Iris Murdoch and Remorse: Past Forgiving? 3031430131, 9783031430138

Citation preview

IRIS MURDOCH TODAY

Iris Murdoch and Remorse Past Forgiving? Frances White

Iris Murdoch Today Series Editors

Miles Leeson Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK Frances White Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK

The aim of this series is to publish the best scholarly work in Murdoch studies by bringing together those working at the forefront of the field. Authors and editors of volumes in the series are internationally-recognised scholars in philosophy, literature, theology, and related humanities and interdisciplinary subjects. Including both monographs and contributed volumes, the series is scholarly, (Update the same in the other volumes also) rigorous and opens up new ways of reading Murdoch, and new ways to read the work of others with Murdoch in mind. The series is designed to appeal not only to Murdoch experts, but also to scholars with a more general interest in the subjects under discussion.

Frances White

Iris Murdoch and Remorse Past Forgiving?

Frances White Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester West Sussex, UK

ISSN 2731-331X     ISSN 2731-3328 (electronic) Iris Murdoch Today ISBN 978-3-031-43012-1    ISBN 978-3-031-43013-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: “The Scream,” Edvard Munch, 1893. Courtesy of Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, The Fine Art Collections This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

‘A driving force in all his writing is his serious desire to change the life of his reader.’ (Iris Murdoch of John-Paul Sartre)

This Linocut by Iris Murdoch was first published in Badminton School Magazine, Autumn Term 1936, page 39, and is reproduced here by kind permission of Badminton School.

In memory of Paul & Patricia and Eric & Anne

Acknowledgements

The world-wide Iris Murdoch community is a cooperative and supportive environment and I have many people to thank for inspiration and encouragement, beginning with Cheryl Bove who welcomed me into the Iris Murdoch Society back in the 1980s when I thought I was the only person compulsively reading her novels. But it was Anne Rowe who persuaded me to turn my passion for Murdoch’s work into a PhD thesis which I gained under her expert supervision from Kingston University, London, in 2010. And it was Miles Leeson, Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester, who encouraged me to write this book, which has grown out of that thesis, for the series Iris Murdoch Today which we are co-editing. I owe these three colleagues, mentors, and friends more than I can express. I am grateful to the team of staff and PhD students at the IMRC, Hannah Maria Altorf, Lewis Brewster, Rob Hardy, Lucy Oulton, and Maria Peacock and also to the editorial team of the Iris Murdoch Review, Rebecca Moden, Pamela Osborn, Daniel Read, and Heather Robbins, also Lucy Bolton and Carol Sommer. I want to thank colleagues around the world who have included my work in collections they have edited: Gary Browning, Nora Hämäläinen and Gillian Dooley, Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, Mustafa Kırca and Şule Okuroğlu, Sofia de Melo Araújo and Fátima Vieira, Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood, Simone Roberts and Alison Scott-Baumann, and Margaret Sönmez. If I named every Murdoch colleague who has worked alongside me and inspired me the list would be never ending, but I must thank Paul Hullah and his Japanese colleagues for involving me with the Iris Murdoch Society of Japan, Fiona Tomkinson for being the perfect travelling ix

x 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

companion at many Murdoch conferences abroad, and Scott Moore for broadening my horizons with his rich eclectic knowledge. Also Annette Badland, Patron of the Iris Murdoch Society, whose joyous presence has enhanced our events. The Iris Murdoch Collections in Kingston University Archives is a rich resource for scholars, and much gratitude is owed to Dayna Miller, the university archivist, and to Katie Giles, former archivist, for the help, support, and enthusiasm they have unfailingly given to all researchers. I must also pay tribute to the dedicated work of Rachel Hirschler (among others) whose transcribing has made so much material available to scholars. I am specifically indebted to Stephanie Daniels, archivist at Badminton School, Bristol, for the image of Murdoch’s Linocut, ‘The Prisoner’, and to Badminton School for permission to use it, to Graham Harrison for information about Russian etymology, and to Chiho Omichi for information about Japanese etymology. I am more generally indebted to Christopher Cordner, Murray Cox, Raimond Gaita, Michael Proeve, Mark Stern, Alan Thomas, and Steven Tudor for their pioneering work in the field of remorse studies, to Bran Nicol for inspiration about the place of remorse in Murdoch’s retrospective fiction, and to Robin Silbergleid for informing my thinking on Murdoch’s place in Holocaust literature. All Murdoch scholars owe a debt of gratitude to Gillian Dooley for her invaluable collection of interviews in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction. Turning from the Murdoch world to the personal, I could not have achieved any of this work without the support, encouragement, and love of my friends and family so my final deep thanks go to my husband Stephen, my sons Samuel and Charles, and my daughter-in-law Charlotte (who is nothing like D!)

Contents

1 A  Meeting of Minds: Iris Murdoch and the Theory of Remorse  1 2 ‘If  Only’ and ‘Too Late’: Remorse, Philosophy, and Time in The Nice and the Good and The Philosopher’s Pupil 35 3 ‘A  Fearfully Complex Theological Concept’: Remorse, Repentance, and Salvation in A Word Child and The Book and the Brotherhood 73 4 Remorse,  Trauma Theory, and Primal Wounding: The Good Apprentice and The Green Knight107 5 Remorse,  Holocaust Studies, and Heidegger: The Message to the Planet, the Heidegger Manuscript, and Jackson’s Dilemma145 6 Mystical  Remorse: Saints and (Parenthetical) Heroes, and The One Alone183

xi

xii 

Contents

7 Conclusion:  Remorse as a Challenge to Be Met—Biography and Bibliotherapy197 References207 Index219

Abbreviations

Primary Texts AM B BB BD BP EM FE FHD GA GK HC HPB IG JD MGM MP NG NS OA PP SH SRR

An Accidental Man The Bell The Book and the Brotherhood Bruno’s Dream The Black Prince Existentialists and Mystics The Flight from the Enchanter A Fairly Honourable Defeat The Good Apprentice The Green Knight Henry and Cato Heidegger The Italian Girl Jackson’s Dilemma Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals The Message to the Planet The Nice and the Good Nuns and Soldiers The One Alone The Philosopher’s Pupil A Severed Head Sartre: Romantic Rationalist xiii

xiv 

ABBREVIATIONS

TSTS TA U UN WC

The Sea, the Sea The Time of the Angels The Unicorn Under the Net A Word Child

Secondary Texts S&A Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist IMAL Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life IMWW Peter J.  Conradi, ed., Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1939-45 TCHF Gillian Dooley, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch IMLL Priscilla Martin and Anne Rowe, Literary Lives: Iris Murdoch IMAR Anne Rowe, Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment IMM Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, eds., Iris Murdoch and Morality LOP Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, eds., Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 TMM Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood, eds., The Murdochian Mind

CHAPTER 1

A Meeting of Minds: Iris Murdoch and the Theory of Remorse

Remorse, remorse, the pages of the novel whisper. —Dipple (1995, 7)

Murdoch’s Status in the Twenty-First Century Iris Murdoch is a maverick. Her work, both literary and philosophical, eludes easy categorisation. Vocabulary employed about her in current Murdochian scholarship is revelatory: words such as ‘pertinent’, ‘unabashed’, ‘absorbing’, ‘fun’, ‘serious’, ‘engaged’, ‘perceptive’, ‘radical’, ‘personal’, ‘bravely’ and ‘unafraid’ offer clues to her enduring attraction to new generations of readers. More than twenty years after her death, Murdoch remains an enigmatic figure, both as a writer and as a woman. Interest in her work and intrigue about her life have grown exponentially in the past two decades which have seen publications on her life and work burgeon. In 2012 Maria Antonaccio asserted that ‘Iris Murdoch is both an iconic and contested figure in the public imagination’ (Antonaccio 2012, 1), which remains true today, although scholarship over the past decade has done much to win the contest for her reputation as both philosopher and novelist. She is also increasingly being recognised as a neo-­ theologian for, as Paul Fiddes’s recent work Iris Murdoch and the Others: A Writer in Dialogue with Theology reveals, Murdoch’s ‘philosophy and novels form a kind of internal dialogue’ with theology (Fiddes 2022, 5).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8_1

1

2 

F. WHITE

The publication of Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 in 2015 added fuel to the fire sparked by John Bayley’s memoirs (written both before and after his wife’s death 1998–2001), Peter J. Conradi’s authorised biography Iris Murdoch: A Life of 2001 and A.N. Wilson’s unauthorised biography of 2003, as well as Richard Eyre’s film, Iris, of 2002. Since then a memoir by her student David Morgan (2010), my own short biography, Becoming Iris Murdoch (2014), Conradi’s Family Business: A Memoir (2019) and Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (2019) have added to the biographical material available, causing Anne Rowe to remark, ‘her life is now becoming one of the twentieth century’s most extensively catalogued’ (Rowe 2019, 114). In this account of Iris Murdoch in the Writers and Their Work series, Rowe demonstrates how ‘her work is a crucial link in the evolutionary chain of the novel that stretches back to the nineteenth century, while her experimentation with the novel form projects it forward to the twenty-first’ (Rowe 2019, 114), and illuminates ‘her commitment to making moral philosophy pertinent to the experience of ordinary individuals’ (Rowe 2019, 115). This observation follows up the claim made earlier by Antonaccio that ‘One of the great virtues of her writing is her unabashed assumption that a broadly philosophical mode of reflection on moral questions is accessible to everyone’ (Antonaccio 2012, 3), which is being consolidated in more recent work. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, the editors of Murdoch’s letters, account for the shift in attitude towards her work from her own century to the current one: Her insistence on the ethical dimension of literature, and her demand that literary theorists and philosophers should not abandon rigorous discussions of morality, rendered her out of kilter with mainstream critical thinking. Nevertheless, she bravely defied this trend. (LOP 559)

Such intellectual courage is being rewarded with increased international attention to Murdoch’s art and philosophy as the relevance of her thought to the present day becomes manifestly clear in many disciplines. In Why Iris Murdoch Matters, Gary Browning opens his response to the question implied by the title: She matters in many ways. Her novels are absorbing and fun. They make us think and feel in all sorts of ways. Her philosophy is serious and engaged. She offers a realistic reading of the psyche, a perceptive understanding of

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

3

social and political life and appreciates how religion and art speak to us in important ways. (Browning 2018a, 1)

And in The Murdochian Mind, the most substantial collection of essays on Murdoch’s philosophy to date, in the Routledge Philosophical Minds series, the editors believe that her work ‘offered a radical re-thinking not only of the standard moral theories put forward by the philosophical establishment, but of the very methodology and overall worldview that underpinned those theories’ and that ‘Murdoch was deeply aware of the personal nature of philosophising and unafraid to talk about it’ (TMM 1). This series, Iris Murdoch Today, is expanding the range of approaches taken to her work, building on current scholarship and taking it forward in future directions.

Murdoch’s Prophetic Vision Murdoch (1919–1999) died on the eve of the twenty-first century. As work on her writing expands in philosophical, theological, and literary critical discourses, it becomes increasingly apparent that her ‘subversively unfashionable’ thinking is both prophetic and avant-garde (IMAL 587). The brief danger, between her death and her centenary in 2019, that her work would suffer critical dismissal (either as old-fashioned and over-­ popular or as idiosyncratic and obscure) has now passed with the rapidly growing recognition that in many areas her vision is ahead of its time. This study of remorse in Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy embraces that recognition and extends it to include the engagement of her work with the emerging field of remorse theory and related discourses. The concept of remorse began to attract increasing attention during the last decades of the twentieth century, perhaps generated by the approach of the Millennium which inspired retrospective analysis in all discourses; indeed the cultural analyst Jean Baudrillard diagnoses in le fin de siècle ‘a truly species-wide sense of remorse’ (Baudrillard 1994, 72). The idea of remorse has progressively come under scrutiny in an interdisciplinary fashion as a growing number of articles and monographs endeavour to conceptualise the precise meaning of the term remorse, to identify the locus of the concept in the moral spectrum, and to evaluate its psychospiritual impact. This study identifies the resulting body of texts as forming a field of inquiry which may properly be termed remorse theory. Philosophy, psychology, theology, and literature are all contributing to the

4 

F. WHITE

development of a penetrating comprehension of the connotations and significance of remorse, a concept that proves a rich and subtle trace in other current fields of enquiry including trauma theory and Holocaust studies. In 1989, the year Murdoch that published the twenty-fourth of her twenty-six novels, Kenneth Gorelick observed that Our pleasure-seeking culture does not abound in images of remorse. It is hard to readily think of examples of healthy remorse in everyday life or in contemporary myth, that is, news media, novels or movies. (Gorelick 1989, 219)

In The Message to the Planet (1989) the central character mysteriously dies of remorse and prior to that her novels A Word Child (1975 [2002a]) and The Good Apprentice (1985 [2000c]) revolve around remorseful protagonists, respectively, offering unhealthy and healthy models of remorse. Pace Gorelick, Murdoch’s fiction abounds in images of remorse, augmenting and enriching the literary tradition she inherits by adding fresh imaginative material to the theme of remorse which runs through Shakespeare, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad: Murdoch herself singles out Macbeth and Lord Jim as literary representations of remorse (MGM 500). ‘Nobody writing now […] depicts grief and remorse with greater truth and force’—Sheena McKay’s appraisal in 1989 (Murdoch 1998, 63) endures, as Murdoch is still foremost among contemporaneous British novelists in tackling the subject of remorse, perhaps only Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) rivalling her achievement. Murdoch’s intuition of the pivotal place remorse has come to occupy in contemporary culture reveals the uncanny prescience of her work for, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes remarks, ‘the romance with remorse and with reparation, memory and healing […] has emerged as a master narrative of the late twentieth century’ (Cox 1999, 156). In The Haunted Inkwell: Art and Our Future, Mark Patrick Hederman comments that ideas which are haunting the ether at specific times […] are sensed by artists, who, like animals, foretell by their behaviour the earthquake that is on the way [….] Artists are prophets, in the literal sense of speaking out before their time. As they become the unwitting mouthpiece of the psychic secrets of their age, they are often as unconscious as sleep-walkers. (Hederman 2001, 8)

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

5

Murdoch, who is included in Hederman’s study, epitomises the artist as (unconscious) prophet: issues and concerns that she articulates in her fiction and conceptualises in her philosophy demonstrate her discernment of changes in the Zeitgeist. So, for example, Conradi’s biography notes Murdoch’s early eco-consciousness: ‘Her vision of the world as sacred looks forward to ecology and the Green movement’ (IMAL 597).1 Murdoch is also an early portrayer of homosexuality as an ordinary aspect of life long before the advent of Queer Theory; she is quick to perceive and fictionalise the effects of displacement before the development of Diaspora Studies; she was writing ‘third category’ Holocaust literature before Holocaust Studies was demarcated as a discrete field of discourse, and she dramatises and analyses the effect of trauma long before trauma theory became an academic topic. It is now definitively established that Murdoch is a pivotal influence on the intellectual transition identified as the ‘ethical turn’ and her work is being discussed in relation to the ‘turn to theology’.2 Murdoch’s influence on both philosophers (Maria Antonaccio, Cora Diamond, Christopher Cordner, Raimond Gaita, Sabina Lovibond, Alasdair Macintyre, Stephen Mulhall, Martha Nussbaum, Kieran Setiya, Charles Taylor, Alan Thomas) and theologians (Don Cupitt, Paul Fiddes, Franklin Gamwell, Stanley Hauerwas, Fergus Kerr, Alister McGrath, Willian Schweiker, David Tracy, Rowan Williams) continues to increase. The seeming eclipse of Murdoch’s fame on the intellectual stage of twentieth-century Britain before the renaissance in her reputation in the twenty-first century may perhaps derive from that very element in her writings which Hederman identifies as prophetic. Murdoch engaged in political life with committed enthusiasm in her youth, but after writing ‘A House of Theory’, denoted ‘Murdoch’s landmark contribution to socialist political thought’ by Carey Seale (2001), she appeared to withdraw from the public arena to the private study. In Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, Stefan Collini observes that Murdoch’s unfashionable plea for metaphysics as a basis for political philosophy set her apart from contemporaneous intellectuals, and his analysis of the trajectory of Murdoch’s career thereafter registers her ‘hunger for some creed or body of ideas that would transcend the mundane preoccupations of empiricism’. He describes  On Murdoch and eco-criticism see Oulton (2020) and (2022) and White (2020).  On the ‘ethical turn’ see Adamson et al. (1998), IMM Part 2 (2010), and White (2010a): on the ‘turn to theology’ see IMAR Part l (2007) and IMM Part lll (2010). 1 2

6 

F. WHITE

Existentialism as ‘a kind of false start for her’ and perceives that ‘subsequently, partly spurred by her reading of Simone Weil, she moved towards a loosely Christianised Platonism’, with the result that, ‘the more she embraced this position, the less engaged she became with public debate in contemporary Britain’, so that her ‘later career went in other, more purely literary and religious, directions’ (Collini 2006, 160–2). As it became clear to Murdoch that she was first and foremost an artist, her mode of engagement with the human condition, in either the political or the spiritual realm, was thereafter primarily through literature. But this received view of her as an a-political novelist is rigorously contested by Murdoch scholars, from my highlighting of the political sub-text of The Flight from the Enchanter (1956 [2000a]) in ‘“The world is just a transit camp”: Diaspora in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch’ (2010d) to Gary Browning’s analysis of Murdoch’s political thinking in Why Iris Murdoch Matters (2018a) and Iris Murdoch and the Political (forthcoming). Tracing the development of this new strand in Murdoch criticism Rowe finds that ‘fresh primary sources continue to instigate newly energised political readings of her novels’, and she judges that ‘Murdoch’s fiction and her polemic intensify and complicate rather than simply endorsing political debate’ (Rowe 2019, 57). Included in the compendious study The Murdochian Mind, Lawrence Blum’s essay on ‘Murdoch and Politics’ asserts that ‘Politics broadly construed was important to Murdoch throughout her life’ (TMM 424). Remorse takes on political significance in Murdoch’s thinking in relation to events (such as the Holocaust) and figures (such as Martin Heidegger) which came to dominate her late work. The prophetic nature of Murdoch’s role as artist impacts on political life too, through the underpinning ‘theory’ that she emphatically terms ‘metaphysics’ which she spent her life delineating in both philosophy and fiction. Conradi concludes the account of her influence in his biography by stressing her belief ‘in a timeless human nature, and a perennial philosophy that might address it’, and observing that her writing has ‘helped restore moral philosophy to the people, showing its importance as something other than a remote, enclosed speciality, an arcane ritual conducted by an elite within the academy’ (IMAL 587). But Murdoch believes that, as Andrew Gibson asserts, ‘in their own particular manner, novels can perform an ethical work, or can be made to, and it is worth trying to enable that work to take place’ (Gibson 1999, 1). She disseminates her moral philosophy as potently (and more extensively) through her fiction as

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

7

through her academic treatises, and William Irwin Thompson’s insight into the influence art has on political life corroborates Hederman’s sense of the artist as prophet: By refusing to commit himself to political action the artist is insisting on discovering what he senses has been ignored in the politician’s demand for an immediate commitment. In bringing this vague and intuitive perception into the distinct and articulate shape of art, the artist is only doing in symbolic form what society at large will do later when it comes to its own awareness (often through the help of the artist himself) and gives this awareness shape in political decision and military action. (Thompson 1967, 114)

Art impacts on life. It matters. This belief is the central tenet of Murdoch’s aesthetics which informs her whole literary endeavour: ‘the work of great artists shows up “art-for-­ art’s sake” as a flimsy frivolous doctrine. Art is for life’s sake […] or else it is worthless’ (EM 218). For though Murdoch is never didactic, her art, as well as her metaphysics, is offered as a guide to morals in that she views the novel as a potentially educative force for good and believes that ‘the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations’ (EM 326). Murdoch’s moral philosophy clings tenaciously to absolute concepts of good and of value, holding fast against the various Western philosophical fashions of the twentieth century, which she apprehends as dangerous linguistic games, amoral variations on relativism and determinism. The tenacity of her metaphysics, the claims she makes for the moral power of literature, and the role she allots the reader combine to place Murdoch at the epicentre of what Martha Nussbaum heralds as the ‘turn toward the ethical’ in literary studies (Adamson 1998, 13). Remorse features significantly in this ethical turn.

Murdoch and Her Readers Conradi says of the interaction between Murdoch’s characters and her readers, a strenuous suspension of moral judgement on the author’s part […] comes to mean that judging these ‘loveable monsters’ resembles passing judgement on ourselves. This is one reason why reading these books can be, as well as a hilarious and spell-binding experience, also a very uncomfortable one. (S&A 35–6)

8 

F. WHITE

Murdoch is always aware of the reader as the partner in the enterprise of novel-writing. She refers jocularly but seriously to ‘the writer and the reader, that wicked co-operating pair’ (EM 251). Before publishing any novels herself, she wrote a ground-breaking study of Jean-Paul Sartre in which she already affirms that ‘the reader too must be the creator of the novel; his continuing to read it “properly”, that is to enter into it seriously, to “lend” it his emotions and so on, involves him in a sustained act of faith in the work itself’ (SRR 97). Murdoch sees ‘the creation and appreciation of a novel [as] a complex highly diversified operation’ (MGM 146), and she regards reading novels as both a moral and spiritual activity: ‘the consumption of literature involves continual (usually instinctive) evaluation’ (MGM 190) and ‘experience of the art of the novel is spiritual experience’ (EM 282). Literature and ethics are thus intrinsically linked in her eyes, a connection that she expounds in her magnum opus, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992): Art, especially literature, has in the past instinctively operated as a form, the most profound generally accessible form, of moral reflection, being in this respect close to ordinary life which is saturated with moral reflection [.…] It requires ingenuity to produce a work of literature devoid of moral judgements […] Good novels concern the fight between good and evil and the pilgrimage from appearance to reality. They expose vanity and inculcate humility. They are amazingly moral. (MGM 89 & 97)

She perceives reflexivity between the experience of reading novels and the experience of living: ‘In the traditional novel the people, the story, the innumerable kinds of value judgements both illuminate and celebrate life, and are judged and placed by life, in a reciprocal process’ (MGM 97). Auden may say that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ (Auden 1966, 142), but Murdoch believes novels can act as a catalyst for moral change in the reader, and she writes her fiction to interact with that responsive potential as well as to entertain.

Murdoch’s Concern with Remorse The emotional lives of Murdoch’s characters invite her readers both to experience remorse vicariously and to reflect on its moral significance. Murdoch states in interview, ‘I have known people absolutely wrecked by remorse’ (Murdoch 1998, 63), and, in more analytic detail,

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

9

It’s a salient thing in human life, one of the most general features of human beings, that they may be dominated by remorse or by some plan of their lives which may have gone wrong. I think it’s one of the things that prevents people from being good. (TCHF 130)3

The specific connection she makes here between remorse and failure in virtue links the concept of remorse to Murdoch’s moral philosophy and is a key point in this analysis of the importance of remorse in her moral economy. For remorse is not just a recurrent theme in Murdoch’s fiction but a crucial concept in her ethical vision. A brief survey of Murdoch’s novels, to orientate the scope of this study, confirms that remorse is virtually omnipresent. In only two novels is there no mention of remorse and the tally of instances of the word remorse increases as her literary career progresses; in eight novels there are between eleven and twenty instances with the highest count being twenty-three in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983). The Bell (1958 [2004]) denotes the start of Murdoch’s developing interest in the experience of remorse; Michael Meade is left ‘bent double with the pains of remorse and regret and the inward biting of a love which had now no means of expression’ after the suicide of Nick Fawley whom Michael feels he should have looked after (B 306). Thereafter, Murdoch steadily returns to this theme, re-inventing situations which provoke remorse and re-imagining potential responses to it. She composes two case-studies of the psychological and spiritual effects of remorse in A Word Child and The Good Apprentice. These are Murdoch’s ‘Ur-texts’ for this subject, but she continues to interweave cameos of, and reflections on, remorse as an inescapable source of human pain throughout her late novels, coming at her theme from varying angles and investigating new elements of the problem it poses. The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) focuses on the vexed question of what Christian doctrine has to offer to remorse generated by abortion, whereas The Message to the Planet, which has been described as a ‘Millennialist’ novel (IMLL ix), dramatises remorse engendered by empathetic identification with Holocaust victims as a cause of death, and the characterisation of Lucas Graffe in The Green Knight (1993) intensifies Murdoch’s concern with the psychopathology of the absence of remorse. This concern was earlier depicted through Julius 3  This was in response to Haffenden’s remark, ‘One of the most interesting aspects of your novels is that you often depict characters […] who are repressed or in some way fixated by their past lives, by certain events or situations that they cannot escape’ (TCHF 130).

10 

F. WHITE

King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970 [2001b]) and Austin Gibson-­ Grey in An Accidental Man (1971 [2003]). Ultimately, remorse becomes a rhythmically repeated leitmotiv in Jackson’s Dilemma (1995). This final novel is haunted throughout by remorse, in conjunction with Murdoch’s troubled questioning of the lack of remorse evinced by Heidegger on whom she was concurrently working.

A Working Definition of Remorse Bran Nicol identifies Murdoch as ‘one of the most persistent and effective chroniclers of loss in late twentieth century fiction’ and suggests that ‘her novels explore what we might call the “natural” forms of loss we all inevitably experience—time, love, other people—and also a more unexpected, tragic kind of loss, which features in a large number of her novels which are concerned with guilt’ (Nicol 2004, 31). This connection of loss with guilt is the bedrock of remorse in Murdoch’s fiction, so preliminary clarification of what exactly remorse is understood to mean by theorists of remorse, by the ‘common reader’, and by Murdoch herself, is necessary. Remorse has long been recognised as a major human concern; the eighteenth-­century philosopher Adam Smith described remorse as, ‘of all the sentiments which can enter the human breast the most dreadful’ (Cox 1999, 135). Twentieth- and twenty-first-century inquiry into remorse has taken two forms. The early stage of the inquiry concentrated on philosophical discrimination of terminology. Remorse is one of a related group of terms: regret, agent-regret, guilt, remorse, repentance, contrition, compunction, pity, shame, sorrow. This is the common vocabulary of this area of moral philosophy and other related disciplines, although there is no absolute agreement between practitioners as to their respective definitions and usages. Murdoch also uses the closely associated words, regret, guilt, and shame, and acknowledges the significance of distinguishing between them. Her interest in subtle distinctions is revealed by the annotations and underlinings found in her copy of The Anatomy of Dependence by Takeo Doi, a 1973 discussion of the Japanese concept of amae in the course of which guilt, shame, and remorse are teased apart.4 This careful discrimination occurs throughout Murdoch’s novels. In Tamar Hernshaw’s experience in The Book and the Brotherhood, ‘repentant regret, like a kind of knowledge, gradually replaced self-destructive 4

 This book is held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives IML573.

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

11

self-­hating remorseful misery and despair. There were differences and she understood the differences’ (BB 492). Dr. Marzillian in The Message to the Planet remarks on the ‘interesting differences between these concepts’ of guilt and shame (MP 498). Hilary Burde (the word child of A Word Child) and Edward Baltram (arguably an apprentice to Good in The Good Apprentice) both assess the potential vocabulary available for articulating their experience. Hilary says, ‘I have carried this thing silently and alone all these years and the burden has not become less. I am not even sure what the name of the burden is. Naming might help, only words are defeated. Guilt, sin, pain, repentance, remorse?’ (WC 220–1). But Edward is clear that lexical analysis and differentiation are irrelevant to his remorseful suffering. He screams at his brother, ‘Words don’t help, names don’t help, guilt, shame, remorse, death, hell, at the level I’m at distinctions don’t exist, concepts don’t exist’ (GA 50). By constantly juxtaposing remorse with these other related concepts Murdoch refuses to tie remorse down with over-tidy precision, but instead allows it to retain a slippery elusive quality whereby it has differing resonance and connotations for individual characters and particular situations. Her fiction correspondingly does not offer a conceptual definition of remorse; rather, it enacts and reveals it.5 Murdoch’s novels do, however, endeavour to encapsulate the feeling of remorse. Conradi’s comment that her fiction ‘abounds in passages seemingly designed to answer the question: “What is it like?”’ (S&A 257) can be extended to the novels selected for this study all of which contain passages that attempt to articulate what remorse is like. For example, N., the narrator of The Philosopher’s Pupil, says that the old philosopher John Robert Rozanov ‘had times of the most bitter remorse, that biting, “Oh if only”—which can gnaw its way into the very centre of the soul and there set up a pain which mixes itself with every experience’ (PP 307). N. also says of a young character, ‘Tom was experiencing for the first time in his life […] that blackening and poisoning of the imagination which is one of the worst, as well as one of the commonest, forms of human misery’ (PP 371). A ringing echo of Murdoch’s statement in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals—‘One of the most terrible of human woes and also the most 5  For a doctoral thesis on remorse ‘data […] were gathered by asking subjects to write a description of a person who is remorseful, using the following prompt questions to guide the description: What would the person be feeling? Thinking? What would the remorseful person do? What other details about the person would indicate that he or she is experiencing remorse?’ (Proeve 2001, 75). Murdoch’s novels offer just such guided descriptions of remorse with the richly imaginative empathy of the great artist.

12 

F. WHITE

common, is remorse’—can here be heard (MGM 500). Three features of Murdoch’s use of the term remorse emerge from these passages. First, she regards remorse as a metaphorical description of a particular mental, emotional, and spiritual experience; second, she perceives remorse as affecting the imagination—the power of picturing oneself and others, and third, she considers remorse to be a universal human experience. All attempts at definition of the term remorse stress its metaphorical nature because the closeness between the semantic and experiential components of this word lies in its etymological origins. Remorse, or re-morse, from the Latin re + mordere, that is, to be bitten again, thus contains within itself the emotional experience it connotes.6 Many European languages are etymologically similar: rimorso in Italian, remordimiento in Spanish, and remords in French all repeat the Latin metaphor.7 Russian has two possible equivalents, one of which is ugryzenie sovesti—‘the biting of conscience’.8 German is Gewissenbisse (from Gewissen—conscience and bissen—to bite); again the same metaphor. In other languages the concept of remorse carries the same charge of suffering, though differently weighted towards the physical or the mental. Japanese, for example, has two words for remorse: kashaku from ka—scold and shaku—torture/torment, and jiseki from ji—self/yourself and seki—torture/torment. Greek words which approximate to remorse stress consequentiality: metameleia—aftercare, metanoia—afterthought, and metalgein—to feel afterpain, respectively, emphasise an emotional charge, cognitive acknowledgement, and the sense of physical hurt. These etymological perspectives denote remorse as a state of mind involving mental distress so strong as to call forth images of physical agony. The importance to Murdoch of finding the right imagery for remorse is evident in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, where she muses that ‘the image of burning is good. Remorse is said to bite, but better said to burn: an adherence of burning stuff’ (MGM 502). Her preferred image gives a powerful sense of the impossibility of escaping from remorse—it sticks fast to the sufferer, like the shirt of Nessus. Murdoch’s fictional descriptions  The Latin itself for ‘to feel remorse’ is conscientia morderi or ‘conscience-bitten’.  See Janet: ‘Le remords est la douleur cuisante et, comme l’indique le mot, la “morsure” qui torture le coeur après une action coupable’, qtd in Grand Larousse de la Langue Française, Vol. 6 (1977). 8  The other is raskayanie—remorse as in ‘I very, very much wish I hadn’t done it’, from raskáyat—the verb meaning ‘to regret, feel sorry for’. Both are used in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. 6 7

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

13

evoke the agony remorse causes. It is a pain twisting ‘round and round in Edward’s entrails’ (GA 341), and a terrible weight, a ‘stone on the heart’ (GK 326).9 She often adopts the commonplace currency of biting: Michael Meade in The Bell suffers ‘inward biting’ (B 306); Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea (1978) imagines that his old flame, Hartley, ‘felt terrible secret pangs of remorse and regret, and that a bitter worm gnawed her as painfully as it has gnawed me’ (TSTS 85), and he speaks of ‘the painful bite’ of remorse (TSTS 458). The etymology of remorse promotes metaphors of devouring over other possible images and such images add a double layer to the always already metaphorical term—re-bitten, enacting within the language itself, the repetitive and recurrent nature of the specific pain of remorse. A working definition of remorse, with which Murdoch’s usage of the term accords, is as follows: remorse is a painful state of mind, focusing on the irrevocability and irreparability of a regretted action in the past, culpably caused by an agent who will subsequently and recurrently suffer as a direct result of this action. This analysis involves separate components each of which must necessarily be included for remorse to be the appropriate descriptor. The necessary components are sevenfold. First, there must be serious significance, one cannot suffer remorse over a trivial matter. Second, it must concern the past: ‘I have done it’: one cannot suffer remorse about a future or hypothetical event. Irrevocability and irreparability are the third and fourth requirements: the time cannot be recalled and the action done differently, although the deepest wish of the sufferer from remorse is to undo the deed—those terrible words, ‘If only…’.10 There is no possibility of undoing the damage done, the thing is broken, the person dead, and nothing can ever compensate for it. Fifth, ownership of the deed—‘I have done it: I acknowledge and feel my responsibility for what has happened’—which leads onto the sixth and even worse element 9  ‘Our verbal articulations of psychological suffering very often achieve their greater descriptiveness and, hence, communicative power through metaphoric […] reference to physical pain. We speak of having aching hearts, tortured souls, boiling blood, of being in the grip of fear, racked by guilt, pierced by a betrayal, and so on. In this way, physical pains aid in the articulation of psychological suffering by being descriptively primitive. Our thousand natural shocks can thus serve as elemental colours on the palette for describing psychological suffering’ (Tudor 2001, 26). 10  ‘As Kierkegaard has perceived, remorse is associated with a desire to nullify a past actuality’, (Rosthal 1967, 578): ‘Mental undoing of an action is a general feature of remorse’ (Proeve 2001, 31).

14 

F. WHITE

of culpable guilt: ‘I know I could have avoided it had I chosen/acted differently’. Seventh and last, the unavoidable, intrinsic mental/emotional pain: I endlessly and recurrently suffer the inescapable knowledge of what I have done. Full perception of the ethical significance of the term remorse in Murdoch’s lexicon requires its conceptual differentiation from three associated terms. First, regret, defined as ‘to remember, to think of (something lost) with distress or longing […] to grieve at, feel distress on account of (some event, fact, action, etc), perhaps [derived] from re + (Germanic) greeten—weep, i.e. to weep again’ (OED), which is a broader notion by comparison with remorse. The basic component of regret is that of wishing something were other than as it is, which forms a bedrock to the linked meaning of this term with that of remorse, but regret implies no moral context (one can regret the ending of a holiday or having missed a television programme), and it can have ‘rather a mild flavour about it’ (Roger Trigg, qtd Zoch 1986, 55). Regret divides into ‘general regret’, the wish that something hadn’t happened, and ‘agent-regret’, the wish that I had not done something. Regret therefore shades into remorse on a sliding scale usefully delineated by Marcia Baron: ‘One goes from, “If only it had been otherwise” (general regret) to “And it happened through me” (agent-regret) to “And I could have averted it”’—and if at this stage if ‘the “could” implicitly involves a “should”, we reach remorse’ (Baron 1988, 267–8). This clear distinction of related terms importantly introduces the vital element of conscious moral responsibility inextricable from remorse. Murdoch’s most poignant evocation of the pain of regret occurs in The Nice and the Good (1968 [2000b]) when Paula Biranne thinks, ‘But oh, the human weakness, the desire for the comforter, the frail crying wish that it had all never happened at all and things were as they once were’ (NG 175). This wistful hankering after a previous state does not, however, contain a sense of necessarily acknowledged culpability for regrettable change in the state of affairs, so it does not qualify as remorse. Within this essential distinction lies the moral quality inherent in remorse but potentially absent in regret.

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

15

Second, guilt, a term often twinned with remorse by Murdoch, which indicates her apprehension of the disparity between these terms.11 Of unknown etymological origin, guilt covers failures of duty, offences, crimes, sins, and the state of being justly deserving of and/or liable to penalty (OED). It is weighted towards forensic usage as the last instance indicates. A necessary sub-division between ‘being guilty’ and ‘feeling guilty’ is easily understood: the cheerful burglar who regards occasional spells in prison as part of the ‘job’ accepts the legal fact that he is ‘guilty as charged’, whilst feeling nothing beyond regret at getting caught. By contrast, the clinical neurotic feels irrational guilt despite having done nothing blameworthy.12 Third, shame, which can be described as the public face of guilt, is also linked to remorse in Murdoch’s fiction, The central attribute of shame is being seen by others to have done wrong. A neat Sartrean scenario perfectly exemplifies what is meant by this: a man, suspecting his wife of unfaithfulness, listens at a keyhole to her conversation with her supposed lover. He feels no guilt about so doing as he believes himself entitled to discover the truth. But when a footstep behind him alerts him to the fact that he has been witnessed eavesdropping, he feels shame, at being known to have behaved in a discreditable manner—this is paraphrased from Mary Warnock’s account of Sartre’s example of shame in Being and Nothingness (Warnock 2001, 121). Murdochian characters who suffer more strongly from shame than remorse are chiefly embarrassed by others’ perception of their actions.13 Those who may die of shame are bothered by loss of face rather than moral distress. In Henry and Cato (1976 [2002b]), the concept of shame is seen in a darker light and is implicitly distinguished from remorse in the narration of Cato Forbes’s shattered self-perception after 11  For example, in An Accidental Man Mavis Argyll has been trapped by ‘guilt and remorse’ (46); Charles Arrowby says, ‘I knew that I was surreptitiously attempting to ease my own remorse and guilt’ (TSTS 429); ‘remorse and guilt’ remain with Tim Reede in Nuns and Soldiers (412), and Lucas Graffe tells Sefton Anderson to ‘avoid remorse and guilt’ (GK 274). 12  Dorina Gibson Grey in An Accidental Man is a prime example of such guilt-ridden characters in Murdoch’s novels. Just before her accidental death, Dorina, who has committed no crime or sin, is in a state of fearful anxiety and neurosis and trembles with ‘old terror, only now it was worse and she felt guiltier’ than ever (AM 306). 13  The term shame occurs with greatest frequency in Nuns and Soldiers in which Gertrude Openshaw becomes engaged to (the much younger and poorer) Tim Reede indecently soon after the death of her husband, Guy. Both experience shame in front of onlookers at their hasty union, far more so than they experience guilt about the relationship in itself: ‘Piety, reason, shame […] seemed to suggest some […] delay’ (NS 201).

16 

F. WHITE

killing a man. His sister Colette thinks her brother is ‘dying of shame’ rather than remorse (HC 303). Her perception carries conviction, as shame is a Sartrean enclosed hell with no exit, so Cato is unable to move from that situation. Lucid remorse is more analogous to purgatory, from which there is respite after the allotted suffering has been undergone. Shame may be among the emotions of a remorseful person but in true remorse internal self-condemnatory pain overshadows external public-­ condemnatory pain. The difference between shame and remorse is also manifested physically. Shame brings a hot feeling, a flush to the face; it is felt on the surface. Remorse gnaws at the innards and claws at the pit of the stomach; it is felt deep inside. It is this internalised nature of remorse that identifies it as a more specifically ethical matter than regret, guilt, or shame.

The Ethical Dimension of Remorse The second stage of remorse theory develops the ethical component of remorse located by earlier terminological studies: remorse has become an interdisciplinary academic focal point. A body of seminal texts underpins work in this area. First, a collection of essays on Psychotherapy and the Remorseful Patient, edited by Mark Stern, appeared in 1989. Raimond Gaita’s philosophical study, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception which finds remorse an essential concept for differentiating good and evil, was first published in 1991.14 A compilation of perspectives on the linked topics Remorse and Reparation edited by Murray Cox appeared in 1999, and in 2001 both Steven Tudor’s philosophical study Compassion and Remorse: Acknowledging the Suffering Other and Michael Proeve’s empirical studies in Remorse: Its Description and Its Interpersonal Effects augmented the growing discourse on remorse. Christopher Cordner consolidated his previous work on remorse with the publication of Ethical Encounter: The Depth of Moral Meaning in 2002, and Proeve and Tudor co-authored a study Remorse: Psychological and Jurisprudential Perspectives in 2010. Insights from these texts on remorse inform my discussion and two 14  The edition of Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception used here is the substantially revised second edition of 2004, but the original edition was published in 1991 and thus predates Remorse and Reparation by eight years. As Alan Thomas is the only contributor to the later book to cite Gaita’s work, the two studies of remorse remain independent of each other.

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

17

general premises which underlie all these pioneering studies of remorse— and which Murdoch’s view sustains—are adopted per se. First, the foundational premise is that remorse denotes a matter of vital importance, both in individual lives and in ethical thought.15 This claim opposes the ‘anti-remorse camp’, Tudor’s appellation of followers of Spinoza and Nietzsche who hold ‘the view that remorse does not really constitute a worthy moral emotion and should not be brought to the forefront of philosophical discussion of morality’ (Tudor 2001, 128). In contradistinction to this position, Murdoch and this group of remorse theorists affirm a strong link between remorse and morality and create ‘space for the articulation of remorse’s value and importance’ (Tudor 2001, 8). Murdoch’s novels impressively manifest this ‘value and importance’ of remorse, thereby identifying it as a vital component in her ethical picturing of the human. The second premise is that remorse, in itself, is inherently neither good nor bad. Good and bad forms of remorse need to be clearly differentiated.16 Good remorse, which Tudor calls ‘lucid remorse’ (Tudor 2001, 130), and Gaita calls ‘genuine remorse’ (Gaita 2004, 49), is constructive, morally and spiritually educational, and ethically significant. This ‘lucid’ form is clear-sighted awareness and acknowledgement of responsibility for harm which one has culpably caused. Lucid remorse can lead to healing experiences of repentance, reparation, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Bad remorse, by contrast, is a pathological state of mind, a ‘continuous rigmarole of remorse’ (BP 100), or ‘fruitless litany of remorse’ (MP 171), which leads to no such healing possibilities but which instead dominates and wrecks lives, as Murdoch observes. This form is usefully designated as ‘chronic remorse’ by Tudor (Tudor 2001, 191) and as ‘immature remorse’ by Bjarne Jacobsen and Alice Theilgard in their study of Kierkegaard’s

15  ‘Remorse is often in the news and has been the subject of great literature, but it has been under-researched, in both psychology and philosophy. It is a fundamentally important moral emotion, one which has the potential to turn lives around—or indeed to cripple them—and yet, curiously, it has remained relatively peripheral as a topic of research by psychologists and philosophers. Also, despite the fundamental role of remorse in the discourses of criminal justice, the policy basis of that role is notably underdeveloped’ (Proeve and Tudor 2010, 1). 16  ‘The fact that an emotion can—and often enough does—go wrong is not a sufficient basis for assuming that all instances of it are inherently pathological. Indeed, we maintain that the central or paradigmatic case of remorse should be seen as a lucid and rational emotion’ (Proeve and Tudor 2010, 2).

18 

F. WHITE

analysis of remorse by which the personality is effectively paralysed ‘in its guilty conscience’ (Cox 1999, 197). Murdoch’s novels examine what it is to experience both forms: A Word Child depicts chronic remorse, The Good Apprentice, lucid remorse. Murdoch also investigates the psychological, spiritual, and ethical significance of failure to experience appropriate remorse. Proeve and Tudor remark that Works of literary fiction have provided some of the richest explorations of human experience and emotion. The modern novel, in particular, in which the God-like author can portray the inner lives of multiple characters, has often proved a very effective narrative form for representing complex and nuanced human emotions. This is certainly true in relation to remorse. (Proeve and Tudor 2010, 13)

As examples to illustrate this claim, they select Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999), Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001), The Outsider by Camus (1942), and Emily Dickinson’s poem on remorse (c.1863) but the centrality of Murdoch’s fictional case-studies of remorse oddly escapes their notice.

Simone Weil’s Concept of Affliction Murdoch’s distinctive contribution to theoretical understanding through her literary enactment of remorse is rooted in her ongoing dialogue with Weil’s concepts of affliction and void. Focusing Murdoch’s work through the lens of remorse reveals a distinctive element in the importance of Weil’s concept of affliction to Murdoch’s ‘moral psychology’. Murdoch speaks of Weil with love (TCHF 135) and readily acknowledges her indebtedness to Weil’s work.17 That Weil’s thinking permeates Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction is well documented: an early study by Gabriele Griffin discusses the ‘elective affinities with Weil’s work [which] are pervasive’ in Murdoch’s thought (Griffin 1993, 59), in Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy (2011) Sabina Lovibond notes that Murdoch accepts from 17  Conradi observes that Weil is ‘the only woman among Iris’s great teachers’ (IMAL 260), and George Steiner denotes her a ‘key persona’ and ‘tutelary presence’ in Murdoch’s writing (EM xiii–xiv). A.S. Byatt, Murdoch’s earliest critic, initially realised the influence of Weil in Murdoch’s fiction and later critics continue to comment on Murdoch’s Weilian themes and maxims, the most recent being Düringer (2022) and Panizza (2022).

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

19

Weil ‘certain ideas that will leave an indelible mark’ (Lovibond 2011, 28), and Eva-Maria Düringer opens her essay on Murdoch and Weil in The Murdochian Mind with the statement, ‘Simone Weil’s influence on Iris Murdoch can hardly be exaggerated’ (TMM 306). Previous literary criticism has chiefly concerned Weil’s influence on Murdoch’s concepts of Ate in The Unicorn (1963), deracination in The Flight from the Enchanter, gravity and grace in The Bell, and attention in The Sovereignty of Good (1970). Affliction has not been fully identified as conceptually significant, though in Why Iris Murdoch Matters, Browning notes that ‘Edward’s guilt plunges him into what might be termed the void of which Murdoch speaks in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’ (Browning 2018a, 112). Weil’s voice recurs throughout that work, being notably dominant in the two final chapters, 18, ‘Void’, and 19, ‘Metaphysics: a Summary’.18 Murdoch differentiates Weil’s ‘concept of “the void” […] from the Angst of popular existentialism, in that […] experience of the void is a spiritual achievement’ (EM 159). Her meditation on Void ‘concerns a region […] which might seem to have been left out of too optimistic a picture’ (MGM 498). She remarks that this chapter which could ‘also be called “despair” or “affliction”’ is ‘an opposing companion piece to happiness’, and it refers to ‘something extreme: the pain, and the evil, which occasion conditions of desolation such as […] most human beings have met with’ (MGM 498). Murdoch catalogues ‘dreadful human fates’, in which she includes ‘remorse’ (MGM 498), explicitly identifying remorse as a form of extreme human suffering. So Murdoch conceptualises remorse as a form of Weilian affliction—an aspect of the void. She finds it ‘very difficult to “touch” this dark condition’ and thinks ‘perhaps art does it best after all’ (MGM 500), which leads into her contemplation of remorse as displayed by Conrad and Shakespeare in Lord Jim and Macbeth. Her novels disclose her effort to ‘touch’ the void through her own art, and remorse is one form of affliction through which she recurrently chooses to present experience of the void, another being bereavement. Murdoch prefers her ‘philosophy’ to be designated ‘moral psychology’ because this term lays joint emphasis on ethics and consciousness (TCHF 18  ‘Void’ is a key concept in Weil’s philosophy and theology: see Gravity and Grace (1947 [2002]) and The Notebooks of Simone Weil (1956). The impact that this concept had on Murdoch is evident in her choosing ‘Knowing the Void’ as the title of her single essay on Weil, a review of Weil’s Notebooks that she wrote for the Spectator in 1956, which, as Conradi notes, fails to indicate Weil’s ‘importance for Murdoch’ (EM xxvii).

