulty is that none of it is true . . . what seems beyond doubt is that moral philosophy is daunted and confused, and in many quarters discredited and regarded as unnecessary. The vanishing of the philosophical self . . . has lead in ethics to an inflated and yet empty conception of the will, and it is this that I have been chiefly attacking. The search for unity is deeply natural.52 This is precisely where Murdoch is in relation to Heidegger; and the cause of her discrediting and rejecting her own work concerning his philosophy. It is obvious that more work and development need to occur in this specific area of Murdoch studies as this essay has only just begun to comprehend the importance of her relationship to Heidegger in both her philosophy and her literature. What it has uncovered is that their relationship is not as straightforward as the major critics would have us believe; of course Murdoch has reservations of the ‘horizontal transcendence’ that Heidegger promotes but as she does not fully comprehend his thought, and gets caught up in the minutiae of his language analysis (a difficult barrier to cross), she

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fails to realize that perhaps the end product of transcendence is not dissimilar to her own writing. The dismissal of her manuscript and its subsequent obscurity is a loss for both Murdoch studies and the wider philosophical community: it is my hope that it will one day be more widely available. However, Murdoch is at her most consistent when her fictional work is matched by her philosophical preoccupation and her unpublished work on Martin Heidegger reveals that, even though it was never published or widely acknowledged, she was, to some extent, fascinated by his philosophy for a great deal of her career.

Chapter Four

The Bell and Platonism

Before The Bell (1958), her fourth novel, Murdoch’s primary concern was the development of philosophy within fiction, namely that of Sartrean existentialism and we have discussed how this leads into her fascination with Germanic philosophy. However, this novel reverts to the (anti)pastoral, as used by writers such as Hardy and George Eliot. The shift from Sartre is marked by the focus upon a more rural setting. However, Frank Baldanza believes that in sketching out this novel Murdoch uses Sartre’s distinction between being-for-itself and being-for-others, which is at the basis of the desire for freedom:1 Murdoch had not quite escaped from the influence of the existentialists. A great deal of criticism has already been written concerning The Bell. Of all Murdoch’s earlier work it is to this novel that critics return time and again to re-examine the structure, the narrative content, the inherent issues of morality, and the nature of the novel itself. It is of The Bell that Byatt writes in 1965: Within The Bell, as opposed to The Sandcastle, or indeed, to any of Miss Murdoch’s other novels one has the sense that to attempt to expose a framework of thought is to diminish it in some way; this is because here we have a novel which has the solid life that Miss Murdoch praises in the great nineteenth-century novels.2 At the point of Byatt writing this Murdoch had yet to publish a large body of work. For the purposes of this book, however, it is necessary – indeed essential – not only to expose the framework but also to subject it to philosophical investigation. Byatt believes that the characters have a life outside the novel, and it is certainly easy to view the narrative as open-ended, but of central importance here is not the open-endedness of the novel but also of the relationship between Imber and the contingent world – necessarily the nearby village and, to a greater extent, London.

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I believe Byatt is correct when she suggests that The Bell ‘tends toward the crystalline’3 due to the nature of its placement within a community – which being a collection of disparate characters that must interact with each other lest the community falls apart of course does so – a community which lacks the form of the good. The crystalline nature emerges from Murdoch’s tight narrative formation which, although exacerbated by the formulaic characterization, is nonetheless necessary for the novel to sustain itself although this is certainly less apparent than in the novels discussed in the last two chapters. I believe that Wolfe is correct in his assertion that ‘The Bell marks Iris Murdoch’s return to a mythological setting for the purpose of blending philosophy and social criticism’,4 as the encapsulation of Murdoch’s use of Platonic myth and philosophy is the major force behind the narrative. I believe that in order to thoroughly examine the impact of Platonic philosophy upon The Bell we must see the novel as Wolfe does as a form of social criticism, one that returns Murdoch to her mythological setting. Dora and Toby are the catalysts by which a series of events unfold which propel the other inhabitants of Imber Court, from a subsistent existence at the outset, into a form of reality; events which have already been hinted at by the abbess. This chapter will offer a discussion of Platonic myth and symbolism, Murdoch’s use of homosexuality, the role of the outsider and Murdoch’s view of ‘the good’ and moral vision. ‘We need more concepts than our philosophies have furnished us with’ Murdoch writes. ‘We need to be enabled to be able to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian, and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality’.5 The Bell and, in particular, The Sandcastle (1957) are the natural beginnings of Murdoch’s fictional use of Platonism. The creation of The Sandcastle marks a shift in Murdoch’s writing. In contrast to Under the Net and The Flight from the Enchanter, in The Sandcastle Murdoch creates an insular and low-key novel which deals directly with morality within family life and the wider community attached to it; in this case the love of Bill Mor for the painter Rain Castle whose appearance signals the beginning of this novel. The number of characters is strictly limited to provide greater focus than the previous existential works, and the plot is much more predictable. This is a deliberate act by Murdoch to create a ‘closed’ novel. The Sandcastle is not such a ‘closed’ novel, as The Bell, as the community which inhabits the school and the surroundings is able to escape its confines. Although Dora is able to retreat to the arms of Noel in London the other inhabitants seem trapped within

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the radius of Imber Court. This is perhaps best exhibited in Toby’s leap over the abbey wall, where the nuns appear content with their life in a ‘closed’ order. The Sandcastle develops the primary idea of ‘Against Dryness’ being a more pastoral vision of ‘the good’, and a more proactive visioning of the impact of art upon ‘the good’ although it does not contain a ‘convincing picture of evil’;6 this had been developed in The Flight from the Enchanter but is not seen in its fully realized form until The Time of the Angels. It also fails in another major aspect of ‘Against Dryness’: We need to turn our attention away from the consoling dream necessity of Romanticism, away from the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, toward the real impenetrable human being.7 The focusing of the narrative upon a specific location and the reduction in the major characters as opposed to Murdoch’s Earliest novels serves the fiction well and allows a much more naturalistic approach to emotion and the development of the individual to develop. Even though Murdoch wishes a fictional impenetrable person to emerge in her early novels it seems that The Sandcastle works, in a limited sense, without one. This leads us then towards the questioning of the Platonic influence upon both of these early novels. Murdoch’s interpretation of Plato is central to understanding both the background to The Bell and her conception of the moral life: Value is everywhere, [that] the whole of life is movement in a moral scale, all knowledge is a moral quest, and the mind seeks reality and desires the Good, which is transcendent source of spiritual power, to which we are all related through the idea of truth.8 This holistic vision is one which Murdoch attempts to present in her fictional world; The Bell in particular. I shall say more about Murdoch’s conception of desire, vision and choice in morality, later in the chapter as I now wish to concentrate on Murdoch’s specific use of the allegory of the cave in relation to The Bell. Murdoch’s vision of the moral life, as we can see from her earliest work, is universal in relation to her philosophical concept of the individual. She refers to Plato constantly in her later philosophy for inspiration and to justify her argument against existentialism and linguistic analysis of language. She describes the Cave as a ‘parable [which] portrays a spiritual pilgrimage from illusion to reality’.9 As this is central to the development

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of this novel, and Murdoch’s general conception of ‘the good’ it is worth explaining in some detail: the nature of the allegory, the direct linkage with the narrative and the connection with contemporary philosophy. In the dialogue Socrates describes an underground chamber in which there are prisoners who have been imprisoned there since before they had memory. They are made to face the back of the cave wall and are fastened to the floor by chains which are attached to their legs and necks, making it impossible for them to turn around; here we see what Murdoch views as unenlightened man in The Bell; those ‘chained’ in the community at Imber. They may only look at the wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners burns a fire, the only source of light in the underground chamber, the only world which the prisoners know. Between the fire and the backs of the prisoners runs a path along which people walk to and fro carrying whatever objects they need on a day-to-day basis. The prisoners assume that the shadows cast upon the wall in front of them are real objects and they therefore must conclude that the voices and sounds that they hear are also emanating from the shadows. Socrates then considers what would occur if one of the prisoners was able to loosen the manacle around his neck and look around and see what was happening behind him. He suggests that ‘if one was freed from his fetters and compelled to stand up and suddenly turn his head around and walk and lift his eyes up to the light, and in doing all this felt pain, and because of the dazzle and the glitter of the light, was unable to discern the objects whose shadows he formerly saw’.10 And this is Dora’s realization when she raises the bell with Toby. The pain involved in this transformation would lead to both bewilderment and anxiety to such a degree that the prisoner would be likely to reject the revelations and return to his old position, believing the shadows on the wall to be more real than the objects and people now confronting him. Indeed if the prisoner was forced to look directly at the fire behind him he would suffer even more pain and would be blinded and so unable to distinguish among objects and would therefore wish to return to a darker level where he may see forms of shapes again (a certain link to Michael can be seen at this stage of the analogy). The next stage of the allegory involves the prisoner’s journey from his place of confinement, past the fire and up towards the entrance to the cave and then out into the sunlight. The process would again be painful and the prisoner would be temporarily blinded having never had contact with such a source of light; in which case he would again be unable to discern what he saw as real. Eventually, however, the prisoner would acclimatize to the light and begin to view the world outside the cave. This process, Socrates tells us, would be slow. The final

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point of the prisoner’s journey would be to look directly up at the sun and discern the landscape set out before him. Only here, at this final stage in his development, is it possible for the prisoner to comprehend the entirety of the view before him and conclude that the sun ‘provides the seasons and the courses of the year and presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some sort the cause of these things he had never seen’.11 At this point he would realize the lowliness of his former state and wish that those incarcerated with him could share in his discovery. However, if he were to return to the cave and again be manacled and faced the wall he would appear to his fellow prisoners as a fool, being unable to comprehend the shadows on the wall. They would assume that his journey was fruitless as he returned with his eyes ruined and, perhaps more importantly, would be unable to comprehend any knowledge or values beyond their own and would resist his advance to explain the outside world to them. Does any one of the characters in the novel make a successful transition to the outside world from the darkness? The majority of the characters are left at the end of the narrative in a state of confusion as they are dispatched to disparate locations with no inner knowledge of themselves or how they may possibly change their personal situation which originally brought them to Imber. Only Dora seems to have gained an insight into her ‘self’ and decides to leave on indefinite hiatus in Bristol to pursue a teaching career. The community has failed in preparing the inhabitants for life outside (or indeed life on the inside in the case of Catherine Fawley) due to a lack of support from each other and a dearth of Platonic ‘unselfing’. Murdoch believes, as Plato does, that this myth can be used as a metaphor for the moral life, which entails levels of moral awareness and perception. At the lowest level one only has the vaguest idea of higher states of awareness, hence the difficulty of clear and distinct definition and the need for ‘metaphorical moral thinking’.12 She regards the allegory as perfectly informing the intuitive and spiritual aspects of the moral life. Although it is mystical in its form, Plato’s images are not far removed from our own experience and explain familiar forms of knowing and neatly resist definition by the empirical language so beloved by Ryle, Ayer and Hampshire. For Murdoch then: The Cave is a religious myth suggesting, what is also accessible to any careful not necessarily philosophical reflection, that there are discernible levels and qualities of awareness or experience (we need this terminology), which cannot be reduced to acquaintance with neutral factual propositions or analysed in terms of dispositions to act.13

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Murdoch significantly alters and deflects the significance of the metaphor which she ascribes to the narrative. Alistair MacIntyre points out that ‘Iris Murdoch’s novels are philosophy: but they are philosophy which casts doubt on all philosophy including her own’14 which seems to suggest that the ‘Murdoch as Platonist’ argument is far from linear in relation to the fiction discussed in previous chapters. Peter Conradi notes how the setting of The Bell suggests the Phaedo with the scenery including the convergence of the four rivers and the lake and the insistence that philosophy itself is dying, although Murdoch is thinking here of the later work of Wittgenstein rather than any Greek myth. Conradi sees the geography of Imber as ‘a Platonic map of unselfing . . . An aerial map of Imber would show three sets of walls, and resemble a dartboard. The outer circle is the wall of half-stripped Imber Court, the next the wall of the wholly austere abbey and the last of the concentric circles containing the happy cemetery with its laughing nuns’;15 a fascinating conclusion that draws attention to Murdoch’s own background in ancient history. Conradi mentions that it also brings to mind Dante’s Inferno with the inclusion of the lake, causeway and the ferry – which also ties in with linking Nick to the underworld and likens his dog to Cerberus; an interesting sideline with which we need not overly concern ourselves. This may well be a literary joke by Murdoch and it does not detract from the overall scheme of Platonism. It is certainly put to good use within the novel; the river separates Nick from the rest of the community and the only other route to the cottage is from the main gate. The idea that only Toby can enter the inner circle of the nun’s garden and be allowed access back to the other side through an unlocked gate is surely an example of Platonic unselfing: The unexpectedness of the scene made Toby rigid in the doorway, his hand still on the door. He was in a green space enclosed by a rectangle of walls . . . ‘Good morning’ said the nun, ‘I believe you must be Toby. Have I guessed right?’ ‘Yes’ said Toby hanging his head. ‘I thought so’ said the nun. ‘Although we never meet, we seem to know each one of you, as if you were our dearest friends’.16 This unthreatening scene is contrasted with one in which Dora realizes the connection between herself and the bell: It was black inside and alarmingly like an inhabited cave. Very lightly she touched the great clapper, hanging profoundly still in the interior. The feeling of fear had not left her and she withdrew hastily and switched her

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torch on. The squat figures faced her from the sloping surface of the bronze, solid, simple, beautiful, absurd, full to the brim with something which was to the artist not an object of speculation or imagination.17 As we have discussed, The Bell marks a definite shift in Murdoch’s use of philosophy in fiction. This book progresses through the philosophies of existentialism and linguistic analysis through to the most difficult and introverted of German philosophers and the reader now finds themselves in Platonic symbolism, as discussed in the introduction: we shall return to the form of the neo-Platonic in the final chapter. However, the Platonic is not the only use of philosophy within this novel. As we have discussed in the previous chapter, the religious and political conservatism of the 1950s supplied Murdoch with the physical and moral setting in which we, as readers, find ourselves placed in The Bell and it is, as it was to the first readers of the novel, of immediate and topical interest due to the societal change of both the late 1950s and today. Necessarily then the Platonic sense of harmony, which the novel superficially presents, must have, in order for any sense of drama in the narrative, an opposite. Although we have discussed the influence of Nietzsche in the previous chapter, The Bell was written eight years before The Time of the Angels, marking The Bell as Murdoch’s earliest fictional use of his work. The aesthetic doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, promulgated by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1884) and Ecce Homo (1888) is of primary importance to this novel. Nietzsche promotes a ‘many worlds’ theory insisting that different states of the universe repeat themselves; that at both a physical and psychological level we keep reliving our lives in eternally recurring patterns or, as we would now refer to it, a theory concerning a limitless possibility of alternate universes where every action thought or conceived is played out, with all the possibilities which could possibly happen from that occurring also.18 While time is unlimited, the number of positions, alterations, and developments of force is bounded. Consequently then our actions and thoughts must be constantly repeated. Referring to his ideals of the übermensch Nietzsche claims that the strong will take hope and encouragement from this and the weak and unhappy will learn that they must repeat the same events for eternity.19 Murdoch uses this idea of cyclical patterns to develop the character’s actions within The Bell as, far from dismissing the idea, she sees the fictional potential of it; she revises Nietzsche’s credo only from the position of human volition. A regular, uniform pattern or format does choke the creative will of an individual, but it is the individual’s acts themselves which will trap him or her in a circle of cause and effect.