20 

F. WHITE

92).19 Her philosophical writing presents these elements of human life as of paramount importance, and her fiction depicts them in conflict. Plato and Weil are key influences on Murdoch’s conceptual profile of this ‘moral psychology’ because love is as central to their perception of reality as to her own. Her image of life as a pilgrimage from the darkness of solipsism towards the light of the Good is imbued both with Plato’s myth of the journey from the fire in the cave to the sun and with Weil’s concepts of ‘attention’ and ‘unselfing’ which Murdoch borrowed and made her own. Plato (albeit ironically) and Weil inform her central credo: Art and morals are […] one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. (EM 215)

This core of Murdoch’s thought is the touchstone against which any claims about her work must be measured. Although Murdoch scholarship focuses strongly on the centrality of love and of art in her moral universe, the less immediately obvious concept of remorse is pivotal for a fuller understanding of her vision which takes account of evil and of her sense of the void. Murdoch’s work authorises an interpretation of the nature of remorse which links it firmly, though paradoxically, to love and which makes remorse not simply an ethical issue but a non-substitutable index of moral sensibility. For remorse, at its lucid best, produces that attention to the reality of the other which Murdoch defines as love. Indeed, apprehended in this way, remorse is, paradoxically, the obverse, or shadow side, of love itself. Remorse serves as a negative image of that essential breaking down of solipsism—unselfing—for which love serves as the positive image. Murdoch’s concept of unselfing is usefully elucidated by David Gordon in Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing. He states that ‘solipsism is for her our moral burden, as unselfing is our moral task’, and defines unselfing as ‘the overcoming of the self-centredness that prevents us from loving others as separate existences’: Murdoch pictures 19  At Caens in 1978, Murdoch said: ‘People often talk of somebody’s philosophy of life, meaning their general outlook. The novel itself of course, the whole world of the novel, is the expression of a world outlook. And one can’t avoid doing this. Any novelist produces a moral world and there’s a kind of world outlook which can be deduced from each of the novels. And of course I have my own philosophy in a very general sense, a kind of moral psychology one might call it rather than philosophy’ (TCHF 92).

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

21

‘this difficult and always imperfect process’ as ‘either a movement out of Plato’s firelit cave of illusion into the truthful light of the sun, or, more severely, [as] the experience of Marsyas flayed by Apollo, a radical unselfing’ (Gordon 1995, 7–8). Murdoch’s novels portray lucid remorse as a flaying experience which may also lead to such movement from illusion to truth.20 Following Plato, Murdoch views falling in love as a potentially unselfing experience. Remorse is the mirror image of that experience, with equal (perhaps greater) potential for unselfing. In The Fire and the Sun, she comments that ‘Falling in love’ […] is for many people the most extraordinary and most revealing experience of their lives, whereby the centre of significance is suddenly ripped out of the self, and the dreamy ego is shocked into awareness of an entirely separate reality. (EM 417)21

The word shocked is central here, as Gaita uses this exact term to express the impact that remorse has upon a person who fully apprehends the effect of his actions upon another. He speaks of ‘the “shock” of remorse’—that aspect of remorse that prompts him to say that it ‘registers an encounter’ (Gaita 2004, xxv) and to explain that remorse teaches us what it is to wrong another […] It discloses the fundamental determinant of our understanding of what it is to be a human being. It is fundamental because it radically transforms what conditions it. What it is to be a friend […] what it is to be a respondent to another’s call to serious-

20  On the importance of the image of flaying in Murdoch’s fiction, see Rowe (2002, 144–51). 21  Cf. ‘Falling in love is for many people their most intense experience […] and most disturbing because it shifts the centre of the world from oneself to another place’ (MGM 16–17). Murdoch’s (frequently criticised) device of having her fictional characters fall in love with one person after another within the same novel—A Severed Head (1961 [2001a]) is a prime example—is a deliberate ploy to show this ‘intense experience’ in action and also to put it into question. She acknowledges that ‘Love in this form may be a somewhat ambiguous instructor’ (EM 417), and her novels show how much self-seeking fantasy can be mixed up with the human tendency to ‘fall in love’. But she is not cynical about its genuine power for good, saying, ‘But a love which […] comes to respect the beloved and […] treat him as an end not a means, may be the most enlightening love of all’ (EM 417). Her novels display both characters whose love is self-delusory and characters who arrive at such an ‘enlightening love’ which truly perceives and attends to the reality of the other.

22 

F. WHITE

ness—these are transformed under the shock of what a human being is disclosed to be in serious remorse. (Gaita 2004, 151)

So through the negatively charged experience of recognising and owning that one has harmed another, as well as through the positively charged experience of falling in love, the agent is shocked out of solipsism, which is the starting place for moral awareness. Murdoch’s novels reveal this educative process in action. Remorse shocks her characters into new attention to the reality of others and thereby forces them into a degree of unselfing. It breaks open the ego. Remorse enables them to perceive evil, and—by antithetical extension— the Good and to realise their distance from it. Remorse is revealed as the dark side of love, a terrible teacher of truth. Other characters, who fail to experience remorse, emerge as lacking in moral awareness, and Murdoch’s fiction also tackles this lacuna, asking what traumatic experience or psycho-­ spiritual deficiency may cause failure to feel remorse. Murdoch thereby reveals remorse as not merely a form of loss, loss of innocence, loss of happiness, but as a moral index: it tests the capacity of her characters for unselfing, for attention, for love. And, uncomfortably, it tests those capacities in her reader too. Apprehension of the crucial role of remorse in human life is central to Murdoch’s moral vision and to her art.

The Place of Theory and the Parameters of This Study ‘All theorising is flight’, says Hugo Belfounder in Murdoch’s debut novel Under the Net (1954). Her aversion to theory is challenged by new responses to Murdoch’s work which exhibit the tension identified by Rowe ‘between her resistance to the theory-centred approach to textual analysis and the relative ease with which […] her novels or philosophy invite it’ (IMAR 2). ‘A good critic is a relaxed polymath’ in Murdoch’s view (EM 24), and remorse theory demands acquaintance with many areas of discourse as Cox acknowledges; ‘the paradoxical, pervasive-yet-­ ungraspable capacity of remorse as a theme [….] is so all-embracing that no single discipline could possibly have a monopoly of access to the material’ (Cox 1999, 12–13). So while the primary perspective of this study is literary criticism and the main part of each chapter consists in close textual readings, it is necessarily multidisciplinary, embracing philosophical,

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

23

psychological, and theological as well as literary critical perspectives on remorse and drawing specifically on developments in trauma theory and Holocaust theory. Murdoch scholarship perceives the necessity of ‘“tactful” close readings that give autonomy to Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy, but also demand theoretically informed perspectives that allow them to be responsive to positions about which she voiced suspicion’, as Rowe remarks (IMAR 9). ‘Tact’ is the term elected by Valentine Cunningham to denote the missing element in Theory’s misconstruings and misreadings, in precisely its tactile failures, its mishandlings of text and textuality […] Tact [is] gentle touch, caring touch, loving touch; appropriate handling, unmanipulative reading. (Cunningham 2002, 155)22

It is, as he says, a form of Weilian attention to, and of Murdochian love for, art. Tactful reading and theory are not mutually exclusive but must work together in counterpoint. Anne Whitehead’s study Trauma Fiction exemplifies the value of this methodological approach: The literary readings in each of the chapters add something, or speak something, that the theory cannot say. Rather than simply illustrating the theory, the readings are an extension of the theory’s own silences. Theory and literature both speak to and displace one another throughout the volume signalling to the reader the complex and supplementary relation between the two discourses. (Whitehead 2004, 4–5)

Remorse is a form of trauma, and this study of Murdoch’s work through the lens of remorse theory follows Whitehead in seeking ‘to remark on a resonance between theory and literature in which each speaks to and addresses the other’ (Whitehead 2004, 4). This study also counterpoints Murdoch’s governing thematic focus on remorse with studies of individual novels within that context, mindful of her observation in a letter to Suguna Ramanathan, that ‘searching for clues in her novels and linking them with each other is not as rewarding as actually studying a given work for itself’ (IMLL viii). The principal material is the texts in which her concern with remorse is most fully realised: the 1960s novel The Nice and the Good, the 1970s novel A Word Child, 22  Cunningham delineates the renaissance and advocates the re-empowerment of ‘tactful’ reading as a method of literary criticism, drawing on Murdoch’s poetics to make his case.

24 

F. WHITE

Murdoch’s last six novels of the late 1980s and 1990s, her radio play, The One Alone (1987), and her soon to be published study of Heidegger.23 Murdoch’s ubiquitous preoccupation with remorse in her ‘moral psychology’ informs close readings of these texts, which draw on her philosophical writings and other novels for additional contributory material, using the ‘cento approach’ advocated by Gordon and illuminatingly employed in Cunningham’s critique of her work. The cento approach is an elegantly economical practice of multi-textual quotation in response to the problem caused by what Elizabeth Dipple terms Murdoch’s ‘awesome prolificacy’ (Dipple 1982, 117), which precludes any fully comprehensive study of her work. Gordon suggests that ‘we are justified in adopting a “cento approach” to a novelist whose individual works so readily merge into an oeuvre’ (Gordon 1995, 121). Although this approach has potential drawbacks, it offers a synoptic view of Murdoch’s fiction which allows a multiplicity of voices from various novels to speak, widening the scope of this study beyond the texts selected for close reading.24 The usefulness of this critical tool can be seen in illustrating the ringing cries of ‘too late’ and ‘if only’ which permeate Murdoch’s fiction. These cries draw the reader into the harrowing experience of the relentlessly immutable nature of remorse, and the cento approach reveals their omnipresence in the following way: from The Nice and the Good, ‘If only I had called him back, or tapped on the window, or gone with him’ (NG 139), ‘If only it hadn’t happened like that, so suddenly and all by chance’ (NG 205); from A Word Child, ‘If only she had not come back to me after that first kiss. If only Anne had not told me that Gunnar knew she was pregnant’ (WC 126), ‘Oh if only it hadn’t happened, if only he hadn’t come back’ (WC 135); from The Philosopher’s Pupil, ‘If only he had, years ago, seized the child in his arms’ (PP 210), ‘Oh if only he had just said no at the start’ (PP 371–2); from The Good Apprentice, ‘If only the telephone hadn’t rung, if only I had not gone away, if only I had left the door 23  This work, unpublished in her lifetime, was until recently only available to Murdoch scholars in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives KUAS6/5/1/4. The first twenty-six pages of the manuscript were published in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (2011) in which Justin Broackes discusses the work in his editorial; the whole work is now forthcoming with Oxford University Press, edited by Broackes. 24  This practice been criticised on the grounds that ‘a cento approach would necessarily have a cramping effect on Murdoch criticism [because it] would limit professional discussion of her work only to those completely familiar with everything she has written’. Author unidentified, Iris Murdoch Newsletter 5 (Summer 1991), 5.

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

25

unlocked, if only I had come back twenty minutes sooner’ (GA 13), and from The Book and the Brotherhood, ‘to go over and over the terrible past, running through every “if only …”, until he had exhausted all these things and been exhausted by them’ (BB 95). As Conradi observes, what Murdoch (like Dickens) ‘created is less a series of novels, more an entire world’ (IMAR xv), and therefore the ‘cento approach’ is a valid critical method that appropriately responds to Murdoch’s kaleidoscopic re-­ presentation of the theme of remorse from ever-changing angles and viewpoints. Chapter 2 demonstrates Murdoch’s relevance to current philosophical debate on the moral basis and ethical significance of remorse. The foundations of both Murdoch’s philosophy and remorse theory are a conception of absolute Good and Evil and a conviction of the centrality of ethics. These parameters create the context in which remorse is delineated as a moral matter. Murdoch’s exploration of potential negative and positive responses to remorse through her creation of characters who commit acts which bring remorse in their train is rooted in a Socratic concern with the fate of evildoers. Her fiction dramatises the impact of remorse as loss of innocence articulated by Gaita: ‘when good people do evil they get something they could not accept as part of the package along with whatever else they may get through their deeds. They get themselves as evildoers’ (Gaita 2004, 231). Her philosophy establishes that remorse functions in dynamic relation with determinism because it is predicated upon responsibility, and with freedom because it is integral to identity. Her fiction enacts her subsequent insight into the destructive effects of succumbing to what may be identified as temporal determinism. Murdoch’s work constructs a dialogue with theorists of remorse and her input is distinctive. Her contribution can best be identified by outlining current issues in remorse theory, which this chapter undertakes. By linking morality with causality Murdoch discloses connections between remorse and the philosophical problem of time; she demonstrates time as the medium of causality, and causality as the medium of remorse. Readings focused on the need to ‘do something about the past’ (NG 120) which is dramatised in The Nice and the Good, and on the apparently excessive use of the term remorse in her late metafictional novel The Philosopher’s Pupil, manifest her presentation of the moral essence of remorse in two contrasting fictional styles. Murdoch’s thinking on remorse participates in what critics have identified as her neo-theology, and Chap. 3 engages with the debate on her

26 

F. WHITE

contribution to the ‘turn to theology’. In Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment Rowe earmarks Murdoch’s oxymoronic ‘Godless theology’ (IMAR 4), and in the introduction to Iris Murdoch and Morality, Rowe and Horner further note that in the three years between these anthologies her ‘theology has been recognised as radical and innovative’ (IMM 9). Originally ‘deemed important because it brought the discipline to the fore after its forced exile by the intellectual preoccupations of postmodernism’ (IMM 9), Murdoch’s theology now proves a forerunner in the ‘turn to theology’ currently evolving from the earlier ‘ethical turn’.25 This development is due to the realisation that ‘an understanding of human nature must include an understanding of belief systems’, something which ‘Murdoch knew […] all along’ (IMM 9). This prescient understanding and the apophatic nature of Murdoch’s theology draw her closer to Derrida than the antagonistic admiration she expresses in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals would suggest.26 A gnomic utterance in Derrida’s On the Name precisely locates Murdoch’s paradoxical theological position: ‘The desire of God, God as the other name of desire, deals in the desert with radical atheism’ (Derrida 1995, 10). In illustration of this enigma, nowhere is Murdoch’s ambivalence more deeply inscribed in her work than when—after saying ‘We need a theology which can continue without God’ (MGM 511)—she chooses for the final words of her major philosophical opus verses from Psalm 139 beginning, ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit, whither shall I flee from thy presence?’ and ending ‘thy right hand shall hold me’ (MGM 512). Murdoch is, in Nicol’s resonant phrase, a ‘persistent and effective chronicler’ of the postmodern loss of God and the wistful yearning this loss entails (Nicol 2004, 31). Remorse proves a focal point of interaction for Murdoch’s critique of Christian doctrine and practice because the demand remorse creates for some means of forgiveness and salvation highlights the difficulty of conceptualising repentance (metanoia) and redemption after loss of belief in the grand narrative of Christianity. The concept of unselfing forms a secular equivalent to metanoia which Murdoch defines and depicts as ‘deep 25  ‘In the modern period religion was ignored, tolerated, repressed, and […] persecuted. But today we witness a massive return of religion, with all of its ambiguity, together with a “return of God to the center of theology” and to certain streams of postmodern thought in general’ (Caputo and Scanlon 1999a, 11). 26  On the apophatic element in Murdoch see Lazenby (2014).

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

27

change’ (MGM 431: WC 200). Her first Ur-text on chronic remorse, A Word Child, in which Weil’s insight into complicity with affliction is highlighted, explores the interrelationship between remorse and repentance and seeks secular forms of salvation and grace. The role of repentance in Murdoch’s analysis of remorse is obliquely elucidated by her two best known novels The Black Prince (1973) and The Sea, The Sea, which have received much critical attention and high acclaim, winning the James Tait Memorial Prize and the Man Booker Prize, respectively. The word remorse occurs eleven times in The Black Prince and nineteen times in The Sea, The Sea, but these novels are not discussed in detail in this study as neither repentance nor remorse are adequately conceptualised and experienced by the first-person narrators, Bradley Pearson and Charles Arrowby. One of the postscripts with which Murdoch meta-­ fictionally frames the pseudo-paratextual The Black Prince suggests that Bradley writes his narrative to ‘distract himself from serious remorse or the effort of repentance’ (BP 407); Charles ironically wonders if the purpose of the egotistic diarising which constructs The Sea, The Sea is ‘to repent of a lifetime of egoism’ (TSTS 1), but in the end admits that his ‘chattering diary is a façade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure’ (TSTS 483). Neither Bradley nor Charles achieves unselfing or attains metanoia. Murdoch constructs these characters as self-deceiving unreliable narrators so that although both pontificate on the concept of remorse and claim to experience it, the ironic perspective of the novels reveals the superficiality of their understanding of remorse. Furthermore, in each case the narrative indicates that neither character experiences a true form of remorse leading to an unselfing attention to the reality of others to whom their egocentric behaviour causes harm. The moral growth these novels purport to portray in the lives of their first-person narrators is rendered so problematical by Murdoch’s multi-layered irony that interpretation of the novels is held open, and the discussion of remorse which occurs in both novels is subject to this ironic perspective. These narrators bandy the concept of remorse about, but both fail to experience the potentially transforming power of remorse. By this means the narratives of The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea each reveal that Bradley and Charles are deluded in thinking that they have been improved by their experiences, as if they had come to apprehend the reality of others as equal to their own, they would be overwhelmed by remorse. Remorse is a catalyst for deep change in those of

28 

F. WHITE

Murdoch’s characters who take on the challenge it presents, but Bradley and Charles fail to do so. The cutting edge of remorse in Murdoch’s moral psychology suggests that Hilary Burde, the humble narrator of the less acclaimed novel A Word Child, who makes no claims for self-improvement, is in fact a more spiritually advanced and morally improved character then either Bradley Pearson or Charles Arrowby. So, paradoxically, Murdoch imparts the essential ethical function of remorse as much by her characters’ failure to engage with remorse in The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea as she does by making remorse a central dynamic in the novels which, for that reason, form the focus of this study. In The Book and the Brotherhood she sets remorse in tension with the Christian doctrines of faith and salvation. Both A Word Child and The Book and the Brotherhood indicate that, despite her antagonism to the metaphysics of Christianity, Murdoch’s neo-theological narratives acknowledge the role of religion in healing remorse through her ironic admixture of Christian and post-Christian spaces and rituals. In Chap. 4, readings of Murdoch’s second Ur-text on remorse, The Good Apprentice, which displays Weil’s analysis of the tendency for the afflicted to be shunned by the unafflicted, and of her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, engage with insights from theoretical discourses of trauma theory and ‘primal wounding’ which are used as hermeneutical tools for interpreting her texts on remorse. Trauma theory illuminates Murdoch’s mythic dramatisation of Edward Baltram’s ordeal by remorse, and the theory of the trauma of the ‘primal wound’ of adoption (another form of loss) relates closely to Murdoch’s investigation into the roots of Lucas Graffe’s lack of remorse, as she raises the question of whether a ‘terrible original never-healing wound’ (GK 82) from childhood might account for ethical autism. Conversely, these close readings of Murdoch’s texts illustrate her innovative and anticipatory contribution to the genre of trauma fiction. Trauma is as disputed a term as remorse, and trauma theory shares common issues with remorse theory in being inherently multidisciplinary. Remorse and trauma both demand an approach unrestricted by theory because specific experience of either must set the agenda for its own study and not be subjected to the agenda of any predetermined theory or methodology. This proviso corresponds to Murdoch’s own ubiquitous stress in her writing on the individual, the particular, the detail, of all persons and situations. Her fiction reveals remorse as being in itself a form of trauma. Trauma theory also resonates with the ethically orientated reader-response Murdoch’s

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

29

texts desire, because ‘trauma theory readjusts the relationship between reader and text, so that reading is restored as an ethical practice’ (Whitehead 2004, 8). It is instrumental in refining critical understanding of Murdoch’s search for the nucleus of the ethical paramountcy she accords to remorse. In Chap. 5 this search continues as the parameters of Murdoch’s exploration paradoxically both widen to encompass the overwhelming sense of guilt which ‘was felt by many people in relation to the Holocaust’ (MGM 362) and narrow to a brooding concentration on the lack of remorse in relation to the Holocaust shown by Heidegger. Murdoch’s three last texts are all imbued with her acute sense of the continuing after-shock of the Holocaust, her engagement with the central dilemma of Holocaust studies—whether speech about the Shoah is ethical or even possible—and her struggle with the conundrum which Heidegger’s life and philosophy presents. Murdoch’s post-Holocaust narratives can be mapped on to what Robin Silbergleid terms ‘a third category of Holocaust literature’ (Silbergleid 2007, 12), and her prescient belief in literature as an ethical force allies her (albeit unconsciously) to ‘the Holocaust narrative’ defined by Daniel Schwarz in Imagining the Holocaust (Schwarz 2000, 56). Her fiction offers an enscripted form of remorse which passes on the memory of the Holocaust. Reading Murdoch’s oeuvre with the concerns focalised by her late work, coupled with reflections from Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics and Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory, makes it retrospectively apparent that the Holocaust is a constant ethical presence in her writing and the source of her generalised profound remorse about the human potential for evil. Murdoch ranks with those for whom, as Omer Bartov expresses it, the Holocaust is […] a crucial event for Western civilization [because] however much we learn about other instances of inhumanity, we cannot avoid the fact that this genocide, in the heart of our civilization, perpetrated by one of its most important nations (with the collaboration or complicity of many others), can never be relegated to secondary place. (Bartov 2000, 6)

The fatal nature of the corporate, politicised remorse which may ensue from this knowledge is mythically enacted in The Message to the Planet by Marcus Vallar who dies of identification with the six million. Yet, paradoxically, Marcus also conjures the figure of Heidegger. Murdoch’s Socratic concern for evildoers and her fascination with Heidegger are deeply inscribed in both The Message to the Planet and

30 

F. WHITE

Jackson’s Dilemma. Indeed, in her last novel Murdoch’s preoccupation with Heidegger is overt and this text forms a counterpoint to her monograph on Heidegger. Murdoch, like Dominick LaCapra, interrogates Being and Time for ‘particularly important features that facilitated Heidegger’s turn to the Nazis as well as dimensions of the text that may be argued to place this turn in question’, and she is among the many intellectuals ‘attempting to understand the way in which Heidegger’s difficult work could fit together with what we know of his political engagement’ (LaCapra 1994, 139 & 146). Heidegger and remorse had become Murdoch’s most pressing concerns. David Morgan’s memoir of Murdoch asks, ‘“Why Heidegger?” “Why did it all come back to Heidegger?” “What had he got?” “Why did he beat you?” (Seven years work—scrapped book.)’ (Morgan 2010, 68). This study offers a potential answer to Morgan’s query by isolating remorse as the key concept in Murdoch’s engagement with Heidegger. Chapter 6 considers biographical factors in Murdoch’s increasing stress on remorse, noting how, according to the editors of her letters, her ‘later years were marked by biting self-reflection’ (LOP 561) and surveying the philosophical ramifications of the importance remorse accrues in her vision. Remorse is here contemplated against transcendence and mysticism which form the contextual background to Murdoch’s philosophy and art. The position of remorse as an ethical index in Murdoch’s thought which forms a pivotal point in her apprehension of morality is demonstrated by the way her work sets anonymous saints and heroes against Luciferian figures such as Heidegger (EM 358). She names dissidents in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (parenthetically, as if to acknowledge their bracketing in the history of her time), and such people flit anonymously through the shadows of her novels, particularly in An Accidental Man. But the culminating point is reached in The One Alone. Murdoch’s creation of a nameless political prisoner in this radio play both pays homage to these unknown people and puts their virtue and courage under the searchlight of remorse, against a transcendental mystical background. Close reading of this neglected text adds a final dimension to Murdoch’s philosophical, spiritual, and psychological repertoire on remorse, as remorse is here paradoxically linked with her ethical and neo-theological conviction that ‘the only genuine way to be good is to be good “for nothing”’ [because] the Good […] excludes the idea of purpose’ (EM 358). The message Murdoch offers through her fiction, that remorse is an ethical matter manifesting that attention to the reality of the other which is

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

31

one face of love—and perhaps a more reliable form than the erotic face of love—is given its fullest extension when the play renders remorse an even more problematical concept by juxtaposing it against the highest spiritual achievement of being good ‘for nothing’. In The One Alone the lifelong contemplation on the ethical and spiritual significance of remorse which Murdoch offers for the moral enlightenment of her readers reaches an ineffable mystical depth. Two linked factors govern the importance this study accords to the theme of remorse in Murdoch’s work. First, her interest in remorse goes beyond philosophical analysis of the concept as a moral index to an engagement with the practical concern of what can be done with the experience of remorse in individual lives. Second, her portrayal of remorse through literature makes the subject accessible to a wide readership, of whom attentive response is demanded. Nancy Schaumburger remarks that ‘All of Murdoch’s fiction seems to pose variations on the same question. If you have committed a sin that is “unforgiveable” by your own standards, how then do you live?’ (Schaumburger 1992, 3). Focusing Murdoch’s novels through the lens of remorse offers answers to this question and builds on Angela Hague’s observation that ‘the theme of survival runs through her work’ (Hague 1984, 60). ‘Could one not die of […] remorse?’ (PP 349), Murdoch wonders, and her fiction asks not only what remorse is, and what it signifies, but also how people survive remorse, whether there can be legitimate psychological and spiritual recovery from remorse, and what means are available to aid that recovery. As such Murdoch’s novels have the double function of challenge and comfort. She teases her readers into thought about remorse, challenging them to contemplate its place in the moral scheme, yet her fiction also offers ‘practical devices’ (IMM 10) for alleviating the distress of remorse in real life, as no reader will be without his or her own share of this most terrible and most common human woe.

References Novels

and

Plays by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch, Iris, Flight from the Enchanter (1956): (London: Vintage 2000a) Murdoch, Iris, The Bell (1958): (London: Vintage, 2004) Murdoch, Iris, A Severed Head (1961): (London: Vintage, 2001a) Murdoch, Iris, The Nice and the Good (1968): (London: Vintage, 2000b) Murdoch, Iris, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970): (London: Vintage, 2001b)

32 

F. WHITE

Murdoch, Iris, An Accidental Man (1971): (London: Vintage, 2003)) Murdoch, Iris, A Word Child (1975): (London: Vintage, 2002a) Murdoch, Iris, Henry and Cato (1976): (London: Vintage, 2002b) Murdoch, Iris, The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983): (London: Vintage, 1983) Murdoch, Iris, The Good Apprentice (1985): (London: Vintage 2000c) Murdoch, Iris, The Book and the Brotherhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987) Murdoch, Iris, The Message to the Planet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989) Murdoch, Iris, The Green Knight (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993)

Other Works

by

Iris Murdoch

Murdoch, Iris, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Bowes and Bowes) Murdoch, Iris, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, ed. by Yozo Muroya and Paul Hullah (Okayama: University Education Press, 1998)

Murdoch Criticism Antonaccio, Maria, A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Araújo, Sofia de Melo and Fátima Vieira, ed., Iris Murdoch, Philosopher Meets Novelist (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011) Browning, Gary, Why Iris Murdoch Matters (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018a) Dipple, Elizabeth, Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen, 1982) Düringer, Eva-Maria, ‘Murdoch and Weil’, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 306–317 Fiddes, Paul, Iris Murdoch and the Others: A Writer in Dialogue with Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2022) Gordon, David J., Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing (Colombia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995) Griffin, Gabriele, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 1993) Hague, Angela, Iris Murdoch’s Comic Vision (Pennsylvania: Susquehanna University Press, 1984) Lazenby, Donna J., A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) Leeson, Miles ed., Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (Devizes: Sabrestorm, 2019) Lovibond, Sabina, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2011) Morgan, David, With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (Kingston: Kingston University Press, 2010)

1  A MEETING OF MINDS: IRIS MURDOCH AND THE THEORY OF REMORSE 

33

Nicol, Bran, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Oulton, Lucy, ‘Loving by Instinct: Environmental Ethics in Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good and Nuns and Soldiers’, Études britanniques contemporaines, 59 (2020) Oulton, Lucy, ‘Nature and the Environment’ in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 453–467 Panizza, Silvia Caprioglio, The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil (London: Routledge, 2022) Rowe, Anne, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2002) Rowe, Anne, Iris Murdoch, Writers and Their Work Series (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019) Schaumburger, Nancy E., ‘The Conversion of Hilary Burde in A Word Child’, Iris Murdoch Newsletter, 6 (Summer 1992), 3–4 Seale, Carey, ‘The Maze of Murdoch’, review of Iris Murdoch: A Life, Yale Review of Books, 4:3 (2001), http:/www.yale.edu/yrb/fall01/review07.htm White, Frances, ‘“Art is for life’s sake ... or else it is worthless”: the Innovatory Influence of Iris Murdoch’, in Kırca and Okuroğlu (2010a), 27–40 White, Frances, ‘“The world is just a transit camp”: Diaspora in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch’, Iris Murdoch Review, 2 (2010d), 6–13 White, Frances, Becoming Iris Murdoch (Kingston: Kingston University Press, 2014) White, Frances, ‘Anti-Nausea: Iris Murdoch and the Natural Goodness of the Natural World’, Études britanniques contemporaines, 59 (2020)

Other Works Adamson, Jane, Richard Friedman and David Parker, eds., Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998) Adamson, Jane, ‘Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral Philosophy’, in Adamson, Friedman and Parker (1998), 84–112 Auden, W.H., Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 (London: Faber & Faber, 1966) Baron, Marcia, ‘Remorse and Agent-regret’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XIII (1988), 259–81 Bartov, Omer, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Baudrillard, Jean, The Illusion of the End (1992), trans. by Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) Caputo, John D., and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999a)

34 

F. WHITE

Collini, Stefan, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Conradi, Peter J., Family Business: A Memoir (Bridgend: Seren Books 2019) Cox, Murray, ed., Remorse and Reparation (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publications, 1999) Cunningham, Valentine, Reading After Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) Derrida, Jacques, On the Name, trans. by David Wood, John P. Leavey and Ian McLeod, ed. by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) Gaita, Raimond, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) Gibson, Andrew, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) Gorelick, Kenneth, ‘Wielder of Many Swords: Remorse and its Transmutations’, Psychotherapy Patient, 5 (1989), 219–234 Hederman, Mark Patrick, The Haunted Inkwell: Art and our Future (Dublin: Columba Press, 2001) LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) Proeve, Michael, Remorse: its description and its interpersonal effects, 2001, University of South Australia http://arrow.unisa.edu.au:8081/1959.8/25016 Proeve, Michael, and Steven Tudor, Remorse: Psychological and Jurisprudential Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Rosthal, Robert, ‘Moral Weakness and Remorse’, Mind, New Series, 76:304 (October 1967), 576–9 Schwarz, Daniel, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2000) Silbergleid, Robin, ‘“Treblinka, A Rather Musical Word”: Carole Maso’s Post-­ Holocaust Narrative’, Modern Fiction Studies, 53:1 (Spring 2007), 12 Thompson, William Irwin, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin 1916 (Massachusetts: Lindisfarne Press, 1967) Tudor, Steven, Compassion and Remorse: Acknowledging the Suffering Other (Leuven: Peeters, 2001) Warnock, Mary, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics (London: Duckbacks, 2001) Weil, Simone, First and Last Notebooks, trans. by Richard Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970): French editions, Cahiers (1970) and La Connaissance surnaturelle (1950) Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge, 2002): French edition, La pesanteur et la grâce (1947) Whitehead, Anne, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) Zoch, L.N., ‘Remorse and Regret: A Reply to Phillips and Price’, Analysis (1986), 54–57

CHAPTER 2

‘If Only’ and ‘Too Late’: Remorse, Philosophy, and Time in The Nice and the Good and The Philosopher’s Pupil

In what ways does moral philosophy claim to be able to illuminate the nature and concept of remorse? —Cox (1999, 127)

Murdoch’s Dialogue with Theorists of Remorse Murdoch’s philosophy and remorse theory share axiomatic roots. While some theorists are clearly indebted to her ‘moral psychology’, Murdoch’s depiction of remorse in her novels both illustrates and advances current philosophical debate on the moral basis and ethical significance of remorse. Her literary presentation of remorse makes this debate widely accessible as fiction readers far outnumber students of remorse theory, illustrating her contention that ‘the novel, that great sensitive mirror, or screen, or field of forces, is still one of the most articulate expressions of the dilemmas of its age’ (EM 221). She also points to the fact that ‘Literature is read by many and various people, philosophy by very few’ (EM 4). Her distinctive contribution to this field lies in defining the relationship of morality to causality by means of an engaging fictional exploration of the connection between remorse and time. Close readings of two novels, The Nice and the Good and The Philosopher’s Pupil, reveal the development of Murdoch’s concern with remorse as a central moral issue as she moves on from this exploration of the philosophical connection between time and remorse, to a playful deployment of remorse as a philosophically slippery and misused © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8_2

35

36 

F. WHITE

concept, challenging her readers to discriminate true from false conceptualisations of remorse. In her discussion of the moral life in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Murdoch quotes the phrase ‘Conscience is acquaintance with ourselves’, extending the sentence with ‘and our remorseful thought that we might have been another, better, man’ (MGM 66). This (unacknowledged) phrase comes from Schopenhauer’s On the Basis of Morality, a text included in the Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archive: the reproaches of conscience primarily and ostensibly concern what we have done, but really and ultimately what we are; for our deeds alone afford us conclusive evidence of what we are, since they are related to our character as the symptoms to the disease. Thus guilt and merit must also lie in this esse, in what we are. What we either esteem and love or despise and hate in others is not something changeable and transient, but enduring and existing once for all; it is what they are […] Therefore how could guilt and merit lie anywhere else than in what we are? Conscience is the acquaintance with ourselves which becomes ever more complete, it is the register of deeds that becomes more and more filled up. (Schopenhauer 1965, 195–6)1

The context of this quotation and Murdoch’s underlinings reveal Schopenhauer’s influence on the essentially ontological nature of virtue in Murdoch’s moral philosophy and disclose her thinking about the interrelationship between conscience and remorse. The dynamic thrust of Murdoch’s philosophical writing is the imperative to become a better person through ‘the continuing daily moral work of the soul fighting its way between appearance and reality and good and evil’ (MGM 356); the source of remorse is self-admitted culpability for failing to become better because one has chosen evil over good. Notwithstanding her unexalted view of human nature, ‘human beings are naturally selfish’ and ‘we are what we seem to be, transient mortal creatures subject to necessity and chance’ (EM 364), Murdoch is convinced that ‘it is the fundamental task of each person to make himself good’ (MGM 362). She believes that ‘much of the awfulness [of Macbeth] lies not only in Macbeth’s wickedness but in his remorse. (“I could have done otherwise” recognised as true)’ (MGM 104): the reproach of Macbeth’s 1  IML 1005. Schopenhauer’s italics, Murdoch’s underlinings. Her copy is undated but a letter to David Hicks of 3 November 1945 indicates that Schopenhauer made an early impact on her (IMWW 251).

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

37

conscience thus concerns what he is, in Schopenhauer’s terms, which is revealed to him by what he has done. Murdoch’s characters gain similar self-insight through remorse. As such her fiction dramatises the important role remorse plays in her ‘moral psychology’, and, in doing so, it offers her readers a mirror in which their own moral experience of remorse can be reflected. Analysis of how and why the concept of remorse is intrinsic to moral value is embedded in remorse theory. Remorse is intelligibly delineated as a moral matter only in the context of the philosophical primacy of ethics as, without ethical absolutes, remorse is reduced to its emotive, psychological component which lacks a moral edge. Murdoch innovatively reinstates ethics at the centre of the philosophical enterprise. She finds no other point to ‘knot the thread’, using Kierkegaard’s image (MGM 186). Against all forms of logical positivism, linguistic analysis, phenomenology, historicism, existentialism, structuralism, and deconstructionism, she maintains that ‘philosophy must be moral philosophy’ (MGM 213). For Murdoch, ‘there is something about moral value that goes jusqu’au bout. It must go all the way, to the base, to the top, it must be everywhere […] It adheres to the central concept of being human and cannot be detached; and we may express this by saying that it is not accidental, does not exist contingently, is above being’ (MGM 426). Her own philosophy, informed and endorsed by her ‘two mentors’ Plato and Kant (MGM 469), is saturated in a passionate, proselytising conviction of the absolute importance of morality.2 The seminal texts on remorse by Stern, Gaita, Cox, Tudor, Proeve, and Cordner corroborate the moral framework that governs Murdoch’s philosophical perspective. They work within the ineluctable assumption of the absolute importance of good and evil, and Murdoch’s fear ‘that the attempt to be good may turn out to be meaningless, or at best something vague and not very important, or turn out to be as Nietzsche described it’ (EM 359), is paralleled by Gaita’s fundamental

2  ‘Philosophy is moral philosophy as Kant and Plato thought’ (MGM 216). ‘Kant’, Murdoch says, ‘finds it perfectly clear and primary that we all recognise the absolute call of duty, know the difference between good and bad’, and ‘Plato makes the assumption that value is everywhere, that the whole of life is on a moral scale, all knowledge is a moral quest, and the mind seeks reality and desires the good, which is a transcendent source of spiritual power, to which we are related through the idea of truth’ (MGM 56). In Murdoch’s opinion these perspectives are not superseded by twentieth-century developments in philosophical methods or mores.

38 

F. WHITE

maxim: ‘There are some things it is evil even to believe, and that good and evil may be an illusion is one of them’ (Gaita 2004, 22). Murdoch’s recurrent concern with remorse derives from her investigation of evil which runs complementarily with her study of the Good.3 As such her philosophy retrospectively engages with Gaita’s pioneering study of conceptualising good and evil which finds remorse ‘a central and inexpungeable determinant of what it is for something to be a moral matter’ (Gaita, 2004, 61). This is because ‘Remorse as the recognition of the reality of evil—evil done and evil suffered—is the recognition of evil as sui generis. It is fundamental amongst the ethical determinants of human individuality’ (Gaita 2004, 78). Gaita’s central premise, that remorse ‘is an astonished encounter with the reality of the ethical’ (Gaita 2004, xiv), is based on his (Schopenhauerian) discussion of good and evil which emphasises remorse ‘because it is fundamental to an understanding of the ethical determinant of what we are. What it can mean to do evil to another is basic to our understanding of others and of ourselves […] Remorse is internal to the deepest of the ways we speak of the “reality” of evil’ (Gaita 2004, 189). Two features of remorse encompassed by Gaita’s resonant phrase, ‘an astonished encounter with the reality of the ethical’, are demonstrated in Murdoch’s novels. First, a sense of shocked astonishment is the hallmark of her remorseful characters. Edward Baltram in The Good Apprentice and Hilary Burde in A Word Child, for example, are in a state of prolonged shock at the permanent effect of their momentary, unintentional actions which result in the deaths of Mark Wilsden, and Anne and Kitty Jopling, respectively. The recurrent thought patterns of Murdoch’s remorse-ridden characters embrace the tormented self-questioning which Gaita’s analysis of ‘our sense of what it means to wrong someone’ centralises: ‘“My God what have I done? How could I have done it?” Those are the typical accents of remorse’ (Gaita 2004, xxi). Second, Murdoch’s emphasis on alterity corresponds to the element in Gaita’s formula for remorse which is a sense of awakenedness to the reality of the other as a co-equal centre of being to oneself. Recognition of, and attention to, the equal reality of the other is 3  For an account of the importance of evil in Murdoch’s moral philosophy, see Horner (2010), Widdows (2009), Pachau (2007), and Read (forthcoming 2024). Horner notes that Murdoch explores ‘the possibility that evil is not just the absence of good, but a dynamic force to be recognized and rejected by those pursuing moral goodness’, and ‘how far, in an increasingly secular society, “evil” could remain a valid construct’ (IMM 71).

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

39

the defining nature of love in Murdochian ethics: ‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’ (EM 215). Remorse can break open the egocentric self to the reality of the other, just as forcefully as falling in love. The cruel twist in remorse is that this disclosure of the reality of the other comes too late as, ironically, it is only the destruction of the other that reveals this reality. Also the philosophical understanding of remorse manifest in Murdoch’s fiction shares Gaita’s concern with the Socratic position on remorse. For the ethical basis of remorse is not solely on the grounds of the irreparable damage done to the ‘victim’, but also, and importantly, because of the damage suffered by the ‘agent’ through his own wrong-doing. This complementary perspective on remorse which is the second key to its ethical importance is rooted in the Ancient Greek insight that ‘the worst evil that a person could suffer was to be an evildoer’, so ‘that an evildoer is miserable and pitiable just because he is an evildoer’ (Gaita 2004, 61). Murdoch’s agreement with this Socratic position is clear. As novelist, she draws her readers into experiencing what it is like to be an evildoer, to have destroyed another person: as philosopher, she discusses the ‘deathly pain, such as people experience […] in vain remorse for some terrible act’ (MGM 140) and what can be done with the mind when a person is ‘crippled by awful guilt’ (MGM 323). Murdoch’s compassion is exercised by the mindset of evildoers as well as by the suffering of victims. Likewise, her novels demonstrate Gaita’s claim that evildoers become, in effect, their own victims. His Socratic insight reveals ‘that an evildoer always gets more than he bargained for, and that when good people do evil they get something they could not accept as part of the package along with whatever else they may get through their deeds. They get themselves as evildoers’ (Gaita 2004, 231). This is a fruitful perspective for literature; it applies to, among others, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Dostoevsky’s Rashkolnikov, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Henry James’s Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, a novel which deeply affected Murdoch. 4 Kate’s agonised utterance which concludes James’s depiction of remorse summarises the predicament of morally self-aware evildoers, ‘We shall never be again as we were!’ (James 2008, 553). Murdoch’s fiction develops this theme of irreversible new self-knowledge in The Philosopher’s Pupil in which she reveals the ‘permanently changed reality of [Tom MacCaffrey’s] unhappy being, tortured by 4  ‘I have just finished The Wings of the Dove, which broke my heart, as most of his novels do’. Letter to David Hicks, 4 October 1944 (IMWW 214).

40 

F. WHITE

yearning and remorse’ (PP 475) and in The Good Apprentice in which Edward Baltram’s life is ‘profoundly and permanently altered’ (GA 7) by his recollection of ‘his lost self, his happy self who did not know that his life was irrevocably smashed and over’ (GA 11). Murdoch believes that such apprehension of lost virtue and corresponding recognition of the self as evildoing can induce a moral awakening of a painful but ethically productive nature, depending upon the use made of the unwelcome knowledge. Chronic remorse and lucid remorse must be clearly distinguished, as the quality of the remorse experienced crucially determines whether an evildoer grows in moral stature as a result of, or is destroyed by, his evildoing. (Conrad’s Lord Jim is an example of the former; Shakespeare’s Macbeth of the latter.) Murdoch’s fiction dissects remorsefulness to disclose how commonly genuine sorrow and contrition are combined with, and corrupted by, hurt pride, self-pity, and resentment. Pure remorse is rare and difficult, and Murdoch’s characters struggle, with varying degrees of success, to transform chronic destructive remorse into lucid constructive remorse. Her fictional portrayals of remorse variously illustrate the potential pitfalls Gaita identifies: ‘Remorse is, amongst other things, a disciplined remembrance of the moral significance of what we did. It must be disciplined if it is to avoid self-deceiving re-descriptions and the corruptions peculiar to remorse itself—self-­ abasement, morbidity, and many others’ (Gaita 2004, 59). Lucid remorse counters egocentrism because ‘the self that discovers itself in remorse and the self that seeks only its reductively conceived interests are incommensurable’ (Gaita 2004, 78), and ‘self-pity excludes the proper recognition of the harm the evildoer has done himself’ (Gaita 2004, 63). To look steadily at what one has done, to own the harm done to the victim and equally recognise the self-harm wreaked by one’s evildoing, and to hold these perceptions without shrinking from such knowledge require a clarity of moral vision and depth of ethical maturity which tries the self to the utmost. Theorists of remorse share with Murdoch the assumptions that human beings are personally responsible for their choices of action and that consciously owning such personal responsibility is a measure of moral stature. Remorse is a key feature of such ownership of responsibility, so the integral conjunction of remorse and responsibility is the initial key to the ethical importance of remorse. The anthology Remorse and Reparation, ‘a first step towards an understanding of remorse and its related topics’, identifies the role of remorse in moral philosophy from variant perspectives (Cox 1999, 7). Douglas Cairns summarises the relationship between remorse

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

41

and responsibility: ‘Remorse […] is predicated upon responsibility, and holding people responsible for their actions is at the heart of the reactive attitudes in play […] one accepts one’s own responsibility whilst acknowledging the legitimacy of other’s criticism, and thus declares oneself an acceptable moral interlocutor’ (Cox 1999, 172). Bjarne Jacobsen and Alice Theilgaard, taking a Kierkegaardian view of remorse, state that ‘remorse arises when the self in freedom chooses itself and its story in relation to the Other—the value of man’ (Cox 1999, 94), and James Gilligan further links remorse to moral integrity: remorse has almost universally been considered to be an index as to whether the person truly repents of his or her actions, and is fully committed to changing […] judges, juries, priests, forensic psychiatrists, journalists, and the general public often speak of it as though it were among the most centrally important indices of a person’s moral character and the state of his or her soul. (Cox 1999, 33)

The claim that remorse is a crucial ethical issue depends on these three factors as it is the predication of remorse upon responsibility and the connection of remorse with ‘relation to the Other’ which leads to conceptualising remorse as an index of moral character. Remorse is crucial to Murdoch’s ethics because it necessarily interacts with the concepts of determinism and freedom. Specifically, remorse counteracts lax submission to determinism which Murdoch targets because it nullifies personal responsibility. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she juxtaposes the concepts of remorse and responsibility in her argument against new forms of determinism: Determinism is always reappearing in new forms since it satisfies a deep human wish: to give up, to get rid of freedom, responsibility, remorse, all sorts of personal unease, and surrender to fate and the relief of ‘it could not be otherwise’. (MGM 190)

Remorse involves knowing that it could have been otherwise and accepting responsibility for the fact that it was not, so lucid remorse indicates a refusal to give up or surrender to fate or to any other extenuating explanations of one’s conduct. A biographical aside: Murdoch’s insight into this position came from harsh personal experience. Having in the early 1940s treated her friends

42 

F. WHITE

Philippa (née Bosanquet) and Michael Foot with a cruelly selfish disregard, Murdoch wrote to Philippa years later, on 10 October 1946: ‘When one has behaved as I then behaved to two people one loves the hurt and sense of guilt go very deep […] I’ve realised those events fully as things that I did […] I have lived through them again, seeing my own responsibility’ (LOP 83). Based on such painful perceptions from her own life, Murdoch’s philosophy emphasises, and her fiction dramatises, the difficulty of moral exertion against capitulation to determinism for naturally weak, selfish, and lazy human nature. She balances the demand for such moral effort against the acknowledgement that there are determining circumstances, historical, sociological, and psychological, which do affect the degrees of our freedom to choose our actions. Her analysis of ‘the charm of determinism’ displays her double perception of the human predicament: We are tempted to imagine an alien material which we cannot transcend and where morality and personal responsibility, as it were, stop. Here a general theory reinforces our natural sloth, our weariness and covert despair. Of course, in law courts and in ordinary life, we learn how to forgive people (including ourselves) as victims of forces (psychological or social forces for instance) which are ‘beyond control’. But these are properly judgements in individual cases, not instances or evidences of a general human state which must be taken to be beyond challenge. (MGM 479)

She locates this tension between freedom and determinism as the crux of her philosophical enquiry: ‘The metaphysics of morals has its own baffling enigmas. Scientifically, psychologically, we are determined, but spiritually we are free’ (MGM 446). Remorse theory identifies remorse as a ‘response to […] moral and ethical concerns’ which ‘maintains the reality of unique responsibility’ (Stern 1989, 1–2), and in the dialogue between determinism and freedom which governs Murdoch’s ‘moral psychology’ remorse acts as an elemental testing agent which indicates acceptance of personal accountability. Remorse theorists Gaita, Tudor, and Cordner all nominate Murdoch as a source of wisdom re remorse and build on her work, and the vital role that Murdoch’s literary portrayal of remorse plays in theoretical debate is evident in Alan Thomas’s ‘Philosophical Analysis of Remorse’ in Remorse

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

43

and Reparation.5 Thomas uses The Good Apprentice to demonstrate his philosophical perspective which aims both to ‘deflect […] a scepticism which treats remorse as an obsolete concept only appreciable from a religious standpoint which has no secular counterpart’ and also to ‘build up a case for the distinctive conceptual role of remorse, separable from the concepts of guilt and shame’ (Cox 1999, 128). His argument rests on the ‘distinction between a morality of standards’—standards which produce guilt and shame in those who fall short of them—and ‘an ethic of value’, which is a deeper philosophical concept (Cox 1999, 129–30). ‘Remorse, by contrast with either shame or guilt, seems to involve the destruction of value rather than the infringement of standards’, and ‘the fact that other people are the paradigm locations of value is’, Thomas suggests, ‘part of the deep significance that we attach to remorse’ (Cox 1999, 130). The focus of remorse on ‘other people’ connects with Levinas’s stress on the Other as the primary concern of ethics, and it consolidates the connection between remorse and Murdoch’s (Weilian) insistence on attention to the reality of the other as the substance of love. The intrinsically ethical nature of remorse is based on this link between apprehension of the other and the experience of (true, lucid) remorse. The Good Apprentice provides a case-study for the distinctive conceptual (and secular) role of remorse, as the novel displays the two key features of remorse that indicate its essentially moral nature which Thomas’s philosophical analysis isolates. First, remorse ‘necessarily involves an internal authority’ (Cox 1999, 131)—one is not remorseful only when one is accused by others—and second, experiencing remorse is evidence of ‘a fundamental capacity to enter into ethical relations’, a deeper moral position than ‘mere identification with rules’ (Cox 1999, 132). Second, the relationship between remorse and reparation, vexed by the necessarily irreparable nature of situations sufficiently grave to elicit true remorse, means that ‘demand for reparation seems to have a solely symbolic or expressive role’ (Cox 1999, 132), a point that Murdoch’s novel perfectly illustrates: The attitude of mind called for by the experience of remorse is focused not on an action, but on reflection; on an attitude of contemplation of the damage done […] well expressed [by] Murdoch, in a number of novels, such as 5  Cordner acknowledges, ‘I am greatly indebted to the important work of Raimond Gaita and Iris Murdoch’ (Cordner 2002, viii).