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This rejection of Nietzsche’s historical position is the key difference with Murdoch. The characters based at Imber Court do not see themselves as enclosed within this cyclical pattern. It is only their guests, who are more freely able to come and go as they please, who have any self-awareness of the consequences of the actions they commit. It is this lack of self-knowledge that drew them to Imber in the first place, the Staffords who are stuck in a cyclical and diminishing marriage and Michael Meade, turning between ‘the sacred and the profane’ – a very Murdochian concept. Dora and Toby are noticeably different as they have other reasons for visiting and staying at Imber and, crucially, they have potential to escape it and create a new life for themselves; the community cohesion vanishes at the merest hint of scandal or disagreement. At the end of the novel all the characters are scattered throughout Britain trying to assess how best to proceed with their lives, whilst Dora finds herself in virtual control of Michael and Imber Court: ‘the halcyon days for Dora came after the others had all gone, when she reigned undisputed over Imber. She took especial pleasure in Michael’s domestic helplessness’.20 More than this, in a setting that fosters a denial of selfhood and the development of spiritual freedom, the ‘internal’ characters are unable to develop any sense of moral clarity. It would appear that spiritual dedication is not enough to prevent oneself being influenced by the outside world; as Murdoch comments: ‘those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed’.21 In order to inhabit the form of the good, we must first discover what it is that we are missing; although as Michael mentions at the beginning of the novel ‘Has it ever occurred to you that all symbols have a sacramental aspect? We do not live by bread alone. You remember what I told you about the bell’.22 The bell itself is connected with both Dora and the abbess, both being, for their separate communities, the ultimate source of moral development throughout the novel. Although it may seem odd to connect Dora to any sense of morality at the outset, as she has left Paul for Noel, her discovery of both herself and the bell coincide; it is only when the bell is retrieved from the bottom of the lake by the two outsiders that Dora realizes something beyond herself of equal or greater value. Her sense of self has been partially replaced with a new understanding of otherness. Stephen Wall describes how the sunken bell is understood by the community as a symbol: Catherine sees the bell as a sign of divine pleasure, Nick, presumably as a sign of vengeance, Dora as firstly a means of redressing the inferior

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balance of her own position at Imber and secondly as an artefact with a mysterious attraction and authority, – not to mention the attitudes of less important characters such as Paul Greenfield who is interested in the bell as a piece of art history, and Mrs. Mark who regards it as a fit subject for decoration in spite of craft revivalism – it surely becomes difficult to postulate for the bell a static or fixed meaning. In fact, its significance alters, according to the perspective in which it is viewed. The author nowhere gives any indication that any one of these attitudes, or some superior insight given to the reader alone and not shared by any of the characters, is to be regarded as authoritative.23 The bell then has a multitude of definite symbolic meanings which are all equally valid. What Wall says is correct up to a point but in order to fully understand the bell one must, like the characters, listen to it; ‘Vox ego sum Amoris. Gabriel vocor’24 I am the voice of love; I am called Gabriel, perfectly illustrating the point of realizing the ‘otherness’ of individuals and not to be contained within the Nietzschean idea of solipsism25 and referencing directly the voice of god through an angel, a theme later distorted in The Time of the Angels as already discussed. Deborah Johnson believes that the bell is threatening to Dora, when it is finally brought to the surface, because it expresses mythical history (the death of the nun) and the literal history of its male creators: The bell is threatening because it expresses by its history, its function in the narrative, and its very shape, the inescapable connections between erotic and spiritual love. The imagery throughout this section is powerfully erotic as well as religious; it links the bell with unexplored and unexpressed (female) sexuality as well as with the spiritual energy of the past which speaks to the present through carvings and inscription in a foreign and only half-understood language. The writing itself here emphasizes the connection which all the major characters (except for the abbess) seek in their different ways and for their different reasons to deny with all the unhappy consequences.26 Johnson is partly right here when she discusses repressed sexuality and knowledge of selfhood, but it is not only to Dora that we must look when understanding the relevance of the raising of the bell. Dora, Michael and Toby, at distinctly different stages of their lives, are all linked to this notion of sexual repression or confusion of sexuality. Michael, as we know, is unable to accept his homosexuality, Dora is unsure of the position of her marriage

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and Toby has recently come to the stark realization that adult sexuality is fraught with difficulties and unsurety. The voice of love which resounds from the bell is one which seeks to reconcile these insecurities and ultimately belongs not to the bell itself, which is only a catalyst, but to the abbess who is unseen and also misunderstood to the detriment of the community. Murdoch believes (and this is consistent throughout all the novels discussed here) that we must recognize goodness and beauty rather than the Nietzschean ideal of power as our moral criteria for objective action. Only then can any sense of power, connected with the Platonic ideal of ‘unselfing’ be certain. Marvin Felheim describes Dora in these terms: She is the last to arrive at, and the last to leave, Imber. One of her first acts there is to lose her shoes by the lake; she is somewhat afraid of the water, as she cannot swim. Her final action is to row upon the lake in a kind of lonely triumph (she has meanwhile taught herself to swim so ‘the depths below affrightened her no longer’) with the feeling that ‘it belonged to her’. The religious community has failed, the members have scattered, but Dora, who had no vocation, has found herself. Falheim makes an important point here by proposing that all those who had (or imagined themselves to have) a quasi-religious vocation have been disappointed whereas those who did not (Dora and Toby) have made a journey of self-discovery through the narrative. It would appear then that not having a ‘vocation’ is no bar to progress in Murdochland. The social construction of The Bell is regressive insofar as it reverts to the embedded moral values of the British middle and upper classes. This new moralism was only developing slowly since the late Victorian era and neither of the two world wars had fully displaced it; in fact it could be argued that the strengthening of British morality in the post-1945 period created political, social and moral tensions that brought the Conservative party back to office in 1951.27 The Conservatives responded to the social concerns of its core group of supporters by legislating to ‘improve’ the moral climate of Britain. The preservation of public order, the upholding of moral behaviour (as well as the disgust felt towards homosexuality which informed these policies) were all tenets of the government’s agenda. As homosexuality was still considered immoral by the vast majority of the population in 1955, Anthony Eden’s government felt obliged to develop its understanding of gender issues and sexual orientations. The ultimate objective of this pursuit was to develop a ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of homosexuality which would reduce the number of criminal offences committed

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and ensure the Conservatives remained as the party of moral worthiness. As the 1950s progressed public sentiment changed, so that although public displays of affection between men were still viewed as repugnant, it was still felt that private acts between consenting males should be decriminalized. The publication of the Wolfenden report on 3 September 1957 confirmed these findings.28 Murdoch discusses the distinction between the public life (of public conventions) and the private life (of private phenomena) of individuals in ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’ (1952) and ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ (1956). Where she says: On this view, the moral life of the individual is a series of overt choices which take place in a series of specifiable situations . . . A moral judgement, as opposed to a whim or taste preference, is one which is supported by reasons held by the agent to be valid for all others placed as he [is] . . . What must be clearly separated is the notion of inner or private psychological phenomena, open to introspection, and the notion of private or personal vision which may find expression overtly or inwardly.29 Tammy Grimshaw believes that: Murdoch plays out these philosophical views [noted above] in her fictional representations of homosexuality by illustrating that moral dilemmas are especially keen for the homosexual since one’s expression of sexuality is indeed one of the most individual freedoms, yet one that can be fraught with a variety of moral constraints and dilemmas . . . this tension conspires to keep homosexuals ‘in the closet’.30 Grimshaw is correct as it is clear that Michael cannot openly accept himself as a homosexual due to societal constraints and must therefore keep himself ‘in the closet’. Murdoch’s focus on homosexuality in The Bell can be seen, therefore, as her reaction to the continuing debate at this time. Although she had moved away from her earlier communist stance she was still actively involved in political thought and supported the liberalization of morality laws. She always held firm to the view that it is the individual that matters and that individuals are ‘free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world’.31 Murdoch’s fiction of this period (1958–1970) represents social prejudices towards both homosexuals and women and the power that

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society wielded to keep them at a distance from any meaningful form of power.32 As she wrote A Fairly Honourable Defeat in 1969, a novel which also concerns homosexuality, Murdoch was also writing ‘Permissive society? Not for queers and women!33 which relates directly to the plot of The Bell, the two major protagonists being a ‘fallen’ woman and a closeted homosexual; she continued to examine the role of homosexuals in society up to and including The Green Knight (1993) which is the focus of the final chapter. Conradi praises Murdoch for taking on the challenge of writing gay fiction at this point in time and working into The Bell the everyday challenges felt by a typical closeted homosexual, the novel displaying ‘strongly leftist, anti-fascist and pro-third-world tendencies’34 and that ‘she surely now had a gay following . . . every novel after The Bell now had at least one homosexual character’.35 Conradi is certainly right in asserting that the portrayal of homosexuality in Murdoch’s early fiction is impressive for the period in which it was written. However, the notion that her work is politically aware at this point overlooks her previous involvement with communism and European politics. As her friend and biographer Conradi knew that these tendencies were expressed in her writings at least ten years before, during her university career. That she had not totally departed from her communist sympathies is perhaps the most interesting factor, seen through the commune which Imber Court certainly is. The placement of this group with a religious community also raises the theological question of enclosed communities, promoting the view that individuals in such confinement naturally assume the ideals of Marxism. If we return to the issue of homosexuality in Murdoch’s novels we see that her fascination with male homosexuality did not reappear until 1970, although she briefly flirts with lesbianism in An Unofficial Rose (1962). In 1990 Jeffrey Meyers asked her what the function of homosexual characters was in her novels: Meyers:

What is the function and meaning of the homosexual characters who appear frequently in your novels? Murdoch: I think it depends on the context. They play different parts in different stories. I know a lot of homosexuals. I have homosexual friends. I’m very much in favour of gay lib, and I feel strongly that there shouldn’t be any sort of prejudice against homosexuals, or suggestions that homosexual love is unnatural or bad. I hope such views are tending to disappear from society.36

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Lesbianism is an important issue, as Murdoch had lovers of both genders throughout most of her adult life and was concerned that the public conception of homosexuality should develop into a positive environment for homosexuals and it is certainly the case that early reviewers of The Bell focused, in part, on Murdoch’s ability to assume a form of gender reflexivity: Once again Miss Murdoch displays in these scenes of homosexual tension her remarkable capacity for literary transvestism – Jake, Rainborough, Mor, Michael and Toby are so intimately understood that it seems unlikely those derogatory clichés about sensitive lady novelists will ever be applied to Miss Murdoch.37 Presumably the reviewer has in mind authors such as Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Bowen; Virginia Woolf could hardly be termed a ‘sensitive lady novelist’. The movement away from the fantastic, by which I mean moments devoid of any touch of realism such as the collapse of the film set in Under the Net or the scenes in Mischa Fox’s basement in The Flight from the Enchanter that Conradi describes as ‘Lewis Carroll-like and fantastic’,38 brings with it a freer conception of crystalline realism (albeit one that allows the characters a freer form) that enables The Bell and The Sandcastle to develop Murdoch’s philosophical fiction. Both Byatt and Conradi have asserted that The Bell is Murdoch’s best attempt at realism, and note that the particular world in which she develops her values is one which is closest to narrative of Eliot and Tolstoy which she was trying to attain. In contrast, Elizabeth Dipple criticizes it for ‘frequently coming close to being a forum for moral ideas’,39 which of course it is. But the central question is whether these two statements are antithetical; can one have a realistic novel which consists of a narrative of moral ideas and development? Murdoch would point to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Dickens’s Oliver Twist as examples of this. I believe that this has to be the case if we are to experience what Murdoch determines the ‘moral life’ to be, and this is present in the narrative form which she creates here. By placing the major part of the narrative within a lay-religious community Murdoch is able, in a detailed but not contrived way, to question the significance of spiritual meaning within an increasingly secular world; perhaps this is the major reason why The Bell has become the most discussed work in Murdoch’s early period, examining the boundaries between the aesthetic and the moral life, the bridging between the life we lead and the ‘good life’ we should aspire to, the schism between moral philosophy and fictional existence in her fiction. These factors are intrinsically linked to

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the narrative and certainly expose her philosophical ideas for her fiction as a whole. We have seen then that Murdochian realism is firmly founded on the conviction that the knowledge of moral value, such as the worth of any given person, is rooted firmly in the experience of the world around us, which in turn forms the grounding of all our knowledge. She believes that we must move away from the prevailing notion of fact and value so beloved of the empiricists, which I have outlined in the first chapter, and towards a position which ‘attempts to restore the conceptual richness of this [goodness] and other moral terms by seeing it in the context of an agent’s struggle to apprehend reality by means of a total vocabulary of moral vision’.40 Although the lineage of the barrier-creation between fact and value is rich in influential philosophers, Kant, Marx, Sartre and Heidegger to name but four, Murdoch regresses towards Plato for guidance as, she believes, to follow Platonic philosophy will ultimately lead to a negation of value and the nature of truth itself. Murdoch says that she regards the fact/value discussion as ‘the most important argument in modern philosophy – indeed it is almost the whole of modern philosophy’41 and in order to assert her own moral vision she feels she has to attempt to overturn these prevailing notions. It is no coincidence that Murdoch uses the arguments of Sartre, Kant, Heidegger and Freud in her novels. She uses their insistence upon the discrepancy between fact and value to develop her fictional settings and promote her own philosophical ideals. Her use of realism is only fully established once she realizes the fallacy of the fact/value dichotomy. The linkage of these is essential to her thesis. The argument of this book is only sustained therefore if these links can be shown to be self-sustaining. Murdoch contends that in order to understand a philosopher we must first ask what he or she is afraid of. Fergus Kerr says that: . . . her own fear over the years has plainly been the fact/value dichotomy which has dominated philosophy since at least Hume and Kant [and] has had immensely destructive effects throughout our culture in aesthetics and especially in the realms of ethics.42 The list of those who broadly agree with this includes almost all the major Western philosophers since Hume and also, crucially, involves Wittgenstein. If the early Wittgenstein is able to reduce philosophy to a series of statements, or even dispose of it all together (‘What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence’),43 and if this is universally believed to be true, then

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Murdoch has failed in her primary motivation for writing both philosophy and philosophical novels. The conception that obtaining the correct facts is an entirely separate business from evaluating their worth means that, in an ideal situation, we can resist passing any form of moral judgement until we have gathered the required facts for an objective and impartial stance. Murdoch realized that a perfectly objective view is never obtainable (one can never obtain the pure objectivity of God), but to then pronounce that any impartial view is, and always will be, illusory is an extreme Marxist or theocratic view which is equally invalid. Murdoch fears that the loss of a traditional form of devotional religion prevents individuals from possessing the inner knowledge to understand moral actions correctly; they can neither see a transparent act of evil nor a correct act of goodness.44 This is the case no matter what the circumstances of the action. The act itself may cause a range of emotional responses, painful or pleasurable, in the individual, but that in itself would not determine the rightness or wrongness of it. We may feel good about an action, and every individual may experience the same response, but for Murdoch the goodness or wickedness of an action is determined independently of how we feel about it.45 Murdoch’s position is broadly supportive of that postulated by Socrates – that true knowledge results in right action – but the obtaining of true knowledge of reality is a moral task in itself. Clearly The Bell is ultimately concerned with obtaining the true knowledge of reality for Dora, Michael and the reader but it will be useful if we leave this aside until we have determined why Murdoch takes issue with Christianity and the communities which it propagates. If religion is truly inescapable, and this is something which Murdoch certainly believed in 1958 (and indeed throughout her later life) then a return to Plato and Platonist metaphysics was for Murdoch the only viable form. Although Murdoch was not a theologian herself, preferring instead to concentrate on the problem of moral philosophy, she was seriously involved in religious thought. She believed that ‘we need a theology which can continue without God’46 based upon the thought of morality as a code of action with religion being specifically concerned with a deep spiritual sensibility.47 She was concerned that religion was more often than not debased (by secular society) as a personal experience which could bring little insight into the debate concerning morality. This is precisely, she believes, why religion has to be demythologized; if we remove the anthropomorphic image of Christ, which she believes to be nothing more than an image made for veneration, we may begin, once again, to promote religion as a workable

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system. However, Murdoch thinks that the illusion of Christ could not be removed from believers’ minds without negating the entire fabric of their belief structure.48 Where then does this leave the oblique notion of ‘the will’? Murdoch seems to be suggesting, through her critique of the Humean notion of schism between fact and value, that the will is bound up with, and left almost redundant by, her moral vision. As we discussed earlier, Murdoch’s conception of moral understanding (or motivation) veers towards that expressed by Socrates. If we are to fully understand the concept of ‘the will’ in these terms we must understand how Murdoch envisages it in her philosophy and then, most crucially, how she applies it to her work. First, however, we must define what Murdoch means when she discusses theories of moral motivation. The basic question is this: is knowledge sufficient for moral conduct, or is something more needed to compel right action? This is crucial to the ethical system which Murdoch is trying to establish. The classic theory takes into account two visions, the internalist and the externalist, both having clear ideals concerning the distinctions between desires and beliefs in defining a certain moral attitude.49 Antonaccio discusses this in Picturing the Human: Internalists, as the name implies, hold that since moral attitudes are more like desires than beliefs, there is an internal relation between moral attitudes and practical moral action. On this view, moral attitudes are understood to contain a motive force (i.e. desire) that compels action. Externalists, on the other hand, hold that since moral attitudes are more like moral beliefs than desires, some external desire is required to motivate moral action; beliefs by themselves cannot compel action on this view. Cognitivist thinkers (like Murdoch) are thought to be externalists on this question, since cognitivists presumably hold that moral attitudes are essentially beliefs about the world.50 Murdoch’s view may be neatly expressed as ‘true vision occasions right conduct’,51 which would classify her as an internalist in her theory of moral motivation. If we now come back to the Socratic view discussed earlier, we can see that Murdoch holds that the relation between moral knowledge and moral action is such that one cannot act contrary to one’s knowledge of the good. If we act on the good we see then we cannot act in a negative way, which brings us back to the Socratic model. As Murdoch remarked,