44 

F. WHITE

The Good Apprentice […] Murdoch’s fascination with remorse explains a recurrent structural device in her novels: the remorseful individual gains release from his […] emotion by living through a structurally analogous scene to that of the original trauma. (Cox 1999, 132)

Thomas, in common with other remorse theorists, concludes that the category of remorse is philosophically non-substitutable, because as ‘part of an ethic of care for that which we value, it seems indicative of a fundamental form of ethical orientation […] central to the response we expect from those who have destroyed value’, and therefore remorse ‘does not seem a plausible candidate for replacement or revision in our ordinary moral thought’ (Cox 1999, 133). Murdoch’s perennial literary re-­imaginings of the concept and characteristics of remorse indicate that she likewise finds this very specific moral category indispensable. Her fiction not only discloses the ethical significance of remorse but also discusses ways of ‘gaining release’ from its painful psychological grip, as her novels pose the question of how one can recover from remorse and explore a variety of potential recourses. Murdoch conceives of human beings as essentially ‘benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy’ (EM 293). She therefore portrays people as not easily capable of moral growth and few of her characters are capable of meeting the severe test imposed by remorse. The ego shrinks from the suffering imposed by such stark apprehension of reality and hides behind any available alternatives, blaming others or fate in general, succumbing to determinism, or wallowing in self-pity. Remorse is thus a test case of moral temperament. Paradoxically, abject chronic remorse which blocks any further move of mind or spirit, chaining the evildoer to the one action, and to the one time of their life when that action was performed, acts as a last self-protective resort. This obstructive form of remorse ensnares the sufferer in a recurrently retarding frame of mind, which Murdoch powerfully depicts in A Word Child. As a philosopher, Murdoch is demandingly absolute; morality and personal responsibility have no stopping place. Goodness, perfection, are the desiderata, nothing less will do, no excuses are acceptable, the ‘fat relentless ego’ (EM 342) must be vanquished. As an artist she is both wryly realistic about human moral capacities and optimistic concerning the perpetual resurgence of moral sensibility in human life: ‘The human scene is one of moral failure combined with the remarkable continued return to an

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

45

idea of goodness as unique and absolute’ (MGM 427). Murdoch sets the concepts of freedom and determinism against one another in the individual cases which the novel is so well able to portray, in contradistinction to philosophy which deals with instances or evidences of a general human state. Her philosophy robustly confronts and challenges: her fiction can more gently explore and enlighten. For example, in A Word Child, Hilary Burde comes from a disadvantaged background which could potentially be seen as a deterministic explanation for his destructive actions, but the novel challenges simplistic explanations, requiring more incisive interpretations of Hilary’s attitudes and behaviour.6 More enigmatic examples are the revelation at the conclusion of A Fairly Honourable Defeat that Julius King, who wreaks havoc with other people’s lives, is a concentration camp survivor and the hint in The Green Knight that Lucas Graffe may be psycho-­spiritually damaged by his adoption. Murdoch’s overtly didactic approach in her philosophy yields to an open-ended authorial stance in her fiction where readers are left to draw their own conclusions. The novels themselves, not an omniscient author, pose the questions. Hilary may possibly change and move towards the good through the events of the story (he will not be perfect but he may be slightly improved)7; Julius seems cast in stone and likely to continue as a literally remorse-less agent of destruction; Lucas remains a baffling figure to readers as well as to other characters in the novel. The non-didactic tone of Murdoch’s fiction disguises a palpable design upon her readers; she wants them to apprehend through her art the moral message that ‘the struggle against evil, the love of what is good, the inspired enjoyment of beauty, the discovery and perception of holiness, continues all the time in the privacy of human souls’ (MGM 458).8 She acknowledges that this insight is difficult for art to communicate because it lacks overt dramatic quality: 6  Murdoch repudiates a simplistic determinism which would claim that Hilary cannot help what he becomes because he is predestined by bad childhood experience, but nonetheless her detailed accounts of loveless childhoods evince compassionate understanding of the residual damage done which makes any pilgrimage towards the good so much harder a road for people thus deprived. 7  ‘What of the command “Be ye therefore perfect?” Would it not be more sensible to say “Be ye therefore slightly improved?”’ (EM 350). 8  Rebecca Painter notes that Murdoch’s fiction calls for ‘the active reader, who revisits Murdoch’s novel for the purpose of understanding its truth, not simply the reader who reads just for cursory knowledge’ (Tymieniecka 2006, 233).

46 

F. WHITE

The whole of morality involves the discipline of desire which leads to instinctive good action. This slow discipline, this gradual shift of inclination, is less visible, and indeed less interesting, than the dramatic head on encounters between duty and interest, or duty and passion, which can be so effectively displayed and explored in literature. (MGM 384)

But one of her distinctive literary achievements is finding ways of dramatising this gradual shift from one mental and spiritual outlook to another as her novels display and explore the slow discipline that her moral philosophy propounds.

Time, Identity, and Remorse Time, morality, and remorse are interlinked because time is the medium of causality, and causality is the medium of remorse: remorse is felt when responsibility is still owned for an action now in the past. Time is intrinsic to the philosophical problem of identity, as responsibility and concomitant remorse are rooted in the continuity of identity through the passing of time. Murdoch’s reflections on time and identity offer a pithy summation of remorse: ‘I did something very wrong long ago. And I can’t get away from it ever’ (WC 108). Here she targets the fact that remorse is a problem of identity in the present, caused by actions in the past. Conradi notes that ‘“what to do about the past” is one great theme of Murdoch’s novels’ (S&A 182), and Nicol conceptualises her work as retrospective because of ‘the preoccupation in Iris Murdoch’s fiction with the way the past makes its mark upon us, haunting us and eluding our attempts to grasp it’ (Nicol 2004, xv). He differentiates her from contemporaneous post-war novelists because ‘the strange power of [her] novels comes from the way they address the question of the past’ from a concern with the personal history of individuals rather than with history itself (Nicol 2004, xvi). Murdoch’s focus on the personal derives from her concern with the moral life, in which remorse both acts as a testing agent and is instrumental in the process of moral change. Her novels portray this moral change as related to her characters’ perception of time and also as occurring over time. They reveal the moral dimension she accords to time by exploring the problematical nature of past and present in individual lives through the experience of remorse. Interconnection of time and ethics in Murdoch’s ‘moral psychology’ hinges on the key concept of causality which she elucidates in The Black

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

47

Prince. The first-person narrator, Bradley Pearson, remarks ‘there are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave “anyhow” and then expect to resume life where we left off. The wicked regard time as discontinuous, the wicked dull their sense of natural causality. The good feel being as a total dense mesh of interconnections. My lightest whim can affect the whole future’ (BP 125). He further reflects that ‘human wickedness is sometimes the product of a sort of conscious leeringly evil intent […] But more usually it is the product of a semi-­deliberate inattention, a sort of swooning relationship to time’ (BP 189). These passages are densely packed with Murdoch’s central concerns. Complex concepts of the good, wickedness, causality, continuousness, interconnectedness, and inattention are all drawn together by this ‘swooning relationship to time’ in which most human beings pass their lives. Her moral pilgrimage involves disciplining the attention to direct it towards the good, which involves adjusting and amending one’s relationship to time, in particular to the present moment. This reorientation is the work of perceiving reality, of which, as T.S. Eliot observes, humankind cannot bear very much. Murdoch refers frequently to the puzzling concept of the present moment and to its significance as the point of intersection of time with morality: ‘We live in the present, this strange familiar and yet mysterious continuum which is so difficult to describe. This is what is nearest and it matters what kind of place it is’ (MGM 495). She emphasises the continuity of time; the phrase ‘no spare encapsulated moments’ from The Black Prince is paralleled by a crisp directive in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: ‘Every moment matters, there is no time off’ (MGM 484), and the point is reiterated throughout: ‘I would regard the (daily, hourly, minutely) attempted purification of consciousness as the central and fundamental “arena” of morality’ (MGM 293); ‘At every moment we are “attending” or failing to attend. (“What, can’t we ever rest?!” There are different kinds of resting.)’ (MGM 296); ‘We are all the time building up our value world and exercising, or failing to exercise, our sense of truth in the daily hourly minutely business of apprehending, or failing to apprehend, what is real and distinguishing it from illusion’ (MGM 304); ‘(“But are you saying that every single second has a moral tag?” Yes, roughly.)’ (MGM 495). Time is integral to the cornerstone of Murdoch’s philosophy because it is formative in the mechanism of the moral life which ‘is not intermittent or specialised, […] not a peculiar separate area of our existence’, because ‘morality is and ought to be connected with the whole of our being’ (MGM 495).

48 

F. WHITE

The difficulty of inhabiting the present moment is synoptically voiced by characters in Murdoch’s fiction. John Ducane in The Nice and the Good declares, ‘We are human beings […] We can’t just live in the present’ (NG 80); in The Message to the Planet Franca Sheerwater wonders, ‘Yet what was it living in the present, could it be done, was it what she was doing now?’ (MP 319), and Alfred Ludens in his anxiety finds the present ‘a place where he certainly could not live’ (MP 354). But Murdoch perceives virtue as fully inhabiting the present moment, which is closely connected to goodness in her moral psychology: ‘Living in the present: I really see the face of my friend, the playing dog, Piero’s picture’ (MGM 301). Weilian attention, ‘the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent’ (EM 327), is the key concept here and vision the ‘dominant metaphor’ (MGM 462).9 The connection of remorse to the interdependence Murdoch perceives between goodness and attention to the present moment is clearly illustrated in The Book and the Brotherhood, where she sets up a dialogue on the issue between Jenkin Riderhood, one of her late ‘figures of good’ (Ramanathan 1990, 2) and his nice but less good friend, Gerard Hernshaw. Jenkin tells Gerard to ‘live in the present’ (BB 120), but Gerard ‘can never find the present’ (BB 128). Jenkin’s lack of egoism, ‘the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self’ (EM 385), contrasts with Gerard’s self-preoccupation and Murdoch illustrates the gulf between their moral dispositions by their very different experiences of going for a walk:

9  This major topic can only be glanced at here through a cento approach to Murdoch’s multiple texts on the subject: ‘Is not the metaphor of vision almost irresistibly suggested to anyone who, without philosophical prejudice wishes to describe the situation? Is it not the natural metaphor?’ (EM 316–7); ‘Where virtue is concerned we often apprehend more than we clearly understand and grow by looking’ (EM 324); ‘Plato here draws attention to the dominance of sight over the other senses. We also, in a natural metaphor, “see” (perceive) non-visual forms of beauty […] the naturalness of using visual images to express spiritual truths […] the visual so eloquently mirrors the moral’ (MGM 15); ‘the largely explicable ambiguity of the word “see” here conveys the essence of the concept of the moral’ (MGM 177); ‘Perception is both evaluation and inspiration even at the level of “just seeing” […] Vision is the dominant sense’ (MGM 329); ‘The activity and imagery of vision is at the centre of human existence’ (MGM 461); ‘Speaking of morality in terms of cognition, the imagery of vision, which is everywhere in our speech, seems natural. Sight is the dominant sense, our world, source of deep imagery and thought-modes, is a visual world, our idea of the world is of a visual world’ (MGM 462).

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

49

while Gerard walked wrapped in the great dark cloak of his thoughts, Jenkin walked through a great collection or exhibition of little events or encounters. Trees […] an immense variety of dogs […] rubbish tips containing the amazing variety of things which people threw away […] shop windows, cars, things in gutters, people’s clothes, people with sad or happy faces, houses with sad or happy faces. (BB 131)

By contrast with Gerard’s solipsistic preoccupation, such attention to the world outside himself demonstrates Jenkin’s possession of virtue as delineated in Murdoch’s philosophy: ‘Virtue […] is concerned with really apprehending that other people exist’ (EM 284); ‘Virtue is selfless attention to nature’ (EM 332) and ‘Unselfish attention breaks the barrier of egoism’ (MGM 301). Murdoch depicts Jenkin’s and Gerard’s responses to remorse as paralleling this disparity between their relations to the present moment. Jenkin avoids behaviour which will give rise to remorse. He keeps life as free as possible of muddle and ‘ordinary sinning’ because they involve ‘states of mind which he found uncomfortable such as envy, resentment, remorse or hate’ (BB 132), and Gerard, observing his friend’s mode of being, thinks Jenkin ‘doesn’t have to worry about virtue’ because ‘he lives a simple life devoid of temptation and remorse’ (BB 248). But on the occasions when Gerard, whose life lacks this simplicity, does come to apprehend the reality of someone outside himself, remorse is the catalyst which triggers his apprehension of the reality of the other. After visiting his dying old tutor Gerard aches ‘with remorse at not having managed a more affectionate farewell’ to him (BB 26), and after his father’s death he ‘felt remorse, not because he had been a bad son […] but because he was no longer a son, and there was still so much to say’ (BB 42). Gerard missed the present moments available to him with his tutor and his father through lack of attention, and remorse results, because his apprehension of others comes too late for him to act towards them with the love he retrospectively recognises. The traumatic effect of remorse on the experience of lived ‘serial’ time (MGM 263) is demonstrated in Murdoch’s fiction. In A Word Child, her study of chronic remorse, Hilary Burde, whose dangerous driving caused the death of his mistress Anne Jopling twenty years previously, denies the possibility of change over time: ‘The deepest levels of the mind know not of time. It was all still there’ (WC 147). He is therefore subjugated by remorse for twenty years and the stylised structure of A Word Child is mimetic of the stuck-in-a-groove nature of his rigid habits, which convey

50 

F. WHITE

the sterility and tensely controlled panic caused by chronic remorse. Hilary is aware that issues of temporality underlie the straitjacket of remorse which constrains him: ‘A death is the most terrible of facts […] And nothing could take that fact away. Time could not do it’ (WC 228). Despite the truth of this statement, transforming chronic remorse into lucid remorse involves learning to live in time again, and in The Good Apprentice, her study of lucid remorse, Murdoch forms a contrast to Hilary’s twenty-year circular stasis. Edward Baltram avoids becoming stuck, like Hilary, in a loop of remorse; the structure of the novel is arc-shaped in that the end-­ point of Edward’s journey from potentially chronic to lucid remorse is located at a psycho-spiritual distance from its beginning. To begin with, Edward is as unwilling as Hilary to conceive of change and grieves over the ‘one momentary act of folly and treachery [which] had destroyed all his time’ (GA 11). But by the end of the novel Edward’s being able to accept the thought of what new thing he will be doing ‘this time next week’ (GA 560) is a great advance on his conviction at the beginning he has ‘no future’ (GA 11). His perception of time has shifted to a renewed sense of future possibilities through which Murdoch indicates the alteration in the condition of Edward’s, now lucid, remorse. Remorse highlights the troublesome issue of continuing identity over time, on which Murdoch repeatedly reflects in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: ‘The notion that the continuous self is a fiction may occur to us in ordinary situations, in puzzling about memory or responsibility for the past. Is the Nazi war criminal unearthed many years later the same person who did those terrible things in a concentration camp?’ (MGM 165), and ‘can we properly condemn a man of seventy for crimes he committed when he was twenty?’ (MGM 305). Hilary who asks ‘Had time done anything, changed me so that I was a different person? Was I still and forever the person who …?’ (WC 228) still so judges himself. His self-­condemnation is fashioned by a belief in a very specific kind of determinism which makes transforming chronic remorse into lucid remorse very difficult for him. Temporal determinism is the particular form of determinism that is caused by the refusal to relinquish the past which Murdoch’s novels identify and explore. Hilary feels ‘a victim of the past’ (WC 243) and the effect on identity and behaviour of such adherence to a temporally deterministic stance is one of the concerns of A Word Child. Regarding oneself as a victim denies one’s freedom, whether the determining constraints are sociological, psychological, or temporal. Hilary’s friend, Clifford Larr, tells him, ‘You behave like a lout. I suppose it is early conditioning’ (WC 277),

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

51

and Hilary is tempted to take refuge in the sociologically deterministic idea that his unhappy childhood is responsible for his fate: ‘I was destined to suffer stupidly, my mother suffered stupidly, my father suffered stupidly, my sister suffers stupidly, it’s what we were made for’ (WC 291). Self-pity based on such determinism easily turns to relinquishing of personal responsibility: ‘I was back where I belonged, where my childhood had condemned me to be, alone, out in the cold, without a coat’ (WC 269). But the narrative manifests Murdoch’s conviction that it is not merely the external factors in a person’s life which create who he becomes, but the (continuous) effort he makes to look clearly at his life and to think intelligently about it. Hilary had, and took, the chance to overcome his deprived childhood, so it is not only the sociological or psychological determining of his early life which creates the impasse in which he becomes fixed by remorse. Rather, it is his passive submission to the idea of temporal determinism—another word for which might be ‘fate’ (WC 227). Temporal determinism relates to remorse theory in that the differentiation of lucid remorse from chronic remorse partially derives from willingness to relinquish the past. Tudor observes that in neither case can there be ‘a “re-winding” of time, so that one returns as the innocent person one was before’ (Tudor 2001, 190), but the ‘remedy for [remorse] is not to forget what one did but to remember it appropriately’ (Tudor 2001, 194). Hence in lucid remorse, ‘it is not a matter of putting it out of one’s sense of self, but of putting it in one’s past’ (Tudor 2001, 199), but a ‘chronically remorseful person [is] someone whose remorse lacks lucidity in its temporal aspects’ (Tudor 2001, 191). Murdoch depicts Hilary as just such a chronically remorseful person who allows his own past actions to determine and limit his future. She distinguishes the concept of temporal determinism from sociological determinism by contrasting Hilary’s childhood deprivation with the privileged background of the man he injured, Anne’s husband Gunnar Jopling. The novel performs this distinction by the fact that Anne’s death curtails Gunnar’s mental freedom equally with Hilary’s. Gunnar’s second wife Kitty knows that he has never moved forward in time from that event despite his new marriage, so Gunnar too behaves as a ‘victim of the past’ subject to temporal determinism (WC 243). Kitty says, ‘to be so tied up to particular things in the past is a sort of illness’ (WC 192), and the narrative demonstrates that her observation applies equally pertinently to both men, because her subsequent death results not only from Hilary’s compulsion to repeat relationship patterns in his life, but also from Gunnar’s submission to temporal determinism. Had Gunnar

52 

F. WHITE

been able to move on from the past into a new life with Kitty, the events narrated by the novel would not have taken place. The uneasy relationship of Murdoch’s remorseful characters with time is dramatised as they suffer over what has been and yearn over what might have been, manifesting the difficulty of living in the present rather than being filled with brooding over the past and fantasy of, or fear for, the future. Her novels probe the interaction of remorse with human consciousness of time and identify how relating to time is essentially a moral matter. In so doing Murdoch’s fiction consciously parallels and echoes T.S. Eliot’s meditations on time in his poetry.10 Both writers philosophically and theologically question human experience of time and interrogate the relationship of the present moment to past and future moments. Murdoch weaves lines from Eliot’s Four Quartets into the closing pages of A Word Child when Hilary, sitting in the church where Eliot served as churchwarden, muses on the opening lines of Burnt Norton.11 These lines revolve around the enigma of the (un)redeemability of time, the problem which lies at the heart of remorse: Time present and time past Are both perhaps contained in time future And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end which is always present.  Murdoch played Leader of the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral in Oxford in June 1940 (IMWW 6 & 184). Her copy of Eliot’s Collected Poems 1905–1935 is held in the Murdoch Collection in Kingston University Archives (IML 190). She considers Eliot’s theological perspective (MGM 126 & 137), and ‘T.S.  Eliot as Moralist’ (1958) finds Four Quartets significantly moving (EM 165). 11  ‘I could feel a lively gratitude for words, even for words whose sense I could scarcely understand. If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation’ (WC 384). See Chap. 3 for a full discussion of this scene in A Word Child. 10

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

53

And the stanza concludes: humankind Cannot bear very much reality Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end which is always present. (Eliot 1969, 171–2)

Through those of her characters who succeed in escaping the grip of temporal determinism and who achieve recovery from remorse by transforming the chronic form of that affliction into a lucid form, Murdoch demonstrates that this can only be done by letting the past be past and moving into fully inhabiting the present. Failure to do so leaves the afflicted one who cannot bear reality frozen in time past, the domain of chronic remorse. As such her novels manifest the conviction which Hilary voices: ‘Of course the past could not be undone. But, yet, there could be deep change’ (WC 200). This concept of ‘deep change’ is central to all her narratives of remorse: it signifies not only moral and psycho-spiritual change in the characters involved, but also change in their conception of, and relationship to, time.

The Stranglehold of the Past in The Nice and the Good This germinal concern with time is evident in The Nice and the Good, in which Murdoch creates a symposium on the subject of the past, offering multiple viewpoints through what Conradi describes as a ‘cast of displaced persons, unfortunates who have fallen out of the great social bond […] roughly held in place at the Dorset court of the philanthropic, selfish hedonists Kate and Octavian Gray’ (S&A 181–2). All the ‘unfortunates’ are preoccupied by problems relating to the past and the surface sunniness of the novel is belied by the dark shadows cast across these interconnected lives by their various personal histories. Mary Clothier, widowed when her husband, Alistair, was killed by a car, is still grieving. Paula Biranne is divorced from her husband, Richard, following her affair with Eric Sears. (Richard seriously injured Eric who left for Australia but is now coming back to Paula’s dismay.) Willy Kost survived Dachau and cannot speak of his experience there. Theo Gray left a Buddhist Monastery in India ‘under a cloud’ (NG 14). In each case, the past has a stranglehold over the

54 

F. WHITE

present for these people. They wrestle with it, alone with their thoughts, and in conversation with each other. The novel’s discussion of the problem of the past is rendered complex by the polyphony through which Murdoch maintains an elusive authorial position. Not all characters’ voices carry the same moral weight, so the reader is required to discriminate between statements, according to who is speaking. The theme of the past is first opened by a letter from Eric, a deliberately unfully realised character who remains ‘off-stage’. He is made to seem both comic and menacing by Paula’s guilty revulsion towards his artificial foot (the outcome of a violent fight with Richard, who overturned a billiard table on his wife’s lover), and the letters Eric sends Paula from his ship as he sails back from Australia, advancing ever closer to her, make him a risible figure. ‘One must acknowledge the past, assimilate it, be reconciled to it’ (NG 42), Eric announces portentously. The theme is taken up and developed by other voices. The fortunate and hedonistic Kate echoes the phrase, ‘One must be reconciled to the past’ (NG 47), in a context which makes it a breath-takingly airy pronouncement because she and Ducane are discussing Willy’s ‘brooding and remembering’— about Dachau. Ducane (the voice of reason, but reason untested by experience until he undergoes an ordeal later in the novel) similarly pontificates, ‘the only point of severity with the past is improvement of the future’ (NG 76). His logic takes no account of the emotional impact the past may continue to have by way of grief, guilt, and remorse and therefore rings as hollow as Kate’s facile dictum. Paula and Mary, who both possess a sensitive conscience and developed moral awareness, think more analytically about the past and its impact on the present. ‘Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one’s life went wrong?’ Paula wonders, and she feels that ‘one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be’ (NG 120). Paula suffers shame, about her adultery, grief, for herself and her children at the break-up of her marriage, and loss, of Richard whom she still loves. Her voice is to be taken seriously in the debate. Mary’s voice too offers a serious variation on the theme, as she wishes to move forward in life, but is stuck in her grief for Alistair and her guilt over his death because they were quarrelling when the accident occurred. Murdoch’s insistence on the element of chance in human affairs stresses the contingency of life. Alistair died in an accident, he died by accident. Mary knows this but finds this accidentalness hard to comprehend or accept. Guilt over their quarrel, and remorse about what she did not do, increases her grief:

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

55

the old thoughts came crowding to her. If only I had called him back, or tapped on the window, or said just one more sentence to him, or gone with him, as I might have done if we hadn’t been quarrelling. Anything, anything might have broken that long long chain of causes that brought him and that motor car together in that moment of time. (NG 139)

Trying to move on in the process of grieving, Mary needs to revisit the place where, for her, the past got stuck. She has ‘a sense of having somehow shirked the past, of having too cravenly put it away’ and feels she has ‘to go back, to revive and refresh those dull old memories and those dull old pains’ (NG 138). The precision of the word ‘shirked’ exactly captures the shrinking from facing the past because of the unbearable pain it holds, and Murdoch’s depiction of Mary’s need to return and confront her memories before she can let go of the past is psychologically astute. Only then will she recover sufficiently from remorse to live her life in the present and envisage a future. Paula’s case is more complex than Mary’s, as Paula’s ‘lost’ husband is still alive, and she must decide how to act towards both him and her ex-­ lover. Their mutual past is messy and unresolved. She experiences guilt towards Eric because of his injury for which she feels responsible, but which also destroyed her illusion of love for him. Now he is threatening to return, she feels that she has to ‘endure’ Eric, ‘because of the unredeemable past buried alive in its demoniac silence’ (NG 174). Unredeemable is the word which gives the past power over Paula, who ‘never believed in remorse and repentance’ (NG 120). She cannot turn back the clock and undo the scene of violence which haunts her, restore Eric’s foot, or recompense him for the damage he sustained because of her. Her problem is resolved by the comic expedient of a final letter from Eric, whom Paula apprehends in exaggerated terms of Greek Tragedy as ‘that resurrected bloodstained shade’ (NG 74). This letter displays Murdoch’s comic genius in making a superficial, essentially silly communication comment ironically on the theme she explores elsewhere with seriousness. ‘I am happy and feel set free from the past’ (NG 283), Eric writes, having formed a new shipboard liaison with one Angelica, which instantly dissolves all ties concerning Paula and the past for him. Paula laughs with hysterical relief on hearing this and the reader laughs with her. Eric is preposterous. But the anxious thought his letters have made Paula devote to her past, about which she ‘must do something’, have had effect. She is ready to think again about Richard, who takes a rather cerebral view of the past and is

56 

F. WHITE

unemotional and unrepentant about bygone betrayals and violent deeds. With apparent coolness, and eschewing conscious attention to the concept of remorse, the couple mutually agree to accept the ‘responsibilities occasioned by the past’ (NG 326), to draw a line under the muddle of the past and move into a potentially positive future together. Paula’s decision to return to Richard may seem contrary in the light of her knowledge of his degeneracy and unreliability, but Murdoch uses a painting to suggest that the couple achieve moral advancement in terms of understanding the past, in which remorse is implicit though unstated. The means by which Paula and Richard are together reconciled to their violent past and uncertain future imply a mutual forgiveness containing awareness of the moral risks involved. Paula and Richard are reunited by Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, the ‘most frankly erotic’ painting in the National Gallery’s collection (Rowe 2002, 126), through which Murdoch focuses attention on the strength of the erotic bond as a well-spring of forgiveness and renewal.12 Contemplating art usually affects Murdochian characters by breaking the constraints of solipsism, but here Paula and Richard’s mutual appreciation of Bronzino’s masterpiece breaks instead the resentments and hurts of the past. On a previous visit to Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time Paula meditates on her damaged marriage, and by apprehending the eroticism of the painting recognises the strength of her continuing desire for Richard. As Rowe observes, ‘images can tap suppressed emotions; the erotic excitement induced by the painting heals the past and clarifies the present—whatever Richard’s faults, time has not annihilated Paula’s love for him’ (Rowe 2002, 137). Lucid remorse is implied (without using the word remorse) in Richard’s and Paula’s ‘rational discussion’ which relinquishes the past whilst acknowledging responsibility: Something dreadful happened for which we were both to blame. It happened. You know I don’t believe in God or in guilt feelings or in repentance or any stuff of that sort. The past is gone, it doesn’t exist anymore. However, things that do exist are responsibilities occasioned by the past and also our thoughts about it, which we may not find it very easy to control. (NG 326)

12  Entitled ‘An Allegory with Venus and Cupid’ (probably 1540–50) by the National Gallery collection (NG651) by Bronzino (1503–72) although commonly referred to by the title above. See Rowe (2002, 126–39), for a full analysis of the interaction of the painting and the novel.

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

57

Reconciliation and renewal of commitment are the Birannes’s positive and creative response answers to Paula’s earlier expressed need to ‘do something about the past’ (NG 120). Murdoch uses the motif of Bronzino’s painting in The Nice and the Good to make vivid her moral conviction that ‘every moment matters’ in this comedy of manners, for just as the brilliant colour of the Bronzino painting does not preclude a darker subtext to his allegorical picture, so the essentially comic form of the novel still enables Murdoch to offer a moral vision to the thoughtful reader. Her non-directive methods of imparting ethical concerns through fiction and her ‘technique of using a painting to foreground a central philosophical issue’ (Rowe 2002, 2) apply here to Murdoch’s portrayal of time as a moral issue. Love, sexuality, jealousy, folly, and deceit are all depicted in the scene which is revealed by the figures of Truth and Time who draw back the curtain between them. The reader’s attention is specifically drawn to this aspect of the painting—‘The figures at the top of the picture are Time and Truth […] Truth stares, Time moves’ (Rowe 2002, 323)—and Murdoch emphasises ‘the terrible figures of Truth and Time’ (Rowe 2002, 324). Rowe links the importance of time in this painting with the meditation on causality offered by the novel in an analysis which encapsulates Murdoch’s presentation of the moral nature of temporality: The different ways characters respond to moments of temptation is crucial in this novel, because each character is haunted by past moments of sexual or moral weakness and comes to realise that ‘human frailty forms a system […] faults in the past have their endlessly spreading network of results’ [NG 192]. The symbolism of the Bronzino expands to cover all such moments of human failure […] and the novel demands a moral awareness of each passing moment of temptation. (Rowe 2002, 133)

Nonetheless, in reuniting the Birannes (and in other Shakespearean couplings at the novel’s closure) Murdoch offers an optimistic view of the redeemability of the past held in tension with this awareness of human frailty and failure. The debate set up about the problem of the past in The Nice and the Good includes the knowledge that evil and guilt can break people and that the effects of the past may be irreparable. Murdoch’s work in refugee camps with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in 1944–1946 gave her first-hand knowledge of people

58 

F. WHITE

tortured by their memories. Trauma can lodge so deep in the psyche that the past seems unredeemable and Murdoch depicts the damaging potential of unprocessed remorse in the paralysed lives of Willy Kost and Theo Gray. Although the novel does not overtly designate remorse as his affliction, Willy suffers from chronic remorse. The ‘court’ at Trescombe House is awed by his internment in Dachau and assumes that what was done to him there is too terrible for articulation. But when eventually Willy breaks his silence and confides in Theo, the narrative reveals that what Willy finds so unbearable to live with is not what was done to him, but what he himself did there, which resulted in the deaths of others in the gas chambers. He tells Theo, ‘I betrayed two people because I was afraid, and they died’ (NG 342). As Theo too has cause for remorse in his past, because after taking vows in a Buddhist monastery where he ‘thought to end his days’ he fled ‘after an incident involving a young novice’ who ‘later drowned in the Ganges’ (NG 347), both men seem destroyed by their experiences. Willy wonders ‘Was it too late? Had the past really broken him?’ (NG 178), and Theo is like ‘someone who had had all his bones broken and yet [was] still moving about like a sort of limp doll’ (NG 87). When they speak together of the horror of Dachau, Theo says, ‘We are clay, Willy. There is no man whose rationality and goodness cannot be broken by torment’ (NG 342). These stories darken the tone of the theme of the past in the novel and engage with the problem of how to go on living after committing an action one finds unforgivable. Willy counsels Theo: ‘Pardon the past and let it go … absolutely … away’ (NG 126, Murdoch’s ellipsis). Yet he proves ironically unable to take his own advice. ‘I am just a past with no present’, he tells Theo, who calls that ‘a cowardly lie’ (NG 342). Each is able to let go of the past for the other, but not for himself. Willy’s terrible story (the first of Murdoch’s holocaust cameos) draws out a crucial element in the process of transforming chronic remorse into lucid remorse which is the difficulty of self-forgiveness. Willy’s problem is not forgiving Hitler, it is forgiving himself. Theo suggests a dispassionate perspective: ‘Do not think “I did it.” Think it was done’. But Willy is adamant that, ‘I did do it’, and when Theo says ‘that sense of ownership is pride’, he retorts, ‘They were gassed, Theo’ (NG 342). For Willy (as for Hilary in A Word Child) death is the most terrible of facts which cannot be circumvented by adopting a detached viewpoint, as the finality of death precludes Willy from progressing from chronic to lucid remorse.

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

59

Willy’s ‘sense of ownership’ for a deed is the acknowledgement of the personal responsibility upon which remorse is predicated (Cox 1999, 172), and he experiences Gaita’s ‘astonished encounter with the reality of the ethical’ (Gaita 2004, xiv) which indicates remorse. But Theo’s registering of the element of pride in Willy’s pain is perceptive, as it is this pride which prevents Willy’s remorse from taking a lucid form. What Willy hates above all about Hitler is that Hitler has made a murderer of him which destroys his self-respect. Willy’s story is paralleled by the case of a Dutch woman, analysed in Gaita’s discussion of remorse: She had given shelter to three Jews fleeing the Nazis, but after some days she asked them to leave because she was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler and judged it would be at risk if she were caught sheltering Jews. Within days of leaving her house the three were murdered in a concentration camp. She said Hitler had made a murderess of her, that she hated him for many things but most of all for that. (Gaita 2004, 43)

Gaita observes both that ‘her sense of the seriousness of what she did is captured in her judgement on herself’ (Gaita 2004, 43) and also that many people would consider remorse an inappropriate reaction towards an action for which one cannot rationally be blamed. The Dutchwoman had no intent to murder; circumstances were beyond her control. The evil in the situation originated in Nazism, not within herself. These facts are also true for Willy who had no murderous intent and was circumstantially trapped by the evil of Nazism. Yet, he judges himself as harshly as did the Dutchwoman. Further, Willy’s self-respect, his pride (as Theo implies), has been destroyed. Willy possesses the discomforting knowledge articulated by Primo Levi that ‘the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the “gray zone”, the spies […] The worst survived, that is, the fittest, the best all died’ (Levi 1988, 82). In the extreme situation of the camps, Willy exemplifies Murdoch’s Schopenhauerian reflection, ‘“Conscience is acquaintance with ourselves” and our remorseful thought that we might have been another, better man’ (MGM 66). Theo similarly fled from ‘a broken image of himself’ (NG 348), unable to become the better man he dreamed of being, too wounded in his pride to stay at the Monastery as ‘his broken self’ (NG 348). The reactions of both characters reveal that, for Murdoch, turning chronic remorse into lucid remorse involves learning to accept and live with

60 

F. WHITE

broken self-images which is one of the hardest tasks in the overcoming of the ego. The theme of the past as a difficult problem which has to be worked at which permeates The Nice and the Good juxtaposes characters who clearly manage to ‘do something’ with their pasts and move forward into a renewed future against characters who risk remaining transfixed by time and remorse. But the narrative’s Shakespearean comic tone and multiple pairings-off present Murdoch’s view that the past need not be an insuperable problem. Working through painful memories intelligently, with loving, forgiving help from others, her characters succeed in doing something with their respective pasts and all are offered promise for the future. This debate about the problem of the past concerns a confused sense of remorse in Mary and Paula, Willy and Theo, although at this stage in her oeuvre Murdoch does not yet overtly identify remorse as the essential philosophical, psychological, and spiritual issue involved. Indeed, the word remorse itself is scarcely used in The Nice and the Good occurring only twice—when Ducane ruefully acknowledges an impure sense of remorse with regard to his lover, Jessica Bird (NG 75), and when Paula asserts her lack of belief in the concept (NG 120). Yet this novel makes it clear that Murdoch is beginning seriously to contemplate the concept of remorse and its relationship to time in her fiction. In later novels Murdoch compulsively returns to this theme; she increasingly employs the word remorse and enlarges the role that remorse plays in the picture of human consciousness and ethical sensibility presented by her art.

Problematical Remorse in The Philosopher’s Pupil Fifteen years after The Nice and the Good, Murdoch again tackles the interlocked problems of the experience of remorse and the concept of time in The Philosopher’s Pupil. The evolution of her fictional technique during the interim, through her persistent experimentation with form and narrative stance in her novels, increases the interpretative response here demanded of her readers. In her philosophical writing Murdoch is concerned with exactitude, but fiction allows her to embrace and manifest the very lack of clear discernment between emotions that is commonly experienced in muddled human consciousness: ‘Philosophy aims to clarify and to explain [whereas] Literature […] is full of tricks and magic and deliberate mystification’ (EM 4). The reader is asked to reflect on the moral nature of the characters’ experience and perceptions, a task which the characters may or

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

61

may not perform themselves. In this mature work which ‘stands as the finest example of the “polyphonic irony” which functions in Murdoch’s first-­ person fiction’ (Nicol 2004, 98), she develops the text into a moral forum for a debate on remorse, though this serious philosophical agenda is concealed within a rollicking story full of action, farce, and high comedy. The word remorse, used so minimally in The Nice and the Good, is predominant in The Philosopher’s Pupil. It occurs twenty-three times (the highest number of references in any of her novels), in association with a wide variety of characters and situations. Far from merely signalling Murdoch’s growing interest in the concept, her deliberate drawing of attention to the word requires the reader to consider the accuracy and appositeness of its usage. The novel calls into question whether what the characters (and narrator) identify as remorse can properly be categorised as remorse in accordance with the definition of remorse theory. Murdoch renders the concept philosophically problematical and forces the reader to exercise discrimination in each case of so-called remorse. Further, the narrative’s lack of the conceptually clear differentiation of remorse (from regret, shame, and other closely related terms), which gives remorse distinctive value as a category in moral philosophy, potentially reduces remorse to merely a component part of the Dostoyevskian anguish which permeates the novel.13 But The Philosopher’s Pupil ‘is one of Murdoch’s most self-deconstructionist texts’ (Nicol 2004, 153) and the massing of emotions in this novel is deliberate artifice. Indeed, Murdoch might even be said to be deconstructing remorse in this work. By demonstrating the need for distinguishing between chronic and lucid remorse she implants questions in the reader’s mind about the philosophical nature and potential moral value of different types of remorse. But whereas in other novels Murdoch offers the reader vicarious experience of the violent pain of remorse and its possible after-effects in human life, The Philosopher’s Pupil paradoxically conveys truth about the moral nature of remorse by the very failure of its characters’ experience of remorse according to a strict philosophical conception of it. In responding to the novel, readers may be led to question the validity of remorse as experienced here and perhaps even to realise from the excessive usage of the term remorse in this novel that the concept of remorse requires the

13  George McCaffrey, like Hilary Burde in A Word Child, has strong links with Dostoevsky’s characters.

62 

F. WHITE

more careful differentiation and more discriminate application of the word which remorse theory is endeavouring to supply. Murdoch sets up a triad of perspectives on remorse and time in human consciousness between the interacting characters of John Robert Rozanov, his ex-pupil George McCaffrey, and George’s much younger half-brother Tom, whose youthful innocence and capacity for happiness contrast with the experience and self-hating misery of the two older men. Rozanov, the revered philosopher of the novel’s title who has returned to his hometown of Ennistone, has lost his faith in philosophy as an enterprise and is incestuously in love with his granddaughter, Hattie Meynell. George, the self-­ appointed ‘local âme damnée’ (PP 75), commits destructive acts in angry disappointment with life—the novel opens violently with him pushing a car with his wife, Stella, inside it into a canal. Tom is a fairy-tale hero beloved of all, just beginning on a life full of promise and unbesmirched by evildoing. Stress is self-consciously laid on the fairy-tale associations of this novel by the narrator N. (PP 111 & 476). Essential factors in the complex plot are, first, that George so craves Rozanov’s attention, which Rozanov maddeningly refuses him, that after Rozanov’s death George believes that he has murdered his beloved-hated teacher; second, that Rozanov wants to force Tom and Hattie to marry. Each character variously experiences cause for remorse to which the reader’s attention is overtly drawn by the frequent occurrence of the term remorse in the novel. By making the character Rozanov a philosopher Murdoch creates a semblance of bringing a professional philosophical perspective to bear upon remorse in this novel, but the narrative places his perspective on remorse under suspicion. He wonders what reality remorse can be said to have and relates it to the problematical notion of consciousness14: 14  The nature of consciousness, and the means of altering it, is a central issue throughout Murdoch’s philosophy and art. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she devotes two chapters to consideration of it (6 Consciousness and Thought—I, and 8 Consciousness and Thought—II), and many of her characters muse on the matter, for example, Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, who echoes Murdoch’s philosophical writings: ‘no philosopher and hardly any novelist has ever managed to explain what that weird stuff, human consciousness, is really made of. Body, external objects, darty memories, warm fantasies, other minds, guilt, fear, hesitation, lies, glee, doles, breathtaking pains, a thousand things which words can only fumble at, coexist, many fused together in a single unit of consciousness. How human responsibility is possible at all could well puzzle an extra-galactic student of this weird method of proceeding through time. How can such a thing be tinkered with and improved, how can one change the quality of consciousness?’ (BP 190).

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

63

every morning as he assumed the burden of consciousness he reflected upon its strangeness: the mystery of the mind, so general and so particular. Why do thoughts not lose their owners? How does the individual stay together and not stray away like racing water-drops? How does consciousness continue, how can it? Could the curse of memory not end, and why did it not end? Did not the instant, of its nature, annihilate the past? Was not remorse a fiction, an effect of a prime delusion? How could a feeling be evidence of anything? (PP 132)

But certain assumptions about the nature of remorse in this passage indicate that Rozanov fails to make the philosophical connection between remorse and morality which Gaita and Thomas pinpoint, and Murdoch endorses. His opinion that remorse is just a ‘feeling’, his view of it as a ‘fiction’ resulting from a ‘delusion’, and his sense that the present annihilates the past allies Rozanov with the position articulated by Tudor’s ‘anti-­ remorse camp’ of which Spinoza and Nietzsche are prominent adherents (Tudor 2001, 128).15 Rozanov’s personal experience of remorse is as an emotional state connected with his regret at not having formed a strong grandfatherly bond with Hattie at a young age: ‘he had times of the most bitter remorse, that biting “Oh if only”—which can gnaw its way into the very centre of the soul and there set up a pain which mixes itself with every experience. Remorse, at times, even distracted Rozanov from philosophy’ (PP 307). The phrases ‘too late’ and ‘if only’ feature repeatedly in Rozanov’s tortured reveries, but his remorse is self-concerned, lacking any sense of attention to the reality of the other. It is not his past failure to be a loving grandfather figure to his orphaned granddaughter for her sake which he regrets, but the lost opportunity to engage her affection for himself. Had Rozanov not fallen in love with Hattie it would never have occurred to 15  In his Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, Spinoza writes of ‘the two archenemies of the human race, namely Hatred and Remorse’ (Spinoza 2002, 47): Gilles Deleuze comments that ‘he denounces these sources again and again’ (Deleuze 1988, 13). Nietzsche too is hostile to the concept of remorse, which he calls a ‘kind of cowardice towards one’s own deeds’ (Nietzsche 1968, 134–6). Kant, whom Tudor does not include, is also in the anti-remorse camp: ‘All remorse is idle and absurd; for a wrong doer appraises his deed not from his former but from his present state of mind which, if it had existed in him then, would certainly have prevented the deed, though the supposition that it ought to have prevented the deed is false because it was not actually present in his former state. Remorse is merely a misunderstood representation of how one could act better in the future, and in fact nature has no other purpose in it than the end of improvement’ [Kant’s italics], (Kant 1996, 12).

64 

F. WHITE

him that he has failed in duty and affection towards her, nor does he appear to take his incestuous desire for his granddaughter as a matter for self-censure. 16 Rozanov’s experience of remorse is not remorse as an ethical concept, an index of moral character. He signally fails in attention to others around him as equal centres of reality to his own, driving George to insanity by casually cruel rejection and perceiving Hattie only in terms of his own desire. Monstrously egocentric, Rozanov attempts to use Tom and Hattie as chess pieces in his own mental game of arranging the future, without seeing them as real individuals with a separate existence. His struggle with the philosophical nature of time as an element in his solipsistic version of remorse enigmatically arises from Rozanov’s attempt to assuage the pain of his unspoken love for Hattie and dread of losing her. Although they stem from regret for his past neglect of his responsibilities, Rozanov’s meditations on remorse and time lack cohesion and do not foster moral lucidity: As time went on John Robert, in the relentless painful working out of his remorse, kept moving the moment at which it became too late further and further onward in time towards the present, with which it never caught up. But if ‘too late’ kept moving on in this way, was it not still in his power, looking at the present from the future, to assert that, after all, now was not yet too late? (PP 308)

Ironically, the professional philosopher fails to conceptualise remorse in an ethical context through egocentric concentration on freedom for his own desire. So although Rozanov may be said to be remorseful to the extent that he regrets what he has failed to do, knows that he could have done differently, and certainly suffers recurrent biting pain, his remorse stops far short of any ‘astonished encounter with the reality of the ethical’ (Gaita 2004, xiv). Rozanov’s pain is entirely for himself, and not for himself as evildoer but simply because he cannot attain his desire. Solipsism precludes insight into the true nature of remorse. 16  Rozanov is unconcerned at breaking (even mentally) this taboo and evinces no remorse in connection with what is commonly considered a shockingly perverse form of sexual relationship. Incest in Murdoch’s novels is a problematic topic in itself which also features notably in A Severed Head (1961) and The Time of the Angels (1966): for discussion of incest in Murdoch’s work see Leeson and Miller, Incest in Contemporary Literature (2018, 12), and Rowe (2019, 52).