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‘The author’s moral judgement is the air which the reader breathes’,52 and it is crucial we understand her formulation of the will, desire and moral judgement if we are to understand The Bell. Charles Taylor believes the Socratic model to be a ‘linear’ theory of moral motivation due to it positing a direct or linear relation between seeing, or knowing, the Good and willing, or doing, the Good.53 The original Christian model, by contrast, is ‘circular’ because it assumes that the will is not merely the ‘dependant’ variable, ‘shaped by what we see’, but also ‘the independent variable, determining what we can know’.54 This has a direct relation to the second chapter of this work where Freud’s notion of the will is discussed. It is my contention that we see Murdoch mediating between the two positions, Plato’s and Augustine’s, although slightly over-balanced towards the Platonic model, in her philosophical work55 and, specifically in The Bell; I am thinking here particularly of Plato’s concern with the highest form of good and Augustine’s consideration of knowledge and forms as a real link to a tripartite God, of whom no greater idea may be conceived. Murdoch rejects the divinity of Christ but holds fast to the moral ideals of the Christian faith: I think I was then [in the 1950s] perhaps gradually influenced by moral philosophy and by an interest in Plato – and the feeling that, although I never felt any impulse to come back to God the Father, and have never done so (I mean, I don’t believe in a personal God, and I don’t believe in the divinity of Christ) – I began to feel, partly as a philosopher and partly generally in life, that the place of God, being empty, needed to be filled by some kind of positive reflection, a kind of moral philosophy, or even neo-theology, which would explain very fundamental things about the human soul and the human being.56 Both views, Plato and Augustine’s, are reflected within the novel itself with Imber Court and the abbey being in opposition and Michael Meade and James Tayper Pace being similarly opposed. But how do these views differ in theoretical terms? Both Plato and Augustine agree that inner attention, or the soul’s attention, may be directed either towards the good or away from it.57 The direction of attention determines the desire of the inner self; both philosophers affirm the intrinsic relation between vision and desire, and thus both, at least superficially, have the potential to assume the Socratic model. There are, however, two specific differences. Augustine has a more focused view of the will than Plato; Augustine believes, for example, that the will is not entirely dependent upon knowledge, whereas Plato sees it as simply a focusing of knowledge, or, that our desire for the good is

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the function of how we see it: ‘This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections’.58 This introduces a potential conflict between vision and desire. Wrong action for Plato, as it is for the abbess of The Bell, is explained by a lack of vision or insight, whereas for Augustine this simply will not do: ‘the perversity in the will can never be sufficiently explained by our lack of insight into the good; on the contrary, it makes us act below and against our insight’.59 This is why the central problem of weakness in The Bell, the weakness of Michael in failing to come to terms with his homosexuality, the weakness of Dora in failing to accept herself and to re-evaluate her relationship with Paul, and James’s weakness in failing to understand contrary points of view to his own, is of such great importance: it is the central problem of Platonism and Murdoch wishes to examine it in a fictional form. Murdoch has stated that The Bell is ‘essentially a study of two types of moral and religious attitude’,60 and the two sermons in the novel certainly exemplify this. Michael favours salvation through self-exploration, which is rather odd as his failing is precisely this, whereas James preaches on unquestioning allegiance to the word of the Bible. James, however, is able to address his listeners from a position of, we are led to believe, purity of inexperience. He preaches that we have no need to examine or calculate; attitudes and practices are either sanctioned or forbidden by divine wisdom: A belief in Original Sin should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds or regard ourselves as unique and interesting sinners. As sinners we are very much the same and our sin is essentially something tedious, something to be shunned and not something to be investigated . . . We should consider not what delights or what disgusts us, morally speaking, but what is enjoined and what is forbidden . . . Truthfulness is enjoyed, the relief of suffering is enjoyed, adultery is forbidden, sodomy is forbidden . . . sodomy is not disgusting, it is just forbidden.61 In James’s view the universality of God’s judgements demonstrates that perfection resides objectively in the Hegelian world of spirit. James argues that by exploring subjectivity, like Michael, we only distort the simple rules governing human behaviour. Michael replies in his sermon that: The chief requirement of the good life . . . is that one should have some conception of one’s capabilities. One must know oneself sufficiently to know what is the next thing . . . to live in innocence, or having fallen to return to the way, we need all the strength that we can muster – and to use

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our strength we must know where it lies. We must not, for instance, perform an act because abstractly it seems to be a good act . . . self-knowledge will lead us to avoid occasions of temptation rather than to rely on naked strength to overcome them.62 The point being made here is that human behaviour cannot be governed by simple rules or all-encompassing human narratives; we must obtain or create a reflexive moral guidance system. No uniform view of scripture or moral law exists; James fails in his attempt to correct his listeners as there can be many interpretations of what is forbidden and what is to be enjoyed, while Michael’s notion of Christian morality, although more democratic and empirical, entails the same degree of personal latitude. Conradi points out that ‘Michael’s temporizings and James’s austerities are both inadequate partial views’,63 and tells us that Murdoch called the conflict between the two that of saint and artist, although he does not say where this occurred. James, as the saint, is best suited to a rigid and austere morality and is trying to obtain the unobtainable (since we are corrupted by Original Sin), whereas Michael is the artist as ‘he is the proponent of the second-best act and loves spiritual drama and pattern for its own sake’.64 Of course, this is not to say that either of these positions is, according to Murdoch, correct. We should mediate between the two of them, she insists, in order to create an idea of perfection suitable for understanding the attention the self must pay to the other, whilst also allowing for some setting of boundaries. The abbess, echoing Murdoch’s view, believes that: Our duty . . . is not necessarily to seek the highest regardless of the realities of our spiritual life as it in fact is, but to seek that place, that task, those people, which will make our spiritual life most constantly grow and flourish; and in this search. We must make use of divine cunning, ‘As wise as serpents, as harmless as doves’.65 Hers is a perfectly Platonic form of reasoning. The downfall of the community, and the humour in the novel, are provided by the characters’ lack of the spiritual awareness of each other. Mrs Mark, for example, lacks the wisdom to impart to Dora any sense of belonging when she refuses to discuss her previous life, perhaps due to the shame she feels at the breakdown of her own marriage. If she were able to properly attend to Dora and sympathize with her on her own terms she would be able to morally progress. The abbess sees the inhabitants’ failure to attend to each other as a failure of love: ‘Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in

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love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back’ (235), as she says to Michael at the end of the novel. Michael’s inattention to Nick is the most glaring of all the failures of love in the narrative. Murdoch’s comments concerning high and low eros are directly related to this inattention, as Michael has failed to distinguish between the two; indeed this distinction prevents him from realigning his baser instincts to a more active vision of the other. Michael, learning of Nick’s imminent arrival, is faced with the forceful entry of the major ‘other’ from his past, and is forced to rethink his position within the community and how he may relate to Nick without betraying his homosexuality to the group. This, in turn, turns the ego in on itself as he is forced to think of his position within the group; a position that Murdoch warns her readership about as she encouraged individuals to turn their attention ‘outward, away from [the] self’.66 Although Murdoch’s use of the cave allegory is central to the form of The Bell it is pertinent to ask if she is a true Platonist; does she completely deny the independence of the will from knowledge? She appears to agree with the view that knowledge and the will are inextricably linked and that moral desire is inherently linked with both. Perhaps we can even see her as reducing her notion of the will to some form of vision, or indeed, consciousness. Although she rejects Freudian theory, Murdoch appears to be assuming one of its key tenets, that of the unconscious mind being the driving force of the will. However, we must also understand that the reflexivity of Murdoch’s account of realistic vision makes any simple comparison with Plato problematic and suggests, perhaps, that she is not, as she believes herself to be, a full Platonic disciple. She acknowledges in her philosophical work that the influence between vision and will may be seen as mutual rather than strictly linear, or, that one begets the other in an Augustinian ‘circularity’, or reciprocal fashion. If the will continually influences belief, either for better or worse, then Murdoch must admit that vision has a great deal of bearing upon an individual’s belief system. If we return to our earlier discussion of The Sovereignty of Good, then perhaps Murdoch may shed some light on it: Will and reason are not entirely separate faculties in the moral agent [us]. Will continually influences beliefs, for better or worse, and is ideally able to influence it through a sustained attention to reality 67 . . . leaping ahead of what we know . . . [w]e may sometimes decide . . . to ignore vision and the compulsive energy derived from it; and we may find that as a result both energy and vision are unexpectedly given.68

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And ultimately the will may exert some direction over vision, and not only the reverse: ‘[Man] is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accordance with what he sees, and who has some continual slight control over the direction and focus of his vision’.69 So we can now see that Murdoch’s view of the will, desire and vision is not strictly linear or indeed of entirely Socratic origin. This in turn suggests that the problem of weakness of the will is as much a problem for Murdoch as it was for Augustine, and so it proves in her fiction. We can now understand why Murdoch was so preoccupied with the weakness of will in several of her characters, and the lack of spirit in the community as opposed to the freedom experienced by the enclosed nuns in the abbey. We have already discussed the nature of the Platonic allegory of the cave, and its repercussions on the narrative, but we have yet to discuss its impact upon two central aspects of the novel: the impact of Murdoch’s philosophy upon the feminist subtext and the latent homosexuality of Michael. Deborah Johnson argues that ‘the presence of a feminist subtext can be discerned throughout The Bell where Iris Murdoch’s narrative symbolism is particularly sustained and subtle’,70 which Byatt argues is the most effective part of the novel. The key point is the impact of Dora upon the community, the outsider arriving, along with Toby, to unwittingly disrupt and ultimately destroy the lay-religious community. Although the abbess refers to the inhabitants of Imber Court as ‘a kind of sick people, whose desire for the God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life’ (81) she does not predict that they themselves will bring the community to an end. Here Johnson relies heavily on the work of Byatt and by doing so she misses what I believe to be the most important aspect of Dora’s relationship with Michael, for although Dora naturally gravitates towards Toby in the later part of the novel, in a sense a kindred spirit, she is left at the end to assess the impact of the destruction of Imber Court with Michael. However, Johnson’s view of Catherine as an echo of Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost has something to be said for it. Like Eve, Catherine is first seen by Dora in a natural setting picking fruit (although this fruit is not forbidden by the community). The garden itself is reminiscent of the symbolism of the bell connecting Catherine to a more pastoral life, one which should not, and will not, be interrupted by her entry to the abbey. Johnson believes that the garden with Catherine in it is portentous: It [the scene] comments proleptically upon the appalling consequences that will follow from Catherine’s attempt to discipline her own sexual nature through her choice of the religious life, an attempt in which all the lay community members are implicated.71

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Catherine’s impact on the community is discussed further on in this chapter, although it is certainly true, and a central part of Johnson’s thesis, that the relationship (or failure of a relationship) between Dora and Catherine provides an interesting subplot for the long struggle of Michael to accept his homosexuality and focus his attention outwards. It is also true, as Johnson states, that the story of Dora’s progression through the novel is of primary importance as she remains, at the end of the novel, with the most potential to move forward with her life: in this context then The Bell may well be a feminist, as well as a philosophical, novel. Johnson’s argument is this: A ‘Dora-centred’ perspective allows for a more flexible and emotional reading of Iris Murdoch’s symbolism in The Bell than does a neutral overview. It allows us, in Elaine Showalter’s phrase, to see ‘meaning in what has previously been empty space’.72 From here it is possible to argue that Iris Murdoch’s symbolism in general presents a ‘double-voiced discourse’.73 To assess this we must return to the impact of homosexuality upon Murdoch and how it influenced her fiction. In ‘Against Dryness’ Murdoch engages in her foremost attack upon behaviourism for its view that ‘the inner life . . . is identifiable as existing only through the application to it of public concepts, concepts which can only be constructed on the basis of overt behaviour’.74 She argues here for a shift in focus towards the inner moral life of the individual and goes on to lament that ‘we no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him’.75 It is useful to view these statements, within her fictional representation of homosexuality, by understanding that moral dilemmas were especially prevalent for the homosexual in the 1950s as their sexuality was, as in the case of Michael Meade, constrained by moral and social dilemmas. She depicts Michael as struggling in private with his sexuality whilst trying to maintain a public image of moral worthiness. As a leader of the community at Imber it is crucial that he maintain the illusion of his supposed heterosexuality in order to prevent any collapse of his public standing within the group. He believes that he will only be judged on his public behaviour. In addition to this he first has to contend with his past, embodied in Nick Fawley and then his kissing of Toby – both of which, he believes, could lead to his social downfall. Michael’s failure to master his inner life and come to terms with his homosexuality ultimately result in his moral failure to acknowledge Nick with ‘attention’; a factor which Murdoch may be largely responsible for Nick’s suicide.

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Murdoch’s realization that Michael’s religion and sexuality both emanate from the same source is a useful tool in understanding her vision of eros – the vision that sexual energies can be virtuously transformed into movement towards the good. Michael’s struggle to transform his low eros, his sexuality, towards high eros, his love for the religious life is consistent with Platonism, and Murdoch depicts this as a significant aspect of his inner life. His inner drama impacts negatively on his ability to attend to his moral obligations, and this lessens his potential to love others in the community. In Murdoch’s view, these struggles shape his subjectivity and, as we have seen, prevent him from obtaining an objective view of any member of the community. Michael’s struggle to turn his attention outwards as he enters Imber Court and passes from sexual passion to semi-religious vocation is the crux of his turmoil. By refusing to acknowledge his homosexuality and confront it, he is unable to fully experience the community. Sexual deviance, as viewed in the Christian tradition, is something which must be confessed, and Michael’s refusal to do so precipitates his undoing. For Murdoch, however, it is not the sexuality that matters but his refusal to accept himself for what he is. Michael must exhibit a Platonic unselfing in order to become fully naturalized with the world around him; he must see what is truly there by walking out of the cave and defining what his own landscape is like. The orthodox Christian perspective is embodied in James Tayper Pace, and although he never actively refers to Michael as a homosexual, once he has heard Toby’s confession, he believes him to be a ‘deviant’ of sorts. This ensures that Michael is further ostracized by the other members of the community, as James believes the group to be without moral unworthiness. The reader is aware, of course, of their individual failings. It is an interesting decision of Murdoch’s to make Imber the family home of Michael, allowing another layer of Freudian drama to proceedings. Once he has been ‘outed’ by Toby’s confession he is marginalized both from the community and the place where he should, naturally, feel most secure.76 A character equally guilty of neglecting both the complex plenitude of the world and the true state of her inner life is Catherine Fawley. Although she appears to be the perfect addition to the community, and is held up as an ideal, her inner life is far from stable. Like Michael she has frequent dreams about drowning and is often associated in the novel with water (much like Hannah Crean-Smith of The Unicorn) which she fears; she constantly dwells on her unworthiness to be a part of the community and to enter the abbey itself. When the new bell arrives at the abbey, and subsequently falls into the lake, Catherine assumes the blame as she views it as directly related to her as the new penitent entering the abbey through the same gate that she will use.

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In her mind she sees this as a dreadful portent, relating it back to the legend of the nun drowning herself in the lake once the old bell had flung itself out of the tower. Catherine’s speech, as she prepares an attempt at drowning herself, is childish and without reference to anybody else; her language reflects the undeveloped self within her: ‘God has reached out his hand. A white garment cannot conceal a wicked heart. There is no passing through that gate. Goodbye’ (276). Clearly Catherine has suffered a total mental breakdown at this point, although it does not come as a shock to the reader that this should come to pass. Jacques Souvage analyses this scene: As we know, Catherine has transferred to Michael her former passionate devotion to Nick. Although she is to enter the Abbey as a novice (at the moment of the bell’s installation), she is in love. In a person as unbalanced as Catherine such love will breed guilt . . . she comes increasingly to identify herself with the guilty nun who drowned herself in the lake.77 As with Michael, then, myth and the past face the present and reality with devastating consequences for the community. Catherine and Michael are unable to transform themselves, and their piety, into a realistic appraisal of selfhood or a satisfying relationship with an ‘other’. It is not without irony that it is Nick’s eventual suicide which presses the two of them so firmly together at the end of the novel: it would appear that one cannot now function without the other. If we remember the central moral impulse of the novel, that all failures are ultimately failures in love, then only by loving attentively and selflessly may we gain a true other-directed understanding of reality. This is as true of Catherine as it is of the unspoken homosexual connection between Michael and Nick. In The Bell Murdoch represents the homosexual subject’s attempt to suppress knowledge, and therefore the effects of power, related to his sexuality. She describes the manner in which autonomous inner linguistic and moral processes affect the subject and emphasizes the importance of seeking the truth in these processes. Finally, she depicts the moral failures of the individual that spring from solipsism and egoism, in addition to portraying the effect on the homosexual of the community’s failure to see him truthfully and lovingly. It follows, of course, that this is a Platonic ideal which Murdoch wishes to express to her readership, and she believes that the novel is the form best suited to promote this; one which is returned to much later in her career with The Green Knight which will be discussed later.

Chapter Five

The Philosopher’s Pupil: A Revision of Ideas?

The final two chapters of this book are rather different from those which precede them. They are shorter in length, although not in scope, as theories and ideas already discussed in early chapters are once again at the fore: Murdoch never escapes Platonism, and nor does she want to. Rather she restates the case for Platonic dialogue in expanded works of prose:1 the concept of Weilian attention is again employed to highlight the inner struggle of two central figures. As Murdoch develops her fiction she expands both the length and the fictional spaces to encompass a larger perspective. However the underlying struggle between the Platonic and the demonic, although not as obviously two dimensional as previously seen, is still fundamental to the narrative of both novels. In both The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) and The Green Knight (1993), indeed in all the novels of her later period, Murdoch espouses Platonism as she believes it to be the ultimate provider of conscious awareness of both the self and the other. Her early adversaries can be seen, at least in general terms, as Existentialism and Linguistic Analysis; both removing the inherent uniqueness of the self and debasing it to general suppositions and analytical certainties that hold true for all – the essence of the self becomes corrupted as existence precedes individuality. A. N. Wilson believes that: Thereafter [Under the Net], for book after book, Murdoch would write philosophical novels challenging in one way or another the idea of the philosophical novel. Her work would retain the sweet clear-mindedness and rigour of the mentality that runs through that fine brief study of Sartre . . . but these are quite determinedly not philosophical novels in the conventional sense, or the senses she had established in writing her first book.2 With which I am inclined to agree. Wilson is expressing the same view of Murdoch’s fiction that Alasdair MacIntyre does when reviewing Dipple’s

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Work for the Spirit which is discussed in the third chapter. The conventional sense of the ‘philosophical novel’ is not applicable here either but Murdoch reworks some of her earlier thought on Platonic vision and transcendence and gives her reader a more expansive narrative. With The Philosopher’s Pupil the engagement with a number of philosophies is displayed when Murdoch lists the works of John Robert Rozanov – her power figure and protagonist: He had already published his two youthful books; one, Logic and Consciousness, a demolition of the views of Husserl, the other about Kant’s view of time. He now added a long book called Kant and the Kantians which established his reputation as something considerably more than a ‘clever boy’. His well-known studies of Descartes and Leibniz followed, then Against the Theory of Games, and the seminal work Nostalgia for the Particular. He then became, by way of Kant, interested for the first time in moral philosophy, which he dismissed when young; becoming for a while an obsessive student of Plato and wrote a book called Being and Beyond, considered marvellous but eccentric, about Plato’s Theory of Ideas. (He also wrote a short book, difficult to find now, on Plato’s Mathematical Objects.)3 His reappearance, returning as the ‘philosopher-king’ to his people, set in motion the central action of the novel: the conflict between Rozanov and his former pupil George McCaffrey; there is also some suggestion that Father Bernard Jacoby becomes another disciple of Rozanov’s and it is his lack of religious faith which enables the philosopher to exploit Jacoby’s ideas of transcendence; the priest representing Murdoch’s ideal of a demythologized religion. He no longer believes in God but has dedicated his life to the teachings of Christ and keeps the Christian beatitudes at the forefront of his mind. Jacoby is an interesting creation as he is the opposite of Carel Fisher in The Time of the Angels and forms a trinity of philosophical positions with George and Rozanov with both himself and George echoing two distinct areas of Rozanov’s persona. Even before Rozanov appears our narrator, ‘N’, to whom we shall return later, makes it clear that Rozanov’s imminent arrival has already started a chain of events which are referred to as ‘odd’ or ‘strange’, including the eruption of a geyser in the grounds of the baths and the appearance of UFOs over the common; George’s attempt to kill his wife Stella also fits into the happenings. The naming of the central part of the narrative ‘The Events in Our Town’ lends it a mythic air of detachment from reality. All is not as it should be in Ennistone4 (or N’s town as we later gather) and it is only

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through the death of Rozanov and the rehabilitation, in some respects, of George that normality can resume. Nicol believes that ‘it is the novel which explores the relationship between philosophy and literature perhaps more deeply and more contradictorily than any of Murdoch’s others’5 and that ‘The Philosopher’s Pupil shows that the philosophy precedes the fiction in an even more deep-rooted sense, in that the organisation, characterisation and plot of Murdoch’s novels are governed by her philosophy and literary theory’.6 Nicol’s reading of the novel is worth exploring as I believe it to be a correct re-visioning of the underlying Platonic theme. There are, of course, other constituents that have been discussed by Conradi, Heusel and David J. Gordon, notably the Bakhtinian ‘carnivalesque’ nature of parts of the narrative as well as the connected journalistic discourse that forms part of the centre of the novel. These should not distract us, however, from the locus of the text: the relationship between George and Rozanov. We must delineate the nature of this coupling, for they seem to exhibit both opposing and similar strategies of discourse and through this realize the central pronouncement on a Platonic philosophical vision. It is not enough to accept Murdoch’s understanding of their relationship as purely that of teacher and pupil: this is a superficial argument. What underlies this is a central disagreement of philosophy not just between subject and object (both characters are guilty of objectifying the other) but also between the Platonic (an almost mystic Platonism) and the demonic. It is fair to say that both Rozanov and George are complex and that Murdoch does not rely, as she has done in her early work, on the caricaturing of a philosophical discourse through a character but rather envisions both the characters through a range of differing philosophical visions. Why then have I chosen to concern the final chapters of this book with a re-envisioning of Murdoch’s philosophical fiction? It must be stated at the outset that the two novels chosen are unlike those previously discussed, being broader in scope, longer in length and more highly stylized. I shall of course discuss the reasons for including The Green Knight in greater detail in the final chapter but it merits some discussion here as there needs to be a general explanation at this point: simply the two novels complement each other. As Murdoch develops as a novelist (and this is the agreed critical view)7 she becomes more expansive in her development of the narrative. The closely structured plots of The Bell and The Time of the Angels are superseded by a more expansive and detailed narrative with reference the fiction of both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky,8 the theatrical plotting of Shakespeare and the Jamesian ‘loose baggy monster’; although Murdoch draws on all these inspirations there is still a tendency within her later fiction to rely on an

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intricate but highly constrictive plot that, although not the crystalline novel of the 1950s, is still restrictive.9 The development of Murdoch’s fiction encourages a re-envisioning of her philosophical base. What I mean by this is that her later novels display a very different working of philosophy than the fiction already discussed. The classical ‘novel of ideas’ developed by Thomas Carlyle, Voltaire and others is far removed from what Murdoch is attempting to achieve. The Philosopher’s Pupil is not written with the expressly overt and conscious decision to repudiate the philosophies of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer or Heidegger, although its aim is to puncture the notion of the internalized development of being, the primary reason for its creation is for fictive purposes. Murdoch discusses this in an interview given just after publication of the novel: Haffenden: The Philosopher’s Pupil is a powerful story of a dark obsession and love, riveting reading. It’s the first novel in which you’ve placed a philosopher at the centre, almost as if you’re outfacing critics who have labelled you a philosophical novelist. Murdoch: This novel really has more to do with a pupil–teacher relationship . . . I made the character a philosopher because it came along with the passage, as it were. I am writing philosophy at the moment, but of course in The Philosopher’s Pupil the character talks philosophy en passant rather than as part of the story. Haffenden: And yet the character, John Robert Rozanov, has covered something of the same ground as your own work in philosophy, including Platonism . . . Murdoch: In a very rough way, yes, but that’s not particularly significant.10 As we have seen earlier Murdoch is rarely the best judge of her own work and we must let the texts speak for themselves. It is central to the novel that Platonism is discussed by Rozanov. He holds firmly to the belief ‘Who could fathom Plato’s mind? Unless one is a genius, philosophy is a mug’s game. There were not even any books any more. All the books were inside him now’.11 If all philosophy is inside him, if Rozanov has managed to transcend philosophy – or rather to have philosophy inhabit him – then the material world must no longer be able to provide for his needs. Once knowledge has been assumed (perhaps even consumed) then Rozanov is at the centre of power and this is the reason he holds the town in his grasp; with knowledge of the centre Rozanov’s discourse is held by all others to be the literal

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‘truth’ and this is precisely the reason he, like Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter before him, attempts to stage manage the fate of his fellow inhabitants. Two separate points must be made in clarification of this statement. First, the power that Rozanov wields is comedically negated by his semi-incestuous love for his grand-daughter Hattie. Secondly we must keep in mind the omnipresence and omnipotence of ‘N’: I shall deal with these sequentially. To rid himself of these unnatural desires – there is an undercurrent of the unnatural and supernatural throughout the novel – Rozanov forcibly suggests to Tom McCaffrey, George’s younger half-brother, that he marry Hattie and keep her apart from the world. He tells Tom, ‘she has had no experience – she is – a virgin’.12 Murdoch’s concern for sexuality, freedom and experience has been noted earlier in the book but it is interesting that a little earlier in the conversation Rozanov alludes to his belief that philosophy, and philosophers, are a corrupting influence upon innocence: John Robert replied gloomily, ‘Some risks must be taken.’ ‘But the world is full of young men – what about your pupils – there must be someone –?’ ‘I do not think a philosopher would be suitable.’ ‘Why, are philosophers under a curse?’ John Robert took this exclamation seriously. ‘Yes.’ The curse of the philosopher is the curse of Rozanov; they wish to escape the world and human relationships are alien to them: certainly Murdoch makes use of this throughout her fiction in relation to almost all her power figures – another reason for accusations of repetition towards her fiction. Murdoch’s playfulness suggests that Rozanov’s suicide is the end result of this internalized struggle. Unlike Murdoch’s recurring image of ‘the saint’ who gives himself up to the world (the Christ-like Peter Mir of The Green Knight, for example) the enchanter/philosopher is so consumed by his demonic vision of internalized being that the only sure escape is death. The same is true of Carel Fisher and Mischa Fox although the latter escapes to southern Europe and suffers a form of internal death, what Murdoch may term ‘dying to the world’: the same can be said of Peter Mir whose death enables the other characters in The Green Knight to move forwards. Conradi suggests that the internal dialogue of Rozanov, indeed of any of the major characters does not work as it should: ‘Yet in both The Philosopher’s Pupil and The Book and the Brotherhood she risks the penalties of too much success: their interior dialect does not, in either novel, quite take fire, which, in so far as they are novels interested in ideas, is potentially harmful’.13 I believe that this is Murdoch’s central point: the ‘interior dialect’ is lacking as Rozanov’s

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philosophical vision is lacking. He has failed to pay ‘attention’ to George or Hattie or Tom or even Father Bernard. If he had done so he may have gained deeper personal insight. As it is his failure is reflected in his death. The other interesting point from Conradi is that he believes these novels to be ‘interested in ideas’;14 it is unlike him to give any ground to philosophical influence upon Murdoch’s novels and on this point he is, perhaps, in agreement with Nicol’s statement earlier. If we consider sexuality within the novel we discover some regular ‘Murdochian’ traits that the author has used to good effect in her earlier work. Incest, unrequited love, homosexuality and sexual violence are all present and serve to highlight the necessary movement from low to high eros and the Platonic vision of ‘unselfing’. Tammy Grimshaw believes that: Yet, a deeper analysis reveals that Platonism influenced Murdoch’s depiction of homosexuality in this and other novels much more deeply than did her interest in social and political issues. Significantly the reader learns that Father Bernard’s quest for solitude ‘included celibacy’ (156). . . In her nonfiction, Murdoch expressed a great interest in the control of sexual impulses as a path to the divine. The Fire and the Sun provides perhaps her clearest explication of Eros, the transformed sexual energy ‘which connects the commonest human desire to the highest morality’.15 It is clear that the control of sexual desire, and here we may think of Diane and George who fail in this regard and Farther Bernard who manages his celibacy, ultimately leads to a transcendence towards a higher form of the good. Perhaps it is really Father Bernard who is ‘the philosopher’s pupil’; his relationship with Rozanov provides both of them with the means to relinquish some of the baser thoughts which hold both of them back. Tom’s sexuality is originally seen by Rozanov as something that he can use to reflect his passion for Hattie. It is his lack of vision towards Tom that is the real failing; his incestuous desires must be dealt with internally, not through deflection by a young innocent. I shall comment on Nicol’s reading of The Philosopher’s Pupil shortly but I now wish to consider the omniscient ‘N’. ‘N’ remains in the background of the narrative, only making himself known to highlight crucial scenes. We find out towards the end of the novel that he was present along with Father Bernard – whose appearance as a dark figure on the bridge echoes both George’s demonic thought and acts as a portent of coming change – and Diane when George drove his car at the canal, in order to provide the reader with a sense of both perspective and also authorial guidance. ‘N’ lives within

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Ennistone, the very name suggesting that he controls (or at least directs the lives of) the inhabitants and acts with a form of benevolence. He gives refuge to Stella, whom Murdoch believes to be a problematic creation,16 and is aware of all events; especially the carnivalesque party scene involving a great ensemble of characters – ostensibly to play out the awakening of Hattie to Tom – that ‘N’ ‘objectively’ comments on. The presence of a narrator, at least a created narrator, is rare within Murdochian fiction; so much so that his presence lends a decidedly postmodern turn to the narrative. Several critics have quoted the final sentence of the novel ‘I also had the assistance of a certain lady’17 asserting the idea of a depthlessness of truthtelling. If the lady is the author, as Conradi and Heusel believe her to be, then Murdoch’s vision of a house fit for free characters is clearly disregarded: truth claims must now lie within the philosophical discussions at the heart of the novel. At times the plot is rather disparate and the ‘set-pieces’ that form the central action are often re-worked Shakespearian drama: this also informs The Green Knight. Murdoch’s use of The Tempest within The Sea, The Sea (1978) works better than its influence upon The Philosopher’s Pupil as the earlier novel focuses the action upon a small cast of characters and does not allow myriad philosophies to intrude as they do here. There are also echoes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, most noticeably with Jenny Hirsch and Mark Lauder, employed, it would seem, as an obvious parallel with the play to provide the carnivalesque drama. This reduces the novel’s impact, and if these ‘mythic’ scenes were removed and the novel considerably condensed it would be a more satisfying production. As it stands The Philosopher’s Pupil tries to balance serious discussion with frivolous action meaning neither is totally satisfactory. Murdoch’s reworking of ideas stems from this issue as Nicol states in The Retrospective Fiction, ‘The context of Murdoch’s narrative technique [in] The Philosopher’s Pupil is therefore a paradox, a combination of two literary forms she favoured, first-person retrospective novel and omniscient Jamesian “loose baggy monster”’.18 However unsatisfactory the novel may be, and it was not well received by literary critics, it echoes the Platonic vision of her earlier work pitted against a larger spectrum of opposing philosophical views. I believe Nicol’s reading of the novel is central to fulfilling the need of Murdoch studies to reassess her philosophical engagement within her later work. Nicol believes that the presence of Derrida haunts Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and his influence can be seen in the demonic creations of both Rozanov and George McCaffrey: In an important sense, behind this opposition is a more wide-ranging opposition between philosophy and literature. Where Rozanov is clearly

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interested in similar philosophical problems to his author, and also shares her puritanical desire to write down nothing but the truth in philosophy (PP 134), George can be – and has been – regarded as the prime representative of the carnivalesque literary spirit that can be seen at work in the novel . . . George is the novel’s dangerous supplement . . . he plays a similar role, in other words, to that of Derrida in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.19 He contrasts the desires of Rozanov, whom Murdoch terms a neoPlatonist20 but who seems rather more nightmarish than this, with the inherent Nietzschean vision of George who wishes to render himself as beyond good and evil. As George is, to some extent, the creation of Rozanov – and we are already aware of Rozanov’s myriad philosophical interests – it stands to reason that Rozanov as enchanter may be slightly less neo-Platonic than first thought. In discussing Platonism in the last chapter, and Murdoch’s sense of Platonism, we concluded that her Platonic vision forms the parameters for her fiction. Are we to believe then that Rozanov as neo-Platonist exhibits these tendencies towards some form of idealistic monism? He is surely more complex than this. Nicol believes that: On one side there is Murdoch’s own philosophy, represented by Rozanov (who is described as a neo-Platonist (PP 83), and is obsessed by ‘the uncategorized manifold, the ultimate jumble of the world, before which the metaphysician covers his eyes’ (PP 133), and on the other we have an embodiment of a quasi-Nietzschean ideal. Certainly George is the less successful character as he performs this specific task within the novel. Where I disagree with Nicol is his overly simplistic drawing of Rozanov for there is certainly a lack of Platonic vision towards both George and Hattie (mindful also of Simone Weil’s concept of attention, it is prudent to notice the distinct lack of understanding displayed to George, Pearl and Hattie). If Rozanov was a neo-Platonist, or if Murdoch had fashioned him thus, a reading of his motives would be clear. The only true vision of ‘the good’ is provided by William Eastcote or ‘Bill the Lizard’ as he is known; lizards being connected with wisdom. His death, coupled with the death of Rozanov, marks the end of the collective hysteria as some semblance of balance has now been restored to Ennistone. As it is we must rely less on Rozanov’s words, and Murdoch’s characterization, focusing instead on his direct action. George’s ‘enlightenment’ on the common, coming as it does from a chance encounter with a UFO, is one of the least convincing aspects of the novel and renders his character rather unsettling.