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

65

George’s apparent experience of remorse equally lacks moral focus because George lives his life at the centre of an emotional storm, his feelings jumbled together in a confused mass of mental suffering. After pushing the car with Stella inside into the canal, he ‘recalled painfully, shamefully, remorsefully, the way things had happened’ (PP 16), and later the narrator remarks that ‘George was consumed by hate, jealousy, misery, remorse, fear and rage. Emotions blackened the sky and tore his entrails like vultures’ (PP 147). But when remorse is undifferentiated, forming one item in a list of unpleasant states of mind, it fails to have a cutting moral edge: George’s emotions are constantly presented in multiple form as when Father Bernard, the priest, says to him, ‘Your mind is boiling over with anger and remorse and grief and black pain’ (PP 496). When George is in extreme psycho-spiritual pain, remorse is the first in the series of terms Murdoch chooses to describe what he is suffering: George ‘felt in the crammed blackness of his soul remorse, regret, resentment, loss, anger and terrible longing, that composition of love and hate which can be the most painful and degrading sensation in the world’ (PP 298). But she makes the reader share in George’s sense of muddle as it is not clear what is being delineated here as ‘the most painful and degrading sensation in the world’. Nor is it clear whether remorse is seen as a composite of these other emotions or merely being included here as one emotion among many. Ennistone, ‘our town’, is stressed by N. from the outset of the novel and functions within it almost as a composite character (PP 23). It could be viewed as N.’s town—the narrator’s town, or N’s town—the novelist’s town, Murdoch’s fictional creation. The whole cast of the novel projects emotions onto George who is demonised by the town—a very local version of an âme damnée indeed. Murdoch’s presentation of his character through ironic layers of narratorial commentary makes interpretation of his story tricky and therefore demanding of her reader. At the close of the novel George is overcome by a change of moral being, connected with his belief that he murdered Rozanov. (The fact that Rozanov had attempted suicide by taking an overdose from which he was unconscious before George drowned him in a bath leaves it unclear whether the philosopher took his own life or was indeed killed by his pupil. George’s murderous intention remains, however, whether Rozanov died from drugs or drowning.) He is struck down by hysterical blindness (or visited by extra-­ terrestrial beings—the verdict in Ennistonian gossip is open), after which he returns to his estranged wife and becomes docile and kindly. He reaches a mysterious state of calm after his emotional tempests and at the climax

66 

F. WHITE

of George’s drama the reader is told that he ‘felt the pain beginning; it was starting to spread inside him, the crippling awful pain of absolute remorse’ (PP 539). For the first time remorse is singled out as George’s sole emotion. It is left unclear (by both the narrator N. and by Murdoch), whether, through the shock of remorse, George belatedly came to see Rozanov as a separate other and not as a projection of his own desires and needs. But George’s return to his marriage suggests that he at last sees his wife as a separate other with a reality of her own, and he now pays attention to his mother. Such details arguably connote that George experiences lucid remorse, that ‘astonished encounter with the reality of the ethical’ (Gaita 2004, xiv), and that the moral change perceivable in him has been worked by remorse. Murdoch denies the reader inside knowledge of what psychological changes occur within the minds of her characters in this novel. In the slippery narrative technique which changes from first to third person, and overlays the voice of the narrator N. with the voice of M., Murdoch, the author behind N., no perspective is privileged. Murdoch seems here to be insisting that an author cannot authoritatively (the word is apposite rather than tautologous) tell the reader what is happening in the mind of a character just as one cannot perceive the minds of other persons in life but can only interpret their words and actions. When reading a novel, as when ‘reading’ other people in life, there are only linguistic and behavioural signs to interpret which must always remain uncertain and mysterious. The other is other, in literature as in life, and Murdoch’s metafictional technique reflects on and ultimately rejects the authorial omniscience that N. tantalisingly appears both to offer and to deny. ‘What Happened Afterwards’, the novel’s epilogue, is full of unanswered questions and displays a resolute refusal to tie up ends whilst paradoxically making pretence at so doing. The closing words of The Philosopher’s Pupil underline the slippery nature of the relationship between narrator and author: ‘As I now end this [tale], somebody may say: but how on earth do you know all these things? Well, where does one person end and another begin? It is my role in life to listen to stories. I also had the assistance of a certain lady’ (PP 558). N.’s comment on George, ‘It is hard to say how far his present mien is instinctive and how far it is a deliberate façade (the distinction can often be unclear)’ (PP 556), highlights the impossibility of being sure that one is interpreting another’s behaviour correctly, and the vocabulary that Murdoch chooses for him is loaded with hesitation and uncertainty.

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

67

George ‘seems’ is repeated. N. does not know, the reader too cannot know; the author is not self-empowered to tell in this highly metafictional novel. Obeying the implied injunction to acknowledge the extent of the narrator’s and reader’s inescapable ignorance of George’s private mind allows one only to say that it ‘seems’ as if George’s experience of remorse has caused him better to apprehend the reality of others. To claim more would disregard the text’s deliberate framing of the reader’s experience by means of which The Philosopher’s Pupil dramatises the real-life difficulty of knowing whether another person experiences remorse. The third perspective in Murdoch’s triad comes from Tom McCaffrey, whose story presents remorse as marking the end of youthful innocence. Ordered by Rozanov to court Hattie, Tom proves an unsurprisingly clumsy suitor, and they mutually agree to reject her grandfather’s plan, upsetting each other’s sensibilities in the process. Tom, who has been ‘accustomed to an unscarred soul’ in the innocent happiness of youth, finds that his contretemps with Hattie has ‘left a painful throbbing scar upon [it]’ (PP 332). Unwilling to obey Rozanov’s dictatorial condition that if he fails to persuade Hattie to marry him, he should agree never to see her again, it gradually dawns on Tom that he cares what the philosopher thinks of him. This realisation causes Tom’s first experience of remorse, described as a ‘blackening and poisoning of the imagination’ (PP 371), and he feels an urgent need to see Hattie again ‘so as to wash off, as it were, the painful unclean impression of their previous meeting when he had behaved like a cad’ (PP 372). Belatedly he recognises his attraction to Hattie and unwisely he acts immediately, going to the ‘Slipper House’ where Rozanov has installed Hattie for her stay in Ennistone, without taking into account that he has been drinking in company with the jeunesse d’orée of the town, who all go with him, mistakenly assuming a party. A Dostoyevskian skandal scene ensues in the Slipper House and garden, further alienating Hattie who reasonably blames Tom for the invasion. The incident is (mis)reported in the local press and comes to the ears of Rozanov who likewise blames Tom and anathematises him. Remorse comes to Tom as a bolt which strikes his happy existence, shattering his taken-for-granted sense of self, and causing him to perceive both others and himself afresh. Unlike Rozanov, Tom does apprehend remorse as being a moral matter. He commits no deliberate evildoing; youthful thoughtlessness is the only ‘crime’ that could be laid at his door. But his moral sensitivity and growing awareness of the reality of others causes Tom to feel his own shortcomings acutely. He is described as

68 

F. WHITE

‘reckless and remorseful and angry’ (PP 379), ‘remorseful and repentant’ (PP 401), and he lies awake ‘tossing and turning in paroxysms of misery and remorse and resentment and fear’ (PP 417)—it becomes apparent how repeated use of the word remorse in this story brings the tally to the highest in Murdoch’s fiction, even becoming a comic feature of the novel. But whether what Tom now experiences as ‘very painful remorse’ (PP 418) truly qualifies as remorse according to the philosophical analyses of Gaita, Cox, Tudor, Proeve, Cordner et  al. is the testing question. Tom takes responsibility for his actions and for the hurt and damage they cause, and to that extent, he shows ethical sensitivity and awareness of others. Thinking that his behaviour has lost him both Hattie and Rozanov is a source of great pain as Tom now loves Hattie and reveres Rozanov. The situation creates in Tom’s life ‘a terrible overriding reality, the permanently changed reality of his unhappy being, tortured by yearning and remorse’ (PP 475). One is tempted to say that it looks like remorse and it sounds likes remorse but, notwithstanding appearances, against the testing criteria of true remorse (as defined by remorse theory in Chap. 1 of this study) it falls short. Tom’s misdemeanours lack grave seriousness; indeed they are highly comical. He is not going to suffer remorse throughout his life; rather he will half-forget, half-remember with mixed amusement and embarrassment, the events of his youth. Murdoch’s presentation of Tom’s experience of remorse is therefore not on the same level of serious enquiry as that of Hilary in her earlier novel A Word Child or of Edward in her subsequent novel The Good Apprentice. The working definition of remorse contains a ‘checklist’ of characteristics, without which the term remorse fails as an adequate description of the specific philosophical concept it is understood to be. The cases of Hilary and Edward very precisely fit this definition and correspond to the checklist. But in juxtaposing Tom’s situation with this definition, discrepancies arise. Remorse is a painful state of mind, as Tom experiences, and he does indeed regret an action in the past which he culpably caused. He owns responsibility for what has happened and suffers from the knowledge of it. But a critical gap opens here between The Philosopher’s Pupil and the philosophical understanding of remorse as developed by moral philosophers and experts in other fields. Tom’s situation is not irreparable. The Slipper House incident is irrevocable merely in that as an event in the past it happened and cannot be undone, but the damage done by the event is not irrevocable. Those who were hurt and

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

69

upset by it recover. Tom indeed marries Hattie at the close of the novel. Rozanov dies, it is true, but not because of Tom’s actions. Therefore Tom’s experience of remorse as presented by Murdoch in The Philosopher’s Pupil fails to be convincing because both the Carnivalesque tone and the very plot of the novel trivialises it, and ‘trivial remorse is a contradiction in terms’ (Cox 1999, 12).17 Murdoch’s pyrotechnical debate on remorse in this sophisticated late novel lays the concept open to philosophical contemplation by her readers, who must respond with belief or disbelief to the characters’ claims to remorse. In Sartre: Romantic Rationalist Murdoch states that the ‘role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind’ (SRR 137). Her fiction has a similar purpose, and the role of literature may be said to be to extend and deepen the awareness of the reader. Murdoch describes Sartre as ‘performing the traditional task of the philosopher […] reflecting systematically about the human condition’ (SRR 137). Her own systematic (the discipline of her philosophy) and unsystematic (the relative freedom of her art) reflections on the human condition have diverse effects. Texts such as Metaphysics as Guide to Morals and particular novels such as The Nice and the Good, A Word Child, and The Good Apprentice indicate that remorse holds a central place in the philosophical analysis which she terms her ‘moral psychology’ and demonstrate how remorse is inextricably linked to time and its losses. Other novels such as The Philosopher’s Pupil throw the concepts of time and remorse up for discussion by a less precise and more capricious usage of the word remorse. If philosophy’s role is extending and deepening human self-­ awareness, Murdoch’s presentation of the philosophical role of remorse, in concurrence with remorse theorists, is that it has the potential to extend and deepen ethical self-awareness and to promote moral/spiritual growth. While her novels indeed display the moral potential of remorse for shaping human consciousness towards the form of the Good by enforcement of attention to the injured other, Murdoch’s realistic appraisal of human egocentrism mediated through the comic irony of her fiction demonstrates too how rare and brief such attention is wont to be. Comedy and seriousness are held in tension as her fiction also seeks out means by which the suffering of remorse may be relieved, to which the next two chapters turn.

 For an account of the carnivalesque element in The Philosopher’s Pupil see Heusel (1995).

17

70 

F. WHITE

References Murdoch Criticism Heusel, Barbara Stevens, Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s Novels of the 1970s and 1980s (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995) Horner, Avril, ‘“Refinements of Evil”: Iris Murdoch and the Gothic’, in Rowe and Horner (2010), 70–84 Leeson, Miles, ed., Incest in Contemporary Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018) Nicol, Bran, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Pachau, Margaret L., Construction of Good and Evil in Iris Murdoch’s Discourse (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007) Ramanathan, Saguna, Iris Murdoch: Figures of Good (London: Macmillan, 1990) Read, Daniel, Degrees of Evil in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction and Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) Rowe, Anne, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2002) Rowe, Anne, Iris Murdoch, Writers and Their Work Series (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019) Widdows, Heather, ‘Murdochian Evil and Striving to be Good’, The Positive Functions of Evil in Tabensky (2009), 81–97

Other Works Cordner, Christopher, Ethical Encounter: The Depth of Moral Meaning (London and New York: Palgrave, 2002) Cox, Murray, ed., Remorse and Reparation (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publications, 1999) Deleuze, Gilles, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by Robert Hurley (1970); (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988) Eliot, T.S., The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1969) Gaita, Raimond, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) James, Henry, The Wings of the Dove (1902): (London: Penguin Classics, 2008) Kant, Immanuel, Practical Philosophy, in Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Writings Vol. 48, ed. by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage International, 1988)

2  ‘IF ONLY’ AND ‘TOO LATE’: REMORSE, PHILOSOPHY, AND TIME … 

71

Nietzsche, Frederick, The Will to Power: In Science, Nature, Society and Art, trans. by Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollindale (London: Vintage Books 1968) Schopenhauer, A., On the Basis of Morality (1840), trans. by E.F.J.  Payne (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) Spinoza, Baruch de, Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, Spinoza: Complete Works, trans. by Samuel Shirley, ed. by Michael L.  Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002) Stern, E. Mark, ed., Psychotherapy and the Remorseful Patient (New York: Haworth Press, 1989) Tudor, Steven, Compassion and Remorse: Acknowledging the Suffering Other (Leuven: Peeters, 2001) Tymieniecka, Anna Theresa, ed., Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Five: The Creative Logos. Aesthetic Ciphering in Fine Arts, Literature and Aesthetics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006)

CHAPTER 3

‘A Fearfully Complex Theological Concept’: Remorse, Repentance, and Salvation in A Word Child and The Book and the Brotherhood

We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable. —The Book of Common Prayer

Murdoch’s Dialogue with Christian Doctrine Murdoch’s fiction chronicles the loss of God addressed in her neo-­ theology and explores the complex interaction between remorse and the theological concepts of repentance, forgiveness, and redemption.1 Her specific contribution to the ‘turn to theology’—which challenges the post-­ modern dismissal of religious discourse—lies in the reflexivity of her novels with the moral and spiritual lives of her readers.2 Rowe’s analysis of the impact of Murdoch’s neo-theology observes that

 ‘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 more positive kind of reflection, a kind of moral philosophy or even neo-theology, which would explain very fundamental things about the human soul and the human being’ (TCHF 211). For critical debate on Murdoch’s (neo) theology see Antonaccio and Schweiker (1996), Part III, IMAR, Part I and IMM, Part III; also Leeson (2010), TMM 2022 and Fiddes (2022). 2  On the ‘turn to theology’ see Marion (1991), Blond (1998), Caputo and Scanlan (1999a), and Janicaud (2000). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8_3

73

74 

F. WHITE

It is to the imagined real-life situations of her novels that one has to turn to find the workable neo-theology that can be integrated into the day-to-day lives of those readers whose faith has lapsed or those who feel unable at all to participate in conventional religious practice. This practicality makes Murdoch both unique and relevant to contemporary theological debate […] because she directed her moral philosophy to its end-point—her readers. (IMM 142)

The double function of challenge and comfort offered by Murdoch’s fiction is evident here: she challenges her readers to re-examine theological concepts for their relevance to the experience of remorse and to question the practical devices offered by religion for alleviating its distress. Her novels simultaneously offer spiritual help to the remorse-stricken in real life. Murdoch dramatises the theological impasse outlined in her philosophy in situations where her novels portray Christian doctrine as illusory and Christian practice as potentially damaging, although they paradoxically retain something precious in Christian spaces and rituals. If she is letting go of the Christian perspective as her philosophy declares, then her fiction reveals that she is doing so with reluctance. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she suggests that ‘It may be said of Kant, that for a man who does not (strictly) believe in God, God’s name is (especially in later life) embarrassingly often upon his lips’, and adds parenthetically, ‘(Many people are in this situation today)’ (MGM 448). For Kant, we can read Murdoch here, who was certainly in this situation at the end of the twentieth century. She could again be describing herself when she says, ‘Kant is still so close to Christianity that theistic terminology is a natural, perhaps the only clear, mode of explanation. He loves Christ, and speaks of holiness, seen at times not only as an aspect of virtue, but almost as something superior to it (its aura perhaps)’ (MGM 448). The metaphysical hermeneutic of the Christian grand narrative is intellectually untenable and morally objectionable to Murdoch because it goes against the understanding of the nature of Good which is the pivotal point of her own philosophy. One must be good ‘for nothing’, not for the personal gain implicit in the rewards of pardon and salvation.3 Her suspicion and mistrust are made plain, not only 3  ‘The Good has nothing to do with purpose, indeed it excludes the idea of purpose. “All is vanity” is the beginning and the end of ethics. The only genuine way to be good is to be good “for nothing” in the midst of a scene where every “natural” thing, including one’s own mind is subject to chance, that is, to necessity. That “for nothing” is indeed the experienced correlate of the invisibility or non-representable blankness of the idea of Good itself’ (EM 358).

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

75

in her philosophical dispute with Christianity, but also in the sharp caricatures of clerical figures in her fiction and her cameos of damage done to individuals by certain Christian perspectives and practices. This intellectual resistance to Christianity as a workable interpretative frame of reference concerns the vexed issues of consolation, fantasy, and suffering, which are inextricably entwined in Murdoch’s thought. David Tracy observes that her refusal to allow consolation as a good in human life is not consonant with her recommendations of good states of mind in non-religious contexts, in that although Murdoch (and Weil) are right to suspect cheap religious consolation, ‘the spiritual states of peace, quiet, serenity (all of which Murdoch endorses) are not far from authentic spiritual understandings of “consolation” in the monotheistic tradition’ (Antonaccio and Schweiker 1996, 74n). In the narratives of the remorse-stricken lives of Hilary Burde in A Word Child and Tamar Hernshaw in The Book and the Brotherhood, Murdoch posits two over-arching questions of a meta-theological nature: is remorse a spiritual as well as psychological condition, and can a spiritual cure for remorse prove meaningful? These questions reveal the way in which her ‘moral psychology’ works paradoxically both with and against religious discourse. Her novels take a critical stance towards Christianity on two counts: first, her intellectual rejection of it as a tenable grand narrative; second, her censure of the psychological effects of bad religious practice. A Word Child critiques what Murdoch perceives as the inadequacy of Christian doctrine as a response to the human problem of remorse by exploring the interaction of remorse with theological concepts of repentance and grace; it also exposes the psychological damage caused by Christian charity masquerading as love. The Book and the Brotherhood investigates the doctrine of salvation and displays scepticism about religious conversion: it also castigates the priest-penitent relationship which is presented as harmful psychological manipulation. Murdoch also requires the reader to differentiate between authentic and cheap forms of consolation in narratives of recovery from remorse: Hilary’s vigil in St Stephen’s Church portrays the former in A Word Child and Tamar’s use of religious conversion as magic in The Book and the Brotherhood exposes the latter. The replacement of ‘God’ with ‘Good’ reveals the difficulty of managing remorse in a post-Christian secular

76 

F. WHITE

mind-set.4 ‘I have wanted to move from “God” to “Good”, taking “religion” along too’ (MGM 426), Murdoch says, but she acknowledges the loss of something of major significance in her denial of theistic realism because ‘the Christian deity gives to individual pilgrims direct supernatural help, not offered by the Form of the Good’ which is ‘impersonal and very distant’ (MGM 400). There is an inherent ontological loneliness in Murdoch’s view of human life, ‘God sees and seeks us, Good does not’ (MGM 83), and her refusal of a teleological dimension necessarily makes hers a somewhat bleak vision which is essentially un-Christian and existentialist in its perception of man as alone.5 From her own loss of faith and her personal immersion in a social world in which Christianity is side-lined, Murdoch extrapolates a greater sense of its diminishment than is in fact the case. Ironically, her work is valued and studied by many for whom the Christian religion is still a living force which shapes their lives and interpretation of experience, including monks and academic theologians. Although cultural theory describes this as a post-Christian age, concurring with Murdoch’s statement that nowadays ‘Christianity is not abandoned so much as simply unknown. A generation has been growing up outside it’ (EM 228), Christianity nonetheless maintains a flourishing presence in the world.6 As Rowe and Horner note, ‘with the driving force that lies behind contemporary literary theory becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, a “turn to theology” is currently evolving

4  ‘In this time of deep change, it seems better to drop the old word “God” with its intimations of an elsewhere, and of an omniscient spectator and responsive super-thou. Religion can exist without this concept of a personal God, and does so in Buddhism and Hinduism’ (MGM 431–2). 5  ‘That human life has no external point or τέλος is a view as difficult to argue as its opposite and I shall simply assert it’ (EM 364). Hauerwas articulates the gulf between Murdoch’s view and the Christian view: ‘Murdoch’s world is finally too lonely for those of us called Christian, those who believe that we were created to be friends with God and consequently, with one another and even ourselves’ (Antonaccio and Schweiker 1996, 207). 6  The grand narrative of Christianity, which has shaped human thought in the western world over the past two millennia and has been a major influence on the western art of that period, is regarded by many as an anachronism in the twenty-first century, a primitive mind-­ cast which humanity has long outgrown. Others, however, still view this grand narrative as a realist, truth-bearing worldview, fully inhabited both publicly and privately, a position articulated by Schweiker, ‘we can make sense of theistic discourse in terms of actual religious communities and human experience itself’ (Antonaccio and Schweiker 1996, 232), and in Hauerwas’s ‘personal reflection’ (TMM 108–12).

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

77

out of the “ethical turn” in philosophy and literature’ (IMM 9). An additional irony is that Murdoch’s own work has been a major factor in this rehabilitation of theology and literature as respect-worthy forms of knowledge and interpretation. Murdoch repudiates what she calls the ‘supernatural machinery’ (MGM 469) of soteriology.7 Above all, she takes issue with the bracketing of suffering with redemption.8 She believes that because Christianity offers ‘the story which we want to hear: that suffering can be redemptive and that death is not the end’ it gives the pointlessness of suffering false meaning and beautifies it (MGM 128). This idea appears to her to be a self-­deceiving form of comfort put up by the psyche (and enshrined in religious stories, symbols, and rituals) to protect it from the unpalatable truth that ‘we are what we seem to be, transient mortal creatures subject to necessity and chance’ (EM 365). Although Murdoch’s claim that ‘this is the traditional and persisting picture’ of Christianity cannot be gainsaid, she acknowledges that ‘the light of modern theology attempts to shine with a difference’ (MGM 128), and many current doctrinal re-interpretations of Christology and soteriology avoid contending the unreality of death or the beauty of suffering.9 A two-way influence is perceptible as Murdoch’s thinking is influenced by her wide-ranging theological reading and reciprocally her work offers inspiration to theologians, often in literary form. This correlation is evident in Murdoch’s citing of the radical theologian Don Cupitt who shares her a-teleological, a-theistic views (MGM 127, 452–3, 455–6) and his complementary citing of her work.10 The potential moral pitfalls of religious experience depicted in Murdoch’s novels are thrown into particularly sharp focus by juxtaposition with the concept of remorse because the psycho-spiritual condition of being remorseful inclines sufferers towards escaping the unbearable reality of their situation through the (often combined) consolations of fantasy or of

 ‘Soteriology: the section of Christian theology dealing with the doctrine of salvation’ (McGrath 1997, 576). 8  Christianity’s ‘central image is of a man in torment’ offers ‘all kinds of consolations’ which include ‘an invigorating sense of guilt combined with a countermanding experience of innocence and of salvation through some imagined punishment’ (MGM 81). 9  ‘Christology: the section of Christian theology dealing with the identity of Jesus Christ’ (McGrath 1997, 567). 10  See Cupitt (1997), and Cupitt (2012): for discussion of the inter-relation between Cupitt and Murdoch see White (1994). 7

78 

F. WHITE

masochistic suffering. Remorse intersects with theology through repentance, forgiveness, and grace, which are problematically related to the conceptual understanding of remorse.11 The semantic content of this intrinsically religious vocabulary depends, however, on the predication of a God to whom repentance can be offered and who can confer forgiveness and provide grace. A theological perspective on Murdoch’s exploration of remorse builds on the ‘intriguing phenomenon’ of ‘the ambiguity of interpretation occasioned by her extensive use of theological concepts and language’, as noted by Peter S. Hawkins in The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Iris Murdoch (Hawkins 1983, 3–4). Murdoch employs the vocabulary of theological discourse in her philosophy and fiction: redemption, salvation, grace are all words she maintains for her own use. But her denial of the Christian metaphysic, within which doctrines of repentance, forgiveness, atonement, salvation, and grace function, problematises her continued use of this lexicon as she disallows such terms the content acquired from their contextual place in theology. As such Murdoch’s characters (and readers) are presented with a sense of the divine which lacks a Divinity. The sovereignty of Good is a different realm from the Christian universe created and given meaning by a sovereign God.12 Elizabeth Burns’s study of Murdoch and Christianity in The Murdochian Mind begins, ‘Iris Murdoch’s attitude to Christianity may be described as ambivalent’, which clearly states the case (Burns 2022, 382). For although Murdoch views Christianity with suspicion, she adheres to the concepts of holiness, transcendence, and a sense of the divine and believes in the efficacy of prayerfulness as a mode of unselfing. Also, by retaining the figure of Christ as an icon whilst dismissing orthodox Christology and soteriology, she develops her own neo-Christology.13 Many of her characters have 11  Discussion of remorse as related to theology is limited to Westernised Christian theology: different perspectives held by other world faiths are outside the compass of this study. Murdoch is concerned with a wide range of religious understandings in her philosophy (MGM 451), but her novels adhere to the Christian background with which she is most familiar, and the religious struggles of her characters are those of the Christian and postChristian tradition. On Murdoch and Buddhism see Ramanathan (2007), Grimshaw (2010) and Gowans (2022); on Murdoch and Hinduism see Mattheew (2010) and Nityanandam (2010); on Murdoch and Judaism see Seidler (2022). 12  On God/good see Jacobs (1995). 13  In interviews Murdoch says: ‘of course I can’t get away from Christ who travels with me’ (TCHF 136), and ‘If you are fortunate enough to have Christ in your life, it’s something you should hang on to’ (TCHF 137); see Osborn (2010) for Murdoch’s neo-Christology.

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

79

what Robert Hardy defines as ‘an obsession with a “redeemer figure”’ (Hardy 2000, 103); like their author, they are ‘Christ-haunted’ (Hawkins 1983, 25) despite their/her lack of conventional Christian belief. This iconic quality is vividly evoked in Anne Cavidge’s visionary encounter with Christ in Nuns and Soldiers. Anne, a former nun who has lost her faith, is troubled by the implications of loss of belief in the efficacy of Christ which are spelt out in her dialogue with the figure who appears to her in the domestic setting of the kitchen. He answers her query as to whether there is salvation, ‘almost carelessly’, telling her, ‘You must do it all yourself, you know’ (NS 297). So just as she preserves the divine without a Divinity, Murdoch retains salvation, but no Saviour. Her fear of the magic she sees as inherent in religion causes her to reject this central Christian concept.14 Anne’s Christ tells her that anything she can think about salvation ‘is as imaginary as my wounds. I am not a magician. I never was. You know what to do. Do right, refrain from wrong’ (NS 298), and he firmly puts the ball back in her court: ‘The work is yours’ (NS 299). Murdoch’s conviction that human beings must save themselves as there is no Saviour Christ or Father God to do so is reiterated throughout her philosophical writing and repeatedly depicted in her novels. Yet, unable to undo what they have done, to rewind time, to repair the damage caused by their actions, Murdoch’s characters long for something greater than themselves to save them, to assuage the terrible pain of their burning biting remorse. They want forgiveness, redemption, grace; Murdoch’s fiction interrogates the Christian conceptions of these ideas which she rejects and instead seeks alternative secular equivalents to fulfil these needs. Murdoch’s dismissal of the concept of God, alongside her fear of the loss of religion, contains an intrinsic anomaly and this paradoxical position is manifest in what Rowe defines as the ‘tension between denial of God and the desire for God [that] haunts Murdoch’s novels’ (IMM 10). The discourse of literature is more open-ended than the discourses of philosophy and theology, in that fiction portrays and explores the full range of human experience without attempting to come to conclusions about it. As Rowe has also commented, ‘this battle between desire and denial

14  In interviews Murdoch says: ‘This is one of the paradoxes of religion that it is partly magical, but that in a way magic is the greatest enemy of religion’ (TCHF 100), and ‘One might say that magic is the enemy of religion, that religion degenerates into magic [....] But persistent religions do have magical elements’ (TCHF 237).

80 

F. WHITE

underpinned both Murdoch’s theological thinking and her fiction, which she thought could be a forum for such tensions to be freely debated’ (Rowe 2019, 60). The polyphonic potential of fiction creates just such a space for the co-existence of multiple perspectives between which neither author nor reader necessarily have to arbitrate, and, as Rowe further observes, these ‘multiple perspectives force readers to perform an obligatory moral imperative that is made in every novel, to assess competing perspectives without relying on any authorial influence’ (IMM 153). In her novels Murdoch balances her a-theistic philosophy against human longing for spiritual aid, creating a dialogue between her secular position and traditional sacred narratives.

A Word Child as a Study of Chronic Remorse … With a Coda of Grace In A Word Child Murdoch interrogates the doctrines of repentance and redemption for their credibility and relevance to remorse. The novel also dramatises the gap between Christian charity and love which Murdoch defines as attention to the reality of the other and portrays the damage caused by such negative experience of religion in childhood. Illegitimate Hilary Burde, the ‘word child’ of the title, was dumped in an orphanage by his sadistic Aunt Bill. His experience of evangelical indoctrination coupled with lack of love, ‘nobody gave me their attention’, leaves him ‘scarred and settled in a position of anger and resentment’ (WC 18), that forms the starting place for all the negative things which befall his adult life.15 Hilary  In The Time of the Angels Murdoch offers another pertinent cameo of such damage, in the orphanage upbringing of Pattie O’Driscoll, the half-black maidservant of an Anglican priest, Carel Fisher. Despite being taught that God loves her by ‘brisk women’ who ‘turned her over as it were to God when they had, as they usually had, other things to do’ Pattie is ‘brutalized by unhappiness into a condition which resembled mental deficiency’ (TA 20). Christian ‘charity’ is so very different from the attention to the reality of the other which Murdoch defines as love that Pattie is starved of love. Her crude religious upbringing makes Pattie vulnerable as spiritual and sexual prey for Carel, the Nietzschean, Heidegger-reading atheistic ‘priest of no God’ (TA 168) who exploits her by taking her as his mistress, his ‘black goddess’. But Murdoch’s description of Pattie’s childhood implies that it is this narrow, inadequate religious outlook that fails to offer love to individual children, which renders her putty in Carel’s hands. The ordinary Christians, the ‘brisk women’, not just the extremist Carel, are thus judged by the narrative and found wanting. Murdoch here indicts Christianity for substituting cheap piety for the difficult work of attention. The words of the Abbess in The Bell to Michael Meade are always applicable to relationships in Murdoch’s fiction: ‘Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love’ (B 235). 15

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

81

gives a powerfully negative account of the ‘over-lit, over-simple, covertly threatening form’ of low evangelical Christianity, whose ‘roared out “choruses” about sin and redemption […] reduced the hugest theological dogmas to the size of a parlour trick’ (WC 20). At the orphanage, ‘the mood was brisk and impatient. Either you were saved by the blood of the Lamb or else you were for it, a black and white matter of breath-taking rewards or whipping’ (WC 20). In this savage cameo, Murdoch manifests an all too recognisable mode of religious practice which not only alienates the victim from the church and from the figure of Christ but also indoctrinates him with guilt and low self-esteem with far-reaching effects, as Hilary’s adult life bears witness. Hilary escapes delinquency and prison through the linguistic gifts which gain him a first-class degree, a teaching post at Oxford, and the chance to create a new life for himself and Crystal, the half-sister who shared his unhappy childhood. He destroys this chance by his affair with Anne, his colleague Gunnar Jopling’s wife, which ends with Hilary’s killing Anne by dangerous driving when she refuses to leave Gunnar. This death brings Hilary’s life to a stop: he is possessed by remorse for Anne’s death, but also by resentment for the ruination of his happiness. Murdoch’s depiction of chronic remorse in A Word Child demonstrates Weil’s insight in Waiting on God into the propensity of sufferers to collude with their affliction—one specific aspect of Weil’s extensive reflections on affliction. Hilary self-dramatises as ‘a coarse stupid accidental semi-­ conscious âme damnée’ (WC 77), a role in which he is trapped by his inability to surmount the destructive impact of his remorse for Anne’s death. He relates, ‘I suffered an agony of remorse about Anne which bit me physically [….] I had a problem about responsibility for the past which became a problem of identity’, and ‘I had lost my moral self-respect’ (WC 126–7). Murdoch renders Hilary’s remorse in terms of Weil’s analysis of affliction as that which ‘hardens and discourages us because, like a red-hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt and defilement which crime logically should produce but actually does not’ (Weil 1977, 80). Hilary knows that he perpetuates his ‘suffering out of resentment’ (WC 381) but feels powerless to change. He has entered into a state of complicity with his affliction by remorse, the complicity that Weil scrutinises: Another effect of affliction is […] to make the soul its accomplice, by injecting a poison of inertia into it. In anyone who has suffered affliction for a long enough time there is a complicity with regard to his own affliction.

82 

F. WHITE

This complicity impedes all efforts he might make to improve his lot; it goes so far as to prevent him from seeking a way of deliverance, sometimes even to the point of preventing him from wishing for deliverance. Then he is established in affliction and people might think he was satisfied. [….] It is as though affliction had established itself in him like a parasite and were directing him to suit its own purposes. (Weil 1977, 81–2)

Murdoch dramatises Weil’s observations by presenting Hilary as a character so ‘established in affliction’. This characterisation emulates the psycho-­ analytical fiction of Dostoevsky, whose Notes from Underground Murdoch consciously echoes in the psychology of her own underground man when she has Hilary say, ‘I had thought of calling this story The Memoirs of an Underground Man’ (WC 38). Hilary’s life during the twenty years following Anne’s death is a self-­ imposed punishment of a narrow existence in a grim flat, a boring, lowly Civil Service job, and a rigid routine. Crystal’s life has been equally diminished at his decree. Her relationship with Arthur Fisch and Hilary’s relationship with Tommy (Thomasina) Uhlmeister are circumscribed by Hilary’s restrictions. He imposes a weekly pattern on Crystal, Arthur, and Tommy and likewise visits other friends on specified evenings, including the suicidally unhappy Clifford Larr. Alone, Hilary idles in his flat or rides aimlessly around on the Inner Circle line, drinking in Underground bars. This sterile existence is dramatically changed by the re-appearance in Hilary’s life of Gunnar, newly appointed head of the Whitehall department where Hilary works, and Gunnar’s second wife, Lady Kitty. Gunnar’s life, outwardly glitteringly successful, has also been inwardly ruined by the circumstances of Anne’s death. Believing that reconciliation with Hilary is necessary for Gunnar, Kitty contrives acquaintance with Hilary. But Kitty and Hilary fall in love. Gunnar discovers them together on a Thames-side jetty, and though Hilary (ironically) is telling Kitty that they must part, Gunnar misconstrues the scene and fights him. Kitty gets knocked into the freezing Thames and dies of exposure, so Hilary is also responsible for Gunnar’s second wife’s death. Clifford’s suicide and Crystal’s marriage to Arthur deprive Hilary of his habitual confidantes, so he is left alone with fresh grief and remorse. The loss of God renders the forgiveness that remorse requires a problematical concept as without God, where can forgiveness authoritatively be sited? This question resonates through Murdoch’s fiction. Ineffectual human attempts to fill the gap left by God are made; Tommy writes to Hilary, ‘I forgive you, on behalf of God’ (WC 130), but this offer cannot

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

83

reach his tortured condition. Murdoch renders Hilary’s atheism complex because he posits the theoretical concept of God in order to test whether God’s existence would make a difference to his situation. He believes ‘it would have needed God to remove’ his affliction of remorse (WC 147), but he does not believe that God’s hypothetical forgiveness could be any more effective than human forgiveness because ‘There just isn’t any psychological or spiritual machinery for removing my trouble’ (WC 196). God does not exist, but even if He did, He would not be any help, seems to be the message both Hilary and Murdoch send the reader. Nonetheless, Hilary’s tormented retrospective introspection is theologically contextual: the evangelical reduction of ‘the hugest theological dogmas to the size of a parlour trick’ that he experienced in childhood leaves him intellectually dissatisfied even as he remains ‘defenceless against the guilt […] so fruitlessly beaten into’ him (WC 20), guilt compounded by Anne’s death. Hilary constantly grapples with the theological concepts involved and Murdoch portrays this wrestling as a distinctive feature of his particular (and partial) recovery from remorse: Sin and despair are mixed and only repentance can change sin into pure pain [….] Did I repent? That question troubled me as the years went by. Can something half-crushed and bleeding repent? Can that fearfully complex theological concept stoop down into the real horrors of human nature? Can it, without God, do so? I doubt it. Can sheer suffering redeem? It did not redeem me, it just weakened me further. I […] would have been willing to pay, only I had nothing to pay with and there was no one to receive the payment. (WC 126–7)

This passage, apparently the artless gabbling of an unreliable first-­person narrator, is packed with theological inquiry and allusion. Hilary’s question in the midst of his rumination, ‘Can something half-crushed and bleeding repent?’, recalls not only the appalling figure of his Aunt Bill and her ‘particular way of stepping on insects’ which provided Hilary with his ‘earliest picture of human wickedness’ (WC 17–18), but also the Kafkaesque world which flickers behind this novel, a world in which clarity cannot be achieved, fairness is not to be found, and a man may metamorphose into an insect. ‘The real horrors of human nature’ are vividly conjured by the unspecific half-image of ‘something half-crushed and bleeding’. Hilary interrogates the ‘fearfully complex theological concept’ of repentance, which cannot be reduced to ‘a black and white matter’ in the over-simplified theology of his childhood teachers. Though desperate for release from

84 

F. WHITE

his paralytic condition of chronic remorse, Hilary cannot access repentance as a meaningful practice, cannot find redemption through his suffering, and cannot make sense of these concepts without God. The picture he offers of having ‘nothing to pay with’ and there being ‘no one to receive the payment’ eloquently expresses the plight of the remorsestricken in a Godless universe. Hilary questions the viability of the concept of repentance, rejecting it because ‘repentance would somehow change the thing, and it is its unchangedness which utterly spoils life and precludes joy’ (WC 221). The perception that repentance causes change is doubly suggestive: first, it infers that repentance may prove to be a performative act, and second, it implies that Hilary resists change. He hangs on grimly to his past, painful though it is, and refuses anything that might allow him to let it go. Both factors prove significant in Hilary’s subsequent self-examination and eventual relinquishing of the past. Although he lives in a constant state of repentance according to ordinary language usage (‘the act of repenting or the state of being penitent; sorrow, regret or contrition for past action or conduct’, OED), he is painfully aware that his ‘sorrow’ and ‘regret’ are too muddled up with other emotions to be pellucidly disentangled: What a stupid coagulated mass of indistinguishable guilt and misery I had become. How perfectly futile all my sufferings had been. If only I could separate out that awful mixture of sin and pain, if I could only even for a short time, even for a moment, suffer purely without the burden of resentment and self-degradation to which I had deliberately condemned myself, there might be a place for a miracle. (WC 200–1)

Murdoch’s Weilian reservation that ‘even to regard suffering as a kind of punishment would be a consolation’ (MGM 108) is echoed here. Masochistic suffering achieves nothing: it is a false consolation composed more of the egoistic resentment and self-degradation that Hilary identifies than of any potentially unselfing contrition. There is a critical differentiation between lucid remorse and this ‘awful mixture’, and Hilary correctly intuits that it is his self-condemnation and resentment which prevent his allowing chronic remorse to be transformed into a more lucid form which might enable him to break out of the endless circularity of his personal hell. In the debate on Christian doctrine Murdoch creates in A Word Child, Hilary expresses her views in rejecting both the consolation offered by soteriology and the Christologically contextualised usage of the term

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

85

repentance in theology.16 Hilary and Arthur Fisch (his good humble colleague and future brother-in-law) discuss the immense difficulty of speaking with Gunnar about the past. Arthur, accused of talking ‘like a bloody theologian’ (WC 290), insists that reconciliation must be possible, and Hilary counters: ‘Why must it? [….] You believe in a sort of thing called reconciliation [….] There are no miracles, no redemptions, no moments of healing, no transfiguring changes in one’s relation to the past’ (WC 290). Such a ‘transfiguring change’, a ‘miracle’, is what remorse craves, but Hilary is deeply suspicious of what he perceives as wishful self-­deception through ‘theological fictions’. He impassionedly voices the mistrust of suffering as consolation that Murdoch expresses in her philosophy17: When I was a little child I believed that Christ died for my sins. Only of course because he was God he didn’t really die. That was magic alright. He suffered and then somehow everything was made well. And nothing can be more consoling than that, to think that suffering can blot out sin, can really erase it completely, and that there is no death at the end of it all. Not only that, but there is no damage done on the way either, since every little thing can be changed and washed, everything can be saved, everything, what a marvellous myth, they teach it to defenceless little children, and what a bloody awful lie, this denial of causation and death, this changing of death into a fairytale of constructive suffering! Who minds suffering if there’s no death and the past can be altered? One might even want to suffer if it could automatically wipe out one’s crimes. Whoopee. Only it ain’t so. (WC 291)

Murdoch consequently portrays Hilary’s omnipresent anger as deriving not only from the destruction of happiness and peace of mind brought

 ‘Repentance (metanoia) implies acceptance of the challenge to human beings to respond to God’s call in Jesus Christ that they “repent for the kingdom of God is at hand”. This response consists in a turning away from a life of rebellion, inertia or perversity, and a turning to God in Christ with faith. In this context, repentance is not a single act, but an ongoing responsiveness to the will of God, a continuous experience made possible through the gift of grace’ (Richardson and Bowden 1983, 499). 17  Consolation is always a word of warning in Murdoch’s lexicon. She follows Freud in thinking that the human psyche ‘constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature’ (EM 364). Murdoch fears consolation as a lulling palliative which seeks to cloak the truth and pretend that things are not as they are. She perceives this weak anodyne sense of consolation in the Christian narrative of vicarious suffering and atonement, and her rejection of the epicentre of Christianity—Christ crucified and risen—derives from her identification of consolation with Christian doctrine. 16

86 

F. WHITE

about by his personal adult history, but also from grief at the destruction of childhood faith and an outraged sense of deception caused by this breakdown of the Christian narrative as a believable metaphysic. The defenceless child that was Hilary was deceived by the ‘marvellous myth’ now revealed as just ‘a bloody awful lie’, and, viewing soteriology as an inefficacious fairytale, he is hurt by this loss. Disillusionment with Christianity, and disappointment with the failure of theology to answer his distress, inform Hilary’s outburst which dramatises Murdoch’s perception that a simplistically understood Christian narrative proves too shallow to engage meaningfully with the complex moral trauma of remorse. This is in part what A Word Child offers by way of intellectual substance to the theological debate Murdoch sustains throughout her fiction on the issue of how remorse can be managed. Yet the narrative runs against Hilary’s argument and holds open the possibilities of healing and redemption which he denies. For Murdoch contrasts the symposium on soteriology which she constructs through Hilary’s agonised soliloquies and violent diatribes against a quiet passage which paradoxically proves to be the climactic scene and heart of the novel. Here, the issue of repentance recurs and Murdoch suggests that there is potential for healing change through grace even for a person as entrenched in chronic remorse as Hilary. The setting is St Stephen’s Church, Gloucester Road, where ‘T.S. Eliot served for many years as a churchwarden’ (WC 378) and where, after the shock of hearing that Clifford has committed suicide, Hilary takes refuge. The novel counterbalances Hilary’s (and Murdoch’s) invective against Christian doctrine with a scene of silent vigil. By compulsive repetition of the action which caused his original downfall—again falling in love with a woman married to Gunnar and being the unintentional cause of her death—Hilary has been brought round full circle to the position he was in twenty years earlier, so it is with redoubled guilt and sorrow that he sits in St Stephen’s Church thinking over the past.18 The setting has double significance: it is a sacred space where

 Hawkins comments on Murdoch’s uncharacteristic choice of place for Hilary’s retrospective introspection: ‘The reader is led to expect that this is far more than the dusty museum of some fiction no longer supreme; that it is, at the very least, as vital and holy as the National Gallery, for instance […] Murdoch seems in this episode to be making positive use of an ecclesiastical setting’ (Hawkins 1983, 122). It is my own conviction that the intertextual links between A Word Child and Four Quartets, some of which are alluded to in this study, is the reason for her choice of this setting. 18

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

87

Christian liturgies are enacted and also the memorial site of the poet T.S. Eliot, a professing Christian. Eliot’s poetry intertwines time and faith and enacts the problematic nature of language through which human beings grope for expression of their elusive understandings of both these difficult concepts. (Eliot too could be labelled a word child.) As Hilary sits ruminating on his past life ‘while the light fails on a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel’ (Eliot 1969, 197), the question of whether repentance could have relevance in his situation recurs: Repentance, penance, redemptive suffering? Nothing of the sort. I had destroyed my chances in life and Crystal’s happiness out of sheer pique, out of the spiteful envious violence which was still in me [….] I had spoilt my talents and made myself a slave, not because I sincerely regretted what I had done, but because I ferociously resented the ill-luck which had prevented me from ‘getting away with it’ [….] Of course I regretted what I had done. I regretted all those wrong choices with their catastrophic results, and not just as pieces of ill luck. I saw where I behaved badly, the selfishness, the destructiveness, the rapacity. But I could now see too how hopelessly this ‘penitence’ was mixed in with the grosser elements which composed almost all of me. (WC 381)

This relentlessly clear-sighted introspection in which Hilary refuses to make excuses for himself on any deterministic grounds and accepts responsibility for the mess he has made of things leads him to consider the potential role of ‘religious rituals for separating out the tiny grain of penitence’ in his situation, rituals which continue ‘even when, as anything experienced, the penitence does not exist at all’ (WC 381–2). Hilary, for whom ‘it all remained […] grossly muddled up, penitence, remorse, resentment, violence and hate’ is unable to seek help through ‘these machines’ (WC 382). But although Murdoch keeps Hilary firmly outside the Christian metaphysic and he refuses the Church’s offices, it may be argued that in the simple use of the church as a place to grieve and think, he nonetheless finds grace, even if of a secularised nature. It is here in this sacred space that, almost despite himself, and certainly despite his negative childhood experience of Christianity, Hilary is at last enabled to ‘separate out’ the ‘stupid coagulated mass’ (WC 200) of emotions with which he has lived so long and so painfully. Hilary has become attentive to many disparate elements in his condition by the time he visits St Stephen’s Church. He acknowledges that he

88 

F. WHITE

has made the past into a prison for himself and Crystal and recognises that his failure to attend may have contributed to Clifford’s suicide. He mourns Clifford and realises that there is still a chance of happiness for Crystal. He owns his faults; he ‘confesses’, if only to himself (and the unspecified narratee), his pique, spite, envy, violence, resentment, selfishness, destructiveness, rapacity, hate. He discovers that in spite of all his pain and grief he wants to survive. Above all, he relinquishes his controlling insistence on seeing himself as the only agent responsible for the muddle that his life has been and accepts ‘the amount of sheer accident which these things, perhaps all things, contained’ (WC 382). This letting go of a hubristic sense of sole liability appears as the germ of a new humility, when Hilary says, ‘Then I had raged at the accidental but had not let it in any way save me from my insistence on being the author of everything. Now I saw my authorship more modestly and could perhaps move in time towards forgiving myself, forgiving them all’ (WC 382). He further comments, ‘There is a religious teaching which says that God is the author of all actions. What I wonder is its secular equivalent?’ (WC 382). There is exquisite irony in Murdoch’s placing her exploration of secular equivalents for religious experience and the first intimation that Hilary may be able to give and receive forgiveness, in a church. It seems that in spite of his rejection of rituals for ‘separating out the tiny grain of penitence’, and his continued insistence that it all remains ‘grossly muddled up’ nonetheless, sitting quietly alone in this holy place in the company of T. S. Eliot’s memorial tablet and the customary figures of the Christ-child and the Crucified-Christ, Hilary does find a way of separating things out, through the words with which he and Eliot wrestle. He is more at peace when he leaves because he has (without benefit of clergy, as it were) made and heard his own confession and his soul is eased. Here Hilary does significant spiritual work in transforming his chronic remorse (full of anger, self-pity, and masochistic suffering) into lucid remorse which sees clearly how responsibility and accident combine and accepts the unchangeable reality of the past with sorrow and self-forgiveness. The transformation that culminates in St Stephen’s Church is not a sudden change but is closely linked with Murdoch’s conception of repentance. What Hilary yearns for is that ‘the bad stuff would all fall away and be changed in the twinkling of an eye’. He believes that ‘there could be deep change’ (WC 200), but Murdoch is clear that repentance, metanoia, is not concerned with abrupt reversals, but with a slow, difficult process of

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

89

altered vision and attitude. She defines this concept in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, ‘Change of being, metanoia, is not brought about by straining and “will-power”, but by a long deep process of unselfing’ (MGM 54), and she contrasts it with any kind of sudden instant magical change which may be proposed by religion: ‘severe Protestant sects preach the fierce magical instant Christ of St Paul [….] Zen too appears to offer magical change brought about by interesting techniques. Needless to say, change is usually a long job’ (MGM 129). Hilary is embarking on this long job, the ‘long deep process of unselfing’; he is at last repenting which opens up future potential for achieving lucid remorse. If what Hilary performs in St Stephen’s Church is a secularised mode of repentance, then what he receives there, which offers true potential for ‘deep change’, is grace—albeit grace in a secular form. In theological discourse, grace is the unearned favour of God towards human beings which gives them spiritual help, comfort, and strength and which enables them to continue and progress in faith and goodness. Murdoch acknowledges the intrinsically religious nature of the concept of grace: ‘With [prayer] goes the idea of grace, of a supernatural assistance to human endeavour which overcomes empirical limitations of personality’ (EM 344). But she also claims that ‘the concept of grace can readily be secularised’ (EM 351). Yet here a parallel problem to that of authoritative forgiveness is posed, for the equivalent question arises: whence grace could derive without God? Murdoch thinks that ‘we have all sorts of ways of experiencing things which are pure and sort of out of the world’ and that ‘in certain states of mind we see all sorts of things as full of grace’ (TCHF 164). And she believes that grace touches her life, ‘though […] not in the dogmatic supernatural sense. But […] there are forces of good that you suddenly find, streams flowing towards you’ (TCHF 164). In her philosophy Murdoch likewise remarks, ‘we often receive an unforeseen reward for a fumbling half-hearted act: a place for the idea of grace’ (EM 334). But these vague comments do not satisfyingly confute the difficulty pinpointed by Hawkins, that although she ‘speaks of the practice of attention as a non-dogmatic prayer, [and] translates sin, grace, and salvation into entirely humanistic terms’, it remains the case that ‘as to the provenance of […] grace, Murdoch has nothing to say’ (Hawkins 1983, 96–7). Her metaphysic implies three possible sources of secularised grace: attention (secular prayer), great art (secular worship), and a kind of mysticism which is left very unspecific and unattached to any religious grand

90 

F. WHITE

narrative.19 All three sources are depicted throughout her fiction, which discloses through action the grace which her philosophy is hard put to define. Hilary is not an obvious candidate for grace. He does not pay loving attention to others, nor does he visit galleries and pay close attention to great art. Grace must come to Hilary by other means, and these means are fragmentary and bleak. The catalyst which sends Hilary into St Stephen’s Church is Clifford’s suicide, and it is the loss of the ‘last resource’ of this confidant and mentor which forces Hilary back on his own inner resources. This deprivation seems to him ‘like the work of a mercilessly just providence’ (WC 381) and is perhaps one of these small bleak means of grace. Simply ageing may be another, as Hilary thinks that in middle-­ age the urge for self-survival becomes stronger and wonders whether this in itself may ‘now at last and in this more awful need, guard [him] from the self-destruction to which [he] had earlier doomed [himself]’ (WC 382). Loss opens Hilary’s eyes. Grief belatedly reveals love and, as he grieves, Hilary recognises that he has both loved and been loved. As he recalls the past, Hilary weeps for Clifford, for Kitty, for Gunnar, for Anne, for his old language teacher Mr Osmand, all of whom showed him love, and gradually ‘in some quieter way’ for himself (WC 380). Healing tears loosen his anger. Hilary’s is not an enlightenment experienced in front of beauty, but a small diminution of his blackness experienced in the ‘darkness’ and ‘obscurity of the church’ where ‘little baffled lights [are] flickering’ (WC 378). His physical surroundings serve as an objective correlative for Hilary’s inner state which is dark and obscure but does have ‘little baffled lights’ beginning to flicker in his mind. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Murdoch says: ‘Simply sitting quietly and calmly can be doing something good’ (MGM 337). Here Hilary stops manically walking about London or travelling pointlessly round in circles on the Tube: he sits

19  In The Fire and the Sun, Murdoch explains her theory of the beneficent potential of art when it is paid full attention: ‘Good art, thought of as symbolic force rather than statement, provides a stirring image of a pure transcendent value, a steady enduring higher good, and perhaps provides for many people, in an unreligious age without prayer or sacraments, their clearest experience of something grasped as separate and precious and beneficial and held quietly and unpossessively in the attention. Good art which we love can seem holy and attending to it can be like praying’ (EM 453). Galleries therefore become sacred spaces in which the transcendent can be discerned and paintings can be sources of grace in a secular age: see Rowe (2002), and Bove and Rowe (2008), for extended treatment of this aspect of Murdoch’s theory and practice.