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Why Murdoch uses an extraterrestrial source of change is rather baffling; surely George could have gained a realization of transcendence through other means. George is violently rejected by Rozanov much as he was years ago when he followed the philosopher to America. George is under the misguided impression that Rozanov has returned to Ennistone not only to reinvigorate its inhabitants and bring them out of their collective slumber but also to make amends for his earlier failure to ‘see’ George. George’s subsequent embrace of a quasi-Nietzschean mythology coupled with his continuing rejection of both his family and rational behaviour suggest that what he really lacks is any source of fatherly guidance and affection; this is mentioned at the beginning of the novel. Nicol believes George to be the novel’s ‘dangerous supplement’21 (much as Derrida is the dangerous supplement to Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals) who not only disrupts boundaries, such as the private rooms of the spa connected with a form of enlightenment and high eros, but also disrupts any relationship which aims to bring him back to reality. Paradoxically the only true enlightenment gained by George comes after his father figure takes his own life. George is so consumed by gaining approval from Rozanov that only his complete disappearance can prompt George to rediscover humanity, both his own and that of others. ‘N’ tells us that ‘Some of the dedicated George-watchers in the town are of the opinion that George has “found Jesus”. Of course this is a nonsense, most vociferously denied by Stella’.22 Stella, although a poorly developed character, is the most obvious example of ‘the saint’ archetype within the novel. In rejecting the view of Heusel that George represents the ‘carnivalesque’ Nicol posits that it is George that is central in understanding the real motive behind the narrative and that as he draws Rozanov down to a baser level of eros he corrupts Rozanov’s world as he forces him to engage with a chaotic town that Rozanov has provoked into frenzy. I would go further and say that both major characters are of equal status; although George consciously requires the presence of Rozanov and actively seeks him out the philosopher needs George to finish his great work: this is no literary work but his actual life. The confrontation with George, and its effects on Hattie and Tom, are what draws the novel, and Rozanov’s life, to an eventual uneasy conclusion. As the novel begins with an extended discussion of the Ennistone baths it is natural that Rozanov should find his fate decided in this mythic space. Although Rozanov takes up residence in his former home, and his act of deferred desiring is passed onto Tom in a scene of comedic but also alarming intensity, it is his renting of rooms at the baths that sets the tone

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for Murdoch’s envisioning of his internal discourse. Cheryl Bove in Understanding Iris Murdoch claims that the Ennistone waters serve as both a metaphor for healing – George’s brief moments of awareness of others, indeed the ‘other’ occur here – but also one of inferno. As we have seen throughout Murdoch favours the symbol of water as it deals with the nature of eros: both the higher and lower forms of love. In the previous chapter we noted that the rising of the bell from the lake heralded a positive development in the self-realization of Dora and the Ennistone waters provide a similar experience for Rozanov, albeit one that ends in his death: characters immersed in water often have sudden realization of their surroundings such as Toby’s discovery of the bell or Marian Taylor’s premonition of danger in The Unicorn. Carel Fisher’s suicide in The Time of the Angels, and the links of eastern origin between Carel, Rozanov and Murdoch’s enchanter figures are obvious, is a selfish act of escape (one which enables the other inhabitants to progress) whereas Rozanov’s death via immersion provides George with a route to realizing his own self-preoccupation. There is a clear analogy with Carel as we see Rozanov believing himself to be godlike as well as an association between pain and reality; most notably associated with George. George, of course, is the major cause of overt suffering. Father Bernard sees it thus: So it is that I have witnessed three murders, two by George and one by that philosopher . . . John Robert died because he saw at last, with horrified wide-open eyes, the futility of philosophy. Metaphysics and the human sciences are made impossible by the penetration of morality into the moment to moment conduct of ordinary life; the understanding of this fact is religion. This is what Rozanov distantly glimpsed when he was picking away at questions of good and evil and he knew that it made nonsense of all his sophisms.23 George, of course, initially believes that he has killed Rozanov and is victorious in their philosophical struggle, although this quickly leaves him, and his other-worldly experience on the common adversely affects his public persona. Conradi’s The Saint and the Artist is noticeably lacking in any detailed critique of The Philosopher’s Pupil and I believe this is mainly due to the above quotation. His otherwise excellent book, although his terminology of Murdoch as a moral realist is overplayed, only gives two pages of review to it. He decides it is not a successful romance as the characters are either awful or overly sentimental. The most interesting observations are the links with

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Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov24 with the novel’s primary focus concerned with morality and redemption. Perhaps he says little as he not only dislikes the book but also finds it overly replete with philosophical discussion. He tells us that: 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.25 Conradi would certainly disagree with my assertion that this is precisely what Murdoch achieves in her fiction, albeit directly rather than indirectly. I would hope that we would find some common ground regarding this ‘exhibiting of what is closest’: literature, in general (although some philosophy is literary, especially Nietzsche), is the medium in which a larger readership can, perhaps unconsciously, be led towards a deeper understanding of the self. These necessary changes concerning the exhibition of what is closest, from an insular view of ‘self’ towards a balanced Platonic view, are central to the novel. Indeed the mention of Murdoch’s own philosophical essay ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’ is an obvious hint at the nature of Rozanov. Murdoch’s promotion of phenomena is central: Phenomena such as ‘thoughts’ and ‘symbolic experiences’ must find their place too in any philosophical description of the mind. It is such happenings, heavily weighed as they so often are with a content which seems to go beyond consciousness, that give to the idea of ‘immediate experience’ that inexhaustible richness the neglect of which prompts both resentment and vain investigation.26 Although this is an early essay (1952) it can be seen in relation to The Philosopher’s Pupil as being connected to the numinous and the unseen as well as the unconscious. There are a myriad of ‘symbolic experiences’ throughout the novel – indeed throughout all her novels – and most enable a form of transcendence towards ‘the good’ for the character being affected. For example, the realization of Adam as ‘an other’ by George at the Ennistone baths or the effect of Tom’s arrival at the slipper house together with his fellow actors. As with all of Murdoch’s fiction some ‘experiences’ work better than others but when they do they enable her characters to engage with a form of Platonic vertical transcendence. Perhaps it is fitting that The Philosopher’s Pupil does not coalesce as well as some of Murdoch’s earlier fiction. With such a large and disparate group

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of characters it is obvious that only those at the centre of the narrative will be dealt with sufficiently to allow for any satisfactory conclusion and she recognizes the failings in this work. Barbara Stevens Heusel believes that the interplay between the classical and philosophical dialogue is central: Drawing on her training in the classics and her lifelong interest in Plato, Murdoch has revived narrative techniques that helped the Greeks and Romans portray the kind of full reality that she sets out to create in her fiction. In dramatising a world in which morality struggles against the powers of darkness, Murdoch juxtaposes her philosophy and arguments that test and overturn it. To free her discourse from the monological, she ‘grafts’ voices of the carnivalesque onto her own voice.27 This is certainly true and, as we shall see in the final chapter, the appropriation of classical and mythical texts, along with an expansion of her use of Shakespearian plotting, informs the development of The Green Knight. Indeed Murdoch’s development of her Platonic vision is returned to the ‘real space’ of London – the location she is most at home with – and it is through her development of London as ‘Murdochland’ that Murdoch’s philosophical fiction is best envisaged.

Chapter Six

A Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist: The Green Knight

‘In the background of many of these arguments lies a question about the relation of morality to religion, the difference between them, and the definition of religion. I have already suggested that my whole argument can be read as moral philosophy.’1 This section, taken from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) forms the basis of the argument for this final chapter. What Murdoch is promoting here, in her final philosophical work, is one which we have seen time and again throughout her fiction: the need to see the Platonic vision of the good as a transcendent ‘reality’ which we must all partake in if we are to eradicate a self-centred approach to life. As Murdoch shows us, we must engage in a constant process of ‘becoming’; our goal being the reduction of the ego. The Green Knight (1993), as we have seen earlier with Murdoch’s entire fictional oeuvre discussed in this book, is founded upon an argument between two opposing philosophies (one of which is almost always Platonic), the neo-Platonic developed through Peter Mir and the Nietzschean spectre of Luca Graffe. It is the relationship between these two which holds our attention through the narrative in much the same way that The Philosopher’s Pupil is overshadowed by the figures of George and Rozanov. Unlike the previous novel, The Green Knight opposes two power figures whose figurative and literal conflict is central to the development of the narrative. This is not to say, of course, that this is the totality of the drama which occurs. I use ‘drama’ here as the novel lends itself to a dramatic reading. Murdoch continues with her fascination with Shakespearian form as well as applying Greek mythology, Christian symbolism and Arthurian legend. Although the major philosophical influence surrounds Peter and Lucas, and to a lesser extent Bellamy James and Father Damien, it would be unwise to overlook the role of the other players as they all perform a specific function within the novel. Conradi believes that ‘Like Shakespeare’s romances too, The Green Knight resembles a dream and is often intensely theatrical.

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Many major scenes are played out in front of characters who act as an audience’.2 For the purposes of this chapter the characters that form the ‘audience’: Rosemary Adwarden, Louise Anderson, Kenneth Rathbone and others, are not mentioned as they hold little influence over the movement of the narrative; they have been assessed elsewhere.3 As we have seen in Murdoch’s early work the ‘crystallinity’ inherent in those ‘closed’ novels enables the philosophy to come to the fore: in The Green Knight something rather different is happening and a different approach to the ‘philosophical novel’ is needed. Conradi believes that ‘Although this is Murdoch’s most contrived and strongly shaped plot, it none the less contains her most realized and sympathetic characters’4 and it is difficult to disagree with this except to mention the stereotypical Murdochian creations that one finds at the periphery of the narrative. The plot reworks the MiddleEnglish poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with Mir often referred to as possessing green items of clothing and also being a member of the Green Party5 as well as carrying the weight of the Christ allegory. Lucas then echoes Gawain, in a rather perverse manner, and the infliction of a small wound by Peter enhances this symbolism. David J. Gordon has pointed out that once the quasi-philosophical argument has been dealt with, and Peter and Lucas have been removed, the realism of the novel can come to the fore: The most successful part of the book novelistically is the last third, after both magicians have left the scene and the awkward gap between literal and symbolic levels becomes less noticeable. Everyone tries to grapple with the notion of a benign force somewhere in the world, perhaps fled for the moment but almost able to neutralise their own obsessions and private sufferings . . . the last part of the novel is festive with expectations of coming marriages, somewhat like the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.6 In much the same way then that The Philosopher’s Pupil borrows themes from The Tempest, The Green Knight relies not only on echoes of Shakespearian comedy and romance but recurring mythology as well. This has been well covered in other texts, especially the essay by Sharon Wilson, ‘Enchantment, Transformation, Rebirth: Legend, Fairy Tale, Intertext, A Guide to The Green Knight’ which appears in Iris Murdoch’s Moral Imaginings (2010) but it is worth briefly mentioning the linkage between the re-appropriated mythology and the philosophical undertones. Wilson suggests that the mythic idea of questing, not only the quest of Gawain but also those of Perseus and Odysseus, along with intertexts concerning Leda and the Swan, re-enacted

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by Moy, Sibyls, Valkeries and Daphne and Apollo. These ancient Greek and Roman myths obviously spring from Murdoch’s remembrance of her undergraduate years in Oxford and it is no surprise that they are linked with Platonic symbolism. The biblical intertexts, most notably the story of Cain and Abel, are well developed in conjunction with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to lend a mythic tone to the narrative. In doing so, they also highlight the opposing philosophical ideals of Lucas and Peter. Elizabeth Dipple in her essay ‘The Green Knight and Other Vagaries of the Spirit; or, Tricks and Images for the Human Soul; or The Uses of Imaginative Literature’7 continued with the line of reasoning she used in her earlier work Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit in pronouncing that we must steer clear of allowing the theoretical to intrude on our reading of Murdoch fiction: It seems clear, at least to me, that two points are imperative: (1) It is essential not to clog the investigation with theory. An over-theorised approach stops the fluidity and multidirectional aspect of the novels at the same time as it calls attention to itself . . . (2) A fruitful reading should be aware of but significantly separated from heavy reliance on Murdoch’s recent philosophical work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. This generically different product has been broadly touted as the primary guide to the fiction, as it is to her interpretations of the moral and spiritual life . . . if misused it can also be seen as a sort of unfriendly takeover of the experience of reading, of thinking about fictional writing, of being in the old Lutheran sense one’s own priest. Naturally this is not my approach to the novel but it is worth commenting on Dipple’s pronouncement as it is still the orthodox view in Murdochian criticism. Barbara Stevens Heusel in Iris Murdoch’s Paradoxical Novels has commented that Dipple believes that ‘because Murdoch’s strategies detach the reader from determinate meaning, the novels force the reader to imagine multiple interpretations . . . Murdoch’s brand of realism . . . [is analogous] to her understanding of the search for the good’.8 It appears clear to me that although one may have a differing interpretation from another reader, no doubt based on the other’s knowledge of Murdochian philosophy to a certain extent, it is the case that the novel is linguistically fixed. Interpretations are equally valid but must be informed by some knowledge of Murdoch philosophy; in this case Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. It is necessary to have some understanding of the impact of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals upon the novel. Several critics have claimed that to read The Green Knight as a fictitious expression of the sprawling jumble of

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philosophy that is Metaphysics would be a disservice to both books and on this point I agree. However the two sections (perhaps it would be better to think of them as essays) inform the novel to a certain degree and are central to a perceptive envisioning of its philosophical impetus: these are ‘Schopenhauer’ and ‘Morality and Religion’ the former concerned with the impact of Schopenhauer upon Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and Murdoch’s analysis of his work, and the latter on the two areas that inform Metaphysics and the need for morality in a secular world founded upon a demythologized Christian base. Barbara Stevens Heusel questions Murdoch’s assertion that she is a Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist: Why does she favour certain patterns borrowed from Plato and Wittgenstein over other patterns? Like Murdoch, Plato and Wittgenstein are visually oriented and are, moreover, enamoured of spatial configurations. Some of the perceptual and cognitive patterns that help Wittgenstein investigate the connections between perception and cognition, such as gestalt, also give Murdoch the opportunity to dramatise the power of occasional moments of enlightenment that unveil reality, in addition to dramatising her characters as puppets manipulated by illusions.9 The central idea then is that Murdoch is interested in how language is appropriated to enable transcendence. The perception of others is central to both Wittgenstein and Plato and therefore must be inextricably linked to human experience and inner development. Murdoch’s views on Schopenhauer go some way to explain this. The philosophy of Schopenhauer seeks to form a coherent and unified interpretation of human experience and to understand the plurality of phenomena. As Murdoch tells us, he takes the earlier work of Kant as his first premise ‘He held that the dialogue between Plato and Kant underlies the whole of philosophy. (I am inclined to agree with this.)’10 Schopenhauer believed that the way we view the world must be from a human perspective and that the human mind is pre-programmed to see the world in certain ways. The only way to experience ‘the other’ is within a specified set of parameters: it must be situated within space and time, be subject to spatialtemporal relations and exemplify the relation of causality (important in understanding the relationship between signifier and signified). Naturally you cannot take from this vision that the way objects appear to us is how they really are as ‘things-in-themselves’. It is this distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-itself, the primary question of being, that is at the centre of the philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre which was discussed

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in previous chapters. Although Lucas is undeniably Nietzschean in form,11 Murdoch believes that ‘Schopenhauer inspired Nietzsche (who called him “the only serious moralist of our century”) and overwhelmed Wagner as well as touching Wittgenstein’.12 I would argue that it is the influence of Schopenhauer that is central to The Green Knight. In one sense he pervades the narrative as the distinction between what is said and what is shown, certainly regarding Peter Mir, but also Clement is clearly based on his primary thought on being. Peter’s connection with both the mythological ‘green knight’ of the medieval poem, as well as his embodiment of a ‘Christallegory’ suggest to those around two separate identities. He is either a malevolent force of disruption (for Lucas), or an emerging source of good that pre-empts change (for Clement and Moy): He [Mir] links interestingly with Hugo in Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, which like The Green Knight opposes an artist (Jake, Lucas) and a saint (Hugo, Mir). Both Mir and Hugo are non-English, and spiritual aliens. Each is hospitalised after a blow to the head . . . the ordinariness of both their trades is a token of their authenticity.13 When he is revealed, or rather diagnosed, as being an escaped patient of the mysterious (some critics have referred to him as demonic) psychiatrist Fonsett following his first encounter with Lucas (and Lucas leaves London for America with Aleph in tow) the narrative then develops in a stereotypical Murdochian fashion as David J. Gordon has argued. For the purposes of this book the primary source of interest in the novel is the development of Murdoch’s position concerning her enchanter figures; this focuses our attention on the first two-thirds of the novel before Lucas and Peter have departed. It is important to understand the relationship of Schopenhauer to Kant as it informs, along with Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche, the underpinning of the novel. For both Kant and Schopenhauer the empirical world and the world of phenomena are one and the same thing. Necessarily, the forms of the world are subject-dependent as we have discussed above. However, Schopenhauer’s development of Kant’s thought is central to seeing The Green Knight correctly: what is the connection between the world as it is in itself and the world as it appears to us. He accepted the Kantian view – and we have already discussed the form of ‘Kantian man’ earlier – that the former, the world as it is in itself, can never be directly known, but he wondered if a detailed analysis of the latter – the world as we see it on an everyday level – might give us some indication of what it must be. In this indirect way, Schopenhauer is trying to get at the nature of underlying

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reality much as Murdoch is trying to do with her fiction. This has important implications for Murdoch as a Wittgenstein neo-Platonist, as she wishes to see herself, as the ‘ordinary’ language that we use to posit ourselves within the world must be understood at aiming towards a form of reality. If it does not, then we are leading ourselves away from any form of ‘the good’ and denying ourselves transcendence. Schopenhauer’s argument that for one thing to be substantially different from another thing is only possible if we are able to see the object differently in terms of space and time. This is a rather difficult philosophical position to understand so it may be best if we see Schopenhauer’s idea of ‘the will’, not unlike Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, as being reliant on an understanding of spatial phenomena. If two things are identical in terms of time and space then they must be the same thing – so we can talk only about things existing in the world as we know it – therefore whatever is outside our world of understanding (for Schopenhauer this virtually meant outside the actual world) then we cannot discuss it as it is undifferentiated. This view is central to Wittgenstein’s famous pronouncement that ‘the world is all that is the case’ from his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus discussed in the first chapter; beyond the world lies, simply, silence. Murdoch does not hold this belief to be true, and neither does the later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations, as her Platonic vision of transcendence is at odds with Schopenhauer’s insistence that whatever is behind the world is undifferentiated and ‘one’: an unknowable thing. This is a fascinating view as, at this late stage in her career, Murdoch’s interest in Buddhism and eastern mystic thought is beginning to find voice in her work, and can be seen echoed in the selfless actions of Mir and the insistence by Moy of a ‘life force’ within all objects, animate or inanimate.14 Decades before Freud made his pronouncements on the psyche, discussed at length earlier, Schopenhauer argued that an individual’s inner life, and our motivation behind our actions and speech, remain, for a large part unknowable and unconsciously motivated. Murdoch would agree with his theory that our knowledge of ourselves from inside is false as it does not reflect reality as it really is. Lucas Graffe’s major failing is his insistence on relying on his own inner thoughts. In refusing to see his brother as anything more than an object of distraction, he fails to comprehend the nature of his own reality. In a discussion with Clement he gives voice to his inner demons: ‘But don’t tell him not to come? Were you sitting in the dark?’ ‘Yes, I have been scalded and bleached, light hurts my eyes, in the dark they glow. In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic

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forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon soon to be blotted out. This is a consoling thought. Meanwhile we are surrounded by strange invisible entities, possibly your angels.’15 Peter’s action in the park prevents harm coming to Clement but is not enough for Lucas to reassess himself. It is only when Lucas is confronted within his own home that the barriers, both internal and external (his house being breached) does he begin to reconsider his actions. Unlike the relationship between enchanter/philosopher (Rozanov) and demonic pupil (George) in The Philosopher’s Pupil Lucas and Peter are both figures of power and this provides the narrative, and Murdoch, with a different set of problems. Unlike the resolution of the previous novel The Green Knight is resolved by a carnivalesque restatement of the necessity of love but the unsettling disappearance of Lucas and Aleph to a new life in America unbalances the conclusion and leaves Louise and her daughters concerned for Aleph’s safety. The death of Rozanov provided a real basis for development whereas the elopement of Lucas leaves the ending of The Green Knight precariously unbalanced; Lucas can be seen as a re-working of George McCaffrey in a discussion between Clement and Bellamy: ‘You seem to want him as a saint.’ ‘In a way I do – I mean a sort of counter-saint – I mean he’s above, beyond – ’ ‘Beyond good and evil.’16 Before we move on to discussing Schopenhauer’s view of suffering and ‘the will’, a central part of the text that specifically concerns Bellamy James and Peter, it is useful to note that the mythology behind both the novel and its poetic intertext Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is specifically concerned with movement. We hear of Anax’s escape through London, Moy’s journey back from art school (and her attack by a swan) and the final journeys of Peter and Lucas as they leave the stage to name but three. For Schopenhauer the movements of the body are expressions of desire or a form of inner drive. He uses the word ‘will’ as a general descriptive term for what might more fruitfully be referred to as an inner ‘force’ or ‘energy’. Several of the characters arrange journeys during the novel – willed movement – but in Schopenhauer’s view, and indeed in the later thought of Wittgenstein, it is a mistake to refer to any movement, planned or otherwise, as an act of will which precedes and gives cause to a bodily movement. He would stipulate that it is the internal will which is part of the physical movement and cannot be explained away lightly. There is, he believes, an unconscious striving behind each act of movement, a striving for self-assertion: ultimately it is the will in itself. It is this thing-in-itself that,

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as for Heidegger after him, formed the central interest in discussing the nature of ultimate reality, or ‘being’. How is this ‘will’ to be found within The Green Knight? Murdoch believes this notion to be descended from what Plato pointed to as a lower form of Eros ‘Other debased descendants of Eros are the “Wills” of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the libido of Freud’17 all of which are contrary to comprehending ‘the other’ and analogous to earlier forms of debasement that we have noted in A Severed Head, The Time of the Angels and The Philosopher’s Pupil. Another interesting echo of Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ can be found in the actions of Moy. Moy is perhaps the most unsatisfactory character in the novel as she rarely moves beyond the two dimensional persona that Murdoch creates. Sefton and Aleph each have an outer life connected with a form of real vision but Moy is stranded with her unrequited love of Clement and concern for the inanimate. However, she is useful for relating Schopenhauer’s view of ultimate reality that he relates in On the Suffering of the World that deals with what he saw as a morally corrupt and wicked world. His first statement in this book promotes the idea that: If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of which the world is everywhere full, and which arises out of the need and distress pertaining essentially to life, should be purposeless and purely accidental. Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurrence; but misfortune in general is the rule.18 Moy, and to some extent Peter (perhaps we could also include Bellamy), is attuned to this idea and each suffers in the world accordingly. Peter suffers a loss of freedom and memory, Bellamy suffers a loss of a spiritual director in the form of Father Damien and Moy loses her childhood innocence as the family, and wider circle of friends, is disbanded at the end of the novel. Moy is sensitive to this, Murdoch uses the archaic ‘fey’, and with some sadness realizes that this dispersal must come to pass; this is mirrored in the return of her stone to its original position. Where does this fit in with Schopenhauer’s concern for the metaphysical? Murdoch believes that: Much of his [Schopenhauer’s] moral philosophy refers itself to salient features of his metaphysic (the Will objectified as egoism for instance), but can be discussed without clarification (if such were possible) of the questions raised above . . . The will to live is something fundamental.19

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The ‘questions raised above’ concern the relation of the intellect to will and the multitude of individual human wills in regard to a fundamental ‘will’, one that can be applied universally. Murdoch certainly agrees with him that there is a universal energy, or will, that causes us to fight for existence but is unconvinced by moral philosophy and insists that we must remain true to a Platonic vision. And why does Schopenhauer connect this refuge [music] from the ego especially with aesthetic experience? In these two respects also he differs from Plato, who envisages a definite path out of the cave, seen in terms of intellectual and moral betterment. Schopenhauer keeps moral values out of the ordinary world which is ruled by the Will. A strict dualism must be fundamental. We are captives, subject to determinism . . . Schopenhauer’s Will is, with Nietzsche’s and that of the later Heidegger, one of the nastiest.20 So in order to leave our inner cave of self-observation and emerge into an external world of real moral vision we cannot look to Schopenhauer. As he prevents moral values from impinging on reality and comes perilously close to Nietzsche’s vision that each great man is a law unto himself, ‘Truthtelling, says Schopenhauer, may be important but it is not fundamental. All sorts of reasonable lying is in order’.21 The central point of this discussion is to relate this vision of the will to the central demonic character of The Green Knight, the academic Lucas Graffe. It is interesting that Murdoch makes him a historian as he is placed in line with other academic enchanters of her fiction including Mischa Fox, Carel Fisher and John Robert Rozanov; all of whom we have already discussed. It is arguable that all of them are really re-workings of each other, with the possible dismissal of Rozanov from this list as he has more to commend him, and that the central preoccupation of Murdoch’s entire fictional oeuvre is to dismiss the ideals that these men hold dear.22 Peter Mir is also connected with these Eastern power figures although his name is obviously connected with Christianity and the Russian for ‘world’ and ‘peace’. Is Lucas, then, a representation of an anti-Christ? It is useful to see this in context of the novel: On several occasions Bellamy describes Lucas as ‘anti-Christ’ but he nevertheless loves him. We have seen in earlier novels, particularly in The Time of the Angels, how the evil can attract and inspire love . . . we feel, nevertheless, that the love accorded to Lucas is not sufficient to bring about his salvation; thus the resolution of the plot seems difficult to understand.23

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Bellamy has taken from his correspondence with Father Damien that all humans are worthy of love if we wish to see them transformed; Bellamy obviously hopes that his love for Lucas will provide Lucas with a form of realization of ‘an other’ that will provoke a form of transcendence. As we come to learn, Lucas’ salvation is not completed within the confines of the novel. His escape to America, and his seduction of Aleph, only removes him from ‘Murdochland’, it does not pre-empt the salvation that Bellamy finds when he is reunited with Anax nor does it mirror the disappearance and death of Peter whose life has been mythically sacrificed for Clement. We have already seen that Murdoch links the will of Schopenhauer with the ‘will to power’ of Nietzsche and it is this form of inner power (obstinacy may be a better word) that Lucas retains throughout the novel: he is a law unto himself, and this arrogance prevents him from achieving full knowledge of ‘the other’. It is arguable that his relationship with Aleph provides this, and it seems from her letters to her mother that she is not forced or coerced into a relationship with him, but there is little sign of it being a relationship of equals; Aleph’s future is being conceived by Lucas, not imagined by her. As Lucas tells her sister Sefton, who was once a pupil of Lucas earlier in the novel: The study of history is menaced by fragmentation, a distribution of historical thinking among other disciplines, as we see happening in the case of philosophy. Such fragmentation opens a space for false prophets, old and new. Not only shades of Hegel and Marx and Heidegger, but also those, you know whom I mean, who would degrade history into what they call fabulation.24 This section of text could have been spoken by any of Murdoch’s enchanter figures whom we have already discussed. The fragmentary position that he refers to goes against his vision of history as a seamless process of conflict and resolution that is under threat from various theoretical approaches who wish to view history as a variety of ‘truths’. For Lucas there is only one definitive truth, what he refers to as ‘old values’, and the increased fabulation (perhaps we should read this as postmodernism) threatens his value system. If we are to relate this to Lucas’s inner life it is useful to suggest that his immovable Nietzschean vision of himself is threatened by Peter’s reappearance and disruption. Lucas cannot grasp a Platonic vision as his ego prevents him from admitting to himself that he is not ‘a man alone’, rather a man who exists within a social network that rightly places ‘the good’ and being ‘good for nothing’ at its centre.

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If we are to agree that Murdoch is, as she would claim at this point in her life, a Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist we must understand the relationship of language to her outlook. At first glance this philosophical label seems oddly opposed but if we turn to the influence of Schopenhauer upon Wittgenstein we shall realize the importance of this relationship. Wittgenstein’s debt to Schopenhauer is clear if we take even a cursory look at his earliest writings that formed the central thesis of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein takes from his predecessor the idea of a correlation between subject and object, although a rather different view than that which Descartes takes: the distinction here is between the ‘I’ as epistemological subject and the world that ‘I’ relates to. Naturally I am, consciously, inside this ‘I’ and it therefore has a boundary with the world; it is not an object within it but a singular physical thing that I inhabit. I can, naturally, think of myself – perhaps during daydreaming – and turn myself into an object in the world but there must remain an ‘I’ that is trying to think itself into this position. This Wittgenstein calls the ‘I –subject’. Although this is not unique to Schopenhauer it is where Wittgenstein takes his cue from and for Murdoch this is central to seeing a form of transcendence. As Wittgenstein’s work progresses one can see that he becomes less enamoured with Schopenhauer and less certain of any form of systematic philosophy. Murdoch, however, retains the Wittgensteinian concept of ‘I’ but places it within a Platonic framework that enables the self to develop and transcend itself. The other is both necessary and knowable through transcendence; a transcendence that never fully retires as we never fully achieve a complete knowledge of ‘the other’. Murdoch’s promotion of a demythologized Christianity finds itself embedded in the character of Peter Mir, as it is Peter who exhibits the central ethical codes which inform the basis of the Christian belief. By taking on Lucas in order to both free Clement from his influence and provide Lucas with a hoped-for epiphany, Peter moves towards the good. Lucas mistakes Peter’s intention as seeking literal justice in the form of ‘an eye for an eye’ – very much in the style of the Old Testament; what we eventually see is Peter’s desire to set Lucas and Clement free from the influence of the other and provide a reawakening of ‘the other’ within Lucas. Lucas rejects any form of link between Peter and himself: ‘You are Jewish. You look Jewish. You think Jewish. I know you are Jewish. Heine said that being a Greek is a young man’s game, one ages into becoming a Jew. I believe you are undergoing this metamorphosis.’ ‘You wish to establish a bond between us. I reject this bond. Let us not become sentimental’.25

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In doing so, Lucas places a barrier between himself and Peter, a barrier that prevents any hope for Lucas’ transcendence and a real seeing of the ‘other’. In her essay ‘Morality and Religion’ Murdoch states that ‘we have to live a single moral existence and also retain the separate force of various kinds of moral vision’ and that ‘this maybe a choice between two paths in life, or it may be some everyday matter demanding an instant response’26 and it is the ability of the self to live, or attempt to live, a single moral existence that resounds within The Green Knight. At the beginning of this chapter Murdoch tells us that in the background to many of the arguments lies a question concerning the relationship of morality to religion and it is this relationship, built upon a founding metaphysical principle of Platonism that provides the most important aspect of this novel.