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

91

calmly in silence and this newfound quietude creates in him the potential for ‘removal from one state of mind to another’ which for Murdoch is an element in ‘the ability or attempt to be good’ (MGM 337). This powerfully understated scene in A Word Child offers the possibility that Hilary has been touched by grace and that this grace has had a healing transforming effect on his remorse. Hilary emerges from the church an older, sadder, calmer man more able to bear reality, having sat quietly all alone, and experienced his griefs as ‘the most unalloyed and enduring things in the fickle muddled selfish human heart’ (WC 382). Nothing has changed as Hilary knows it cannot, but the chronic remorse which was destroying his life and that of others is beginning to be transmuted into a lucid remorse which permits life to go on. Slow repentance (true metanoia) and grace is wreaking in Hilary the ‘deep change’ he longs for (WC 200). That Hilary’s experience in St Stephen’s Church effects this ‘deep change’ in him is corroborated first by its impact on others around him: when Hilary at last pays attention to the reality of others—loves them—they are able to become their individual selves, separate from his consciousness and rapacious need of them. No longer in her brother’s thrall Crystal marries Arthur, and Tommy is able to return. A second narratorial confirmation of change in Hilary is the loosening of his pathological control of time. His rigidly ordered calendar has already disintegrated—after Kitty’s death the structure of the narrative ceases to be divided into days of the week as before because ‘there were no more days’ (WC 377) as life spirals out of his control. But now Hilary’s relinquishing of his futile effort to assert control over time is given a more positive and healing significance. Days are named again, but not as mechanically repeating weekdays. Now they are special days—Christian holy days— Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, days signifying rebirth and new hope. By this means Murdoch simultaneously suggests that despite her personal quarrel with its metaphysic, Christianity may play a part in healing a remorse-stricken life and offers an ironic wryly post-Christian gesture. The novel leaves it open for the reader to envisage Hilary continuing to circle round his treadmill of alienation, anger, and chronic remorse or, alternatively, breaking free of the past and moving forward into a future with Tommy. At a conference on her work held in Caen in 1978 Murdoch said, ‘I felt myself that the end was meant to be unresolved: whether Hilary would find any sort of salvation, either by himself or with Tommy, or whether he wouldn’t fall back into some hopeless kind of neurotic obsessional

92 

F. WHITE

repetition of what had happened so that the next twenty years of his life might resemble the twenty years which are described in the book’ (TCHF 73). Rowe concludes that ‘the rather frightening prospect of Tommy becoming Hilary’s third victim is left open, so that any sentimental promise of Christian renewal is undercut’ (Rowe 2019, 67), but the ambiguous closure of A Word Child allows for an interpretation of the novel which reads it as suggesting that grace is capable, even in a hardened case like Hilary Burde, of transforming bitter destructive chronic remorse into a calm and quiet lucid remorse, which ceases to damage the lives of the remorse-­sufferer and those around him. It also allows the possibility that the sacred space of the church, and the Christian faith that Eliot articulates in his poetry, may act as means of accessing that grace, even if that faith is not shared. In this novel Murdoch ‘transforms theological concepts and vocabulary in order to construct her own philosophical discourse’ (Hawkins 1983, 97), and she paradoxically reclaims an ecclesiastical building as the dramatic site of her own secular understanding of repentance and grace. As Hawkins observes, ‘her fictions are more religiously ambiguous than her stated philosophical position would encourage us to assume […] permitting a theological reading as valid as any which fits more comfortably with what we know to be her view of life’ (Hawkins 1983, 90). The chronic remorse of Hilary Burde is salved by forces of good (Crystal, Arthur, Tommy) and streams of grace including—though very obliquely— the Christian faith that both Hilary and Murdoch herself ostensibly repudiate.

Ambivalent Salvation from Remorse in The Book and the Brotherhood In The Book and the Brotherhood, written over a decade later, Murdoch revisits the relationship between religious practice and the healing of remorse, this time with the somewhat dubious ‘benefit’ of the active role played by an Anglican priest, Father Angus McAlister.20 This novel interrogates the doctrine of salvation and critiques the concept of conversion

 Murdoch’s presentation of Anglican clergymen tends towards hostility; Reginald Askew queries whether among contemporaneous novelists there is ‘a more observant chronicler of these secularising superstitious times, and, in particular, of the collapse of frail Christian ministry into absurdity?’ (Askew 1998, 7–9). 20

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

93

by making the relationship between Father McAlister and Tamar Hernshaw, the central remorseful character in this novel, the focus of enquiry. (Tamar is not a protagonist in quite the manner of Edward Baltram and Hilary Burde in their respective novels; it is difficult to say which, if any, are the central figures in Murdoch’s later novels as she increasingly worked to decentralise her narratives and create multiple perspectives and voices.) Father McAlister is one of a string of Murdochian characters classified by Hardy as ‘the “atheist” priests […] who demand attention in what they have to offer sufferers [who] seem to suffer from spiritual as much as psychological illness’ (Hardy 2000, 104).21 The sub-plot of Tamar’s abortion, remorse, conversion, and transformation is intricately interwoven with the other threads of the novel’s complex narrative structure. (One quarter of the text—150 out of 600 pages—is dedicated to the case of Tamar’s abortion and remorse.) Whereas Hilary’s remorse in A Word Child is focused on the distant past and Edward’s in The Good Apprentice on the immediate past, Tamar’s powerfully depicted trauma occurs within the course of the narrative of The Book and the Brotherhood, but Murdoch again frames the current trauma in repetition of the past. In A Word Child this repetition is created by Hilary’s involvement in the deaths of both Gunnar’s wives: here it is presented as a repetition of life circumstances in three generations of women. Tamar is the illegitimate daughter of an impoverished single mother, Violet, who is brutally clear that she was unwanted. But Violet herself was illegitimate: her existence was resented by her mother and she is ‘well aware of the baleful repetition’ (BB 106) formed by her parallel resentment of her own daughter. Tamar’s unhappy life with an embittered mother makes her acutely conscious of the destructive impact of negative emotions, ‘how it was possible to expend all one’s spirit, all one’s life-energy, in resentment, remorse, anger and hatred’ (BB 108). Tamar lives on the fringe of the middle-aged group of friends who form the brotherhood of the title, being first-cousin-once-removed to Gerard Hernshaw, a key figure in the group. Murdoch’s choice of Hebrew name for her character recalls two Old Testament women exploited by male

21  Others in this group discussed by Hardy are Father Bernard Jacoby of The Philosopher’s Pupil and Father Damien of The Green Knight (Hardy 2000, 103–134). Carel Fisher of The Time of the Angels also comes into the class of ‘atheist priests’, though he offers nothing to anyone, thus differing from Fathers Jacoby, McAlister, and Damien.

94 

F. WHITE

relatives in illicit sexual affairs; Tamar, who seduced her father-in-law, Judah (Genesis 38), and David’s daughter Tamar, who was raped by her half-­brother Amnon (2 Samuel 13). These Biblical allusions hint at parallel elements in Tamar Hernshaw’s situation. When another member of the brotherhood, Duncan Cambus, is deserted by his wife, Tamar’s attempt to console him leads to a clumsy sexual encounter resulting in conception. Through this means Murdoch creates another fictional investigation into the experience of remorse and what can be done to survive it. The element of choice in abortion adds a further dimension to Murdoch’s previous presentations of remorse in her novels. Unlike Edward and Hilary who both kill accidentally, Tamar deliberately ends the life of her unborn child. Abortion, probably the most common way in which morally aware people feel compelled to cause the death of another in the full knowledge that they are choosing to do so, is a highly emotive issue, with strong and unresolved arguments on both sides of the ongoing debate.22 Disparate views on abortion are theologically upheld: the Roman Catholic Church forbids abortion as a mortal sin and the Anglican Church shares the view of abortion as a ‘great moral evil’ whilst acknowledging that there may be circumstances ‘under which it may be morally preferable to any available alternative’.23 Murdoch’s misgivings about abortion appear more concerned with the effect of the choice on the perpetrator than with the unborn child denied life, perhaps from the Socratic perspective that being an evildoer is worse than having evil done to one. A.N.  Wilson recalls Murdoch saying to a woman defending the right to choose abortion, ‘You don’t take into account the regret, the terrible regret a woman might feel who had done this thing’ (Wilson 2003, 15). Conradi’s biography of Murdoch records that she witnessed at first-­ hand the effects caused by such a psychological and physiological trauma, as she helped a ‘friend to have an unwanted pregnancy safely terminated’ and took ‘upon herself the whole misery of the situation’ (IMAL 167–8).

22  Pro-abortionists perceive it as a woman’s right to choose not to have an unwanted baby and English law permits terminations: the Abortion Act came into effect on 27 April 1968. 23  From the Church of England General Synod, 1983. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Code of Canon Law (1983) states: ‘A person who actually procures an abortion incurs automatic excommunication’ (Canon 1398), and Evangelium Vitae: On the Value and Inviolability of Human Life,1995, John Paul II, affirms the fundamental position of the Church: ‘I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being’.

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

95

But David Morgan’s memoir, which recounts how when his girlfriend became pregnant Murdoch ‘helped arrange an abortion, with a gynaecologist off Wimpole Street, which she would have paid for’, suggests that while the friend in Murdoch was ‘anything but light-hearted’ about it (IMAL 168), the novelist (even the moral philosopher) was fascinated by this human dilemma and observed it in careful detail. Morgan ‘wondered about IM’s motives’, feeling ‘that this strange woman had out of compassion, not only taken on the misery, but also thrilled to it vicariously’, and he asks, How—so unworldly—was she so efficient at arranging an abortion? [….] An obvious question and not a prurient one, is how, through all her promiscuity in the 1940s, had she avoided pregnancy? [….] Is it possible that she herself went through the devastating experience of an abortion? (Morgan 2010, 109–10)

Such biographical conjectures aside, it is clear that Murdoch’s fictional presentation of abortion is based on intimate knowledge of this trauma. Several earlier novels depict the effects of abortion on women who have ‘done this thing’ and also the effects on their partners or other relations and friends.24 It is a common ethical dilemma and frequent source of distress in Murdoch’s fictional world. Tamar’s abortion causes remorse not only to herself but to her mother Violet and her friend, Lily Boyne. For Violet (like Hilary in A Word Child) remorse is grossly muddled up with other negative emotions. Lily, who has also had an abortion, helps to find and finance an abortionist for Tamar, thus playing the role Murdoch herself played in the lives of others. Lily suffers ‘awful guilt and remorse’ from

24  In A Severed Head Martin Lynch-Gibbon’s wonders: ‘what vast wound that catastrophe had made in Georgie’s proud and upright spirit’ (SH 9) after his mistress gets rid of their baby, and when Flora Narraway wants an abortion in The Italian Girl her uncle Edmund feels ‘moral nausea both at her plight and at its suggested remedy’ (IG 53) although Flora herself speaks as if it had been merely a tooth extraction: ‘I’ve had it out!’ (IG 96). Morgan Browne, by contrast, is haunted by guilt and regret in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (FHD 552) and the scene in which she tells Julius King that she got rid of their baby without his knowledge is, significantly, the one time in the novel when this demonic character evinces any emotional engagement with life (FHD 95–6). The lives of Priscilla Saxe in The Black Prince, Stephanie Whitehouse in Henry and Cato, and Diane Sedleigh in The Philosopher’s Pupil are all shadowed by past abortions, and Sarah Plowmain is grateful to have been relieved of that decision in The Good Apprentice.

96 

F. WHITE

the ‘accusing memories’ of her own past (BB 203). Her ‘burden of remorse’ is intensified when Tamar heaps reproaches on Lily for persuading her to have the abortion (BB 348); she is ‘near to hating Tamar for causing her so much regret and remorse’ (BB 531). For Tamar, as for Edward in The Good Apprentice and Tom in The Philosopher’s Pupil, remorse is the end of innocence. The narrative which presents Tamar as an innocent young heroine has, as so often in Murdoch’s fiction, self-conscious elements of fairytale and Shakespearean Romance. The Book and the Brotherhood opens at an Oxford Midsummer Ball with Tamar ‘poised ready to fall in love’ (BB 5). When her appointed prince, Conrad Lomas, deserts her, she finds herself dancing with the cuckolded bear-like Duncan. Her feelings for him are redolent of Beauty and the Beast, and this pity in conjunction with desire for a father figure makes her seducible.25 Pregnancy and abortion cut through these fairytale allusions with gritty psychological realism, as Tamar becomes utterly changed through affliction. Remorse is the mode in which Tamar experiences affliction—the Void of Simone Weil which Murdoch analyses in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals—and Tamar’s decision to have an abortion is the pivotal point of this dramatisation of remorse. When Tamar, who has already ‘felt guilt and remorse’ at previous sexual encounters (BB 322), finds herself pregnant, she panics. Her distress is multiple: not only has she ‘always had a dread of pregnancy’ and the ‘sordid miserable dilemmas’ of her fellow students in this situation (BB 322) but this is Duncan’s child she is expecting. He and his wife Jean are her friends and mentors and Tamar knows that their childlessness was a grief to them. As Conradi remarks, it also ‘threatens’ to turn her life ‘into a parody of her mother’s and grandmother’s’ (S&A 351). The novel details Tamar’s distress, her awareness of ‘the terrible aliveness of the child’ as ‘an authoritative presence […] asserting his rights’ (BB 325) and stresses the gravitas of what she is proposing to do as she plans the abortion: ‘She and the child walked and walked. She and the child went up in the lift to Lily’s flat’ (BB 327). Persuaded by Lily, who voices the extreme position of one side of the ethical debate, ‘abortion is nothing, it’s a method of birth 25  Murdoch renders the matter of Tamar and a father-substitute complex, as her need for such a figure is not definitively attached to any one particular man: it is at Gerard’s behest that she visits Duncan and Gerard’s scarf which she wears, Jenkin to whom she runs when in trouble and—significantly, Father McAlister, to whom she is immediately susceptible when tormented by guilt and remorse.

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

97

control’ (BB 328), Tamar goes blindly, hastily ahead. The narrative identifies the critical gap between before and after Tamar’s choice which is presented as a momentous moral mistake. Immediately it is over, Tamar realises what it is that she has done: Tamar went into the clinic as one in a dream, walking like an automaton [….] She came out all aware, all raw anguished tormented consciousness. She saw now, now when it was so dreadfully absolutely just too late, that she had committed a terrible crime, against Duncan, against herself, against the helpless fully-formed entirely present human being whom she had wantonly destroyed. She had condemned herself to a lifetime of bitter remorse and lying. (BB 344)

Her agony of mind presents the opposite-extreme ethical position on abortion from that expounded by Lily. She tells Jenkin bluntly: ‘I became pregnant with Duncan’s child and now I have killed it’ (BB 364), and states unequivocally: ‘It’s murder, it’s the irrevocable crime for which one suffers death’ (BB 365). Now that it is too late Tamar recognises that she acted over-hastily and time, which seemed of the essence in getting rid of the unplanned baby, now becomes a fearsome enemy to her peace of mind: ‘she was sentenced to think of that lost child every day and every hour for the rest of time’ (BB 344). Now it is her awareness of the unique dead being of the aborted baby which haunts her; ‘living on as a horrible filthy ghost, dedicated to punishing its murderous mother’ (BB 365), in words which uncannily recall the description of Tamar as being a ‘nasty hurtful ghost’ to her own mother (BB 158). Tamar is set to become entrenched in chronic remorse: her mother fears for her sanity and her friends are at their wits’ end to know how to help her. Murdoch viscerally situates her fictional character in extremis and in desperate need of forgiveness. Through the intervention of Father Angus McAlister, Murdoch sets this position of utter affliction against such relief from it as religious beliefs and practices may claim to offer and tests the legitimacy and goodness of those claims. Father McAlister’s character is critical to Murdoch’s reflections on the interaction of religion with remorse. But his pastoral dealing with Tamar is a source of deep unease and unsettledness, as throughout the novel the characterisation of Father McAlister is destabilised by the contradictory visions offered of him by other characters and by the narratorial voice. The reader is not allowed any interpretative resting-place but is kept in a constant state of puzzlement.

98 

F. WHITE

Father McAlister is initially presented, both to the other characters and to the reader, as a comic figure, a skating parson who is ‘showing off’ (BB 254); such an image remains in the reader’s mind later when the clergyman is seen in his pastoral and spiritual roles. Murdoch’s description of the priest in the pulpit, preaching an impassioned sermon on sin, contrition, and grace, employs the adjectives ‘tall’, ‘striking’, ‘commanding’, ‘fierce’, ‘authoritative’, ‘emphatic’ (BB 279–80), which combine to suggest a forceful personality. He is variously dismissed as an ‘interfering priest’ (BB 283), a ‘sentimental parson’ (BB 506), a ‘loathsome hypocrite’ (BB 507), and a ‘trendy priest’ (BB 594), and a wide range of possible views of him— ‘cynical fake, charlatan, mad saint, wizard’ (BB 545)—is held open by the text. Father McAlister regards himself as ‘nothing, a servant, an instrument, a slave’ (BB 284). It is difficult to know what Murdoch intends the reader to make of this spectrum of appraisal: it could perhaps be read as a deliberate ploy, goading her readers to elicit moral engagement from them.26 Father McAlister’s interaction with Tamar is likewise ambivalent and open to differing interpretations. Ramanathan sees ‘spuriousness in Father McAlister’s worship’ and thinks him ‘guided by his ego under the guise of his Saviour’ (Ramanathan 1990, 198). She reads The Book and the Brotherhood as suggesting that his ‘exorcism [of Tamar] in the form of psychological counselling has left her last state worse than her first’ (Ramanathan 1990, 199). Hardy disagrees with Ramanathan and his reading of the novel puts an opposing view: ‘her progress from utter despair to “quiet hope” under the ministrations of […] Father McAlister, is a psychological case study as powerful as that of Edward’s transformation by Thomas in The Good Apprentice’ (Hardy 2000, 118). Hardy analyses the narratorial tone regarding the priest—‘On the face of it the narrator shares Ramanathan’s suspicion’ (Hardy 2000, 119)—and argues that the complexity of textual attitudes towards Father McAlister and towards his ‘use’ of Christ undermines Ramanathan’s dismissal. Close attention certainly has to be paid to what the narrator says about the priest, set against what the narrative says his spiritual activity achieves. Father McAlister’s determined bid for Tamar’s soul stretches readerly credulity. She is not even a parishioner, and his insistence that she confide her troubled private life to him is depicted as a psychological assault. His

 I am indebted to Anne Rowe for this insight.

26

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

99

‘strong grip’ on her wrist and his commanding imperatives (BB 284) justify Tamar’s claim that ‘he forced me to tell him’ (BB 367). More disturbing than this coercion though is the manipulation of Tamar’s wounded and vulnerable psyche and the pleasure that finding such a soul in distress gives to this self-appointed spiritual director. As soon as she ceases to resist him and weeps, Father McAlister uses a ‘conspiratorial whisper’ to entice Tamar to tell a total stranger her most secret private life. This is tantamount to ‘listener’s rape’,27 a judgement corroborated by the narrator’s comment that Father McAlister ‘might positively have been said to gloat over Tamar’, that his ‘eyes sparkled’ (BB 487), and that a ‘thick emotional atmosphere generated by frequent meetings between priest and penitent’ later develops (BB 515). Murdoch builds up a sense of unholy domination and exploitation. It is overtly stated that ‘unburdening did her no good’ (BB 326). Nor does Tamar do as he advises which is ‘to keep the child and trust in God’ (BB 325). However, after the abortion it is to the priest that Tamar turns, and the novel requires the reader to evaluate this choice of resource for recovery from chronic remorse. For by choosing the priest, Tamar is electing religion as the means of escape from her torment of remorse so The Book and the Brotherhood serves as a fictional meditation on two enigmatic statements Murdoch makes in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. First: ‘In real life we have to do with the deep devious ingenuity of egoism, those “devices and desires of our own hearts” which the Prayer Book tells us we have followed too much’ (MGM 131), and second: ‘Organised religion mitigates its failures by a doctrine of grace whereby the feeble efforts of sinners may benefit from the energy of a higher power and something like this can really happen’ (MGM 130). Tamar’s story suggests that both statements are true. It is Tamar’s ‘deep devious ingenuity of egoism’ which leads her to collude with Father McAlister and with the rites of his church. But it is grace which acts upon Tamar to liberate her, both from the crippling chronic remorse she bears and from the co-dependent mutually damaging relationship with her mother, and it is organised religion, for all the frailty and inadequacy of its representative, Father McAlister, which helps her to find that grace and to achieve ‘deep change’ (WC 200) in her traumatised life. Tamar decides to be baptised and confirmed as a Christian despite not believing in ‘all this

27  ‘There can be such a thing as “listener’s rape”, where the person confiding comes to feel his privacy has been violated, his inner being “robbed”’ (Conradi 2005).

100 

F. WHITE

nonsense’ (BB 452) and despite her priest’s equal lack of belief: ‘Tamar did not believe in God or a supernatural world and Father McAlister, who did not believe in them either, had not troubled her with these fictions’ (BB 553–4). This seems perverse of Murdoch and it forces the question upon the reader of what it is that acts beneficently on Tamar’s life if no reality is allowed to the spiritual world of Christianity. Murdoch presents Tamar’s case as a matter of the psyche using whatever it can to readjust itself and regain equilibrium after deep trauma. She believes psychological survival to be a valid use of religion. The Book and the Brotherhood and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals may be seen as mutually reflexive parallel texts on the same subject.28 In stating that ‘religion may still be an answer to guilt and fear, […] the hope of the salvation of the individual and the redemption of all fallen things remains in many forms’ (MGM 80–81), Murdoch makes a space for the spiritual. She specifically connects religious help with the problem of remorse: ‘Religion provides a well-known well-tried procedure of rescue. Particularly in relation to guilt or remorse or the obsessions which can be bred from these, the mystery of religion (respected, intuited) is a source of spiritual energy’ (MGM 486–7). The stumbling block for Murdoch seems to come with any concept of the supernatural, which, in her view, rapidly shifts into magic, and it is precisely this blurred and porous borderline between the spiritual and the magical that she explores in The Book and the Brotherhood. Tamar feels that she needs ‘extreme help’, that she has ‘got to be saved from destruction’ and needs ‘supernatural help’ to that end (BB 451). She says, ‘I don’t care whether God exists or who Christ was. Perhaps I just believe in magic. Who cares? It’s up to me, it’s my salvation’ (BB 542). The word ‘magic’ recurs in connection with Holy Communion (BB 489) and Father McAlister, who breathes ‘the fire of instant salvation’ (not the long slow unselfing of metanoia), believes in ‘the magical power […] entrusted to him when he was ordained’ (BB 488). He is exactly the figure Tamar is seeking in her distress of mind and soul and Murdoch depicts their collusion as a ‘struggle’ and a ‘dance’ to which Tamar becomes ‘addicted’. She ‘surrenders herself’ to Father McAlister and finding her

28  Murdoch gave the Gifford Lectures which formed the basis of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals in 1982 although the book was not published until 1992: The Book and the Brotherhood was published in 1987 during this decade when she was wrestling with her understanding of how religion, psychology, philosophy, and art might fit together.

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

101

own salvation through this work becomes her ‘absorbing task’; ‘perhaps’, the narrator says, ‘the cleverest thing that Tamar had ever done’ (BB 488). On his part, the priest is shown to be intelligently aware of Tamar’s needs, but the narratorial tone makes a harsh judgement on his practices by openly criticising the combination of his confused emotional atheism with fanatical belief in the saving power of the Christ figure. His Easter observances are performed ‘in agony, with tears’, but the narrator says sharply (and puzzlingly) that ‘this did him no credit. Rather the contrary’ (BB 541). As Hardy notes, ‘the narrator’s stance towards the priest is not straightforward’ (Hardy 2000, 120). In teaching Tamar to pray, Father McAlister uses Murdochian language and concepts, ‘it was simply a quietness, an attentive waiting, a space made for the presence of God’ (BB 490),29 and the priest’s private prayer as he watches Tamar and Violet fight their battle together seems that of a good, humble, and selfless man: ‘Oh let there not be hate, but love, not pity, but love, not power, oh not power except the spirit of Christ’ (BB 505). Yet there is implied criticism of the service of contrition which he imaginatively creates for Tamar to help her let go of her remorse over the abortion—even, perhaps, to exorcise her from any spiritual possession through obsessing over the dead baby. This invented rite combines phrases from Psalms 22, 30, and 51.30 Hardy remarks that ‘it is difficult to do justice to the complexity of this […]  ‘Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love’ (EM 344). 30  Tamar murmured that: 29

she acknowledged her transgressions

For I acknowledge my transgressions:

and her sins were ever before her,

and my sin is ever before me. Psalm 51:3

that she had been poured out like water

I am poured out like water,

and all her bones were out of joint,

and all my bones are out of joint: Psalm 22:14

that she desired to be washed and to be whiter than snow,

Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Psalm 51:7

that a broken and contrite spirit might

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit:

not be despised,

a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. Psalm 51:17

that broken bones might after all rejoice,

that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Psalm 51:8

and she might put off her sackcloth and

thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me

be girded in gladness

with gladness; Psalm 30:11

102 

F. WHITE

metaphorically mixed assortment comically mismatched to the pitiful event’ but owns that ‘the effect is intensely moving and gives an insight into the depths of Tamar’s need’ (Hardy 2000, 122). These ancient words, hallowed in Judaism and Christianity alike, articulate the human sense of total affliction and may be imagined as offering a psychological or spiritual handhold to one trying to climb out of the void. But the narrator dismisses them as a ‘pastiche’ and ‘most holy farrago’, seeming to deny any dignity or significance to the ceremony which leaves Tamar ‘tear-stained and radiant’ (BB 493). The ambiguity of presentation continues after Tamar’s transformation, leading to uncertainty about whether Father McAlister’s influence has been for good or ill. ‘Sleek’ (BB 482) is the word chosen to describe her almost unrecognisably different appearance after her conversion and absolution, but Gerard is anxious that it may be an unreal change: ‘she may be drugged or deranged’ (BB 482). As she resists her mother’s control for the first time in her life Tamar is ‘conspicuously calm’ (BB 506), ‘authoritative and detached’ (BB 509). In Violet’s view, she has become ‘cruel [and] self-willed’ (BB 515). Even Father McAlister is not sure whether this change is ‘a metamorphosis of an old deep hatred’ and wonders if he has ‘simply created another monster’ (BB 510). The lack of a securely sited narratorial position in this novel leaves the reader little clue as to whose voice may be considered dependable, and the constant flux of viewpoints is further destabilised by such enigmatic textual moments as the exchange between Tamar and Father McAlister as she leaves to take up her own independent life, ‘she looked at [him] and an extraordinary glance passed between them. The priest thought she has seen through me. Then: who has betrayed whom?’ (BB 511). This sombre, even sinister, note is consolidated in the priest’s musing after the scene: ‘The power I derive from my Christ is debased by its passage through me. It reaches me as love, it leaves me as magic. That is why I make serious mistakes’ (BB 517). The implication that he thinks he has made a ‘serious mistake’ in his handling of Tamar can be expanded to interpret the novel as suggesting that religion has been a seriously mistaken way for Tamar to overcome her remorse and recover her life. Yet the narrative (never trust the teller, trust the tale, as D.H. Lawrence reminds us) suggests otherwise.31 Tamar and her mother benefit from 31  Lawrence’s exact words in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) are ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ (3).

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

103

Father McAlister’s attention. Violet is rightly coerced into accepting her daughter’s independence and indeed encouraged to seek her own happiness and to come to terms with her own ‘resentment and remorse and hate’ (BB 539). They are both re-integrated into their wider family and the world, are seen at parties laughing, are rumoured to be happy. Tamar is studying at Oxford again, and, as the novel comes full circle in closure, the prince, who deserted her at the Ball in the opening scene of The Book and the Brotherhood, is once more paying court. And Tamar herself is content with the result of her dabble with religion, even if that is all it may turn out to be in the long run. It has performed a vital role in saving her from desolation and potential insanity. It has been, in whatever way the word can be construed, her ‘salvation’ from remorse. Christianity has helped Tamar to feel a ‘natural grief’ and has effected changes in her emotions and in her understanding of those emotions: ‘Many frightful pains grew less, repentant regret, like a kind of knowledge, gradually replaced self-destructive self-hating remorseful misery and despair. There were differences and she understood the differences’ (BB 492). She too is alarmed by her newfound strength to withstand her mother and wonders if freedom from Violet’s domination was what her ‘cunning psyche had […] always been after’ (BB 541). But she believes in good future possibilities for both of them and that religion has helped her recover from her obsessive guilt. The reductive tone of the narratorial account of the role of religion in this is plain: ‘Magic against magic, she had been cured, relieved of evil pain, as her wizard put it, left with good pain’ (BB 543). Whether or not the narrator will give any credit to religion (magic) or a priest (wizard) the fact remains within the text that Tamar’s crippling chronic remorse (evil pain) has been changed into calm lucid remorse (good pain). Like Edward and Hilary in the earlier novels, Tamar has found a way of assimilating the past and living with the truth of what happened. That is a significant psycho-­spiritual adjustment, not to be gainsaid, and the final comment made about Tamar in The Book and the Brotherhood upholds it. When Lily opines that ‘All religion ever did for her was get rid of her mother’, Gull dissents, ‘I don’t know […] I think it was something deep’ (BB 594). ‘Deep change’: the narratorial voice casts doubt throughout, but the narrative concurs. Tamar is as different at the end of her story as Hilary is at the end of his.

104 

F. WHITE

Compassion eschews judgement. It is important to qualify the often-­ sceptical tone of The Book and the Brotherhood with the measured reflections of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. When the sincerity of Tamar’s belief in religion is questioned, she rages, ‘I knew you’d start on that, you all think it’s so important! I don’t. When you’re drowning you don’t care what you hold onto’ (BB 451). Tamar exemplifies the lonely individual depicted in this crucial passage in Murdoch’s philosophy concerning the place of religion in affliction: Extreme suffering, from one cause or another, is likely to be the lot of everyone at some time in life; and innumerable lives are hideously darkened by […] remorse or guilt [….] Here every individual is ultimately alone, and in relation to actual cases it seems impertinent to consider what use is made of religious consolation. Theological truth is abstract. Out on the battle-front of human suffering people will use such devices as they have for survival. (MGM 504)

Deprived of secular sense and sympathy by the death of Jenkin, the novel’s figure of Good, Tamar uses the devices of Christianity for her survival: the novel leaves it open to the reader to judge her success. Just as I think that Hilary is touched by grace and released from remorse alone in St Stephen’s Church, so I think Tamar achieves her salvation with the help of the imperfect Father McAlister and the imperfect rites of the imperfect Anglican Church. Murdoch says, ‘there are many ways out of affliction [….] But a deep, or a real, or a proper recovery demands […] some sort of moral activity, making a spiritual use of one’s desolation’ (MGM 503). Hilary and Tamar take very different ways out of their affliction. But the narrative trajectories and the closures of A Word Child and The Book and the Brotherhood strongly suggest that each of these characters has made a deep, real, proper recovery from their extreme situations of remorse, and they have both made spiritual use of their desolation. In varied and complex ways, and with many misgivings and provisos, Murdoch’s novels appear to uphold the view that religious experience, whether alone and unvoiced as such, or in the embrace of the church and fully voiced, has a major role to play in the work of recovering from remorse.

3  ‘A FEARFULLY COMPLEX THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT’: REMORSE… 

105

References Murdoch Criticism Antonaccio, Maria and William Schweiker, eds., Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Askew, Reginald, ‘The Occasional Clergyman’, Iris Murdoch Newsletter, 12 (Summer 1998), 7–9 Bove, Cheryl, and Anne Rowe, Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) Burns, Elizabeth, ‘Murdoch and Christianity’, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 382–94. Cupitt, Don, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Case of Star-Friendship’, in Rowe and Horner (2012), 11–16. Fiddes, Paul, Iris Murdoch and the Others: A Writer in Dialogue with Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2022) Gowans, Christopher W., ‘Murdoch and Buddhism, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 395–408 Grimshaw, Tammy, ‘Do not Seek God outside your own Soul: Buddhism in The Green Knight’, in Rowe and Horner (2010), 168–193 Hardy, Robert, Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2000) Hawkins, Peter S., The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 1983) Jacobs, Alan, ‘Go(o)d in Iris Murdoch’, First Things, February 1995 http://www. firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3997 Leeson, Miles, Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (London: Continuum, 2010) Mattheew, Minnie, ‘The Sea, The Sea: A Reading in the Light of the Bhagavad Gita’, in Kırca and Okuroğlu (2010), 139–48 Morgan, David, With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (Kingston: Kingston University Press, 2010) Nityanandam, Indira, ‘An Indian Reading of Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good’, in Kırca and Okuroğlu (2010), 149–54 Osborn, Pamela, ‘“A Story about a Man”: The Demythologised Christ in the Novels of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White’, in Rowe and Horner (2010), 156–67 Ramanathan, Saguna, Iris Murdoch: Figures of Good (London: Macmillan, 1990) Ramanathan, Saguna, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Deconstructive Theology’, in Rowe (2007), 35–44 Rowe, Anne, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2002) Rowe, Anne, Iris Murdoch, Writers and Their Work Series (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019)

106 

F. WHITE

Seidler, Victor Jeleniewski, ‘Murdoch and Jewish thought’, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 409–37 Wilson, A.N., Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003)

Other Works Blond, Phillip, ed., Post-secular philosophy: between philosophy and theology (London: Routledge, 1998) Caputo, John D., and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999a) Conradi, Peter J., ‘Fox on the Loose’, review of Party in the Blitz by Elias Canetti, the Guardian, Saturday 7 July 2005 Cupitt, Don, After God: The Future of Religion (London: Phoenix, 1997) Eliot, T.S., The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1969) Janicaud, Dominique, ed., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: the French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000) McGrath, Alister E., Christian Theology: An Introduction 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell,1997) Marion, Jean-Luc, God without being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) Richardson, Alan and John Bowden, eds., A New Dictionary of Christian Theology (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1983) Weil, Simone, Waiting on God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London: Collins, 1977): French edition, Attente de Dieu (1950) White, Stephen Ross, Don Cupitt and the Future of Christian Doctrine (London: SCM, 1994

CHAPTER 4

Remorse, Trauma Theory, and Primal Wounding: The Good Apprentice and The Green Knight

The term ‘trauma fiction’ represents a paradox or contradiction: if trauma comprises an event or experience which overwhelms the individual and resists language or representation, how then can it be narrativised in fiction? —Whitehead (2004, 3)

Murdoch’s Dialogue with Trauma Theory The Oxford English Dictionary defines trauma as ‘a deeply distressing or disturbing experience: emotional shock following a stressful event or a physical injury, which may be associated with physical shock and sometimes leads to long-term neurosis’. An original element of Murdoch’s art is the disclosure made in her novels that to be filled with remorse is necessarily to be traumatised, though the word trauma does not occur in her lexicon. Her fiction presents remorse as a form of trauma, a fact noted but not discussed by Alan Thomas when he comments that ‘the remorseful individual’ in her work undergoes ‘a structurally analogous scene to that of the original trauma’ (Cox 1999, 132). As such Murdoch’s novels clearly participate in a dialogue with trauma theory and extend the range of trauma theory studies through her emphasis on the interconnection of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8_4

107

108 

F. WHITE

literature and ethics which prefigures the thrust of trauma theory towards an ethically oriented reader-response to texts.1 Yet Murdoch’s fiction has seldom been related to trauma theory, which Roger Luckhurst registers as only emerging ‘after the mid-1990s, when various lines of inquiry converged to make trauma a privileged critical category’ (Luckhurst 2006, 497). Trauma theory rapidly proved a burgeoning area, became an accepted category within and across many disciplines, and came to include many fields, focusing on psychological, philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic questions about the nature and representation of traumatic events. Luckhurst locates trauma theory as part of ‘a larger vogue for the “ethics of the infinite” propounded by […] Emmanuel Levinas’ and links it closely with the ethical turn because ‘trauma theory tries to turn criticism back towards being an ethical, responsible, purposive dialogue, listening to the wounds of the other’ (Luckhurst 2006, 504–6).2 So the intrinsically ethical nature of trauma theory correlates with both Murdoch’s connection of art with morals and the kind of reader-response her work invites. Anne Whitehead’s study, Trauma Fiction, delineates the impact of trauma theory on literary criticism: The ethical questions raised by testimony are inherently literary. Geoffrey Hartman observes that trauma theorists are trying to find ‘a way of receiving the story, of listening to it, of drawing it into an interpretative conversation’. In literary studies, interpretation is too often construed as a binary process which takes place between the active subject (the reader) and the passive object (the text). Trauma theory readjusts the relationship between reader and text, so that reading is restored as an ethical practice. Hartman argues that the text addresses the reader as a ‘responsive, vulnerable, even unpredictable being’. (Whitehead 2004, 8)

1  Trauma theory evolved in the 1990s with the work of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, Geoffrey Hartman, Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Ruth Leys. For the interaction of trauma theory and literary studies, see Wolfreys (2002), Whitehead (2004), and Luckhurst (2006). 2  The ethical nature of the dialogue between the writer of a text of trauma and the reader of the traumatic text become particularly relevant in Chap. 5, when the concept of a wound is widened from the suffering of individuals to the sufferings of whole peoples in the context of Murdoch’s Holocaust narratives for, as Luckhurst observes, ‘the range of concerns that can be conceptualized under the category of trauma […] stretches from the psychic life to public history’ (Luckhurst 2006, 503).

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

109

Murdoch’s fiction anticipates such responsive, vulnerable, and unpredictable readers, who reflect on the ethical and spiritual issues her texts raise and allow such interpretative reflections to affect their lives. Her novels aim to restore reading as the ethical practice she declares it to be in her own theoretical writing, where novel-reading is regarded as a moral activity. Murdoch embraces the reader as partner in her literary enterprise. She declares that ‘the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations’ (EM 326), and remarks on the reflexivity between reading and life: ‘In the traditional novel the people, the story, the innumerable kinds of value judgements both illuminate and celebrate life, and are judged and placed by life, in a reciprocal process’ (MGM 97). Whitehead also understands that ‘trauma theory is inherently linked to the literary’ because the novel form provides a more detailed and complex forum for debating the effect of the trauma of remorse than can be offered by theory alone (Whitehead 2004, 4). Murdoch’s own trauma fiction can express something that theory cannot articulate and readings of her novels provide what Whitehead calls ‘an extension of the theory’s own silences’ (Whitehead 2004, 4). Close readings of two late novels—The Good Apprentice, in which Edward Baltram is traumatised by remorse, and The Green Knight, in which the primally wounded Lucas Graffe denies remorse as a meaningful concept—illustrate Murdoch’s innovative and anticipatory contribution to trauma fiction. Pairing The Good Apprentice with The Green Knight juxtaposes contrasting problems concerning remorse. First, the problem presented by those who perceive themselves as evildoers, the work of assimilating remorse; second, the problem presented by those who fail to perceive themselves as evildoers, denoting a pathological lack of relationship to the other which can perhaps be described as moral autism. Murdoch regards the latter as well as the former as modes of affliction, and her participation in the debate on the psychology and psychopathology of remorse focuses on the different challenges that Edward’s remorse in The Good Apprentice and Lucas’s eschewing of remorse in The Green Knight present to the characters surrounding them and, by extension, to readers. Two specific elements in the nature of trauma form links between trauma theory and remorse in Murdoch’s fiction. First, both trauma and remorse are intrinsically connected to the damaged relationship with time discussed earlier in Chap. 2. Ulrich Baer’s pithy description of trauma as ‘unresolved experience’ (Wolfreys 2002, 126) encapsulates Luckhurst’s

110 

F. WHITE

explanation that ‘a psychical trauma is something that enters the psyche that is so unprecedented or overwhelming that it cannot be processed or assimilated by usual mental processes’ (Luckhurst 2006, 499). In this train of thought Luckhurst follows the work of ‘Freud and Breuer [who] suggest that it is not so much the traumatic event in itself as the memory of the trauma that “acts like an agent provocateur in releasing the symptom”’ (Luckhurst 2006, 499). Murdoch’s remorseful characters are obsessed with the past, brooding upon and re-living unchangeable events. Their ‘unresolved experience’ works to the detriment of their ability to function in the present and compels them to repeat destructive actions. Such ‘repetition compulsion’, a concept defined by Freud and Lacan, features strongly in her novels as her characters repeat their unhappy actions in scenes which combine psychological veracity with mythical patterning.3 (Michael Meade’s kissing of Toby Gashe repeats his kissing of Nick Fawley in The Bell: Hilary Burde is responsible for the deaths of both Gunnar Jopling’s wives in A Word Child). Wound is the key word in the second element of trauma which integrally relates it to Murdoch’s emphasis on remorse. In Freudian terms, trauma is ‘understood as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind’ (Wolfreys 2002, 135), and as Cathy Caruth’s study of trauma discloses, ‘the wound of the mind—the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world—is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event’ (Caruth 1995, 4). Unlike the absent word trauma, the word wound features increasingly strongly in Murdoch’s lexicon and the concept develops into a dominant metaphor in her last six novels. Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil has ‘mortally wounded George’s soul’ (PP 138), and remorseful Edward Baltram in The Good Apprentice is described as in a ‘wounded state’ (GA 105). In The Book and the Brotherhood Jenkin tries to soothe Tamar’s ‘massive wound’ of remorse (BB 366), and in The Message to the Planet Dr Marzillian says, of traumatised Holocaust survivors, ‘my heart has knowledge of these wounds’ (MP 498). References to wounds are multiple in the last two novels and many characters describe their suffering in these terms. As painful events and memories accrue even in materially privileged individual lives, Murdoch’s sense of the traumatic nature of all human suffering is expressed in somatic metaphor: widowed 3  See Nicol’s study of retrospection in Murdoch’s fiction which draws on concepts supplied by the work of Freud and Lacan and explores the compulsion to repeat in Murdoch’s fiction within a psychoanalytical interpretive framework (Nicol 2004, 111–13 and passim).

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

111

Louise Anderson in The Green Knight thinks, ‘Now I am all wounds’ (GK 336), as her daughters and friends also drift away from her; similarly Edward Lannion in Jackson’s Dilemma regards being jilted by Marian Berran as ‘just another thing, another wound in my life’ (JD 43), following his earlier traumatic experience of witnessing his brother’s drowning. Murdoch’s characters often suffer physical hurts which seem to express psycho-spiritual states as much as bodily ills—one thinks, for example, of Austin Gibson Grey’s withered hand in An Accidental Man, the result of a childhood injury that he blames upon his brother, Matthew, which was as much a psychic trauma as a physical event; of Edward Baltram’s infected cut finger in A Good Apprentice; of Duncan Cambus’s damaged eye in The Book and the Brotherhood, which reflects his damaged marital relationship, and of Harvey Blackett’s injured foot in The Green Knight which makes him ‘like Philoctetes’ (GK 112), a hero in Greek mythology who had a festering wound on his foot which caused his companions to shun him. This last example makes it clear that Murdoch overtly draws attention to the mythical and psychological aspect of the physical wounds she gives her characters and often the healing of the traumatised psyche is accompanied by physical restoration. An Accidental Man closes with Austin newly able to use his paralysed hand again, having resolved his lifelong fear and hatred of his brother, Matthew; Edward’s septic finger heals as he moves from chronic poisoning remorse to lucid clean remorse; Duncan’s sight improves as his marriage is restored and Harvey’s foot heals as he forms relationships.

The Good Apprentice as a Study in Lucid Remorse The Good Apprentice exploits a credible incident as a locus for exploring the experience of remorse. Edward Baltram slyly gives his friend Mark Wilsden a drugged sandwich despite knowing that Mark refuses drugs, as he is curious to see how Mark is affected. He leaves Mark alone in a narcotised sleep while he makes love with Sarah Plowmain, and in his absence Mark walks out of the window to his death. No malevolence occurs, yet a young man lies dead. This accidental death is irrevocable and irreparable; Edward acknowledges his full responsibility for it; he knows it need not have happened and should not have happened and that it happened through his agency, the criteria for remorse. He is now in ‘his own private hell’ (GA 8). In narrating Edward’s struggle through the first year after Mark’s death, Murdoch offers a sustained analysis of remorse in an

112 

F. WHITE

innovative way, and this profile is her most concentrated and detailed study of the dynamic of lucid remorse. Her depiction of Edward’s initial mental and emotional state corresponds closely to analyses of remorse offered by the theoretical perspectives of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It also corresponds closely to the effects of trauma, making The Good Apprentice a text which reveals the substantial overlap identifiable between the concepts and sufferings of remorse and trauma. Ian Parker’s account of trauma in Psychoanalytic Culture: Psychoanalytic Discourse in Western Society explains Edward’s initial inability to function in a normal manner, to work, or to socialise: ‘Trauma is seen in psychoanalytic writing as an excessive increase in stimulation that is too powerful to be dealt with by the subject, and which thus breaks, in some way, the protective mechanisms that normally allow the subject to cope with life’ (Parker 1997, 247). Remorse is shown to act as just such an overpowering stimulant in that Edward exemplifies Julian Wolfreys’s description: ‘the subject of trauma is rendered immobile, unable to move beyond the haunting effects left by trauma’ (Wolfreys 2002, 134). Murdoch traces Edward’s progress through the psychological trajectory of remorse, beginning with this state of psychic near-annihilation, when, ‘entirely occupied with his misery’ he desires only oblivion, in sleep when possible, in pulp fiction when not (GA 10), and exhibits all the symptoms of trauma-induced depression: lethargy, apathy, isolation. The novel offers a convincing portrayal of the traumatising effects of remorse, true to clinical studies of the condition, as the mental pain which paralyses Edward at this stage is centred on two things: the irrevocability of time and Mark’s eternal absence, both textbook features of the psychological impact of remorse as reported in the case studies discussed in Psychotherapy and the Remorseful Patient. Edward’s remorseful consciousness focuses obsessionally on the moment in time when disaster struck and on the loss of Mark’s life. Murdoch illustrates how the trauma of remorse causes a mechanically repetitive mindset to develop which goes over and over the memory of what happened, arresting him ‘forever in the place of his crime’ (GA 10), so that Edward’s inner life comes to a temporal standstill, in the characteristic mode of relationship of remorse to time. This portrayal of the impact of remorse reflects the diagnostic of the therapist James Dublin: ‘Remorse involves mentally and experientially chewing on the past in a way so painful and so protracted as to possibly cause one to waste away’ (Stern 1989, 165). Edward is indeed ‘fading away […] like a dying animal’ (GA 17). Consumed by his ‘eternally

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

113

unpardonable moral failure’, his ‘ultimate dereliction of duty’ (GA 13) he chants the authentic song of remorse, ‘if only’: ‘If only the telephone hadn’t rung, if only I had not gone away, if only I had left the door unlocked, if only I had come back twenty minutes sooner, ten minutes, one minute…’ (GA 13, Murdoch’s ellipsis). The portrait of Edward’s remorse also illustrates a factor discussed by the psychoanalytical theorist M.F.  Hoyt, who observes that ‘remorse [may] function to preserve a relationship with the harmed Other, who is kept alive and intact as an internalized judge’ (Hoyt 1983, 437). Murdoch stresses Edward’s obsession with the dead Mark, to whose unbearably absent shade he compulsively prays—‘Oh my dear, oh my darling, my poor lost one, my poor dead one, come to me, forgive me, I’m sorry, oh my love, my love, I’m so sorry, help me, help me, help me’ (GA 11)—and she uses a striking visual image which links the different destruction of each young man: had Mark not been cremated, ‘Edward would have had to go and lie upon’ his ‘smeared and broken body’ (GA 13). Edward is as if fettered to Mark by his remorse, and this bond with the dead obstructs his relationship with the living who seem less real to him than the dead, just as his relationship with the present is stymied by his enchainment to that moment in the past. Murdoch analyses the ambiguity inherent in this situation. To the extent that it is directed towards the other, remorse has what Proeve describes as ‘a cognitive focus of minimal self-focus and maximal situation-focus’ (Proeve 2001, 128); the attention is turned outwards from the self towards the person whom one has harmed. But within her evocation of Edward’s genuine grief for Mark and his self-condemnation, Murdoch astutely exhibits the fact that Edward’s ego is also aware that his own life has been ruined by Mark’s death. The ensuing resentment which sullies the purity of his sorrow and remorse is manifest within her depiction of Edward’s distress, as he recalls his innocence and happiness before ‘he had carelessly thrown away all his possibilities of good’ and grieves that ‘one momentary act of folly and treachery had destroyed all his time’ (GA 11). Murdoch subtly reveals that this chink in Edward’s other-directed remorse is—ironically—also the saving grace which will allow him to recover sufficiently from that remorse to resume the life that he still has to live, despite Mark’s death. Without this healthy pressure for survival from the ego, total psychological collapse would ensue from the impact of remorse. But human beings are survivors, adaptors, Protean adjusters to new circumstances, however painful, and the psyche seeks its own healing.

114 

F. WHITE

Murdoch’s psychological realism recognises the necessary role of the ego in this self-healing and by dramatising the activity of the psyche in the work of processing remorse her fiction augments theoretical discourse on the psychology of remorse. Despite human suffering Murdoch portrays life as comic partly because of the obduracy of existence: ‘life goes on’. Remorse connects with the theme of survival in her fiction. So although the novel projects the extreme remorse which makes Edward feel at this point in his life that ‘he had destroyed time’ (GA 12), the progression of the narrative ironically demonstrates that this is actually not so. Learning how to live in time again, after psycho-spiritual trauma, is a major task in the work of recovery from remorse. So The Good Apprentice simultaneously celebrates the fundamentally egocentristic nature of ongoing life even whilst it anatomises the traumatic pain of remorse. To this end Murdoch maintains a double focus, keeping Edward’s anguish constantly before the reader but setting it within a social context, so that although Edward’s affliction sets him apart, life continues richly around him, full of conversations, jokes, and the concerns of other people. In Edward’s immediate circle, his stepbrother, Stuart Cuno, follows his quest for the good; the affair between Edward’s stepfather, Harry Cuno, and his aunt, Midge McCaskerville, runs its erotic course; and Willy Brightwalton, his French tutor, goes to a Proust convention in America. Edward receives letters from minor characters with whom he briefly connects during the course of the story giving news of how their lives have progressed during the time span of the novel and these letters widen the impression of circles of other lives continuing all around his own. The figure of Edward acts as a prism refracting light on the experience and meaning of remorse; through his story Murdoch explores remorse both from the inside—Edward’s undergoing of it as an ordeal—and from the outside—the reactions and responses other characters offer to the remorse-stricken, which, in turn, draws in the response of her readers. This double focus is manifest at the scene in which Murdoch introduces her dramatis personae to the reader, the dinner party given ‘“for” the unfortunate Edward’ (GA 20) by his aunt Midge and her psychiatrist husband, Thomas McCaskerville. Edward is present but, silent and withdrawn, he refuses food and drink and the overtures of his friends and relations. Anxious though they are about his state of mind, they nonetheless talk and laugh, eat and drink, around ‘the terrible figure of the suffering Edward’ (GA 26). They kindly endeavour to cushion his pain with loving normality, but he is isolated from them within a cocoon of mental

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

115

agony so that he and they are juxtaposed, rather than meaningfully together. Edward’s absolute aloneness in the midst of company fictionally encapsulates what Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals describes as ‘the horrors of extreme remorse, its coldness, its eeriness, its destruction of the person’ (MGM 500). The Good Apprentice also dramatises Murdoch’s psychological insight that ‘terrible suffering is difficult to contemplate’, so that ‘if it is remote from us […] we arrange to be hardened enough to forget it fairly promptly’, but that, ‘if, because the sufferer is oneself or a close other, we cannot do this, we use our life energy to transform the experience as soon as possible, as we do in bereavement’ (MGM 130). These facts apply directly to remorse, and the novel explores the multiple means by which Edward is enabled to use his life energy in transforming his experience of remorse. Also, through a perspective shifting third-person narrative style Murdoch situates her readers amongst the family and friends observing Edward’s suffering, presenting a variety of responses to his affliction which readers are invited to assess. The tri-partite composition of The Good Apprentice reflects the structure of Murdoch’s exploration of remorse here. The title of Part One, ‘The Prodigal Son’, emphasises Edward’s situation as a person estranged from his former life by his actions, who longs to be forgiven and re-­ accepted, and desires to regain a sense of being at home in the world. In Part Two, ‘Seegard’, Edward makes his painful journey from chronic remorse towards lucid remorse, in an otherworldly setting, the strange, indeed uncanny, liminal waterside household of his biological father, the painter Jesse Baltram. In this longest section of the narrative most of Edward’s work at the task of remorse is achieved, and at the end of this stage he is ready to leave Seegard and return to his real life. The title of Part Three, ‘Life after Death’, indicates that Murdoch intends Edward’s experience of remorse to be understood as a form of psychic or spiritual death and his recovery from it as a secular form of resurrection. Recovery from remorse involves both a spiritual need—forgiveness— and a medical need—healing; The Good Apprentice resonates with echoes of biblical and Shakespearean meditations on these needs. Verses from St Luke’s Gospel 15:18–19 open the novel: ‘I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no longer worthy to be called thy son’ (GA 1). Murdoch’s implicit choice of the parable of the Prodigal Son as a correlative for Edward’s situation formulates profound connections between her literary

116 

F. WHITE

exploration of remorse and theoretical analysis of the significance of remorse in the discourse of psychotherapy. The Good Apprentice, published in 1985, predates the work of Edward Shafranske, published in Psychotherapy and the Remorseful Patient in 1989, in which he theorises that every person is fated to be a ‘Prodigal Son’, to live out the impulse life and then return home symbolically to the source of his or her humanness with remorse and through this to learn about the world. The remorseful client in becoming aware of the ontological estrangement is therefore seeking a homecoming and reconciliation within the human order. (Stern 1989, 27)

Murdoch anticipates the model of the prodigal son serving as a paradigm of the remorseful human condition and gives it fictional expression. In both her art and in the discourse of psychotherapy, remorse acts as a catalyst for awareness and change. Both posit the human order, rather than any religious framework, as the reference point for recovery from remorse, even though a scriptural text provides a potent image for this common psychological trajectory. Forgiveness is still desperately desired and sought in a post-theistic world, and the question—who can authoritatively offer forgiveness when belief in a Heavenly Father is lost?—is immediately posed by the novel which portrays the plight of post-Christian man in search of secular forms of absolution and salvation. Medical need for healing is implied by the Shakespearean quotation from Macbeth V.3 with which Murdoch opens the scene of the McCaskervilles’s dinner party. Worried about Edward’s condition, Harry asks Thomas the question Macbeth puts to the doctor concerning his remorse-maddened wife, ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?’ (GA 20), and Thomas quotes back, ‘The patient must minister to himself’ (GA 21). By using these familiar Biblical and Shakespearean words, Murdoch evokes stories which suggest the spiritual and psychological repercussions of Edward’s position and probes what recovery from remorse requires. The question of sin and forgiveness implied by the parable interlinks with the question of how to retain sanity denoted by the play. Although the ‘patient’ himself must do the difficult work of finding answers to such questions, Murdoch’s intertextual allusions suggest that stories, both inherited (the Prodigal Son and Macbeth) and self-created (Edward’s own self-myth), may be part of the process of doing so. By linking her literary analysis of remorse with both

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

117

problematical forgiveness and the healing power of narrative, Murdoch’s novel dramatises the trauma theory with which her fiction resonates. Murdoch further participates in the realm of trauma theory through her continuing dialogue with Weil. Her novels link psycho-spiritual wounding with Weil’s concept of affliction, a connection clearly discernible in The Good Apprentice, where the psychiatrist Thomas thinks of his patients both as ‘the soul-wounded’ (GA 83) and ‘the afflicted’ (GA 84). The ongoing interaction between Weil’s reflections on affliction and Murdoch’s fiction expands current parameters of trauma theory through Murdoch’s literary integration of the concepts of trauma, remorse, and affliction. Weil’s influence on Murdoch’s conception of remorse differs here from her influence on A Word Child which enacts the complicity of the afflicted with his affliction. The Good Apprentice focuses on another psychological observation which Weil analyses—the tendency for the afflicted to be shunned by the unafflicted: Our senses attach all the scorn, all the revulsion, all the hatred which our reason attaches to crime, to affliction. Except for those whose whole soul is inhabited by Christ, everybody despises the afflicted to some extent, although practically no one is conscious of it. (Weil 1977, 81)

Murdoch demonstrates Weil’s insight by the reactions of Edward’s friends and relations to his trauma. They find it difficult to respond to the afflicted boy and exhibit signs of the revulsion Weil identifies, although endeavouring to conceal it. While Midge makes wordless gestures of solicitude and brings him gifts, Edward is aware that she ‘was shivering with embarrassment, she just wanted to make a virtuous gesture and run’ (GA 48). Midge is not repelled by him but unnerved by his affliction. Similarly, Murdoch makes Willy Brightwalton ‘cast a glance of dread towards the terrible figure of the suffering Edward’ (GA 26), and Dr Ursula Brightwalton is nonplussed, saying helplessly, ‘We must surround him with—we must surround him—oh dear—’ (GA 24). So the novel illustrates how affliction is an ordeal for onlookers as well as for the afflicted one. Responsive attention to the novel extends this ordeal to readers, for just as trauma theory requires readers to engage in an interpretative conversation with the story, so readers of The Good Apprentice vicariously experience and engage with the problem of compassion towards affliction which Weil pinpoints and Murdoch’s fiction enacts.

118 

F. WHITE

The part others play in the sufferer’s work of recovery from remorse is crucial, and Murdoch displays the variety of forms that part can take. Three characters, Edward’s stepfather Harry, his stepbrother Stuart, and his uncle Thomas, each play major roles in her manifestation of the means by which chronic remorse can be transformed into lucid remorse. Harry, a hedonist and ‘bland rationalist’ in Conradi’s phrase (S&A 332), is used by Murdoch to offer the voice of pragmatic self-preservation. The views he expresses are ambivalently upheld by the narrative, but also subjected to a moral critique. Harry views his stepson’s condition as an illness, to be cured by psychiatric and pharmacological ‘treatment’, simplifying the complex emotional and spiritual state of remorse into that vague catch-all category, a ‘nervous breakdown’ (GA 14). In the pep-talk with which he tries to jerk Edward out of comatose indifference, Murdoch interweaves Harry’s limited moral understanding of what has occurred and his healthy common sense: Concentrate, take a pull on yourself, get yourself together a bit. Try to put all this behind you. Nobody blames you, you’re not guilty of anything, it was an accident. Don’t be so self-important, everybody isn’t thinking about you […] you’ve been forgotten. You’re free now, you’ve been through it all and got off. British justice has forgiven you and sent you home to get on with your life, so can’t you forgive yourself and do just that? […] Happiness, that’s what life’s about, it’s your job to be happy, not to spread gloom and despair around. Don’t be so selfish. Get your courage back, get your narcissism back, get your myth back, straighten your spine and believe in yourself again. (GA 18)

Harry is out of his moral depth, confusing remorse with shame and acquittal with forgiveness. He lacks the necessary ethical vision either to perceive the enormity of what has happened or to comprehend the inward moral accountability that Edward feels. Harry thinks ‘personal responsibility is a sort of pretentious notion anyway […] a fiction’ (GA 18), and in so doing negates the premise of responsibility on which remorse is predicated. But although his argument is shallow and questionable, and his plea to Edward to ‘move on’ is premature, the narrative suggests that Harry’s instinctively hedonistic outlook has a valid role to play in the psyche’s work of moving from chronic to lucid remorse. Putting it all behind him and getting his myth back (with the requisite narcissism involved) will be part of Edward’s process of recovery, so some of Harry’s view proves well founded. Above

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

119

all, the love he bears Edward and the attention he shows him make a positive contribution to his stepson’s recovery. One of those moments of symbolic detail in which Murdoch’s fiction excels emphatically refutes Harry’s denigration of the importance of remorse. He urges Edward: ‘Don’t let this business lodge in your soul, it isn’t anything, it isn’t deep, it isn’t a great spiritual drama, just shrug it off, toss it away, as if it were a bit of ash or—’ Harry, made increasingly irritable and upset by Edward’s silence, leaned forward and picked up a hot cinder from the grate. He dropped it hastily. It was extremely hot and had burnt his fingers. ‘Damn!’ He flapped his hand and blew upon it. (GA 19)

Harry’s refusal to accept that Edward has been seared to the soul by remorse is set at nought as his argument is both empirically and comically confounded by the burning of his flesh on the cinder. He has also at last caught Edward’s attention by his unintentionally ironic gesture: for the first time, ‘Edward watched him with a faint gleam of interest’ (GA 19). This quietly dramatic passage captures the essence of the visceral nature of the burning pain of remorse (Murdoch’s personally preferred image for it), with strength and simplicity; the scene endorses the novel’s claim that remorse is a trauma. Harry’s position of egocentric pragmatism is challenged by the voice of his son Stuart.4 Stuart is one of Murdoch’s fictional Christ figures, or ‘embryonic saints’ in Byatt’s phrase (Byatt 1994, 291), consciously on pilgrimage towards the good, and his ability to have compassion on Edward’s affliction signals his virtue.5 Corresponding to Weil’s note that ‘compassion for the afflicted is an impossibility’ is the fact that ‘when it is really found we have [an] […] astounding miracle’ (Weil 1977, 79). Stuart has a ‘soul […] inhabited by Christ’ (Weil 1977, 81), though his Christ is the paradoxically post-Christian Christ icon that Murdoch’s neo-theology 4  Conradi observes that while ‘Harry acts as devil’s advocate for a sterile new scientific vision […] his son, Stuart […] is spokesperson for a religious (albeit atheistic) vision of the soul [and] acts as Harry’s critic throughout’ (S&A 333). 5  Ramanathan identifies him as such and Conradi notes that he ‘physically resembles Christ in Anne Cavidge’s vision of him in Nuns and Soldiers’ (S&A 337). That Stuart is the ‘good apprentice’ of the title is not only suggested by many Murdoch scholars, but is confirmed by Murdoch herself, who told Heusel that only Stuart is a good apprentice in the novel (TCHF 200).

120 

F. WHITE

salvages from the loss of religious belief. Stuart works at keeping his unresponsive stepbrother’s lines of communication with the outside world open, offering practical comfort and interest in what Edward is reading, thinking, doing, feeling. He questions Edward’s experience of remorse— ‘what is it, what is it?’ (GA 49)—and counsels him to ‘try to think about what happened […] in a bit of clear light’ (GA 49). Unlike others, Stuart is not repelled by the affliction of remorse, but he too challenges Edward’s acceptance of being stuck in mechanical misery: ‘The burning has to go on, but hold onto something else too, find something good, somewhere, anywhere, keep it close to you, draw it into the fire—’ (GA 49), he says (again using Murdoch’s own preferred imagery for remorse). Stuart’s suggestions to Edward are endorsed by Murdoch’s own philosophical writings: both Stuart and Murdoch offer small practical instances of things to hold onto, quiet words (‘stop’, ‘help’, ‘peace’), noticing birds singing, poetry, Bible verses, the mere idea of Christ. Just as Harry’s clumsy effort to connect with Edward in his traumatised state has deferred effect, so the seeds that Stuart sows in his brother’s afflicted mind later grow into positive activities which help with the gradual transformation of chronic remorse which cripples Edward’s life into lucid remorse which can be integrated into his personality. Towards the end of the novel Edward notices the kingfisher (GA 243) and looks again at books (GA 299). The pivotal figure in Murdoch’s narrative of the metamorphosis of Edward’s remorse is Thomas McCaskerville. As a professional psychiatrist, Thomas understands the process of recovery from trauma; he tells Midge, ‘It’s like a chemical process. Edward has got to change and we have to be, for a time, spectators of that change’ (GA 41). Despite what she calls her ‘mixed feelings’ about psychoanalytic theory and practice (TCHF 87), Murdoch acknowledges its potential value and states categorically, ‘Thomas McCaskerville […] is capable of helping people’ (TCHF 179). This is her most sympathetic portrait of a psychiatrist figure, through whom she displays and evaluates psychotherapeutic practice as a means of healing remorse.6 Thomas acknowledges that his skill is ‘weak magic’ in the face of such ‘blackness’ (GA 83), but he has faith that the psyche has 6  ‘In The Good Apprentice […] Murdoch triumphantly presents a “good psychoanalyst’ (Hardy 2000, 59). Other psychiatrist figures in Murdoch’s fiction, from Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head to Dr Fonsett in The Green Knight, are presented with suspicion concerning their motivation and desire for power and scepticism concerning their ability to effect healing.

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

121

potential for regeneration. Because he is not tied to any theoretical school, Thomas is able to see the particular individual, an ability Murdoch strongly commends in her philosophy, and he believes that ‘each person is different, the general idea of “neurosis” a mere hypothesis’ (GA 84), reflecting Murdoch’s own convictions. A psychotherapeutic perspective on remorse develops through Thomas’s guidance of Edward. In his affliction Edward believes that he will stay as he is now, that change has been rendered impossible. To think otherwise would seem to insult the irrevocability of Mark’s death and diminish the intensity with which Edward is suffering for it. Clinging onto his suffering is Edward’s offering for his un-atoneable crime. ‘There’s no cure for remorse like I feel’ (GA 73) he insists, nor does he want there to be. Edward apprehends his condition within the hermeneutic perspective of the ‘soul-wounded’ and tells Thomas, ‘I’m not mentally ill, I’m spiritually ill’ (GA 73). Thomas’s role is facilitating the healing process which Edward’s own psyche naturally undertakes. Two distinct psychoanalytic concepts—the personal myth and the unconscious—perform vital tasks in this self-healing. The Good Apprentice reveals the inherent ambivalence of the simultaneous rejection of myth in Murdoch’s philosophy and her fruitful deployment of it in her art. Rob Hardy has established the essentially Jungian derivation of Thomas’s style of therapy in that Murdoch makes the role of myth central to Edward’s overcoming of trauma and subsequent resurrection.7 ‘People in this sort of shock enact a mythical drama, and circumstances may conspire with them in an almost uncanny fashion’ (GA 41): the psychoanalytical theory expounded by Thomas is borne out in the narrative of Edward’s particular mythical drama. This drama involves his running away to Seegard in search of his biological father, Jesse, which Murdoch endorses in discussion of her novel: ‘Going to Seegard was an ordeal for Edward. One’s life can change by a particular drama’ (TCHF 206). Such an endorsement is surprising in view of Murdoch’s strictures against Jung throughout Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals where Jung’s concept of the role of myth in psychology is strongly critiqued but, by the change evident in Edward at the close of her novel—Murdoch’s own myth-making and myth-using work of art—she validates Thomas’s belief

7  For an extended discussion of the links between Jungian theory and Thomas’s practice as portrayed in The Good Apprentice, see Hardy, 72–8.

122 

F. WHITE

in the necessity and efficacy of ‘the “myth” that heals’, which is ‘an individual work of art’ for each person (GA 84). The essence of the concept of personal myth is connected to the healing work of the ego. This concept is succinctly expressed by the narrator of Anthony Powell’s novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, who says, ‘It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them’, and, ‘if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters’ (Powell 1997, 147). Murdoch echoes Powell’s thought in a youthful letter to Frank Thompson of 22 January 1943, ‘I think it is not what one has experienced, but what one does with what one has experienced that matters’ (IMWW 126). This creed is embraced in a crude form by Harry when urging Edward, ‘Get your myth back’ (GA 18), but Thomas interprets the idea more discriminatingly. Accepting that myths can heal, he simultaneously knows that there is no ontological or metaphysical truth behind such a concept: ‘We do not have mythical fates, even the individual “myth” is ultimately consumed, it is “worked away” in living and only in this sense exists’ (GA 85). Myth is thus concurrently admitted and denied. Thomas, like his creator Murdoch, regards it as a psychologically essential but disposable tool. Murdoch offers mental imagery as another disposable but necessary tool in the psychotherapeutic treatment of remorse because imagery, deriving from the unconscious, counters the inadequacy of language either for grasping the experience of trauma or for palliating it. That which cannot be analytically stated can be pictured, and Edward’s conversations with Thomas create a forum both for finding linguistic and imagistic expression for affliction and for exploring the role of the unconscious in self-healing. The narrator calls ‘grief and remorse […] pale names for his condition’ (GA 11) and instead evokes Edward’s mental suffering through violent metaphor: ‘The plough had gone over him and he was dismembered’ (GA 10). Likewise, in talking to Thomas, Edward finds metaphorical language to explore the inner experience of remorse as he is ‘full of interesting images’ (GA 73) which articulate what being taken over by remorse is like. It is like being a stalled aeroplane with failed engines which ‘must crash by its own weight’ (GA 72) or, like being electrocuted, his ‘whole body glows with pain’ (GA 73); it is ‘misery crystallised as pure fear […] like someone waiting his turn to be tortured’ (GA 76). Thomas reflects in Weilian terms about Edward’s description: ‘How eloquent they can be […] the afflicted ones, the soul-wounded […] forced

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

123

by anguish into being poets […] What awful images of pain the boy had spewed out: captivity, machinery, starvation, electrocution, the dying chrysalis, the plunging aeroplane, the dead butterfly’ (GA 83). Murdoch draws on Weil’s own imagery as well as her thought, to reveal the nature of the trauma caused by remorse. In her study of affliction, Weil says, ‘As for those who have been struck by one of those blows which leave a being struggling on the ground like a half-crushed worm, they have no words to express what is happening to them’ (Weil 1977, 79). This simile of the afflicted as damaged suffering inarticulate insect life is echoed in Edward’s metaphorical statement that remorse is like a negative form of change: ‘the chrysalis story run backwards. I used to have coloured wings and fly. Now I am black and lie on the ground and quiver’ (GA 77). Murdoch’s trauma fiction argues, challenges, and is directive about how remorse can and should be managed. Thomas’s attitude to Edward’s traumatised state reflects her own approach to trauma; deeply compassionate whilst being rigorously without sentimentality. Thomas points out ‘You keep harping on the “terrible thing” [but] you keep spending your energy and your resentment in imagining it hasn’t happened’ (GA 75) and he tells Edward to ‘try to sort the stuff out a bit, get hold of a few concepts’, ‘try to think’ (GA 72–4). Resentment and refusal to accept the past as a given of the new situation within which he now has to work paralyse Edward and drain him of potential energy for creative change and healing. Thomas’s brutal tone—‘don’t worry, you are permanently damaged and you won’t be cured’ (GA 76)—is astute because Edward’s pride finds the notion of recovering from remorse diminishing. But through Thomas’s words Murdoch holds the permanence of the damage Edward suffers in tension with the knowledge that the nature of his suffering will change: ‘You will always carry this pain inside you. […] But it will not always be like this’ (GA 76). Murdoch confers authority on his statements within her multi-voiced text because Thomas is distinguished from her satirised psychiatrist figures by two virtues: his own ego is uninvolved, and he eschews the element of mutual game-playing which is a constant danger in a therapist-client relationship: ‘the love affair of healer and patient enacting a play of stirred-up egoism’ (GA 84). She emphasises the critical difference of his approach by Thomas’s thought that ‘he sometimes felt he ought to invent a new name for what he was doing’ (GA 84). What he tells Edward about remorse therefore carries weight: ‘I’m not telling you not to feel remorse and guilt, only to feel it truthfully. Truthful remorse leads to the fruitful death of the

124 

F. WHITE

self, not to its survival as a successful liar’ (GA 77). Remorse which has potential to serve as a means of unselfing may be a path to the good. Feeling remorse in this truthful fashion is a difficult achievement. Thomas touches the nub of the matter when he tells Edward to recognise the ‘frightful wound to your self-esteem’ (GA 78). Murdoch demonstrates a belief that remorse can be lived with quietly, accepted as an appropriate response to trauma, and that what hampers Edward are the egoistic responses of resentment and injured pride entangled with his purer feelings. Thomas’s expertise is the knowledge that recognising the truth of this emotional mixture, thoughtfully separating out the strands and resolutely letting go of the egocentric ones, will lead Edward through his intolerably muddled pain. This is Murdoch’s concept of ‘work for the spirit’8 and is a weighty instance of ‘remorse as a challenge to be met’ (PP 499). Edward goes to Seegard to confront his own challenging remorse by enacting his mythical drama, taking with him the various perspectives on his affliction which Murdoch has suggested through his interactions with Harry, Stuart, and Thomas. Healing from remorse cannot, though, be achieved solely by pursuance of the sufferer’s personal myth in isolation from others. Their forgiveness is a crucial but deeply problematical element in the trauma of remorse. Mary Cerney, a grief therapist, says, Remorse locks us to the past; forgiveness unlocks remorse by allowing us to integrate past experiences, thus enriching, strengthening, and freeing us to face the future. Forgiveness elevates self-esteem and conquers fear while remorse stagnates by holding on to the status quo. (Stern 1989, 246)

In The Good Apprentice Murdoch teases out the role of forgiveness in recovery from the trauma of remorse and, further, queries the locus of forgiveness in a post-theistic world. Edward feels unforgivable and implores vainly, ‘Oh forgive me, will not someone forgive me?’ (GA 12). Harry tells him that British justice has, but it is a personal forgiveness Edward’s soul desires. The dead Mark cannot; Stuart wonders if he should have done so (GA 57); Thomas says judicially, ‘I don’t think I can forgive you’ (GA 75). Forgiveness can only be meaningfully given by someone from whom Edward can accept it, 8  This phrase used by Murdoch in The Fire and the Sun concerning ‘good art’ (EM 453) has a resonance which gives it a wide-ranging applicability to many aspects of her thought.

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

125

from whom it has significance for him. As a secular post-Christian character, he has no God from whom to seek forgiveness and he rejects absolution from a clerical father figure. The central problem of finding alternative authoritative sources for forgiveness after the loss of God which the opening scriptural text signals is vividly enacted by Edward’s running to Seegard in search of a father figure from whom he can receive forgiveness. But correlating to Murdoch’s dismissal of God the Father, Edward’s hope that his natural father, Jesse, will prove a figure of authority with power to absolve is disappointed. Jesse is a sinister half-mad magician. But when Edward approaches him, saying, ‘I thought you might […] sort of—forgive me’, Jesse responds with astute insight asking Edward whether Mark’s sister, Brownie, has forgiven him. As Edward does not know, Jesse offers a token forgiveness (GA 252) in place of those whom Mark’s death most injured, but Murdoch makes it evident that substitutional absolution is inadequate. Jesse’s words cannot enact the forgiveness Edward needs to receive from Mark’s family. Part of the challenge of remorse which Edward has to meet—daring to approach those whom he has injured—is identified by Jesse, the Father figure, who in himself can do no more for him. Brownie Wilsden acts as a secular Christ figure paralleling Jesse’s role as a God the Father figure, and a dialogue between her and Edward is central to the analysis of the concept of forgiveness which Murdoch offers in the novel. Brownie tells Edward that it helps her if she can understand and sympathise with him, which he translates wishfully as, ‘You mean if you can forgive me’. But Edward’s hope that Brownie, as Christ figure, can end his trauma by absolving him is shown to be as illusory as his earlier hope that Jesse, as Father figure, could do so. To his entreaty, Brownie responds, ‘Yes, if you like to put it that way.’ ‘Well, do you?’ ‘Yes.’ She said it in a dull sad way. Yet, he thought, how else could she say it? (GA 335)

In this bleak and unconsoling exchange, Murdoch suggests that forgiveness changes nothing. The asking for, and granting of, forgiveness may be morally required and psychologically necessary, but, by contrast with traditional Christian understanding of the concept, forgiveness does not make all things well. A moment which could be a climax in the novel is stripped of dramatic intensity. Forgiveness is not the consummation. It is

126 

F. WHITE

just a small step further forward for Edward, another obstacle cleared in the long road to his recovery from remorse. Murdoch’s trauma fiction makes it clear that forgiveness does not do away with the consequences of what has happened, as ‘the consequences of anything can go on and on’ (GA 335), a brute fact that Brownie states to Edward, who begins to understand that being forgiven will not equal not having done what he did. Absolution cannot defeat causality. The stark truth which Murdoch articulates in The Black Prince is intractable: ‘There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave “anyhow” and then expect to resume life where we left off’ (BP 125). Mark’s death remains ‘the most terrible of facts’ (WC 228), and Murdoch demonstrates how acceptance of that fact has to coexist in tension with acceptance of forgiveness. Cancelling out is not possible. Neither the Father figure, Jesse, nor the Christ figure, Brownie, is presented as able to do Edward’s spiritual work on his behalf; both help him to work at it for himself. Although a sense of forgiveness is an essential element in restoration from the trauma of remorse, Murdoch portrays being (and feeling) forgiven as a slow process, with regressions as well as progressions, not a once and for all act of magic. The cumulative effect of being told he is forgiven by different people gradually acts upon Edward’s spirit in a healing way, until he receives the most powerful act of forgiveness possible when Mark’s mother writes to him, ‘I do say, out of the sincerity of deep sadness, that I forgive you’ (GA 542). For the offender, receiving forgiveness cannot cancel knowledge of guilt: for the injured, tendering forgiveness cannot cancel sadness. With those provisos, Murdoch reveals forgiveness to be nonetheless a vital human endeavour, liberating the forgiver from hatred as much as the forgiven from blame. That The Good Apprentice refuses to simplify or hasten this difficult, slow-growing gift of the human spirit makes the impact of Edward’s eventual acceptance of it strongly persuasive. Forgiveness is not simplistically ‘the cure’ for remorse, but it forms an essential part of the complex process of recovery. The concept of salvation is equally pervasive in the novel. What, in a secular context, Murdoch asks, can be said to save someone? The correspondingly necessary question she poses is, what, in a secular context, does someone need saving from? When read as a corpus of work Murdoch’s novels mutually illuminate one another and her themes, passions, and concerns remain constant. Intertextually, what Edward needs saving from is spending the next twenty years of his life, like Hilary in A Word Child,

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

127

becoming entrenched in resentment and paralysed by chronic remorse. It is easy to conceive of Edward’s following Hilary’s self-dramatising but unredeeming personal myth of the âme damnée (WC 77). Salvation is as complex a concept as forgiveness and equally slow of attainment. Brownie’s dull tone, as she inefficaciously forgives Edward, recalls the Christ who comes in a vision to Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers and tells her ‘You must do it all yourself, you know’ (NS 297). Murdoch divorces salvation from any religious context, yet The Good Apprentice portrays Edward working ‘out his own salvation with fear and trembling’ as St Paul eloquently exhorts (Philippians 2.12). A rich variety of salvific resources are offered to Edward. Some are simple and severe; Jesse believes in ‘salvation by work’ (GA 216), and the Seegard routine of tiring hard work creates physical conditions in which Edward can begin to heal. But the novel also depicts salvation from remorse as potentially deriving from intellectual and aesthetic sources. Murdoch has written extensively on her conviction that great art is a positive force for good in human life. Edward’s French tutor, Willy Brightwalton, is jokingly said to believe in ‘salvation by Proust’ (GA 300), and The Good Apprentice bears out the idea that literature can be a vehicle of salvation. Urged by Stuart to read ‘good novels’ whilst paralysed by remorse, Edward snarls: ‘Don’t suggest Proust—I’d be sick, I’d choke and die’ (GA 48), but, when time and reflection have worked on his condition, he reacts anew. ‘Gazing dully at the shelves’ at Seegard, ‘he suddenly noticed the name of Proust’ (GA 299) and pulls out a volume of À la recherche. Reading the text at random Edward is struck, as by a bolt of lightning: The French sentence came to him with extraordinary freshness, like a breath of clean air to a man just out of prison, like a sudden sound of a musical instrument. Intimations of other places, of elsewhere—of freedom. He felt as he read it a kind of invigorating self-reproach and a new sort of power. (GA 300)

The art of the great writer evokes another world outside the suffering self, which creates a sense of life existing beyond the reader’s ego. In the ‘shed light’ of Proust’s text, Edward feels ‘he could rise, he could get up, he could get out’, knows again that there is ‘something else’ outside his own traumatised self, and experiences what he slowly realises is ‘pure joy’ (GA

128 

F. WHITE

300). Life is returning to Edward and reading Proust acts as an epiphanic moment of release from affliction and redemption from solipsism.9 A central ethical message frames Murdoch’s investigation into the transformation of chronic remorse into lucid remorse in The Good Apprentice, which offers a psychologically searching and positively hopeful portrayal of human potential for recovery from remorse. Edward’s reflection at the end of the novel, ‘remorse must kill the self, not teach it new lies […] the soul must die to live’ (GA 549) echoes Thomas’s early directive to him: ‘Truthful remorse leads to the fruitful death of the self, not to its survival as a successful liar’ (GA 77). This reiterated insight into a right response to remorse corresponds to Murdoch’s commitment to unselfing and to the concomitant refusal of the consolations of fantasy or sado-­ masochism. Her narrative enacts the process of the death and resurrection of the truthfully remorseful self; Edward emerges from his trauma permanently scarred but living in the truth. The perceivable change in him goes beyond his resumption of a functioning life of study and sociability. The bedrock of Murdoch’s ‘moral psychology’ is unselfing—solipsism giving way to attention to others, and Edward’s remorse-driven self-­ concern is seen to break open when it first enters his mind, ‘I must start thinking about doing something for someone’ (GA 411).10 He consequently thinks of Midge in her misery, visits her, and is unknowingly an agent for good in her troubled marriage to Thomas. So although, with psychological veracity, Murdoch acknowledges that in black moments Edward feels ‘he had not moved an inch, all movement, all journeying had been an illusion, he was back at the beginning’ (GA 549), the narrative denies such reverses, and a major sign that Edward’s afflicted soul is truly healing is that he acts as a free moral agent with attention to the reality of others again. His mythical drama and the necessary work of his ego have not entrapped him in solipsism but have facilitated the healing process in his psyche which liberates him to re-engage with others after his trauma. The Good Apprentice demonstrates this process in action because, in Edward, Murdoch presents her readers with the full affective impact of remorse as experienced by a morally aware character, who, with the help 9  For a full discussion of Murdoch’s use of Proust in this novel see William C.  Carter, ‘Proustian Resonances in Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice’ (1986). 10  For discussion of the concept of unselfing in Murdoch’s philosophy, see Antonaccio (2000) (passim); for discussion of the concept of unselfing in Murdoch’s novels, see S&A (passim); for re-evaluation of difficulties concerned with the concept of unselfing in Murdoch’s moral psychology, see Vice and Mole in IMAR (2007).

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

129

of others, intelligently and effectively engages with the problem of how to assimilate remorse and who progresses psychologically and spiritually from chronic to lucid remorse—the state in which responsibility has been fully acknowledged, forgiveness sought and accepted, and life purposefully rebuilt. In manifesting the available means of psycho-spiritual recovery from remorse, the novel offers Murdoch’s readers an example of practical devices for alleviating the trauma of remorse in real life.

The Green Knight as a Study of Lack of Remorse In her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, Murdoch approaches her preoccupation with remorse from a freshly problematical angle, which enlarges her exploration of the connections between remorse and trauma. Here she enquires into potential causes for psychopathological absence of remorse, offering a dual perspective on the problem through the figure of Lucas Graffe. Murdoch’s depiction of people who feel/show no remorse is a fictional enquiry into the nature of evil. What makes people wicked is a perennial and troubling question for Murdoch, the antithesis of her desire to indicate to her readers the path to the Good. In this novel she anatomises amorality in greater depth than in her previous work. Her presentation of Lucas functions simultaneously on two levels. On a symbolic level Murdoch imaginatively explores a figure of the age, a late-twentieth-­ century Everyman, representing and enacting her own deepest fears. On a realist level she engages with the trauma of adoption, expanding her writing of trauma fiction to include consideration of the potentially destructive impact of adoption on the moral being of an adoptee. This dark late work sets Murdoch’s debate on remorse in the context of a mythologised metafictional fable, which destabilises and deconstructs its own polemic in a way that unsettles interpretation. In counterpoint to Edward in The Good Apprentice, Lucas is a morally insensible protagonist who acts malevolently and not only fails to feel remorse but repudiates it as a meaningful concept. Remorse has no affective purchase on Lucas’s soul: he disowns responsibility for his actions and feels no desire for forgiveness. Murdoch’s portrayal of Lucas probes the philosophical and psychological positions which underpin his view of himself and of others, and, through her creation of this inimical figure, she engages both with the ethical implications of the absence of remorse and with possible causes of such a moral and emotional lacuna. Lucas is a fictional presentation of what Murdoch says ‘we should […] be afraid of’, ‘a sort of plausible

130 

F. WHITE

amoralistic determinism’ (MGM 198), which is the problem of the era. On the symbolic level, Lucas’s amoral and deterministic remorselessness incarnates Murdoch’s sense of the increasing evil of a solipsistic godless age evident throughout Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. On the realist level Lucas’s disengaged wickedness links her study of affliction and the wound imagery Murdoch employs with theory concerning the traumatic effect of adoption, which has since been termed ‘primal wounding’.11 Murdoch’s widened discussion of remorse engages her trauma fiction with this conception in psychology, uncannily resonating with and even anticipating this development in theory—Nancy Verrier’s revolutionary study, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, was published in the same year as The Green Knight. These contemporaneous texts are connected by the fact that Lucas Graffe is adopted. He is not the only troubled adoptee in Murdoch’s fiction (Titus Fitch in The Sea, The Sea is another) but analysis of potential trauma caused by adoption becomes a dominant issue in The Green Knight. Statistically, 30–40% of adoptees figure in psychotherapy and juvenile delinquency, and Verrier notes that ‘adoptees referred for treatment had relatively consistent symptoms […] characterized as impulsive, provocative, aggressive and anti-­ social’ (xv) which indicates a ‘high incidence of sociological, academic and psychological disturbance’ (xvi). Verrier’s study of this phenomenon coins the term ‘primal wound’ (xvi) to describe a psychic wound ‘which is physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual, a wound which causes pain so profound as to have been described as cellular by those adoptees who allowed themselves to go deeply into their pain’ (xvi). In a chapter entitled ‘The Trauma of Abandonment and Adoption’, Verrier states that, ‘adoption, considered by many to be merely a concept, is, in fact, a traumatic experience for the adoptee’ who is ‘wounded as the result of having suffered a devastating loss’ (16). Lucas Graffe is an example of such a cellularly wounded character identified by trauma theories of adoption and he characterises the effects of primal wounding. Lucas is indeed ‘impulsive, provocative, aggressive and anti-social’, despite his academic success and outwardly functional life. He 11  See Firman and Gila: ‘Primal wounding results from violations of a person’s sense of self […] Wounding may occur from intentional or unintentional neglect […] as in physical or emotional abandonment, from an inability of significant others to respond sympathetically to the person (or to aspects of the person); or from a general unresponsiveness in the surrounding social milieu’ (27).

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

131

nurses concealed hatred towards his younger brother, Clement, who was preferred by their parents because he was not adopted, exacerbating the sibling rivalry which regularly features in Murdoch’s fiction. Indeed her novels abound in such rivalry: notable fraternal hostility features between Martin and Alexander Lynch-Gibbon in A Severed Head; Edmund and Otto Narraway in The Italian Girl; Nigel and Will Boase in Bruno’s Dream; Austin and Matthew Gibson Grey in An Accidental Man; Henry and Sandy Marshalson in Henry and Cato; and George and Brian McCaffrey in The Philosopher’s Pupil.12 In The Green Knight, Sefton says after Peter Mir’s revelations, ‘The main thing he said was that Lucas wanted to murder Clement and that just can’t be true’ (GK 67). But Lucas never denies it. He sees nothing strange or abhorrent about the desire to commit fratricide, taking it as a normal human experience throughout history: ‘Why did Cain kill Abel? Why did Romulus kill Remus?’ (GK 88). Peter also seems to find this aspect of Lucas’s crime comprehensible, ‘After all, brothers do kill each other, it’s a well-known phenomenon’ (GK 160). In The Green Knight Murdoch constructs a blatantly fantastic scenario for her study of the implications of negation of remorse. In a retrospectively narrated time before the novel opens, Lucas takes Clement to a deserted place and attempts to murder him with a baseball bat. A passer­by, Peter Mir, intervenes and receives the blow instead of Clement. Peter dies of this blow. Except that it transpires that (like Shakespeare’s Hermione) he does not die. With audacious imaginative fabrication, Murdoch has him recover, unbeknownst to any of the other characters, and reappear, to seek first retribution, and later reconciliation, after a re-­ enactment of the scene jolts memories which Peter had forgotten following the blow on the head. Nothing in the legal or medical elements of this plot rings true—Lucas is not prosecuted for manslaughter, merely reprimanded, and doctors show no surprise at Peter’s apparent resurrection. Here readers are required to suspend disbelief, for, as Conradi comments, ‘the novel’s disregard for plausibility and its closeness to allegory recall Shakespeare’s late romances, The Tempest and A Winter’s Tale’ (S&A 357). Lucas is one of Murdoch’s demonic, magnetic characters, the last and most puzzling of her figures of evil. His friends ‘all love a glimpse of Lucas, it’s a religious experience’ (GK 158), yet this ‘very unusual man’ (GK 172) behaves in a criminal manner, causes destruction in many lives, and  For analysis of sibling dynamics, see Mitchell (2008).