Conclusion

The fundamental question that Murdoch strives to answer in her fiction is ‘How can we make ourselves better?’1 This is, necessarily, a question of moral philosophy. Murdoch’s position as a moral philosopher of outstanding ability in the twentieth century is beyond doubt, and her fictional oeuvre is of central importance in any canon of British Literature of the twentieth century. How these relate to one another is, however, a different question entirely. This book has developed the thesis that at the very heart of her fiction is a desire to provide her readership with a sense of transcendence (as the best art does) and to examine the most illuminating approach to obtaining inner moral development; necessarily there is a variation in her fiction and some novels work better than others. This is to be expected. We should not, however, conclude that Murdoch’s narratives provide mere escapism; they are what Norman Vance terms ‘serious fun’,2 that is they challenge us to consider our own responses and act accordingly. The questions raised by Murdoch extend beyond the everyday into reflective moral questioning that, as Murdoch would point out, separates the great novelists – Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky – from those who deal in superficial ‘journalistic’ or ‘crystalline’ narratives. We must not allow ourselves, however tempting, to read Murdoch’s life through her work – and naturally vice versa – as this leads to the cult of personality and detracts from the central ideas of her texts. The Barthian notion of ‘the death of the author’ is still held in some esteem and rightly so, if we intend to be attentive to the text. This book has deliberately kept away from this side of the debate, as we need to envisage ‘unselfing’ in all its forms, but there exist several useful texts for this purpose.3 Since her death ten years ago Murdoch seems to have been returned to her texts. Where we once found her entirely absent she is now present (perhaps omnipresent) within each as a guiding moral force. Indeed one need only look to The Philosopher’s Pupil to find her guiding N’s town (M’s town) towards its natural conclusion. The mentioning of her youthful relationships in the early

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chapters serves to heighten the awareness of the reader to envisage Murdoch’s fictional development: Canetti, Bayley, Sartre and Queneau have had a direct impact upon the texts themselves, the stuff of life naturally enters in some form and the guiding figures must be accounted for. Marie Altorf believes that: To read the novels with the philosophy in mind does not necessarily disagree with Murdoch’s own perception of the relationship between her philosophy and her novels. The difficulty starts when there is no room left for discrepancy, where the novels are read as straight-forward explanation of the philosophical texts.4 This is not what is argued here. Of course we must, as serious readers, have a working knowledge of her philosophical writings and see their influence on Murdoch’s fiction but to read The Nice and the Good (1968) as a straightforward reworking of The Sovereignty of Good (1970), for instance, is plainly wrong. The theoretical essay can be found to influence the fiction, as we have seen, but Murdoch is much more than this; a multi-faceted author whose devotion to her art is paramount. If we could read Murdoch as re-imagining her own essays in a restrictive fashion it would certainly make her a less interesting subject for study. She wishes to ‘make us better’ by the dichotomy of the saint and the artist, the enchanter and the pragmatist, and the pupil and the philosopher: each are, at their base, the relationship of two opposing moral positions. What she gives us is of far greater depth and importance than a re-visitation of theory – she develops Heideggerian, Sartrean and Freudian (to name but three) philosophy to enlarge her literary vision and it is this vision that, although ultimately Platonic, seeks to unself, to demystify and to re-imagine the relationship of the self to the other. The expression of the self to the other and the problems that arise is of paramount importance to Murdoch, which may be a reason why she has been accused, in her later fiction, of repetition. Towards the end of her life Rosemary Harthill asked her what kept her writing: Harthill:

Is it because you want Christian ideas to work without God, and they just don’t? Murdoch: No, I don’t think so. I write because I like it, this is my art form and I want to write better, and I want to create works of art. It’s very dangerous to write as a pedagogue. I think good

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Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist novelists, for instance Sartre, are damaged by a desire to put across a philosophical creed. You have to follow your instinct as an artist, I think, and not try to be a teacher in art.5

What is most surprising is that she considers, in 1989, Sartre to be a good novelist whereas she had disowned him in the late 1950s; even more so if we recall that Murdoch was at this point engaging with Derrida and attempting to dismiss his form of deconstructionist philosophy which she believed derived from older French structuralism. Maria Antonaccio’s essay in her co-edited volume Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness concludes that Murdoch as both novelist and philosopher uses both meditative and mediated strategies but in rather different forms: in order to deal with narrative form and contingency Murdoch must envisage a form of metaphysics. If this makes her a philosophical novelist is, of course, debatable. Conradi’s insistence on Murdoch as ‘moral psychologist’ cleverly deals both with Murdoch’s own distaste for totalizing theories of her fiction and the true nature of art and binary opposites present within her narratives. The real distinction, Conradi would have us believe, is that a philosophical reading is at odds with any artistic ‘value’ reading and this debases the novels to a theoretical approach that is too often lacking in spirit. One thing is clear, Iris Murdoch was a contrary writer, and the winding route that she takes in using various influences on her fiction makes criticism of her work rewarding; however, we must always be attuned to the poly-vocal philosophical voices, both her own and her theoretical predecessors, which pervade her fiction.

Notes

Introduction 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

8 9

10 11

12

13

14 15 16 17 18

19

Nick Turner, ‘Saint Iris: Murdoch’s Place in the Modern Canon’ in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 115. Graham Martin, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Symbolist Novel’, The British Journal of Aesthetics 1965; 5: 297. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1953), 8. Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: Harper Collins, 2001) mentions that Under the Net was the third or fourth novel that Murdoch wrote, but the first that she published. The others no longer survive, or if they do they are in the hands of John Bayley. Peter Wolfe, The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and her Novels (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 4. Alasdair MacIntyre, review of Elizabeth Dipple’s Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit in The London Review of Books, vol. 4, no. 10, 15–16. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 20. Peter Wolfe, The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and her Novels, 8. Barbara Stevens Heusel, Iris Murdoch’s Paradoxical Novels: Thirty Years of Critical Reception (New York: Camden House, 2001), 33. Peter Wolfe, The Disciplined Heart, 6. Guy Backus, Iris Murdoch: The Novelist as Philosopher, The Philosopher as Novelist (Berne: Peter Lang, 1986), 102. This is certainly an area which needs more development but the constrictions of space prevent me from doing so. Reassessing all of Murdoch’s novels in this detail would be a mammoth task. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (London: Harper Collins, 1986), xiv. A term first coined by Murdoch at the Caen lecture of 1978 in ‘Recontres avec Iris Murdoch’, ed. Jean-Louis Chevalier (Caen: Centre de Recherches de Littérature et Linguistique des Pays de Langue Anglaise, 1978). Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, xi. Barbara Heusel, Iris Murdoch, 53. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, 86. Guy Backus, Iris Murdoch: The Novelist as Philosopher, The Philosopher as Novelist, 91. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 187. Frank Kermode Interview from ‘The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists’ in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with

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20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28

29 30 31

32 33

34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

47

48 49

Notes

Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 12. Rubin Rabinovitz, Iris Murdoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 3. Ibid. 45. Anonymous interview in The Times, 13 February 1964. Rubin Rabinovitz, Iris Murdoch, 46. Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’ in Iris Murdoch, ed. Harold Bloom (London: Chelsea House, 1986). Ibid. 13. Ibid. 13. Lorna Sage, ‘The Pursuit of Imperfection: Henry and Cato’ in Iris Murdoch, ed. Harold Bloom (London: Chelsea House, 1986), 112. Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’ in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 291. Antonia S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), vi. Peter J. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 28. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (University of Chicago: University Press, 1982), 43. Ibid. I am thinking here of Tammy Grimshaw, Sexuality, Gender and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005); Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: University Press, 2000); and Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). There are no copies currently available for sale online. John Fletcher and Cheryl Bove, Iris Murdoch: A Descriptive Primary and Annotated Secondary Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1994), 38. Ibid. 42. Barbara Heusel, Iris Murdoch’s Paradoxical Novels, 53. Ibid. 52. Guy Backus, Iris Murdoch, 13. Ibid. A discussion of the ‘meta-Murdoch’ can be found in the third chapter. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 165. Ibid. 12. Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human (Bucknell University, US, 2000); Stephen Mulhall, ‘All the World must be “Religious”: Iris Murdoch’s Ontological Arguments’ in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) (Oxford University) and Justin Broackes Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming) (Brown University, US). Caen (1978) ‘Recontres avec Iris Murdoch’, ed. Jean-Louis Chevalier (Caen: Centre de Recherches de Littérature et Linguistique des Pays de Langue Anglaise). Gillian Dooley, ed. From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 47. Ibid. 85–6.

Notes 50 51

52

53

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Ibid. 38. Nick Turner, ‘Saint Iris? Murdoch’s place in the modern canon’ in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 115. Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Barbara Heusel, Thirty Years of Critical Reception, 168.

Chapter One 1 2 3 4 5

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Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 64–5. Interview with Murdoch in The Times, 13 February 1964. Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 46. Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, ix. Alfred J. Ayer, ‘Novelist-Philosophers V, Jean Paul Sartre’, Horizon 67–8 (1945), 12–26, 101–10. Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: SPCK, 1997), 68. Iris Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”’ (1969), in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 358. Alfred J. Ayer, Philosophers in the Twentieth Century (London: Unwin, 1982), 231. Sonia Brownell, ‘Some Recent French Books’, Horizon XIII, no. 73 (January, 1946), 68. Ibid. 69. Could it be a testament to this lack of knowledge that no one corrected her spelling mistake? Alfred J. Ayer, ‘Novelist-Philosophers V, Jean Paul Sartre’, Horizon, 67–8 (1945), 12. Ibid. Cyril Connolly, ‘Comment’, Horizon XI, 65 (May 1945), 302. Raymond Mortimer, ‘Books in General’, The New Statesman, 30 (24 November 1945), 355. Ibid. 25. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 27. Iris Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ in Existentialists and Mystics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 61. Ibid. Iris Murdoch, ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’ (originally published in 1950) in Existentialists and Mystics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 105. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus. Quoted from Iris Murdoch, ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’ (originally published in 1950) in Existentialists and Mystics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 105. Zohreh Tawakuli Sullivan, ‘The Demonic: The Flight from the Enchanter’ in Iris Murdoch, ed. Harold Bloom (London: Chelsea House, 1986), 72. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Bowes, 1953), 54. Stuart Hampshire, Freedom of the Individual (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965). From the Murdoch Archive, Kingston University, London. Note on the inside of the front cover.

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Iris Murdoch, ‘The Existentialist Political Myth’ (1952) in Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 64. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 54. Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 253. Brian Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997), 374. Stuart Hampshire, ‘Fallacies in Moral Philosophy’, Mind, 1949. Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 290. Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 363–4. Iris Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 60. This argument will constitute a large part of the fourth chapter. Iris Murdoch (in interview with Brian Magee), Existentialists and Mystics, 17. A disciple of Wittgenstein. Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), 157. Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 372. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as A Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 23. George Edward Moore, Principia Ethical (Fourth Impression) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948). Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 25. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism in Mill’s Utilitarianism: Text and Criticism, eds James M. Smith and Ernest Sosa (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1971). Iris Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 59. Maria Antonaccio provides a greater philosophical discourse for Moore’s relationship with ethics in Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Gabriele Griffin, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993). Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1953). This excerpt taken from the introduction to the 1987 Vintage edition, 38. Deborah Johnson, Iris Murdoch (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987) investigates this claim with regard to Murdoch and sexual difference. Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now: A Student’s Guide to Contemporary Fiction (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 57. Christopher Bigsby, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch’ in The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition: Interviews with English and American Novelists, eds Christopher Bigsby and Heide Ziegler (London: Junction Books, 1982). Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 287. Gabrielle Griffin, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993), 24. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 75. Ibid. Ibid. Peter J Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 33. Harold Hobson interviewing Iris Murdoch, The Sunday Times, 11 March 1962.

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Caen (1978) ‘Recontres avec Iris Murdoch’, ed. Jean-Louis Chevalier (Caen: Centre de Recherches de Littérature et Linguistique des Pays de Langue Anglaise, 1978). Samuel Beckett Murphy (London: Calder, 1969), 12. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 291–3. Ibid. 292. Iris Murdoch, Her notebook concerning Sartre’s lecture in Brussels, 24.10.45. From the Murdoch Archive. Kingston University, London. The Times Literary Supplement, 9 July 1954, 437. John Bayley, The Iris Trilogy (London: Abacus, 2003), 56. From Iris Murdoch’s Journal (February 1953) in Peter Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Life, 354. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 50. Iris Murdoch, The Existentialist Political Myth, first published in Socratic Digest, 5, 1952. Quoted from Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 136. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 137. Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human, 73. Times Literary Supplement – ‘Philosophical Life in France’, 26 March 1954, XVIII. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 38. Iris Murdoch, ‘The Existentialist Political Myth’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 138. Ibid. 136. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 50. Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 24. Canetti and Queneau being a dominant force and Bayley playing a more supporting role. Andrew Wilson, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003), 86–7. Chris Hastings, John Bayley defends Iris Murdoch – The Daily Telegraph, 29 May 2005, 12. This is in response to a new Canetti autobiography published in the Summer of 2005. Ibid. Quoted by Conradi from a journal of 1946. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 231. Ibid. 234. Indeed John Bayley believes that ‘Iris went on being inspired by him in almost everything she wrote’. Chris Hastings, John Bayley defends Iris Murdoch – The Daily Telegraph, 29 May 2005. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 35. Iris Murdoch, Under the Net, 24. Ibid. 279. Frank Baldanza, Iris Murdoch (New York: Twayne, 1974), 30. Sartre states as much in Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge, 2003), 107. William Van O’Connor, ‘Iris Murdoch: The Formal and the Contingent’, Critique, III (Winter–Spring, 1960), 34. Antonia S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 13.

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Iris Murdoch, ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 243. Ibid. 43. Iris Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 75. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (University of Chicago: University Press, 1982), 54. For an excellent treatment of Murdoch’s thought here see Louis L. Martz’s essay in Harold Bloom’s Iris Murdoch (London: Chelsea House, 1986), 39; and also Elizabeth Dipple’s Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit, 135. Iris Murdoch, Under the Net, 67. Ibid. 70. This appears in the reprinted (Book Club) edition of 1955. Louis L. Martz, essay in Iris Murdoch, ed. Harold Bloom (London: Chelsea House, 1986), 48. K. O’Sullivan, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Image of Liberal Man’, The Yale Literary Magazine, 131 (December 1962), 27–36. Peter Wolfe, The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and her Novels (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 68. Frank Baldanza, Iris Murdoch, 46. The Times Literary Supplement, Friday 9 July 1954. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 388. Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (London: Chatto and Windus, 1956), 269. Ibid. 270. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit, 7. Peter Wolfe, The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and her Novels, 87. Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter, 315. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism. Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman, (Seattle: Meridian Publishing Company, 1989). Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 523. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 30. Ibid. 69. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (London: Methuen, 1977). Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 59.

Chapter Two 1

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Iris Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”’, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 337. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 62. Ibid. Murdoch’s use of and interest in Freud is well documented within Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and The Sovereignty of Good. Iris Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”’. Existentialists and Mystics, 337. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 94. Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’. Existentialists and Mystics, 292. Iris Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”’. Existentialists and Mystics, 338.

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Ibid. Iris Murdoch, ‘The Darkness of Practical Reason’, Existentialists and Mystics, 197. Ibid. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 59. D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (Dover: Dover Publications, 2006), 134. Peter Wolfe, The Disciplined Heart, 139. Antonia Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 118; and Elizabeth Dipple, Work for the Spirit, 76. Antonia Byatt, Degrees of Freedom, 118. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’. Art and Literature, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 225–76. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 55. See for example the retelling of the story of Gyges and Candaules (207–8) which mirrors the situation Palmer, Martin and Honor find themselves in when Martin discovers their incest. This direct reference from ‘Medusa’s Head’, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 18 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974), 273–6. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Ltd, 2007), 10. Ibid. 34. Iris Murdoch and John Priestley, A Severed Head: A Play in Three Acts (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964). Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, 53. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 79. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 49. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 112. Ibid. 119. Ibid. 120. Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, The Horror of Incest in The Origins of Religion, vol. 13 (London: Penguin, 1985), 70. Iris Murdoch and John Priestley, A Severed Head: A Play in Three Acts (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), 67. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachley (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1989). Iris Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”’, 341. All bracketed text is Murdoch’s own. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachley, 61. Iris Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”’, 340. Ibid. 342. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head, 208. Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 36. Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, Existentialists and Mystics, 376. Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 24. Iris Murdoch in conversation with William Rose, 1968.

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Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit, 148. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 54. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 67. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 224. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head, 6. Ibid. 21. Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 134. Iris Murdoch in conversation with John Haffenden, April 1983.

Chapter Three 1

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Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 21. Iris in informal conversation with W. K. Rose in 1968. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 187. Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 58. Iris Murdoch, The Time of the Angels, 184. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 78–9. Mary Warnock, Women Philosophers (London: Dent/Everyman, 1996), 598. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 509. Conradi briefly discusses this in Iris Murdoch: A Life, 586. Iris Murdoch, The Time of the Angels, 150. Ibid. She states on pages 221–2 of the Heidegger Manuscript: ‘I am not a scholar, and I have of course no theory of my own about the obscure matters recently discussed . . . we should try to think about consciousness – philosophically and without falling into either psychology or phenomenology’ – which she herself is prone to in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 586. She had decided to discard this work in November 1993. Iris Murdoch. From her personal journal 20 April 1987. From Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life. The proofs of her attempts are now kept at Kingston University in the Murdoch archive. Murdoch’s manuscript is not likely to be published in full in the near future due to its alleged unsuitability (it is a collection of thoughts and ideas rather than a fully-formed text). It can be viewed at Kingston University library and is around 300 pages in length, the scope being Murdoch’s conflict with Heideggerean philosophy and her views on the transcendent nature of self. Peter Conradi confirmed to me in a private communication of 2005 that only a small section of the manuscript is soon to be made publicly available: The introduction to HEIDEGGER is now to be published in an OUP book edited by Justin Broackes, in – I think – 2006 [it may finally be published in 2010]. He goes on to say that an introduction [in Broackes’s work] should explain why we want to publish this – and only this. The reason behind only publishing a small amount of the manuscript is made clear in

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an email between Stanley Rosen and Conradi from 200: ‘I have read the excerpt from Iris’s manuscript . . . even though you [Conradi] have apparently decided not to publish, I feel it is a great obligation to formulate my opinion as carefully as possible [as Murdoch wished to dedicate a published version to Rosen]. On balance I think that you are right in your assessment’, Conradi’s assessment being that to publish the manuscript in full would be detrimental to Murdoch’s legacy insofar as it would be of inferior quality to the work published in her lifetime which both men feel was of a far greater quality than her unpublished work. To date (November 2009) Broackes’s monograph, to be titled Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, has not yet been published although it is doubtful that this is due to discussions concerning the amount of material used from the Heidegger Manuscript. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 356. Iris Murdoch, Heidegger Manuscript, 221–2. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch, 75. Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, 209. Originally from an interview with Jonathan Miller, 3 April 1988. Iris Murdoch, Heidegger Manuscript, 92. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 293. Iris Murdoch, Heidegger Manuscript, 7. Ibid. 6–7. Ibid. 10. The notion of Gerede is important here as Heidegger stresses the markedness between it and ‘correct’ moral orientation. Murdoch suggests that Gerede is useful insomuch as it relates the individual to the subject. Ibid. 21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 265. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 20. Ibid. 23. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 76. Ibid. 96. Garth Wood, ‘The “Final” Death of God’, The Ottawa Citizen, 3 March 1999, 15. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 509. Ibid. 150. Ibid. 152. Ibid. 157. Ibid. 25–6. Ibid. 221. Ibid. 134. Iris Murdoch, Heidegger Manuscript, 20. Murdoch also acknowledges the influence of Meister Eckhart on Heidegger in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Iris Murdoch, Heidegger Manuscript, 13. A certain echo of Milton’s Paradise Lost – No light therein rather darkness visible. Iris Murdoch, The Time of the Angels, 226–7. Iris Murdoch, Heidegger Manuscript, 13. I am thinking here of the development of Hegelian ideas and Heidegger. This should not be inferred to mean the totality of German philosophy, especially Kant. Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 54.