12

132 

F. WHITE

not only appears to have no moral sensibility but seems to find the whole moral realm senseless. Hilda D. Spear notes that ‘Lucas resembles no one so much as Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat ’, for just as in the earlier novel ‘the demonic figure of Julius King is responsible for Rupert Foster’s death but is able to shrug it off, appearing to feel no guilt and no responsibility for his actions’, so, in The Green Knight, ‘before the return of Peter Mir it looks as though this will be exactly the stance of Lucas Graffe; he has invented a story to tell the world, he has involved Clement in his machinations and he appears to feel no remorse’ (Spear 2007, 114–15 & 119). This startling deficiency of remorse in Lucas makes him one of the most chilling of Murdoch’s fictional creations. In probing his wickedness, she queries how an intelligent, highly educated man living in twentieth-century Western culture can be disaffiliated from the basic moral precepts of that cultural heritage, religious, philosophical, and legal. Absence of remorse in Lucas reveals this disaffiliation and demands that readers ask such questions as: how can truth not matter to Lucas? How can he be indifferent to justice? How can he lack basic human empathy and kindness? The moral vision of the Murdochian circle of friends who function as a Chorus in the novel is blurred by their assertion that ‘Lucas is one of us, we must close ranks’ (GK 166). They are unable to see what Lucas is really like, blinded by their partiality for him, for, as Rowe remarks, Lucas, ‘evil as he is, is compulsively adored by most of the characters’ (Rowe 2002, 111). The confusion of the Chorus mirrors that of Murdoch’s readers who are also required to sift the divergent accounts of Lucas for reality and truth, and perhaps even to recognise and question their own potential complicity with the Chorus view. For as a representative figure of Western intellectual culture, Lucas might be said to be ‘one of us’ qua readers, so a further challenge may be glimpsed in the text concerning readers’ ability to recognise evil within their own cultural milieu. Murdoch presents Lucas as missing a vital element in the composition of a full human being—a conscience. He fails to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, not through lack of understanding, but because of indifference to these concepts. The motiveless malice of Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat is accounted for by the concentration camp number which Tallis Browne notices on Julius’s skin at the end of the novel. Through this detail, the narrative suggests that Julius is passing on the suffering which he received and that his moral sense was damaged by the evil done to him. Within the realist framework of The Green Knight

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

133

Lucas has no comparable experience of inflicted evil, so in Murdoch’s later version of a figure of wickedness, this potential explanation is lacking. It is replaced by her suggestion of the sustained effect of primal wounding. Because her presentation of Lucas works on both symbolic and realist levels he can appear either as inherently evil—plausibly amoralistic in Murdoch’s terms—or as morally autistic—lacking in normal emotional response to others. The idiosyncratically post-modernist, metafictional text of The Green Knight lends itself to both readings, which Murdoch allows to counterpoint rather than contradict one another, and this discussion of the novel considers both possibilities and their implications. For Murdoch’s shape-shifting and unfixed text offers alternative interpretations of Lucas’s character which relate to the various conceptual frameworks of behavioural cause that potentially govern her presentation of this maleficent figure. The text also demands finely tuned responsiveness from readers who are called upon to exercise judicious discrimination between causes of evil behaviour and continuing personal responsibility for that behaviour no matter what trauma may underlie it. This demand on readers is made because the insights from trauma theory which Murdoch’s own trauma fiction dramatises are nonetheless constantly set against her adherence to a position of moral absolutism. This position rejects deterministically based leniency of the kind that implies loss of personal responsibility due to traumatisation from whatever cause. Her novels tread a fine line between sympathy for damaged individuals and a refusal to let them off the hook—a phrase often used by her characters with disapproval. The symbolic level of the text’s presentation of Lucas, which pictures evil as moral apathy, is located in Murdoch’s recurrent concern with postmodern alienation. This symbolic level offers an interpretation of Lucas’s moral desensitisation as a symptom of the late twentieth-century zeitgeist, the amoral, irreligious condition of Western postmodern post-Christian society. From this perspective he may be emblematic of a frightening Everyman figure, the inheritor of an increasingly solipsistic and amoral philosophical perspective. (If viewed in this light, Lucas is the direct literary descendent of Carel Fisher in The Time of the Angels, written 27 years earlier.) This culturally based critical viewpoint locates Lucas as an existentially ‘lost boy’, a product of trends which Murdoch denounces in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She identifies the current moral lacuna as the ultimate consequence of an extension of thinking which began with Nietzsche’s conception of ‘beyond good and evil’, a notion she

134 

F. WHITE

repudiates. Her critical stance also brings into question liberal humanistic assumptions about the continued preservation of religious, philosophical, and legal moral precepts in twentieth-century Western culture: Lucas’s disaffiliation may have widespread implications, denoting a decreasing value placed on truth, and an increasing indifference to justice and to human empathy and kindness. His missing conscience, and his personal failure to make distinctions through indifference to moral concepts, is symbolically symptomatic of the diminishment in ethical discernment and resulting moral apathy which Murdoch discerns and fears in Western society. The realist level of the text’s presentation of Lucas, which pictures evil as a form of moral autism, is located in trauma theory. Here the chief clue for understanding Lucas’s malevolence and lack of remorse lies in childhood; the primal wounding and sibling rivalry which provoke him to fratricidal hatred. This perspective draws on a (for Murdoch, surprisingly) deterministic view of the damaging effects of infant traumatisation leading to ethical insensibility. Such a psychoanalytically based critical viewpoint positions Lucas as a different form of ‘lost boy’, one in whom the loss is actual and physical; the loss of the biological mother who abandoned and failed to nurture him, augmented in his case by loss of partiality for him on the part of his adoptive parents after the birth of their natural son, Clement.13 Murdoch gives the background to Lucas and Clement’s sibling rivalry very early on in The Green Knight, and the consciously punctilious narratorial tone she employs signals that this is a crucial element in the story. The passage begins, ‘Perhaps it is better first to explain, or exhibit, since it is indeed difficult to explain, the relationship which existed between the brothers’ and the narrator speaks of the ‘built-in difficulty’ of ‘How could the parents, blessed now by what they had really wanted, their own child, conceal their preference?’ (GK 80–81). The reader is told that this early sense of rejection left Lucas with a ‘terrible original never-healing wound’ which Clement discerns (GK 82). In her imaginative exhibiting of the psychic state of a damaged adoptee in The Green Knight, Murdoch seems to be asking whether trauma of the 13  This is indeed a second wound of rejection if Verrier’s theory, that the ‘primal wound’ is adoptees’ subconscious memory of their rejection by their birth mothers, is given credence. The Green Knight thus seems to indicate that Murdoch is more concerned with the pain and jealousy caused by a rejection of which the young child is conscious, than with putative subconscious memory.

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

135

deep psychological kind which may be set off by early rejection can morally damage a person’s ethical nature and, as it were, cause the death of the soul, evidenced by insensibility to remorse. In her demonstration of this sensitive and little understood psychological area, Murdoch achieves an ambivalent balance between the fraternal love and closeness of Lucas and Clement, and Lucas’s murderous hurt and anger towards the brother who usurped him, dramatising Juliet Mitchell’s claim that ‘Siblings provide a way of learning to love and hate the same person’ (Mitchell 2008, 225). Lucas tells Clement bluntly: ‘I have always wanted to kill you, ever since the moment when I learnt of your existence’ (GK 88), and when Peter asks him, ‘Exactly why did you want to kill your brother?’ Lucas responds, ‘without hesitation’, ‘Because my mother preferred him to me’ (GK 249). That this primal wound of rejection has poisoned Lucas’s life and deformed his character, resulting in his ethical indifferentism, is a determining factor in his case-history; he tells Peter, ‘I live in hell, and have done so since I was a small child’ (GK 251). But Murdoch’s resolutely anti-deterministic stance refutes it as a simple cause of wickedness. By interweaving the realist and symbolic levels of the text she keeps open the dialogue that she constructs between possible interpretations of Lucas, refusing to allow her readers to settle comfortably for any one explanation of this remorse-less figure and insisting that they hold sympathetic understanding of a victim of trauma in tension with ethical judgement of his amorality. Murdoch sets up a philosophical and theological debate about the amoral position Lucas symbolically represents by juxtaposing him with Peter Mir, an ambiguous figure of justice, who mysteriously evokes Christ, Buddha, and the Green Knight from the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The intertextual engagement of her enigmatically allusive novel with this poem widens Murdoch’s investigation of remorse to include the relationship of this concept to those of justice, forgiveness, and mercy, common to both texts. The ethical implications of absence of remorse are explored through the moral antagonism she exhibits between the characters of Lucas and Peter, dramatised as a ‘battle between two mad magicians’ (GK 238). Peter requires Lucas to acknowledge what he did and in some way atone for it. He wants to know that Lucas experiences and confesses remorse for his wickedness, so his engagement with Lucas is a battle against Lucas’s nullification of remorse. One of Peter’s functions in the novel is to challenge the Nietzschean figure of Lucas in relation to the zeitgeist and the nihilism for which

136 

F. WHITE

Murdoch believes Nietzsche stands.14 This Nietzschean (twi)light is cast on Lucas’s moral position through the phrases his friend Bellamy James uses in his character analysis of Lucas. Bellamy knows Lucas ‘very well’ (GK 171), and loves him, but comes to think, ‘He really is anti-­Christ’ (GK 268). Asked by Peter if he believes Lucas ‘is capable of intending to murder his brother?’, Bellamy’s thoughtful response is, ‘Actually I think he is capable of anything’, followed by the idea that Lucas ‘lives absolutely outside ordinary conventions’, to which Peter counters, ‘Including ordinary morality’. Peter challenges Bellamy: ‘You seem to want to see him as a saint’, and Bellamy admits, ‘In a way I do—I mean a sort of countersaint—I mean he’s above, beyond—’, an ellipsis which Peter supplements, ‘Beyond good and evil’ (GK 171–2). This apparently nihilistic perspective is always anathema in Murdoch’s moral philosophy: she regards Nietzsche as ‘essentially demonic’ (MGM 456) and repudiates him throughout Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Peter attacks Lucas’s lack of remorse from three different angles: first, the normal human emotional response range; second, a moral philosophical position concerning the ethics of intentions as well as of acts—both Lucas and Clement lose sight of the fact that Lucas intended to kill Clement even though he was prevented; and third, a theological position derived from Judaism—he quotes the Psalms, ‘Deliver me from blood guiltiness’ (GK 248) and Isaiah on divine retribution, ‘The heavens—shall be rolled together—as a scroll’ (GK 253).15 But Peter’s three-pronged attack bounces off Lucas. Emotionally, Lucas has no place in his psyche for fellow feeling; ethically, he accepts responsibility neither for what he did 14  Murdoch’s conception of Nietzschean philosophy can, however, be called into question. Nietzsche calls nihilism ‘this uncanniest of all guests’ and defines it as, ‘the radical repudiation of value, meaning and desirability’. He further remarks: ‘What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer’, and ‘Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values one recognizes; plus the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself of things that might be “divine” or morality incarnate’ (Nietzsche 1968, 7 & 9, Nietzsche’s italics). It is plain to see why Murdoch views his thinking with mistrust. But it is erroneous to view Nietzsche as applauding or fostering nihilism; rather he finds it a state of affairs which needs to be overcome. See, for example, Haar: ‘Nihilism as “psychological state” is […] for Nietzsche the manifestation of an enormous lie, of disillusion, and, ultimately, of despair in the face of the crumbling of universal meaning, which results from the absolutization of becoming taken as a whole by means of logic and the moral order’ (Blond 1998, 166). 15  Psalm 51.14 and Isaiah 34.4.

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

137

not intend but performed (Peter’s injury), nor for what he intended but failed to perform (Clement’s murder), and spiritually, concepts of forgiveness and justice have no purchase in his ultra-rational, detached view of the situation. Remorse is the pivotal concept in The Green Knight because it is deficiency of remorse that discloses the lacuna of moral feeling in Lucas’s psyche. Lucas merely says in explanation of his para-murderous blow, Peter ‘interfered with me at […] perhaps the most important moment of my life. I think I hit him out of sheer exasperation’ (GK 89). Asked by Clement ‘Don’t you feel regret?’, Lucas replies, ‘Don’t talk foolishly. Of course I feel regret.’ But this is just mild regret as in the general notion of the term—it would have been better if this had not happened. It has no moral depth, as Murdoch makes clear in Clement’s challenging response, which significantly separates out the concepts of regret and remorse: ‘Luc, something absolutely terrible has happened. You say you feel regret. I won’t ask whether you feel remorse’ (GK 91). Clement resists asking his brother whether he feels remorse because it is evident that this concept forms no part of Lucas’s moral agenda or affective response range. (Murdoch sets this ethical and psychological lacuna in Lucas in sharp relief by making remorse an incisive element in the emotional repertoire of other characters surrounding him in this novel, being explicitly experienced by Clement, Bellamy, Louise, and Harvey.) Lucas never appears to feel that ‘something absolutely terrible has happened’: the incident is just a regrettable past occurrence in his view, which is now irritatingly re-­ emerging and preventing his working in peace. Murdoch presents Lucas’s indifference to all claims of others and, pre-­ eminently, to the importance of morality in itself, as a moral vacuum. When Clement suggests to his brother, ‘Perhaps [Peter] just wants you to say you’re sorry’, Lucas dumbfoundingly answers, ‘What for?’ (GK 118). He appears totally indifferent to having apparently killed a man and, when Peter re-appears, shows neither compassion for his victim’s suffering nor a sense of guilt for having caused it. Further, when Peter infiltrates their group of friends, Lucas says with distress to Clement, ‘you don’t know how I loathe this scene, this vulgarity, this kitsch, these lies, these people. It interferes so with my work—’, to which Clement exclaims, in tones which reflect the ethical bewilderment of readers, ‘But my dear Luc, if you had killed me, would not that have interfered with your work?’ (GK 197). Issues of morality seem not to register with Lucas: it is as if he were the ethical equivalent of tone-deaf.

138 

F. WHITE

Lucas exemplifies a loss of crucial ethical concepts and emotions, whether through the impoverishment Murdoch perceives in twentieth-­ century philosophy and culture or whether through psychological trauma. Murdoch demonstrates this lack through Lucas’s eccentric stance on remorse as he reveals it to Peter and to Sefton Anderson, his pupil. Peter is frustrated by Lucas’s negation of moral or spiritual terminology, evidenced by his confounding of justice with legal acquittal (GK 123), and his rejection of what he calls ‘the sickening concept of forgiveness’ (GK 124). Lucas cannot see why he may be thought deserving of punishment for what he has done. His eloquently intellectualised response, which manifests his incapacity to feel, ends with a breath-taking appeal to Peter not to give himself cause for remorse: ‘Why waste your life and poison your mind with fantasies of revenge. Why wantonly pursue a course which is bound to lead to misery, disaster and remorse?’ (GK 124). The paradoxical fact that Lucas thinks Peter would be bound to incur remorse from evil fantasies, when Lucas’s own evil fantasy (fratricide) and evil act (grievously harming Peter) has not led to any remorse whatsoever in his own case, suggests that he somehow sees remorse as existing in relation to others but not to himself. Equally paradoxically, when Lucas advises Sefton about the scholarly life, he tells her, ‘You must be an ascetic, shun sins, avoid remorse and guilt, these must not consume your time and energy’ (GK 274). If Lucas lived a blameless life, then his adjuration, ‘avoid remorse’, might be taken to mean avoid behaving in ways which will give rise to remorse. But as he says this to her after he has attempted to kill Clement, and wantonly injured Peter, Lucas has already behaved in such ways, and his injunction, ‘avoid remorse’, seems to mean do not feel the emotions of guilt, regret, shame, or remorse, even when you think and act in such a manner that these would be the appropriate and normal feelings in response. Murdoch draws her readers into contemplating the enigma of Lucas’s lack of remorse by means of Peter’s and Clement’s divergent conceptions of him which parallel the two levels of explanations of Lucas offered in The Green Knight. Peter’s view corresponds more closely to the symbolic level of interpretation—Lucas as evil; Clement’s to the realist level—Lucas as traumatised. Peter’s insistent demand for justice disturbs Clement because it forces him to look again, revisualising and reconceptualising ‘the dreadful happening’ (GK 187). The effort to look again is always a sign of moral growth in Murdoch’s moral philosophy: in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ ‘M. tells herself […] “Let me look again”’ (EM 313). Clement’s

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

139

re-looking forms a separate strand in the novel from the philosophical duel between Lucas and Peter which also demands that the reader, too, looks again. Clement oddly characterises his brother as ‘innocent of remorse’ (GK 151). Murdoch unexpectedly juxtaposes concepts (innocence and remorse) to surprise readers into re-assessing the significance of the role of remorse in the moral life; she requires her readers likewise to re-look, to try to understand, to assess and arbitrate between the arguments offered, to question the concepts of justice and mercy—specifically problematised here by the very absence of remorse. Clement finds it difficult to perceive Lucas’s moral abdication and struggles fully to apprehend that Lucas intended to kill him. He acknowledges, ‘I have busied my mind with wrapping up that fact, de-realising it, making it not to be’ (GK 188) because seeing the truth hurtfully changes Clement’s long held perception of his brother: Lucas not only damaged Mir […] he was also engaged at the time in an attempted murder and so is revealed as an evil man, who cannot get away with it by talking about accidents. The picture of Lucas is darkened, it’s lurid, it’s bloodstained, he is presented as a villain. Well, he is a villain. (GK 188)

Briefly here, behind the layers of guilt, compassion, protectiveness, and love, which blur his vision of Lucas, Clement perceives the wickedness of his brother and admits the legitimacy of Peter’s demand for justice, even while he himself forgives Lucas his fratricidal intent. Murdoch further probes the trauma of adoption that Verrier identifies as primal wounding through Clement’s continued attachment to Lucas despite coming to recognise the evil in him. When Clement muses on whether his brother’s moral anarchy may be rooted in his classical historical learning, the words that describe Clement’s perception of Lucas’s development hint at childhood damage. He was ‘saved’ by his classical education, he ‘imbibed […] mysterious substances from his mastery of the past’ and the ‘past’ is another ‘land’ where Lucas was taught ‘pride, contempt for the weak, and also a cold dignified resignation to destiny’ (GK 152). Clement’s metaphorical language yokes classical learning with drug taking and suggests that Lucas does not perceive himself as belonging to or bound by his own place and time. This strange description offers a link between Lucas’s function in the novel as an amoral symbolic being and the

140 

F. WHITE

realist presentation of him as a particular wounded individual—the doubly lost boy. The vocabulary of this passage also raises questions concerning what it is that Lucas needs to be ‘saved’ from (the same term Murdoch uses in A Word Child; ‘words were my salvation’, WC 21), what mental pain requires drugging, and why he is so alienated from his own life. Lucas needs to be saved from the damage done by his primal wound that causes the pain which needs drugging, and he fails to relate to others because of the trauma of his adoption and subsequent rejection by his adopted parents. Lucas’s eschewal of remorse is a self-protective solipsistic position which renders the value of moral and ethical thinking irrelevant and pays no attention to the Other, whether brother (Clement) or stranger (Peter). Trauma theory provides a contextual lens through which Murdoch’s presentation of the psychopathology of Lucas can be read as a broadening of the parameters of her search for the ethical paramountcy of the concept of remorse. The paradox of trauma fiction, identified by Whitehead as the problem of narrativising ‘an experience which overwhelms the individual and resists language or representation’ (Whitehead 2004, 3), is addressed by Murdoch in diversely effective ways in her own contributions to this recently identified genre. Murdoch offers a means of salvation from Lucas’s primal wound in a scene which is playfully parodic of the fourth quatrain of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where Peter takes symbolic retribution by making a nick (a symbolic wound) in Lucas’s ribs with a knife. It is significant that immediately following this ritual of symbolic death the Graffe brothers achieve a resolution of their fraught relationship. Clement asks, ‘Luc, please tell me now—did you intend to kill me?’ and Lucas’s answer is, ‘No, of course not’ (GK 322). It seems as if his fratricidal resentment has somehow been cured by symbolic response to Peter’s demand for retribution. Lucas moves from bitterness to forgiveness in a terse interchange. He tells Clement, ‘I forgive you’, and to Clement’s astonished reaction, ‘What?’ he explains, ‘For all the suffering you caused me when we were children, I forgive you’. Clement responds, ‘Oh—thank you—’ (GK 322), in understanding of the deep place of healing in his brother that this paradoxical act of absolution betokens. Readers too respond ‘What?’ to the idea that the would-be murderer should forgive his murderee, but Murdoch’s psychological acuity in depicting dark places in the human psyche earns credibility. In so many ways the extravagant psychodramas of The Green Knight cause ‘deep change’ in Lucas and shed light on the tortuous depths of human psychology in a similarly mythical and mystical fashion to

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

141

Shakespeare’s late romances. Murdoch’s phrase ‘deep change’, used in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (431) as well as in A Word Child (200), is her image of a movement from one psycho-spiritual state to another. The unspecificity of the phrase holds it open to ambiguity and individual association and recalls Ariel’s song from The Tempest: Full fadom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich & strange. (1:2)

Lucas, who told Sefton, ‘Do not marry’ (GK 74), breaks his own rules and marries her sister, Aleph. The novel leaves the potential for change open and allows the possibility that Lucas has been released from avoiding remorse, intimacy, and commitment, thereby becoming more fully human. Or maybe not—Murdoch leaves the future of Lucas for each reader to envisage (it is equally imaginable that Lucas will treat Aleph as cruelly as Julius treats Morgan in A Fairly Honourable Defeat) and the ending of The Green Knight is as open as the ending of A Word Child for readers to interpret as they will. Murdoch’s ongoing concern with remorse, which progresses from depicting the ills of chronic remorse in A Word Child to demonstrating the possibilities of lucid remorse in The Good Apprentice, eventually presents remorse as a critical and irreplaceable moral category with a clear function. By the time she writes The Green Knight the place of remorse in Murdoch’s moral schema is that defined by Thomas’s philosophical analysis as a ‘fundamental form of ethical orientation […] central to the responses we expect from those who have destroyed value’ (Cox 1999, 133). Murdoch puzzled for decades over a real person whose work she admired but whose avoidance of remorse indicates a troubling lack of this ‘fundamental form of ethical orientation’, as she studied and wrote about Martin Heidegger in both her philosophy and her fiction. The creation of Lucas Graffe is the work of her imagination, wrestling with the double difficulty of getting under the skin of a person for whom remorse has no meaning and of trying to understand how such a psychology is caused and how it functions. The following chapter’s discussion of Murdoch’s work on Heidegger, and the problem which his eschewing of remorse in

142 

F. WHITE

relation to the Holocaust poses for her, will shed retrospective light on why it was so important to Murdoch to expand her fictional investigation of remorse to include its absence, and why trauma theory and primal wounding prove conceptually significant for interpreting her work in this area.

References Murdoch Criticism Antonaccio, Maria, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Byatt, A.S., Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965); (London: Vintage, 1994) Hardy, Robert, Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2000) Nicol, Bran, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Rowe, Anne, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2002) Spear, Hilda D., Iris Murdoch 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Vice, Samantha, ‘The Ethics of Self-Concern’, in Rowe (2007), 60–71

Other Works Blond, Phillip, ed., Post-secular philosophy: between philosophy and theology (London: Routledge, 1998) Caruth, Cathy, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995) Cox, Murray, ed., Remorse and Reparation (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publications, 1999) Hoyt, M.F., ‘Concerning Remorse: With Special Attention to its Defensive Function’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 11 (1983), 435–444 Luckhurst, Roger, ‘Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis and trauma theory’, in Waugh (2006), 497–507 Mitchell, Juliet, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008) Nietzsche, Frederick, The Will to Power: In Science, Nature, Society and Art, trans. by Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollindale (London: Vintage Books 1968) Parker, Ian, Psychoanalytic Culture: Psychoanalytic Discourse in Western Society (London: Sage, 1997)

4  REMORSE, TRAUMA THEORY, AND PRIMAL WOUNDING: THE GOOD… 

143

Powell, Anthony, Books do Furnish a Room, A Dance to the Music of Time: Volume 10 (1971); (London: Mandarin, 1997) Proeve, Michael, Remorse: its description and its interpersonal effects, 2001, University of South Australia http://arrow.unisa.edu.au:8081/1959.8/25016 Stern, E. Mark, ed., Psychotherapy and the Remorseful Patient (New York: Haworth Press, 1989) Weil, Simone, Waiting on God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London: Collins, 1977): French edition, Attente de Dieu (1950) Whitehead, Anne, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) Wolfreys, Julian, ‘Trauma, Testimony, Criticism: Witnessing, Memory and Responsibility’, Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century, ed. by Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 126–148

CHAPTER 5

Remorse, Holocaust Studies, and Heidegger: The Message to the Planet, the Heidegger Manuscript, and Jackson’s Dilemma

This is, undeniably, a post-Holocaust world. If, as Virginia Woolf proclaimed, the world changed on or about December 1910, it changed again in 1945, when the camps were revealed to the public. —Silbergleid (2007, 12)

Murdoch in Dialogue with Holocaust Studies Remorse, the Holocaust, and Heidegger are woven together in Murdoch’s thought. Heidegger’s infamous silence and failure to express remorse about the Holocaust make him for many a stumbling block in twentieth-­ century philosophy and this remorseless silence gave Murdoch a troubled interest in his work and his life. Her philosophical writing expresses her suspicion of Heidegger’s philosophy and influence, but her anxiety about Heidegger’s lack of remorse and the impact that this omission has on the acceptance of his thought is most evident in several of her novels in which he figures either obliquely or directly. Broader questions concerning the Holocaust and remorse also occur as Murdoch explores what remorse might signify in the context of such evil, not only in terms of individual actions directly related to the Holocaust but also in terms of post-­ Holocaust remembering and narrating by those who come after what Levinas has called this ‘hole in history’ (Levinas 1991, 93). This chapter focuses on two of Murdoch’s late novels, The Message to the Planet and Jackson’s Dilemma, identifying them as post-Holocaust © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8_5

145

146 

F. WHITE

narratives, and her as yet unpublished manuscript, Heidegger.1 Close readings of these texts elucidate her perception of Heidegger, locate Murdoch’s work within the genre of Holocaust literature, and further illuminate her thinking about remorse. Intrinsic connections between the concept of remorse, Murdoch’s post-Holocaust narratives, and her study of Heidegger come to light through insights from Holocaust theory, Eva Hoffman’s post-Holocaust theory, Ricoeur’s narrative theory, and the ethics of Levinas. These connections not only reveal new aspects of Murdoch’s work but also extend the range of Holocaust studies by plotting her position on the map of Holocaust literature.2 Holocaust theory is the name now given to all thinking and writing about the causes, experiences, and (continuing) effects of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people and eradicate their culture. Such thinking and writing comes from many different disciplines: history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, theology, and literature, including biography and memoir, drama, film, poetry, and the novel. Neither Murdoch studies nor Holocaust studies have yet acknowledged Murdoch’s place within Holocaust literature and theory; Conradi says ‘It might be surmised that the madnesses of Europe hurt Iris Murdoch into moral philosophy’ (EM xix), but there is as yet little focused discussion of the place of the Holocaust in Murdoch’s writings.3 Nor is there any mention of Murdoch’s novels in studies of Holocaust Literature. Nonetheless her fiction merits serious consideration as post-Holocaust narrative because she engages with current debates concerning the difficulties of remembering, forgetting, imagining, and theorising the Holocaust. This engagement is triply rooted: in Murdoch’s moral philosophy which stresses the distinction between good and evil and the human obligation actively to pursue the good; in her 1  The manuscript become available to Murdoch scholars in 2002 when it was deposited in the archive in by Peter J. Conradi, but an embargo was placed on direct quotation beyond the pages which were published in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher in 2012. The full text edited by Justin Broackes is to be published by Oxford University Press but as it is not currently available, page numbers in this chapter are from the typescript held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives KUAS6/5/1/4. 2  The aftermath of the Holocaust ‘has resulted in a volume of literature that has already grown so large as to be beyond the reach of mastery. The extent of the persistent effort on the part of so many to articulate the Holocaust itself testifies to the magnitude of the event and emphasises our common need to bring it under whatever control continued reflection may afford’ (Rosenfeld 1980, 4). 3  For discussion of this subject, see White (2011).

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

147

critical theory which links aesthetics with ethics, seeing art as a form of morals; and in her personal life which was deeply affected by the history of her time. Although Murdoch’s connection with the Holocaust is not the immediate connection of direct involvement, it is ‘first generation’ experience. In her relief work for UNRRA in Belgium and Austria she saw the effects of the war on survivors. She lost beloved friends (such as Frank Thompson) as a direct result of the Second World War and others as an indirect result of the Holocaust: Murdoch’s lover, Franz Baermann Steiner, whose family perished in Treblinka, died young himself from ill-health caused by deprivation, anxiety, and grief, and Murdoch saw him as ‘one of Hitler’s victims’ (IMAL 322). These war and post-war years were so personally traumatic and intellectually formative that all of Murdoch’s writing, philosophical and fictional, is a sustained reflection on what she calls ‘our, Hitler and after, age’ (MGM 120). Conradi’s biography of Murdoch emphasises the impact of history: ‘war made Iris think anew about human wickedness and irrationality. If there is a common influence on both her philosophy and her fiction, it is surely Hitler’ (IMAL 597). Gaita’s study of Good and Evil apprehends that ‘there are many […] who have neither suffered nor witnessed such evil, yet whose lives and thought have been marked by its presence’ (Gaita 2004, 1) and furthermore, that ‘for some people the evil [of the Holocaust] is not remote, not because they have suffered it or been a direct witness to it, but because its presence determines a large part of their sense of the ethical, of themselves and of their time’ (Gaita 2004, 13). Murdoch engages with remorse and the Holocaust primarily through her fiction because of her belief that art can do things which philosophy cannot: ‘Art indeed, so far from being a playful diversion of the human race, is the place of its most fundamental insights, and the centre to which the more uncertain steps of metaphysics must constantly return’ (EM 360). Her novels re-imagine the Holocaust and offer it to her readers as a locus for contemplation on the importance of remorse. Such contemplation has a moral dynamic as an education in virtue. Murdoch’s focus on the individual, on ethical relations between individuals, and on the relation of literature to moral philosophy (the basis of the ethical turn) connects her work with current meta-critical Holocaust studies on two counts; ethics and the role of literature in current Holocaust theory. First, her rejection of the side-lining of ethics and her mistrust of language games allies Murdoch with ‘the Holocaust narrative’ which, as Daniel Schwarz defines it in Imagining the Holocaust, ‘has an ethical narrator, demands an ethical reader, believes at least hypothetically in essential truths […] and

148 

F. WHITE

has faith in language that signifies’ (Schwarz 2000, 56). Second, her championing of literature as an ethical force relates to the way that fiction is increasingly being understood as a positive means of holding the memory of the Holocaust and passing it on to future generations as an enscripted form of remorse and grief. Narrative acknowledges the reality of the Holocaust, becomes a means of mourning the six million dead, and acts as a form of memorial that counteracts the evil design to expunge their existence from human history. Schwarz is clear that it is the artistic rendering of the Holocaust that will keep it alive in the imagination particularly as memoirists dwindle. The word and the image have rescued the Holocaust from oblivion even if they cannot bring back its victims. Fifty years later the Holocaust lives because the Nazis’ genocidal efforts to erase all traces of a people and to deprive the Jews of their private selves have been flouted by word and image. (Schwarz 2000, 23)

Art can function in this way as a means of preservation, of reverence for the dead, of redemption from oblivion, even a kind of faint triumph over evil. As Schwarz’s study of Holocaust literature suggests, ‘writing about the Holocaust paradoxically restores the uniqueness of the human spirit by restoring the imagination to its proper place and breathes new life into the materiality of victims and survivors’ (Schwarz 2000, 37). The specific kind of ‘artistic rendering of the Holocaust’ and of the remorse it engenders that is found in Murdoch’s fiction should now be mapped onto the genre of Holocaust literature. Her novels are self-­ evidently part of the continuing defiance by artists of any prohibition on a literature of the Holocaust. Locating Murdoch within the domain of Holocaust literature requires justification as she is a non-Jewish author writing at a distance from the event, who touches on the Holocaust only tangentially. Discomfort exists concerning whether anyone without direct experience of the Holocaust has a right to give it voice. Murdoch’s credentials for speaking on this subject can be queried as she is one of many writers who pose what Robin Silbergleid articulates as ‘the vital question of how a person who did not experience the camps might come to possess that memory as her own’ (Silbergleid 2007, 7). He provides a means of locating such authors within the multi-layered genre of Holocaust writings by defining ‘the fundamental distinction between Holocaust literature and post-Holocaust literature’ as follows:

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

149

Holocaust documents […] must confront directly the atrocity of the camps. Post-Holocaust texts, on the other hand, grapple with the aftermath of the atrocity, approach the Holocaust from temporal and spatial difference. They are texts informed by the Holocaust and written in its wake. (Silbergleid 2007, 13)

Murdoch’s Holocaust narratives exactly fit this definition. Current theoretical understandings of the genre extend its range to include distant and tangential work and affirm the link that Holocaust writing necessarily makes between art and morality. Such an ethical approach to the enterprise counteracts the besetting anxiety encapsulated in Peter Hall’s trenchant phrase, ‘bumming a ride on the Holocaust’ (Vice 2000, 4). The essence of the critical dilemma is articulated by Susan Gubar in Poetry after Auschwitz: anyone who participates in the academic field of Holocaust studies inevitably confronts the danger of ‘consuming trauma’ […] converting grievous suffering into rhetorical pleasure or professional profit in much the manner of those creative writers faulted for finding artistic gratification in imaginative responses to the Shoah. (Gubar 2003, 4)

Gubar’s position is a further refinement of the central dilemma; the radical difficulty for all writers of what David Rossuet terms ‘Littérature Concentrationnaire’ which is the aesthetic representation of ‘l’univers concentrationnaire’—the world of the camps (Langer 1975, 22 & 15–16). Dilemma—‘the choice of two alternatives, either of which seems unfavourable’ (OED)—is a recurrent word in Murdoch’s lexicon, chosen for the title of her final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, which affirms her perpetual concern with both the Holocaust and remorse. She shares the sense articulated by so many of the difficulty of knowing whether—and if so, how— to speak of the unspeakable. Murdoch engages in this ongoing meta-critical dialogue about the problematics of Holocaust narratives. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she enigmatically quotes Adorno: ‘How can such a terrible planet dare to have art at all? (“Who can write poetry after Auschwitz?” Adorno.) (An answer. Paul Célan.)’ (MGM 22–3), and she raises the difficulty of ‘stories which we hesitate to repeat, lest we seem to be gloating over horrors or trying to gratify unworthy emotions in ourselves or our hearers’ (MGM 95), which is why she approaches it obliquely in her fiction.

150 

F. WHITE

Murdoch debates the problem of whether and how the Holocaust should be narrated both within and between her novels. In Jackson’s Dilemma Tuan Abelson experiences this problem after he relates his own father’s terrible Holocaust experience (of leaving his sister behind when the family escaped) to his fiancée Rosalind Berran: He ought not to have told that hideous story to Rosalind [.…] Even to tell it to anybody was a sin, why this one little story, when the whole thing was so eternally hideously immense [.…] His having told it to anybody made it a thousand times more vivid, more violent. His father must have known that he should not tell that tale to his son, and he must have regretted it afterwards. Perhaps telling it had seemed to be some great necessary duty, some gruesome detail picked out of the black mountain. But what good had it done?—it had damaged Tuan and now Tuan had damaged Rosalind. (JD 172)

But the opposite viewpoint is put by Rabbi Daniel Most in The Message to the Planet: We’ve all got to do it, we, I mean perhaps everybody, weave the past into the present, work at it, like endlessly imagining, not just falling into it like into a pit, but surrounding it, I don’t mean in a theoretical way, like discussing whether it was unique or exactly what caused it and so on, but connecting it, a sort of Midrash, like people in the camps telling the stories of their lives. (MP 429–30)

In these two passages fear of perpetuating damage by repetition of terrible stories is set against the perspective that the sharing and reworking of such stories may be healing. This is a recurring issue in Holocaust theory. Murdoch unhappily acknowledges the potential of transmitted damage and feels herself caught on the horns of the Holocaust studies dilemma; yet finding the subject crucial to her exploration of the ethical significance of remorse, her response to the dilemma is made evident by her practice. George Steiner cogently remarks, ‘We cannot pretend that Belsen is irrelevant to the responsible life of the imagination’ (Steiner 1977, 4): Murdoch does not keep silence but works at the dark knowledge of the Holocaust in her fiction, endlessly imagining it, compelled to do so by her sense that this marks an extreme situation in which the moral implications of remorse (or lack of it) are forcefully in evidence and can be explored through narrative.

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

151

The impact of the Holocaust is clear in Murdoch’s philosophical writings. In The Sovereignty of Good, she uses examples from those extreme circumstances as a test case of goodness, describing ‘the best kind of courage’ as ‘that which would make a man act unselfishly in a concentration camp’ (EM 346), and in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she refers to ‘the fate of the Jews under Hitler which has become a symbol of the capacity and strength of human wickedness’ (MGM 94), correlating to Levinas’s description of the Holocaust as ‘the paradigm of gratuitous human suffering’ (Levinas 1988, 162). She further stresses the complex psychological impact the Holocaust continues to have on those who come after: ‘The spectacle of the terrible suffering of others may prompt not only sympathy but also a sense of guilt which may be overwhelming. (This was felt by many people in relation to the Holocaust.)’ (MGM 362). This ‘sense of guilt’ is allied to the concept of remorse in the commonly shared disquiet that the Holocaust could, and should, have been prevented from happening by morally responsible bystanders. But unlike Steiner or Hannah Arendt, Murdoch does not seek to analyse the Holocaust from philosophical, political, or cultural perspectives.4 Rather, she absorbs it into her imagination, assimilates it into her moral understanding, and incorporates it into the exploration of remorse that she undertakes in her art. In the multi-layered genre of Holocaust narratives there are primary texts—diaries and memoirs of the first generation, those who perished in the Shoah and direct survivors—and secondary texts—the memoirs and reflections of the second generation, descendants of victims and survivors, whose own lives were equally shaped by the Holocaust. There is also what Silbergleid describes as a third category of Holocaust literature, literature written not out of the expressive needs of survivors nor the vicarious trauma of the second-­ generation, but of the desires of a committed writer to grapple with the major cataclysms of the century. (Silbergleid 2007, 13)

It is within this ‘third category’ that Murdoch falls in that her fictional approach to the Holocaust is at a slant. None of her novels has a Holocaust setting but she drops into them scenes, memories, and thoughts which keep the Holocaust, and the necessity for remorse concerning it, in mind

 For discussion of the different perspectives of Murdoch and Arendt see White (2010a).

4

152 

F. WHITE

as it stands against the bustling human comedy which forms the foreground of her work. The shadowy presence of Hitler and the Holocaust first appears in The Time of the Angels in which Eugene Peshkov is dispossessed by Nazism and refugee camps (TA 50).5 It recurs in novel after novel, often just as the glimpsed background to a character: in An Accidental Man, Ludwig Leferrier’s family were driven to America by ‘a strong and rigid disapproval of Hitler’ (AM 6) and Ludwig inherits ‘the ghost of Hitler’ which ‘needed to be exorcised’ (AM 7); in Nuns and Soldiers Wojciech Szcepanski’s life is shaped by the events of 1939 which prevent his family from returning to Poland (NS 8); and in The Book and the Brotherhood, the old Oxford tutor Levquist’s ‘father and sister had died in a German concentration camp’ (BB 22).6 Murdoch visited Auschwitz (IMAL 566) and things she saw there also appear in her novels. In The Good Apprentice Stuart Cuno broods on ‘the plaits of girls’ hair’ in the Auschwitz Museum (GA 160), and in The Message to the Planet Alfred Ludens recalls ‘the huge pile of suitcases […] which represented the illusions of those who had arrived’ (MP 503). It is this ‘sort of—particular—absolute—thing’ (GA 160) which evokes the individual reality of the victims. Such things—plaits and suitcases—operate as icons (of innocent suffering and the evil which causes it) in Murdoch’s work but only by retaining their absolute existence as verifiable facts pertaining to individual lives and deaths. ‘Particular’ and ‘detail’ are key terms in Murdoch’s philosophy as they avoid dehumanising generalisation and, as Stuart says, ‘it was the details […] that were so unendurable’ (GA 160). Murdoch’s novels portray the impact that struggle for survival in the camps had on the moral psychology of individual sufferers. Hoffman comments that survivors ‘are often difficult people, and are found to be so by others’ (Hoffman 2004, 54), and this can take different forms. Willy Kost, the survivor of Dachau in The Nice and the Good, is reclusive, haunted by 5  The plight of refugees, always in Murdoch’s mind and heart since her work with UNRRA, emerges earlier in her oeuvre, with her second novel, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956). For a detailed account of Murdoch’s writing on refugees see White (2010c). 6  Levquist’s character and lifelong influence on his pupils calls to mind Murdoch’s own Oxford tutor, Eduard Fraenkel. Connections between the Holocaust, Heidegger, and Murdoch’s life and fiction are manifold: Fraenkel, as professor of Classics at Freiburg, was a colleague of Heidegger’s, and he came to Oxford to teach as a direct result of anti-semitic persecution in which Heidegger joined, referring to him in a letter on 16 December 1933, as ‘the Jew Fränkel’ (Sheehan 1988, 40).

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

153

remorse for betraying two fellow inmates to the gas chambers to save his own skin and unable to move on from that terrible past. Willy’s trauma is overt and evokes pity in the reader. But persecution can also create demons. Julius King, the enchanter figure of A Fairly Honourable Defeat who works in biological warfare and wantonly destroys the lives of those around him, shows no remorse for his professional or personal actions. He is a figure of evil and the throw-away information given at the end of the novel that Julius ‘spent the war in Belsen’ (FHD 421) is disconcerting as retrospective compassion complicates readerly judgement of him.

Fatal Remorse in The Message to the Planet? The Message to the Planet is Murdoch’s most sustained meditation on remorse and the Holocaust though set in the context of a wider, often comic, story. Other writers have investigated the Holocaust by means of the genre of comedy but Murdoch does not approach it through comedy—she would find any such comedy black (as indeed it is) and in poor taste (much debated).7 What her work does is not to fuse the inimical elements of horror and humour but to juxtapose memories and thoughts of the Holocaust and its ethical implications against the comic merry-go-­ round of her characters’ human muddling. Murdoch believes ‘the novel is a comic form’ (TCHF 133) but also a form which has the capacity to encompass the trauma and tragedy of the world that always exists as the backdrop to all human experience, Hegel’s ‘slaughterhouse of history’ (Kenny 2006, 300). Significantly, the focus of Murdoch’s meditation in The Message to the Planet, Marcus Vallar—who thinks on the sufferings of the Jewish people and on the evil which bred those sufferings, to a point of identification which appears to cause his death—has no direct link with the Holocaust beyond what he has learned from reading: ‘He has read books about them, as we all have, but he has no other connection, no one whom he knew perished there’ (MP 262). Aside from his being Jewish, Marcus can be seen as standing in the place of the author (and indeed the reader) as someone grappling with the unthinkable, trying to understand and identify with what happened and to deal with the ensuing sense of overwhelming remorse on behalf of humanity itself. 7  See, for example, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski and Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman, discussed by Terrence Des Pres (Lang 1988, 216–33).

154 

F. WHITE

Marcus is the focal point not only for Murdoch’s discussion of possible ways of contemplating the Holocaust but also for her investigation into the potential of remorse to cause the destruction of a human being. He is a reclusive mathematical genius, out of circulation for some years but sought out by his disciple Alfred Ludens (also Jewish), who believes Marcus to be writing a great philosophical work. It transpires that Marcus is writing nothing, just thinking and brooding on the Holocaust. His family (safe in Switzerland) was uninvolved yet Marcus is obsessed by the problems of suffering and evil which the Holocaust poses. His daughter Irina who thinks him ‘stark staring mad’ (MP 96), takes him to Bellmain, a psychiatric foundation where he, she, and Ludens live together in a bungalow (Benbow) in the grounds. There Marcus talks (with Ludens, the psychiatrist Dr. Marzillian, and the local Rabbi Daniel Most), heals people, and attracts a group of followers (who become disillusioned and attempt to stone him), before being found dead one morning lying on the kitchen floor with his head by the gas oven. It transpires that he died not of gas but of mysterious heart failure. His note, ‘I die by my own will […] I wish my body to be cremated’ (MP 471), an unusual request for a Jew, causes Most to remark ‘first the gas then the fire’ (MP 493). Murdoch creates this improbable scenario to provide multiple perspectives on the philosophical and theological difficulties of thinking about the Holocaust.8 The Murdochian Chorus in The Message to the Planet gives a running commentary on the activities, personality, and morals of Marcus. This polyphonic technique enables Murdoch to split the authorial or narrative viewpoint and by so doing to question her own story in the process of telling it. Through this destabilising and enriching narrative device she presents the Holocaust from many angles. The need to interpret Marcus is centralised at the beginning of the novel which opens with Ludens discussing him with two other friends, Jack Sheerwater and Gildas Herne. Marcus is an enigma, variously seen as mad or bad, holy, or even as a god. Gildas’s voice proves a strong marker throughout the novel. Murdoch describes him as ‘the enlightened spectator’ (MP 551) and careful attention to shifts in Gildas’s perception of Marcus offers a guiding thread in the reader’s efforts to comprehend this ‘monster’ of Murdoch’s imagination (MP 362, 497, & 519).

8  Marcus’s life and death also raise questions about the nature of Messiahship; for discussion of this issue see Ramanathan in IMAR, 35–44.

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

155

Specific details link Marcus with Heidegger. Rüdiger Safranski, his biographer, reveals that Heidegger was popularly ‘regarded as the secret king of philosophy’ (Safranski 1998, 121): Murdoch echoes this remark when a colleague says of Marcus, ‘He had to be king or nothing’ (MP 8). Likewise, Heidegger was known as ‘the little magician from Messkirch’ (Safranski 1998, 100), and Marcus is considered a magician by others (MP 495 & 497). Marcus is attended by a poet, Patrick Fenman, and Murdoch makes the connection explicit when Patrick says, ‘Every great philosopher needs his poet’ and Gildas responds, ‘You mean like Heidegger and Hölderlin?’ (MP 131). For Marcus’s public appearances Patrick has special clothes made, reminiscent of the special peasant costume which Heidegger sported. Marcus’s withdrawal to think in solitude, first to the remote ‘Red Cottage’ at Fontellen in Sussex (MP 72) and then to Benbow at Bellmain, mirrors Heidegger’s seclusion at Todtnauberg; in both cases the philosophers are sought out by people, visits about which each is ambivalent, desiring isolation yet gratified by adulation. Finally, Marcus, like Heidegger, ‘wants to solve a philosophical problem about the nature of human consciousness’ (MP 262) and devotes himself to thought. There is, however, a disjunction between Heidegger’s thought (about being and thinking) and Marcus’s thought (about suffering and evil)—the parallels must not be over-emphasised. Marcus is not a fictionalised version of Heidegger, rather, he is a fictional character who oddly recalls Heidegger, so bringing the moral nature of the historically real charismatic philosophical figure under scrutiny. How morality, charisma, and philosophy are linked, or importantly fail to be linked, is Murdoch’s recurrent concern. Marcus neither writes nor teaches, unlike earlier philosopher figures in Murdoch’s fiction, from Dave Gellman in Under the Net to John Robert Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil. He appears to have no urge to communicate his thoughts to others but just thinks, as if thinking were a meaningful activity in itself.9 Murdoch depicts thinking just as an end in itself as both useless and dangerous. As Gildas says, ‘You’ve got to think about something, thinking is very hard, you can’t just sit all day and do it’ (MP 139) and Murdoch’s philosophy is clear that thinking must necessarily be 9  In 1951 Heidegger gave a series of lectures called Was heist Denken? and Arendt’s eightieth birthday tribute to Heidegger remarks: ‘Heidegger never thinks “about” something: he thinks something’ (Ludz 2004, 152). Murdoch’s annotated copy of Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays ed. by Michael Murray (1978) in which this tribute is included is held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives, IML 965.