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Louis L. Martz in Iris Murdoch, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 52. The ‘allusions to Heidegger’ he refers to are caught up in Murdoch’s arguments for a Platonic vision of the self. Alasdair MacIntyre, review of Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit by Elizabeth Dipple, London Review of Books, 3–16 June 1982, 15. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life. For her return to Plato one need only read her following novels The Nice and the Good (1968) and Bruno’s Dream (1969). Although this may have been connected with her dislike of linguistic philosophy and Alfred Ayer in particular who espoused Aristotle. Iris Murdoch, The Time of the Angels, 116. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 168. Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 58. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 361–2.

Chapter Four 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

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Frank Baldanza, Iris Murdoch (New York: Twayne, 1974). Antonia S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 79. Ibid. Peter Wolfe, The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and her Novels, 113. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 146. Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’ in Existentialists and Mystics, 293. Ibid. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 507. Ibid. 10. Plato, trans. G. M. A. Grube, The Republic (London: Penguin, 1975), 515c–d, 748. Ibid. 516b, 479. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 183. Ibid. 183. Alasdair MacIntyre, Review of Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit by Elizabeth Dipple in The London Review of Books, vol. 4, no. 10, 15–16. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 147. Iris Murdoch, The Bell (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), 179. Ibid. 267. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2005), 43. First published 1888. Ibid. 45. Iris Murdoch, The Bell, 300. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 21. Stephen Wall, ‘The Bell within The Bell’, Essays in Criticism, 13 (July 1963), 270. Iris Murdoch, The Bell, 221. All of the other suggestions mentioned by Wall are valid but, much as Paul Greenfield exists only to highlight Dora’s background and moral development, the other interpretations serve to highlight the character traits of those who believe in the other suggestions.

Notes 26 27

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Deborah Johnson, Iris Murdoch (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 85. For a detailed account of the social history of Britain in the 1950s see Asa Briggs, A Social History of England (London: Penguin, 1999). The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, generally known as the Wolfenden report, ultimately recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should be decriminalized. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 77–8. Tammy Grimshaw, Sexuality, Gender and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005), 31. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 290. It is beyond the scope of this work to comment at great length on gender and sexuality but these are explored in Grimshaw’s excellent Sexuality, Gender and Power. Iris Murdoch papers, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. A Fairly Honourable Defeat, book 7, fol. 72v. Referenced from Tammy Grimshaw, Sexuality, Gender and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 423. Ibid. 424. Jeffrey Meyers, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’, Denver Quarterly 26, no. 1, 1991: 109. Review of The Bell in The Times Literary Supplement, 7 November 1958. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, 65. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit, 266. Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 121. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 64. Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: SPCK, 1997), 72–3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. David Pears (London: Routledge, 1961). The seventh major proposition. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 364. Ibid. 368. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 452. Murdoch is citing Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element in Religion (New York Crossroad Publishing, 1999), vol. 2. First published 1908. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 341. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 45. Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human, 146. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts, 66. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 30. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 138. I must acknowledge the importance of Antonaccio’s work in pointing me towards Taylor. Her monograph deals with these issues in a greater philosophical depth. Ibid.

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I am thinking specifically here of her discussion of Fact and Value in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and also of Metaphysics and Ethics in Existentialists and Mystics. Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 211. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, 137. St. Augustine, Confessions (London: Penguin, 1998). Ibid. 138. John Barrows, ‘Living Writers – 7: Iris Murdoch’, John O’London’s, 4 (4 May 1961), 498. Iris Murdoch, The Bell, 131–2. Ibid. 201–4. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, 148. Ibid. 148–9. Iris Murdoch, The Bell, 81. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 354. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 40. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 40. Deborah Johnson, Iris Murdoch (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 77. Ibid. 79. Elaine Showalter, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, Critical Enquiry, 8 (1981), 179–206. Deborah Johnson, Iris Murdoch, 86. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 288. Ibid. 290. It is interesting here to call to mind Foucault’s idea of society as ostracizing of the insane by the sane and forming a workable political system around the sane; everything that is ‘other’ must be insane. A Foucaultdian reading of The Bell would surely decipher the separateness of the abbey, the community and the wider world and would have much to say on discourse analysis in relation to Murdoch’s philosophy. Jacques Souvage, ‘Symbol as Narrative Device: An Interpretation of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell’, English Studies, 43 (April 1962), 81.

Chapter Five 1

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We have already seen the ‘straight’ philosophical development of this in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. A. N. Wilson’s introduction to The Philosopher’s Pupil (London: Vintage, 2000), xi–xii. Iris Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil, 83. Ennistone appears to be an amalgam of various Spa towns. It owes much to Bath, for the imagery of the baths themselves, Tunbridge Wells for the stereotypical conservative views of the populace and also to Cheltenham for the landscape. Ennistone’s placement near London seems to reference Tunbridge Wells; it is very much ‘Murdochland’.

Notes 5

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Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 162. Ibid. 165. See the introduction and first chapter for a detailed discussion of this. Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, although Murdoch would only claim to emulate and never to match their artistic achievement. A large number of critics, especially those reviewing Murdoch’s later novels, complained of her recycling plots and merely transporting the same group of characters from novel to novel and the recurrence of narrative themes. There is certainly some truth in this. John Haffenden talks to Iris Murdoch, from Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 124–5. It has been noted by other critics that ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’ is an essay by Murdoch from 1952 – a deliberate choice of self-mocking knowingness. Iris Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983), 132–3. Ibid. 275. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 349. Ibid. Tammy Grimshaw, Sexuality, Gender and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005), 61. Murdoch mentions the relationship of ‘N’ with Stella in the interview with Haffenden. Iris Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil, 558. Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 152. Ibid. 163. Neo-Platonism is discussed further in the final chapter. Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 163. Iris Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983), 557. Ibid. 553. Unsurprising as Conradi is an authority on Dostoyevsky. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 60. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 58. Barbara Steven Heusel, Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s Novels of the 1970s and 1980s, 119–120. Heusel flags up the use of ‘grafts’ – a term borrowed from Julia Kristeva.

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Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 481. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 361.

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23 24 25 26

Notes

For a more comprehensive re-telling of the narrative see Hilda Spear’s Iris Murdoch or David J. Gordon’s Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing. Peter Conradi, The Saint and The Artist, 361. Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight, 194. David J. Gordon, Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing, 182. From Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, eds Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). Dipple admits this is a ‘crazed title’. Barbara Stevens Heusel, Iris Murdoch’s Paradoxical Novels, 140. Barbara Steven Heusel, Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s Novels of the 1970s and 1980s, 208. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics, 58. For more discussion on the Nietzschean impact on Murdoch’s fiction see Chapter Three. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics, 58. Peter Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 360. Moy has many antecedents within Murdoch’s fiction, most noticeably with Felicity of The Sandcastle. It is also interesting to note how Peter Mir is similarly at odds with the rest of the characters in the novel as Bledyard is with those of The Sandcastle. Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight, 72. Ibid. 171–2. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics, 490. Arthur Schopenhaeur, On the Suffering of the World (London: Penguin, 2004), 3. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics, 58. Ibid. 60–1. Ibid. 63. How far one wishes to pursue the spectre of Elias Canetti behind all of them is another line of debate entirely. Hilda Spear, Iris Murdoch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 119. Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight, 274. Ibid. 248. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics, 483.

Conclusion 1

Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 78. Norman Vance, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Serious Fun’, Theology 84 (November 1981), 420–8. 3 John Bayley’s The Iris Trilogy, Peter Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Life and A. N. Wilson’s Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her all provide a different angle on Iris as an individual. 4 Marije Altorf, Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining (London: Continuum, 2008), 3. 5 Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 234. 2

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Index

aesthetic 11, 13–14, 16, 26, 52, 92, 99, 130 ‘Against Dryness’ 11, 13, 30–1, 33, 40, 59, 61, 68, 74, 107 Altorf, Marije 135 analytical philosophy 25, 44, 110 see also linguistic analysis Antonaccio, Maria 15, 35, 36, 101, 126 Aristotle 83 art 11, 16, 31, 41, 63, 76, 88, 135 attention 41–2, 44, 55, 64–8, 76, 102, 104–5, 107–8, 110, 115, 117 Augustine 102–3, 106 Ayer, A.J. 4, 20–3, 25, 35, 79, 90

Christianity 3, 16, 42, 54, 65, 73, 78, 100–2, 104, 108, 111, 122–3, 125, 130, 132, 135 comedic see comedy comedy 3, 6, 14, 32, 33, 38, 44, 51, 55, 57, 59, 66, 74 Conradi, Peter J. 2–4, 7–9, 12–18, 20, 26, 28, 31, 34, 36, 38, 52–3, 61, 69, 72, 84, 91, 97–8, 104, 114–16, 119, 120, 122, 136 consciousness 31, 35, 42, 46, 49–52, 63, 79–80 ‘crystalline’ novel, the 4, 11–12, 33, 53, 59, 61, 82, 87, 98, 112–13, 134

Backus, Guy 3, 4, 6–8, 13–15 Baldanza, Frank 40, 46, 86 Bayley, John 7, 34, 37, 135 beauty 27, 65, 95 ‘being’ 35, 41, 49–50, 52, 68, 71–3, 75–80, 86 Being and Time 21, 69, 81 Beckett, Samuel 20, 31–3, 44 The Bell 7–9, 11–12, 34, 48, 56, 57, 61, 65, 86–110 The Black Prince 7 The Book and the Brotherhood 84, 114 Bowen, Elizabeth 98 Buddhism 8, 16, 17, 127 Burgess, Anthony 29 Byatt, Antonia S. 1, 10, 12–14, 28, 36, 41, 51–2, 56–7, 86–7, 98, 106

Dasein 71, 75–8 Dawkins, Richard 78 De Beauvoir, Simone 19, 31, 36 Derrida, Jacques 4, 9, 17, 72, 116–18, 136 Descartes, Rene 22, 132 Dickens, Charles 11, 12, 33, 44, 133 Dipple, Elizabeth 7, 9, 12, 42, 48, 66, 69, 73, 98, 124 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 12, 70, 77, 112, 134

Cambridge 25, 61, 63 Camus, Albert 36, 82 Canetti, Elias 9, 37–9, 44–5, 81 carnivalesque 112, 118, 121, 128 Christ see Christianity

Eden, Anthony 95 Eliot, George 11, 12 , 19, 33, 86, 98 ego(ism) 41, 43–6, 52–4, 58, 64–7, 76, 81, 105 emotion 39, 49, 71, 88 eros 58, 64–8, 105, 108, 115, 118–19, 129 ethics 6, 11, 26, 77 existentialism 8, 20–5, 28–30, 34–6, 41, 49, 71, 82, 84, 86 existentialists see existentialism Existentialists and Mystics 5

158

Index

fact/value distinction 27, 99 A Fairly Honourable Defeat 96 feminism 29 The Fire and the Sun 65, 115 The Flight from the Enchanter 7, 29, 37–9, 44, 48, 50, 56, 81, 98 freedom 11, 24, 29, 31, 35–6, 38, 41, 44, 49, 51, 77, 86–7, 106, 129 Freud, Sigmund 9, 16, 18, 51–69, 76, 81, 127 gender 17, 42, 47, 95, 98 God 29, 35, 41, 49, 54–5, 65, 70–1, 73, 77–8, 94, 100, 102, 106, 111, 135 see also Christianity and goodness Golding, William 12, 33 goodness 5, 26–7, 48, 71, 77, 95, 100 Gordon, David J. 112, 122, 126 The Green Knight 3, 16, 110, 112, 114, 122–34 Greene, Graham 33 Hampshire, Stuart 4, 10, 15, 25, 54, 62, 79 Hare, Richard M. 22 Heidegger, Martin 7, 9, 18, 21–2 69–86, 99, 125, 129 Hobson, Harold 31 homosexuality 87, 94–8, 103, 105–8, 115 Hume, David 5, 22, 27, 79, 99 incest 58, 115 The Italian Girl 7, 10 Johnson, Deborah 94, 106–7 ‘journalistic’ novel see ‘crystalline’ novel Kant, Immanuel 69, 73, 79, 82–3, 99, 125, 126 Lacan, Jacques 58–61 language 5–6, 17, 22, 33, 41–2, 59, 69, 70–3, 75, 79, 88, 109, 125, 127, 132 Lawrence, D.H. 55

linguistic analysis 20–2, 24, 26, 28, 33, 40, 42, 44, 49, 77, 88, 110 literary tradition 1, 14, 19 logical positivism 23 London 32, 34, 43–4, 55–7, 74, 121 love 37, 38, 47–8, 52, 57, 64, 67–8, 94–5, 104–5, 109, 115, 119, 128 see also eros MacIntyre, Alasdair 3, 110 Mann, Thomas 6, 37 Marcel, Gabriel 6 Martz, Louis 44, 82 Marx, Karl 24, 36, 50, 52, 99, 100, 131 Marxist/Marxism see Marx, Karl Medusa 52, 58 metaphor 90–1, 119 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 116, 118, 122, 124 Mill, John Stuart 27 ‘moral psychologist’ see ‘moral realist’ ‘moral realist’ 2, 7, 15–17, 26, 28, 53, 63, 68, 119, 136 moral value 49, 99 Moore, George Edward 10, 25–7, 69 ‘Murdochland’ 44, 69, 95, 121, 131 myth 8, 12, 36, 58, 81, 87, 90–1 La Nausée 5, 9, 23, 31, 34, 41 The Nice and the Good 135 Nicol, Bran 112, 116–18 Nietzsche, Frederick 9, 18, 51–69, 72, 81, 92, 113, 125–6, 129 Oxford 15, 19–20, 22, 25, 37, 42, 44 The Philosopher’s Pupil 16, 84, 110–22 philosophical novel 3–5, 7, 9, 11, 30, 32–3, 41, 82, 110–11, 123 Plato 6, 15, 17, 65–6, 76, 83, 86–110, 122–34 Platonic cave allegory 45, 47, 76, 88–91, 105–6, 108, 130 Platonism see Plato psyche 52, 63, 66–7, 127 psychoanalysis 38, 51, 54, 56–7, 59–61, 64, 76, 78–9

Index Queneau, Raymond 20, 31–1, 37, 44 Rabinovitz, Rubin 4, 10, 12 realism 3, 11, 17, 84, 98–9, 123 The Red and the Green 7, 31 religion 16, 29, 73, 78, 100–1, 108, 111, 122, 133 Russell, Bertrand 5 Ryle, Gilbert 15, 22, 25, 35, 62, 72, 79 Sage, Lorna 11 saint/artist dichotomy 38, 104, 114, 118, 135 The Sandcastle 29, 49, 86–8 Sartre, Jean-Paul 11–12, 14–51, 52–4, 69, 75, 84, 86, 135–6 Sartre: Romantic Rationalist 1, 7, 19, 23, 28, 29, 31, 34 Schopenhauer, Arthur 113, 125–32 The Sea, The Sea 7, 38, 116 A Severed Head 9, 16, 30, 34, 38, 43, 51–69, 76, 81, 129 Socrates 6, 89, 100 The Sovereignty of Good 4, 15, 105, 135

159

Spear, Hilda 3 Stevens Heusel, Barbara 6, 8, 12–14, 18, 69, 118 Taylor, Charles 102 The Time of the Angels 6, 7, 9, 29, 53, 57, 69–86, 111, 130 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5, 23, 127, 132 Under the Net 7, 9, 16–17, 19–51, 61, 66, 74, 87, 98, 110, 126 The Unicorn 3, 7, 14–15, 38 An Unofficial Rose 7, 10, 106 Vance, Norman 133 Warnock, Mary 71 Weil, Simone 17, 35, 42, 55, 77 Wilson, A.N. 110 Wilson, Sharon 123 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5, 15, 61, 91, 100, 125–8, 132 Wolfe, Peter 3, 6, 13, 44, 56, 87 Woolf, Virginia 19, 25, 33, 98