156 

F. WHITE

connected to morality, not only to be of any use but to be truly definable as thought: ‘An object of serious thought must be something real, serious thinking is moral truthful thinking’ (MGM 398). Murdoch’s anxiety about Heidegger derives from her conviction that his philosophy is unconnected to morality and therefore cannot be regarded as serious thinking. Yet his ideas attract, compel, and charm followers. Karl Jaspers felt the same duality towards Heidegger, his erstwhile friend and colleague; ‘Among contemporaries the most exciting thinker, masterful, compelling, mysterious—but then leaving you empty-handed’ (Safranski 1998, 100). Marcus likewise attracts disciples, not only Ludens, but also a band of young people called the Seekers who believe he has ‘a message’ for them (MP 308), but they too are left empty-handed. Marcus’s thinking is called into question in terms which relate closely to the philosophical trajectory of Heidegger who rejects the Western philosophical tradition and wants to return to the pre-Socratic Greeks, and who further rejects morality as a form of philosophical thought and looks for some kind of deep thinking as salvation from technology. Murdoch’s description of Marcus is strikingly close. He grasps the ‘fundamental mistakes’ of philosophy and wants to learn from the illusions of the philosophers ‘and place his feet on the rubble of their arguments’ because he thinks that ‘a kind of deep thinking’ is needed ‘which would involve new concepts or perhaps no concepts at all’ and which was certainly not morality, but ‘the only possible escape from the technology which would otherwise destroy the planet’ (MP 54). Asked why morality is not deep enough, Marcus says, ‘Ultimately morality must be discovered to be a superficial phenomenon’ (MP 54), and it is at such critical points that Gildas performs as a reliable guide to the reader from the perspective of Murdoch’s own philosophical convictions. The narrative sets Ludens’s view of Marcus against Gildas’s view. Where Ludens sees Marcus as ‘naïve and childlike […] as if he meant no harm’ (MP 4), Gildas, sees him as ‘mad’ (MP 1) and as ‘a destroyer’ (MP 2). He thinks Marcus is seeking ‘magical power’ and that ‘there’s something evil there’ (MP 14). Gildas denies Ludens’s contention that Marcus’s search for ‘deep foundations’ is a ‘respectable’ idea (MP 14), in terms that echo Murdoch’s philosophy; ‘Our lives rest upon contingency, rubble, rubbish. There aren’t any foundations except mud and chaos’ (MP 18). Gildas champions Murdoch’s own sovereign idea, saying, ‘In fact, what’s deepest is the idea of goodness, without which we would not survive’ (MP 19) and he argues that ‘Nothing Marcus was pursuing had anything to do with morality. He didn’t understand morality,

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

157

that’s a concept he hadn’t got. A dose of ordinary morality would have killed him’ (MP 19). This powerful indictment of Marcus mirrors Murdoch’s indictment of Heidegger. Marcus, disaffected with both morality and metaphysics, is against everything for which Murdoch stands. Jack thinks ‘Marcus is beyond good and evil’, a notion opposed by Gildas who, like Murdoch, believes that ‘Beyond good and evil equals evil’ (MP 3).10 Gildas sums Marcus up as a ‘false prophet, pseudo-scientist, pseudo-philosopher’ (MP 3)—a description which foreshadows the views of Heidegger offered both explicitly by Benet in Jackson’s Dilemma and implicitly by Murdoch herself in the manuscript Heidegger. The polyphonic assessment of Marcus is offered to the reader as a set of pointers, not only for decoding Marcus as a fictional character but also for interpreting both what happens when he dies and whether he can intelligibly be said to die of remorse. Questions are raised concerning whether his death can meaningfully be connected to the Holocaust—or, more precisely, to the matter of post-Holocaust memory—or whether it is only a piece of ‘vulgar kitsch’ as his daughter thinks (MP 557). Against Luden’s exalted idea of Marcus as having a message for mankind Irina sets the alternative interpretation, ‘it’s just dull old megalomania like loonies in bins believe’ (MP 105); she accordingly commits her father to Marzillian’s care. But the psychiatrist too ‘believe[s] him to be a remarkable man’ (MP 222) and does not conclude that Marcus is insane. It is Marzillian’s professional interpretation of Marcus’s death which connects it so strongly with remorse. Marzillian believes that Marcus suffered from ‘his own peculiar feelings of guilt […] for not having died in a concentration camp’ and that this mentality is rooted in Marcus’s reading about the Holocaust because his identification with the victims created ‘an increasing sense of his Jewishness which constituted for him a profound psychological drama’ (MP 498). Marcus took on the role of camp survivors who felt such ‘terrible guilt and shame […] that some […] committed suicide just after being liberated, and some did so many years later’ (MP 498). Remorse is specifically adduced as the cause of Marcus’s death, in a statement by Marzillian which is central to Murdoch’s thinking on the 10  ‘There can be no pact between good and evil, they are irreconcilable enemies, and condemned to everlasting war, but not in Heraclitus’ sense. There is no harmonious balance whereby we suddenly find that evil is just a “dark side” which is not only harmless to good, but actually enhances it’ (MGM 506).

158 

F. WHITE

extreme destructive potential of remorse: ‘To die overcome by guilt and fear and helpless remorse, having made of one’s psyche a vile wicked omnipotent Enemy—I have seen such cases’ (MP 497). Marcus’s remorse is not the chronic remorse of Hilary in A Word Child nor the lucid remorse of Edward in The Good Apprentice but is more akin to the ‘sense of guilt which may be overwhelming […] felt by many people in relation to the Holocaust’ (MGM 362), linked with the ‘no less agonising […] guiltless remorse’ that Murdoch identifies in her discussion of ‘Void’ in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM 500). This is an almost pathological form of remorse which can invade the mind and destroy the desire to live. Marcus is not guilty of causing the Holocaust nor even in the position of having failed to oppose the persecution of the Jews—he was not there at all. He is a fictional case-study of the condition described by Efraim Sicher who defines the phenomenon of the Holocaust as a ‘nagging absence in the personal history of those who were not there and a “trace” in the public memory’ and argues that ‘the obsessive need to identify with Holocaust victims through empathy and identification, sometimes leads to over identification and fantasy’ (Sicher 1998, 7). Marcus’s thoughts are concerned with the totality of the situation as well as the victims, ‘not just them but the wicked people too’ (MP 380)— Hitler, active evildoers, and the mere bystanders. Without locating the precise relationship of remorse to this collective situation Murdoch presents in Marcus a kind of cosmic remorse, a universal sense of guilt, and responsibility for all the evil humankind inflicts upon itself, all the cruelty and suffering throughout human history. Any individual who attempts to take such a burden on himself appears—as Marcus does—to be mad, as the burden of absolute and disengaged remorsefulness is a Godlike perspective beyond the capacity of the human mind to bear. Patrick tries to imagine the experience of such thinking: ‘your mind must be full of horrors […] you’d have to be cruel and have infinite love and […] some great wisdom […] to be able to see the whole of sin and evil and all the tears and not go mad’ (MP 436). In the figure of Marcus, Murdoch explores a human mind put under excessive intellectual and moral strain by deep contemplation of the evil and suffering she identifies as the human condition. He undergoes a ‘travail of agony’ (MP 434), enduring a cosmic vision of the horror of human life clearly delineated in her philosophy (MGM 498). For Marcus this specifically focuses on the Holocaust, for although Murdoch’s philosophical investigation into the darkness of

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

159

human existence exceeds any particular historical example of horror, in her fiction she evokes this era from her own lifetime as the quintessence of what Kenneth Seeskin has called ‘fundamentally unintelligible’ evil (Lang 1988, 110). Murdoch juxtaposes Marcus’s extreme position with the desire of other characters to distance the Holocaust, objectifying it by surrounding it with concepts and theories which will protect them from naked confrontation. Against this self-protective distancing she offers a character who appears to die of such a confrontation. Marcus enacts an idealised ultimate response to the feelings of irrational guilt and remorse which the Holocaust evokes: ‘I feel it crushed him like the fall of a huge stone’, says Ludens (MP 504). The absolute responsiveness of a person dying of the horror of it may free others from being similarly overwhelmed by it. Ludens’s perspective gives a further account of the complexity of trying to find a place of intellectual and emotional balance on which to stand with regard to the Holocaust. He prides ‘himself on keeping, as a historian, a cool head’ about it (MP 194) and makes a sober assessment of its place in the total scheme of things: Of course it was the unspeakable thing that it was, about which so many details were known now, about which words failed [….] But he did not think of it as a cosmic event which must somehow change the whole of human thought, altering philosophy and theology and closing the mouths of poets; such a view seemed to him superstitious, a denial of ordinary scholarship and ordinary hard-thinking rationality. (MP 194)

Ludens accuses Marcus of succumbing to ‘high-temperature religiosity’ about the Holocaust but As he thought this he felt in his heart a voiceless nameless twinge, like a tiny spark, which he chose to identify as a signal, which rarely came through, from his ancestors who had lived in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. (MP 194–5)

In this way Murdoch builds up a whole rational argument in Ludens’s thought and then subverts it in a phrase, with this ‘voiceless nameless twinge’ from these silent dead among the six million, thereby destabilising any resting place of thought about the Holocaust. Details in Murdoch’s narrative offer a form of ‘Holocaust imagery’ which constructs and directs potential interpretation of the novel as a post-Holocaust text. Ludens is taken aback by ‘the short cropped fur of

160 

F. WHITE

[Marcus’s] skull’ (MP 75) and dreams that Marcus sets his bed on fire. Waking, Ludens thinks ‘it isn’t fire, it’s gas’ (MP 70) and later sees smoke from the incinerator where Irina is burning papers (MP 112–3). Driving the silent Marcus and Irina to a new place to live—where in fact Marcus will die—Ludens says cheeringly to them ‘Not long now!’ and ‘At that moment, in a sudden flash as if he had been there, he saw overcrowded cattle trucks packed with terrified Jews trying to comfort each other as the train slowed down and entered the station’ (MP 201). When they get there they find Benbow equipped with ‘a large smart kitchen complete with gas stove’ (MP 204). Cynthia Ozick calls attention to such Holocaust imagery: ‘For a mind engraved with the Holocaust, gas is always that gas. Shower means their shower. Ovens are those ovens’ (Lang 1988, 58). Murdoch’s use of Holocaust imagery in The Message to the Planet along with her destabilisation of viewpoints on the Holocaust relates her work to both Holocaust narrative theory and the work of other Holocaust writers and denotes her as recognisably a post-Holocaust novelist. In this novel Murdoch also articulates her personal sense of remorse concerning the fate of the Jews. ‘Judeophilia, the sudden creation of what Ruth Ellen Gruber has called “virtual Jewishness”’ (Hoffman 2004, 223) is a phenomenon in Holocaust memory which Hoffman finds unsettling. She observes that this is ‘a delicate and a troubling’ theme in second-­ generation German Holocaust literature and that ‘desire to impersonate or appropriate the identity of the other […] carries with it the risk of in-­ authenticity’ (Hoffman 2004, 223).11 Writing from a non-German perspective Murdoch has no inherited guilt yet she puzzlingly exhibits traits of ‘pseudo-identification with Jewish victims’.12 Self-awareness of this danger is evident in her work: in The Message to the Planet she balances other voices against Marcus’s absolute identification with Jewish victimhood. Morality is about the way one treats the other, not about the refinement of one’s own feelings—even feelings of utter empathy. The novel suggests 11  LaCapra identifies ‘surrogate victimage—something that may at times be unavoidable but, in terms of ethical, social and civic responsibility, is open to question’ (LaCapra 2001, 211). 12  Murdoch’s philosemitism increased throughout her life; ‘I find my pro-Semitism becoming more & more fanatical with the years’ (IMAL 100), and it became part of her personal myth to an extent which could seem unbalanced: she said, ‘I am practically a Jew myself’ (IMAL 427), and once asked a bemused friend if she didn’t think ‘that any worthwhile person ought to have at least some Jewish blood?’ (IMAL 308).

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

161

that Marcus performs a pathological act of identification of no benefit to those who died, to those who did evil, or to himself. His death is not an ethical event. Irina identifies the disparity when she remarks on Marcus’s reading every book he could find on the Holocaust and then burning them; ‘I suppose that was symbolic, he’s great on symbols, maybe that’s one way to live without actually doing anything’ (MP 105). Symbolisation can be evasion and in creating a character who identifies with Holocaust victims unto death Murdoch questions and challenges not only her own irrational feelings of Judeophiliac remorse but also the inherent risk in post-­ Holocaust writing of making the Shoah into an icon or symbol, thereby reducing it to totemic, or even (bizarrely and unacceptably) aesthetic, status. Hoffman flags up this predicament: ‘Without the force of specific associations, and from our ever-growing remove, the Holocaust is in danger of becoming an empty if universal symbol, not so much the model as an allegory of historical horror’ (Hoffman 2004, 175). Murdoch’s statement, ‘the fate of the Jews under Hitler […] has become a symbol of the capacity and strength of human wickedness’ (MGM 94), which could be read as veering close to this danger, is counterbalanced by an interchange between Ludens and Most. Ludens wants the Holocaust ‘to be something [Marcus] can think about among other things and not as the thing’ and remembers that ‘he said once it was an icon of all human suffering’ (MP 416). The Rabbi is wary of this potentially reductive and a-historical approach and Murdoch gives to him (the official representative of Judaism as a living Faith) important words on the Holocaust: ‘A touching image, but one must beware of images, they console and are made to be destroyed’ (MP 416). Not an icon, not a symbol, but something that happened to real individual people at real specific times; without that clear focus, thinking about the Holocaust loses any moral dimension. The articulation of this essential point through her fiction is one of Murdoch’s most important contributions to Holocaust literature. Murdoch’s post-Holocaust writing is significant not only for such sharp insights as a moral philosopher but also for her novelistic technique, as it is through her narrative approach that she conveys her moral points. The importance of narrative perspective is increasingly prominent in Holocaust theory because historical and geographical distance are features of later Holocaust writing which must be acknowledged and reflected upon by both authors and readers. Holocaust theory is concerned with the implications of reading about the Holocaust as well as of writing about it. Schwarz

162 

F. WHITE

observes uncomfortably that ‘book publishers compete for Holocaust studies because they sell. Museums, photography, books, and films feed upon one another and whet the very appetite they are meant to sate’ (Schwarz 2000, 7); he urges that ‘we need to think about the ethics of reading Holocaust narratives, how do we suspend our daily selves and enter the world of the unspeakable, how do we as scholar-critics write about that world?’ (Schwarz 2000, 6), and he offers that, at best, ‘when we write—and read—about the Holocaust, we do so to arouse ourselves, to awaken our conscience, to keep our obligations to those who were lost, those who survived, and those of future generations’ (Schwarz 2000, 3). An exact description of Murdoch’s post-Holocaust fiction is given by Silbergleid when he observes of Carole Maso’s 1995 novel, AVA, that it ‘is not about the Holocaust but […] about writing and reading about the Holocaust, about using art to grapple with the losses of the twentieth century’ (Silbergleid 2007, 19). Murdoch’s narrativisation of the Holocaust is similarly indirect, but embedded in her novels are small, detailed stories about specific experiences of certain individuals on exact days during that time of horror. Examples range from Willy Kost’s memory of his act of betrayal in Dachau in The Nice and the Good to the story Tuan tells Rosalind to his later regret in Jackson’s Dilemma. It concerns the loss of his father’s sister who misses the train on which the rest of the family escape because she returns for her dog and ends with harrowing cinematic effect: My grandfather and my father looked out of the window. ‘She is here, she is here!’ But already the train was moving too fast. The last my father saw of her was his sister standing on the platform with the dog in her arms. (JD 167)

Tuan’s reasons for telling this story are those of all post-Holocaust writers: ‘Even the hugest and most hideous things may fade—yet such things must never be forgotten’ and ‘I think of them—millions, tens of millions—how can there be such evil, it must be held up before the whole world forever. My little story is nothing’ (JD 166–7). Murdoch likewise knows that her little stories and the unendurable details they hold before the reader are also ‘nothing’ in the face of the enormity of the Holocaust. Yet it is important that the telling of such a cataclysmic event has to remain on the level of the individual, the particular, the detailed. Hoffman recalls being button-holed by an old man in a café who ‘wanted nothing except to tell his story’ and she questions

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

163

whether such stories should not ‘be redeemed at least by being set down somewhere, inscribed as one tiny gene in our collective cultural DNA, remembered?’ (Hoffman 2004, 186). Murdoch’s interweaving of Holocaust stories, details, flashes of memory, and reminder are such an effort at redemption and inscription—part of a Midrash. Ricoeur’s narrative theory endorses her decision because ‘in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated’, most forcefully so with regard to ‘the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost’ whose ‘suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative’ (Ricoeur 1984, 75). Narrative is both a means to preserve memory and a way of paying attention to the reality of the other—Murdoch’s definition of virtue (EM 284) and love (EM 215). Also narrative is inherently linked to the work of assimilating and surviving remorse as Proeve and Tudor cogently observe in Remorse: Psychological and Jurisprudential Perspectives, ‘It is no accident that it is in stories that remorse, as a human emotion, is often best explored. Human beings are narrational creatures’ (Proeve and Tudor 2010, 7). Remorse for human incapacity to have prevented such evil as the Holocaust and grief for the suffering and death of unknown human beings is given voice through Murdoch’s novels, in a way which purely factual acknowledgement of the event somehow fails to satisfy. Ricoeur theorises this as due to ‘a kind of truthfulness in the preservation by poetry of the memory of harm and suffering, which is often denied in the prose of political life’ (Kearney 2004, 165). His theory of the function of stories in the preservation and healing of memory illuminates Murdoch’s writing on the Holocaust: ‘the work of narrative constitutes an essential element of the work of mourning understood as the acceptance of the irreparable’ (Kearney 2004, 160). Art has a specific function here: literature can reach areas of human experience and feeling, in ways which history and philosophy prove unable to do, and the vital role played by narrative is fundamental in post-Holocaust theory: It is story-telling above all that shapes collective and personal memory […] and the way the story is told, the issue of narrativity itself, therefore must be central to any discussion of the situation of the post-Holocaust generation, which is positioned between history and memory and is removed from the experience by fifty years and more. (Sicher 1998, 13)

Murdoch declares that ‘the story is almost as fundamental a human concept as the thing, and […] a matter of response to a deep and ordinary

164 

F. WHITE

human need’ (EM 232–3). Her slantwise, multi-layered, and irony-laden narratives take into themselves the temporal and spatial distances, the personal absences, the second-hand nature of the burden of knowledge they carry, knowledge which they have inherited from books and which, as books themselves, they will pass on. The ethical dimension to this baton-­ passing endeavour is articulated in Richard Kearney’s study of Ricoeur: ‘Victims of evil cannot be silenced with either rational explanation (theodicy) or irrational submission (mysticism). Their stories cry out for other responses capable of addressing both the alterity and the humanity of evil’ (Kearney 2004, 95). Murdoch’s novels address both alterity and humanity, and the three ways in which she provides the writing of post-Holocaust narrative with an ethical foundation are closely linked to points made in Hoffman’s analysis. First, there is sympathy—the acceptance of another person’s reality through imaginative engagement, a matter of ethics not sentimentality. Murdoch’s views chime with Hoffman in believing that ‘if we lose our sympathy for suffering we lose part of our moral being […] we need to imagine the reality of the other person’s situation accurately’ (Hoffman 2004, 276). Second, she shares Hoffman’s awareness that ‘our contemporary culture sweeps up difficult ideas with great ease and churns them into something smooth and palatable’ and that it is ‘perhaps all too easy to mistake a kind of facile “identification” with the victims of atrocity for serious imaginative engagement’ (Hoffman 2004, 171). The chorus of commentating voices which offers diverse views on the Holocaust in The Message to the Planet dramatises this sweeping up and churning into smooth palatable forms of apprehension. Against this is set the figure of Marcus, by means of whom Murdoch explores the problems of ‘identification’: each both augments and destabilises the other position in this novel, which is simultaneously a highly sophisticated and subtle example of, and also a commentary on, post-Holocaust narrative. Third, respect for the continued moral being of the sufferers with whom one sympathises is essential and Murdoch’s novels significantly do not sentimentalise victimhood. Rather, they demonstrate Hoffman’s perception that we cannot cease to treat the victim as a moral being. The recipients of great wrongs need, for the restoration of their moral world—and a shared moral world—a recognition of those wrongs; but they cannot be placed outside the community of justice and reason. (Hoffman 2004, 277)

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

165

Just so, Willy’s remorseful knowledge in The Nice and the Good is of his moral failure in lacking courage, and in A Fairly Honourable Defeat Julius King’s experience of Belsen does not make him unaccountable for his own mistreatment of other human beings—suffering does not set one outside ordinary morality.13 Remorse is central to Hoffman’s analysis of how forgiveness might be achieved in the post-Holocaust circumstances. She expounds the ethical implications of ‘some genuine reparative remorse aris[ing] from a lived connection to the past’ (Hoffman 2004, 126): if it is authentic, an expression of remorse therefore betokens a sort of bending towards the other—an acknowledgement of the other’s point of view and subjectivity. It carries within it a recognition both of having committed a harmful act, and of the other’s capacity for being hurt. It is that quintessential moral drama that is being symbolically enacted. (Hoffman 2004, 230)

Such remorse is at the heart of the ‘quintessential moral drama’ which forms the core of Murdoch’s and Levinas’s vision. Both find the central thrust of ethics to be a turning from solipsism to attention to the reality of the other although they express it differently and lay different emphases.14 In their stress on the primacy of the ethical and on the all-importance of the other, Murdoch and Levinas have much in common, the crucial difference being that Murdoch’s ‘other’ has a physical face which must be seen, whereas Levinas’s other is more conceptual than personal and therefore curiously incorporeal and (paradoxically) ‘faceless’. Fred C. Alford encapsulates this fundamental divergence:

13  Murdoch articulates the fact that putting frail human beings into situations of intolerable moral testing is a very real part of the torture of the Holocaust. Marzillian’s meditation forms a commentary on Willy’s plight in the earlier novel: ‘Absolute misery and absolute fear quickly reduce men to the instincts of self-preservation at their most gross and graceless. The evil men know that their victims would not survive without co-operating […] and the knowledge of that, perhaps infinitesimal, degree of co-operation, the simple obedience that kept one alive when another, a braver one, had died, demoralised and shamed those who continued to live, destroying their sense of themselves as free worthy beings. How are we to judge even those who quietly, readily gave in, co-operated, became the tormentors of their fellows?’ (MP 498). 14  For studies linking Murdoch and Levinas, see Fred C. Alford (2002), Bob Plant (2003), and Mick Smith (2007).

166 

F. WHITE

Murdoch […] remains strictly within the realm of everyday life, finding there subtleties of knowing, caring and being that Levinas believes only come by way of the infinite […] Levinas was never interested in the concrete reality of the other person, whose fleshly reality can only get in the way of transcendence. Murdoch […] is interested in the reality of the other as it may be known through what she calls ‘love: the non-violent apprehension of difference’. (Alford 2002, 37)

Murdoch expresses the ethical imperative as ‘Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’ (EM 215). Her central credo mirrors Levinas’s work, as defined by Robert Eaglestone: Levinas’s philosophical project is based on the conception of ethics as first philosophy. Underlying all thought and work, all philosophy, is the profoundest ethical relation with the Other, and this relationship is summed up in what Levinas calls the ‘face to face’. The Other appears, empirically, before us, and their face ‘opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation’. This moment of facing interrupts our enclosed self and opens us to the Other. (Leak and Paizis 2000, 201)

In this moral drama remorse is the key factor for all three thinkers as Hoffman’s description of authentic remorse as ‘a sort of bending towards the other’ expresses the same sense of ethical relationship signified by Levinas’s idea of ‘obligation’ to the Other and Murdoch’s notion of attending to the reality of the other. This very difficult ethical (even spiritual) endeavour to realise ‘that something other than oneself is real’ (Murdoch), or to come ‘face-to-face’ (Levinas), is given a similar mode of descriptive analysis by both philosophers. Murdoch calls it unselfing; Levinas calls it interrupting our enclosed self. That remorse is essentially connected to Murdoch’s concept of unselfing—which expresses the need to break open the ego—is made clear by Levinas: ‘The self-accusation of remorse gnaws away at the closed and firm core of consciousness, opening it, fissioning it’ (Levinas 1981, 125). Remorse is viewed as a catalyst for potential moral change because the experience of remorse indicates awareness of personal failure in this ethical relation to the Other. So, paradoxically, the very existence of remorse within a person denotes an ethical reorientation away from the self,

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

167

towards another, and, therefore, towards the Good. People who feel remorse are facing in the right direction for the possibility of moral change. In the very fact of their remorse they have apprehended the reality of the other, come face-to-face with the one(s) they have wronged, and so begun to recognise their obligation to the Other; they have begun—in however small a way—to unself, to interrupt their enclosed self. Conversely, lack of remorse—an inability or refusal to experience remorse—indicates a failure to achieve this moral shift of being. It denotes the remorseless agent as lacking in this ethical sensibility and as remaining enclosed in the self, unable truly to see the Other. Heidegger’s failure to evince remorse causes him to stand out in twentieth-­century history as a public figure who pre-eminently exhibits such moral impairment. His significance is not that such moral failure is uncommon (it is probably the norm for the vast majority of benighted humanity—goodness is rare), but that Heidegger’s intellectual stature is so great and his influence so far-reaching that blatant moral inadequacy in such a figure is disconcerting. Because Heidegger’s philosophical programme is to understand the nature of our very being, evidence of an absence of moral direction in his thinking gives rise to unease for those who, like Murdoch, believe that morality lies at the heart of human existence. Heidegger’s personal history exemplifies the problem which Steiner articulates, of the loss of confidence in liberal humanism and in the very idea of European civilisation concomitant on the collusion of so many educated and ‘cultured’ people in Hitler’s genocidal regime. ‘We come after’, says Steiner, ‘We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning’ (Steiner 1977, ix). Murdoch echoes Steiner’s depiction when she thinks of ‘quite ordinary people who worked as guards in concentration camps: evil as a job to be carried on […] evil as duty’ (MGM 120). Like Steiner she sees ‘our confidence in reason shaken […] by Hitler’ (MGM 360). Neither art nor philosophy can hereafter be practised with the same innocence. Against this historical background Heidegger is a disquieting figure who cannot be bypassed or ignored. It is not only his brief connection with National Socialism and his Inaugural Address as Rector of Freiburg University in 1933 which arouse concern. That period of his career, which caused Heidegger to be forbidden to teach for a decade after the war, might

168 

F. WHITE

conceivably be seen as politically naive.15 It is his continued silence after the war concerning his own part in events, his lack of apologia, and, above all, his refusal to comment on the Holocaust, which creates problems for those who believe his contribution to Western philosophy to be of vital importance. The essence of the question which Heidegger poses has been concisely formulated by Hederman: ‘Is this philosopher worthy of our attention, if he personally is guilty of behaviour and commitments that remove him from the arena of civilized discourse?’ (Hederman 2001, 25). Gilbert Ryle expressed his response to this question with characteristic force, as Nikhil Krishnan relates in his study of twentieth-century Oxford philosophy: Asked by a student, a few decades later, if he had retained his interest in Heidegger … Ryle is supposed to have answered: ‘No, because when the Nazis came to power, Heidegger showed that he was a shit from the heels up, and a shit from the heels up can’t do good philosophy.’ (Krishnan 2023, 47–8)

Murdoch’s position remained more nuanced: she was clearly unable to hold such an unreservedly dismissive stance towards Heidegger’s work. Indeed her last writings are major intellectual and imaginative responses to the disturbing figure of Heidegger which contribute to the eminent debate on the enigma he poses.16 Levinas and Ricoeur, as well as Steiner, find him uniquely problematical, Levinas focusing on the difficulty of forgiveness which Heidegger poses; Ricoeur on the aporia of the concept of guilt in Heidegger’s thinking. Murdoch extends their discussion by defining remorse as the key deficiency in the case, uneasily juxtaposing Heidegger’s philosophy and his attitude to the Holocaust with her 15  It is hard to assess Heidegger’s intentions at that point or to imagine the prevailing Zeitgeist in 1930s Germany. Rosenfeld indicates how Heidegger’s speech was a product of that time: ‘Nazi poster and magazine art provide popular illustrations of the ways in which the descriptions of learning, religion, and artistic effort could be put to the service of brutal power. Martin Heidegger’s inaugural address as rector of Freiburg University, aligning the labours of the scholar with those of the soldier, is a muted and more “refined” example of this complicity […] Yet Heidegger was hardly alone, nor was his the most blatant example of such participation’ (Rosenfeld 1980, 131). 16  However, Murdoch works in isolation on this problem. I find no evidence that she was aware of the widespread debate about Heidegger and National Socialism documented by Neske and Kettering, Wolin, and LaCapra.

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

169

understanding of remorse as a moral indicator. Levinas says that on learning before 1933 of Heidegger’s sympathy towards National Socialism he had ‘a faint hope that it expressed only the temporary lapse of a great speculative mind into practical banality’ but that ‘it cast a shadow over [his] firm confidence that an unbridgeable distance forever separated the delirious and criminal hatred voiced by Evil on the pages of Mein Kampf from the intellectual vigor and extreme analytical virtuosity displayed in Sein und Zeit, which had opened the field to a new type of philosophical inquiry’ (Levinas 1989, 485). After the war Levinas lost any such faint hope: On the issue of Heidegger’s participation in ‘Hitlerian thinking’, I do not believe that any kind of historical research, archival data, or eyewitness accounts […] can equal the certainty that comes to us in the famous Testament in Der Spiegel, from his silence concerning the Final Solution, the Holocaust, the Shoah’. (Levinas 1989, 487)

For Levinas, one of the earliest admirers of Heidegger’s thinking— responding to his work in 1947 with De’Existence à l’Existant and in 1949 with En Découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger—this silence is critical: ‘One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger’ (Levinas 1994, 25). In Memory, History and Forgetting, Ricoeur analyses Heidegger’s excision of the concept of guilt in Sein und Zeit. This philosophical text ‘ignores the problem of memory and only touches episodically on the problem of forgetting’ (Ricoeur 2004, 364). Further, it strips ‘the notion of debt (German, Schuld) […] of its sting of indictment, of guilt’ which Ricoeur thinks ‘regrettable in the case of a historical judgement on notorious crimes’ (Ricoeur 2004, 363). He finds Heidegger’s work ‘excessive in removing its moral character from the concept of debt’ because ‘when historical understanding is confronted with admitted wrongs, the notion of wrongs done to others then preserves the properly ethical dimension of the debt, its dimension of guilt’ (Ricoeur 2004, 363). Heidegger’s refusal to engage with issues of remembering and forgetting or to discuss the concept of guilt is consonant with his silence and lack of remorse. In his biography of Heidegger, Hugo Ott suggests that for him, ‘guilt, responsibility and atonement belonged in a system of categories that had nothing to do with morality. The only ethical category in which Heidegger was

170 

F. WHITE

able to think or be understood—if indeed we can speak of ethics at all in his case—was that of “obedience to Being”’ (Ott 1993, 35). The past appears not to have meaning for Heidegger and it is the importance of the past for the present which makes remorse a coherent and significant philosophical concept and psychological experience.

Murdoch’s Parallel Inquiry into Heidegger’s Lack of Remorse Murdoch’s brooding on the significance of remorse and on the life and work of Heidegger dominates the latter part of her life and manifests itself in both her last novel Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) and her final philosophical work, Heidegger, which Conradi describes as ‘a weighty study’ (EM xxi). While the collection of her essays Existentialists and Mystics was in the process of publication, it became known that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s and would produce no further writing. Conradi’s Editor’s Introduction speaks of the Heidegger Manuscript as ‘her most recent work-in-progress, as yet unfinished’ (EM xxi) and George Steiner’s Preface comments: ‘It is poignant to know that Dame Iris’s most recent and incomplete work was to bear on Heidegger […] this key dimension which is absent from the presentations of existentialism included in this collection’ (EM xiii). Their representation of this work as ‘unfinished’ and ‘incomplete’ is puzzling in view of Murdoch’s letter to Jonathan Burnham, publishing director of Chatto & Windus, in the Spring of 1993, in which she describes it as ‘a complete book with indeed scarcely any tidying up’ (LOP 593–4). The manuscript suggests some confusion concerning the beginning of Murdoch’s long preoccupation with Heidegger. Three times she reiterates that she had not read his work before she wrote her own book on Sartre’s philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), claiming to have first read Sein und Zeit in 1965. But a note on page seven of the Bernard Quaritch Ltd Catalogue relates: The evidence on her first encounter with Heidegger is mixed. By 1993 she seems to have believed that she first encountered Sein und Zeit in M[acQuarrie] & R[obinson]‘s translation in 1965. However, her 1947/8 journal reports that she discussed Heidegger while at Cambridge and [with] Gilbert Tyle [sic—should read Ryle] (who had reviewed the book in 1929) and who lent her Sein und Zeit in March 1949.

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

171

Whatever the facts may be, at a minimum Murdoch spent thirty years cogitating on Heidegger’s work, and she was certainly already working at attempting to understand him, as both philosopher and man, long before she wrote The Message to the Planet. The manuscript reveals the tenor of Murdoch’s mature judgement on Heidegger’s work and indicates why she ultimately finds his thought morally unacceptable, even dangerous. Her continuing, if perturbed, interest in Heidegger derives from the value Murdoch accords to metaphysics; she quotes Derrida’s comment that Heidegger is ‘the last metaphysician’ (Heidegger 112). But her adherence to the absolute value of morality (indeed to the concept of value itself) leads to her profound mistrust of Heidegger’s philosophy and she categorically rejects late Heidegger because she perceives his thought as doing away with remorse. Murdoch’s investigation of Heidegger’s work seeks out the source of his amoral remorselessness. The nub of her unease lies in Heidegger’s lofty disregard for individuals. His disdain is anathema to Murdoch’s advocacy of what Antonaccio and Schweiker denote as ‘the integrity of the individual as a unique and unified centre of value and significance’ (Antonaccio and Schweiker 1996, xii). Murdoch finds the status of the individual blurred in his thinking and faults him for ‘a kind of contempt for human existence’ (Heidegger 10). Although Heidegger writes of salvation by little things in his essay on technology,17 he is unconcerned for little human things, and she finds the particular daily struggles of human life, to which previous great philosophers—her list includes Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Locke, Hume, Marx, and Mill—paid attention and which, significantly, is the stuff of the novel, absent in Heidegger’s work. Throughout Heidegger she reiterates the vital question; whether morality as revealed in ordinary human life and language—the most obvious and ubiquitous concern of human being—is in his metaphysical picture or not. Heidegger omits the concept of goodness which Murdoch considers essential to any metaphysical account of human existence, and she further believes that Heidegger deliberately cuts out any serious consideration of morality from the beginning, a damning indictment which casts his entire worth in doubt. Murdoch thinks the kind of philosophy attempted by Heidegger cannot succeed in its professed enterprise without the element of morality; his enterprise is fatally impaired because it is based on a fundamental error. Heidegger’s cavalier dismissal of the ordinary and the good, indeed the  Murdoch’s annotated copy of The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays is held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives, IML 976. 17

172 

F. WHITE

good in the ordinariness of life, condemns him in Murdoch’s eyes: he fails to perceive that the ethical muddle of ordinary human life has the potential to exemplify or cherish holiness or truth. Murdoch finds Heidegger’s picture too arbitrary, ignoring the complex moral activity which her own philosophical writing endorses and which her fiction displays at work in individual lives. Throughout Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Murdoch plots the dual trend in twentieth-century philosophy of the erosion of the particular individual and submission to determinism. First, she fears the effects which ensue from the contempt for the ordinary individual which she finds in Nietzsche, Sartre and Derrida, as well as Heidegger, and with which she links Nazism and the facilitation of a mindset which can conceive of and implement the Holocaust. She overtly says, ‘As for Nietzsche and (late) Heidegger, roughly, I regard those great writers as essentially demonic’ (MGM 456). Also, ‘The heroic aestheticism of Heidegger and Derrida quietly effaces any close view of moral lives as lived by ordinary individuals’ (MGM 159), and: The hubris and sheer hatred expressed in [Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil] is remarkable. Something of the same tone is to be found in Heidegger’s “heroic” contempt for Alltäglichkeit (everydayness). A degraded version of the transvaluation was enacted in Hitler’s Germany. (MGM 182)

Murdoch constantly connects these (actually very different) writers, seeing a progression of influence being handed down. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she writes: ‘Structuralism […] contradicts common-sense […] and carries with it a certain contempt for ordinary naïve attitudes. This is something which Derrida has in common with Heidegger and with Sartre’ (MGM 89), and ‘Both Sartre and Derrida were of course influenced by Heidegger, adopting from him his “heroic” distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic life, and (in the case of Derrida) his desire to poeticise the language of philosophy’ (MGM 158). And in Heidegger she says that Sartre shares with Heidegger the image of human being as rising up out of contingent surroundings, without any transcendental guarantee or good, and that Heidegger and Sartre also share the contrast between enlivened being (the authentic, the pour-soi) and inert being (the en-soi, the state of ‘they’). This contrast in Sartre’s work has a political anti-bourgeois nuance, whereas in Heidegger’s work the accent is more mythological or heroic. She finds both writers indebted to Nietzsche.

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

173

Second, Murdoch is clear that late Heideggerian thought is determinism of the kind that has always been inclined to undermine philosophical thinking. She fears above all the effects of forms of determinism which circumvent the concept of absolute value and excise remorse: Behind this new ‘revaluation of all values’ by Heidegger and by Derrida, lies the (metaphysical) concept of a vast superhuman area of control: Heidegger’s later concept of Being, and Derrida’s theory of Language. These systems represent new forms of determinism. Determinism is always reappearing in new forms since it satisfies a deep human wish: to give up, to get rid of freedom, responsibility, remorse, all sorts of personal individual unease, and surrender to fate and the relief of ‘it could not be otherwise’. (MGM 190)

Remorse is here included with freedom and responsibility as a measure of a fully developed ethical being willing to be accountable for personal choices and actions, and Murdoch thus locates remorse as a crucial moral indicator. She traces philosophies and myths which by shunning the testing demands of freedom, responsibility, and remorse create a relativistic mindset which accepts evil as an unavoidable and acceptable part of the scheme of things: ‘The hero of Crime and Punishment was animated by a myth, so were Hitler’s followers’ (MGM 136). Thinking and writing are not neutral activities but potentially dangerous. They can lead to permitting murder and genocide. So it is of consequence to Murdoch that Heidegger’s theories and myths are not innocent of potentially malevolent influence and that as well as eschewing remorse for his personal actions he also evinced no remorse for the effects of his words. Absence of remorse can negate the value of everything else, as without any ethical sense of alterity a philosopher is a moral cipher and his contribution to human thought thereby rendered null and void. Capacity for remorse is an absolute marker of discernment and Murdoch circles round Heidegger in her fictional as well as philosophical writing, trying to comprehend how such a powerful intellect could lack moral vision and how such a life could be devoid of remorse.18 Heidegger holds a dual fascination 18  Many writers are likewise troubled by the uneasy question of how to relate the work of Heidegger the philosopher with the life of Heidegger the man. See, for example, Derrida on ‘Heidegger’s Silence’ (Neske and Kettering 1990), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘I only entered philosophy after experiencing the impact or shock […] of Heidegger’s thinking. At almost the same time […] I learned that Heidegger had been a member of the Nazi party. And I must admit that, like many others, I have never got over that fact’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 1990, ix), and Steiner, who identifies ‘the central paradox of the co-existence in Heidegger of a philosopher of towering stature and of an active partisan in barbarism’ (Steiner 1992, xxi–ii).

174 

F. WHITE

for Murdoch both as a philosophical thinker and as a dangerously charismatic figure. When writing as a novelist she is absorbed by his persona. Heidegger’s first appearance in Murdoch’s novels occurs in The Time of the Angels where Sein und Zeit features as an image of meaninglessness and horror. While cleaning Carel Fisher’s study, Pattie O’Driscoll finds the (unidentified) book lying open on his desk and reads a passage concerning death as Dasein’s ‘Being-towards the end’: ‘[It] meant absolutely nothing to her. The words sounded senseless and awful, like the distant boom of some big catastrophe. Was this what the world was like when people were intellectual and clever enough to see its reality?’ (TA 150–1). Enchantment and power are strong themes in Murdoch’s fiction, and her wariness of Heidegger’s capacity as an ‘Enchanter’ figure is emphasised by his shadowy presence behind Marcus in The Message to the Planet. Here Murdoch juxtaposes the image of Heidegger with her exploration of a sense of remorse for the Holocaust so strong as to bring about death, and the dichotomy between Marcus as Heidegger-figure and Marcus as Holocaustsurvivor-figure enigmatically reveals her puzzlement with Heidegger and remorse. Paradoxical irony abounds in Murdoch’s choosing to combine in the character of Marcus both Heideggerian traits and intense identification with Jewish suffering. For Heidegger could not have identified less with the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany, showing no concern whatsoever, even for his pupil and mistress, Hannah Arendt, or his colleague and friend, Karl Jaspers.19 The Message to the Planet did not exhaust (or, perhaps, satisfy) Murdoch’s imaginative interrogation of the troubled relationship she perceives between Heidegger and the vital concept of remorse. She returns to this enquiry in her last novel Jackson’s Dilemma, the text which most explicitly links Murdoch’s thinking on Heidegger with her thinking on remorse. The dark presence of this troubling philosopher broods over Jackson’s Dilemma far more overtly than in The Message to the Planet; there he is an implied and peripheral influence, here he takes centre stage. The Message to the Planet can be read without necessarily bringing Heidegger to mind but 19  Jewish Hannah Arendt was briefly imprisoned, and forced to flee Germany, first to France, and then in 1941 to the USA where she remained for the rest of her life. Karl Jaspers was forbidden to teach at Heidelberg University in 1937 and forbidden to publish from 1938. He and his Jewish wife remained in Germany, in constant danger of being sent to a concentration camp.

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

175

Jackson’s Dilemma overtly forces the reader to pay attention to Murdoch’s thoughts about him. This novel is intricately related to her study Heidegger.20 Benet Barnell, a central character in Jackson’s Dilemma, is, like his creator, trying to write a book about Heidegger.21 Benet’s reflections mirror Murdoch’s own work on Heidegger and offer a parallel insight into the ambivalent and troubled set of thoughts about remorse triggered in her mind by musing on the life and work of Heidegger. The key passage for the connection she forms between the concept of remorse and Heidegger occurs early in the novel: And now—well, Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the century? But what was Benet thinking somehow so deeply about when he turned his mind to that remarkable thinker? It seemed to him that after all his philosophical reflections, there was a sound which rang some deeper tremor of the imagination. Perhaps it was his more profound desire to lay out before him the history of Heidegger’s inner life, the nature of his sufferings: the man who began as a divinity student and became a follower of Hitler, and then –? Remorse? Was that the very concept which sounded the bell? What had Heidegger said to Hannah Arendt after it was all over? What had that pain been like—what had those millions of pains been like? A huge tormented life? Was Heidegger really Anti-Christ? ‘The darkness, oh the darkness,’ Benet said aloud. (JD 14)

Within this passage Murdoch sets out all the points at issue: the measure of Heidegger as a philosopher; the enigma of Heidegger the man; the difficulty of studying Heidegger’s philosophy in view of his life; the nature of  For discussion of the links between these two texts see White (2010b).  At several points in the novel Benet is found in his study looking at ‘the inky foolscap pages’ and contemplating his work: ‘He had made a great many notes, with question marks, in fact his book so far consisted largely of notes, unconnected and unexplained’ (JD 13). Murdoch’s Heidegger manuscript somewhat resembles this description, especially in the later sections when her struggle to think and to write becomes evident. It seems that she, like her alter ego, Benet, ‘found it difficult to plan the work’ and he seems to be expressing her own position when he finds it hard ‘to decide what he really, in his heart, thought of his huge ambiguous subject’ (JD 13). Both Murdoch and Benet are haunted by Heidegger, paradoxically fascinated and repelled by his thinking, and Benet’s ambivalence reflects Murdoch’s own. We see him ‘strangely struggling with that mysterious demon’ (JD 14) and witness ‘his ferocious concentration upon Heidegger’ (JD 70) which helps to distract him briefly from his troubles just as Murdoch’s own work may have helped to her to fend off the ‘endless omnipresent anxiety’ that John Bayley describes Alzheimer’s causing her (Bayley 1998, 35). 20 21

176 

F. WHITE

the concept of remorse and its connection with Heidegger; the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust and Heidegger’s position with regard to it. Heidegger might be called a public work in embryo in that Murdoch originally intended her monograph for publication. Benet’s equally embryonic study of Heidegger is still at the stage of a private work in which his musings and questionings are present in their rough form in the text and have not been smoothed out for publication. At points in Murdoch’s typescript it is possible to see her deciding on a passage as belonging to the private mind of the writer and rejecting it as part of the public work she is willing to share with readers. The thoughts she gives to her character Benet display the gap between what can be said publicly and what can be thought privately, which corresponds to the distinction between what can be said in philosophy—only objective utterances—and what can be said in literature, a freer form of communication which can make space for more subjective thoughts. Murdoch’s study makes a categorical statement: ‘The two philosophers in the twentieth century who have most deeply disturbed philosophical thinking are Wittgenstein and Heidegger’ (Heidegger 2), whereas Benet in Jackson’s Dilemma is less certain, still at the questioning stage: ‘And now—well, Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the century?’ (JD 14). The gap which is identified between Benet’s queries and Murdoch’s statements in her manuscript is at its widest with regard to the appropriateness of including issues raised by Heidegger’s life in a study of his work and this gap revolves around the concept of remorse. There is a notable passage in the manuscript where, referring to Arendt’s justification of Heidegger and Victor Farias’s condemnation of him, Murdoch writes: ‘I leave here these historical researches and speculations. Heidegger says that philosophy must put in question the person of the philosopher. This is no doubt something which the philosopher must do for himself’ (Heidegger 40).22 And then, excised, is the remark: ‘Exactly how his philosophical statements, upon which we must pass judgement, relate to the condition of his soul is likely to remain mysterious’ (Heidegger 40). The excision implies that she considered this material inappropriate for inclusion in a scholarly work on Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus her private thought is censored and adjusted to become the public work. 22  Murdoch’s copy of Arendt’s essay, ‘Heidegger at Eighty’, is heavily underlined and annotated and one item of marginalia reads: ‘One hesitates to talk of Hei unless one has spent one’s life studying him!’

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

177

Yet the suppressed mystery continued to haunt her imagination and Jackson’s Dilemma became the repository for the painful questions which Heidegger’s life and work posed for Murdoch because fictional writing frees her to ask such questions in the tone of urgency which she feels she has to relinquish in philosophical writing. When writing philosophy Murdoch finds biographical conjecture disallowable, so she cannot discuss in her manuscript the disturbing matter of whether Heidegger’s behaviour—specifically the lack of any evidence of remorse in him concerning the Holocaust and his own part in Nazi history—may be held to vitiate the value of his thinking: when writing a novel she is liberated from such constraints and can put all her disquieting questions into the mind of her character Benet. Within the distance between author and character which does not exist in philosophical writing, Murdoch creates an open space for conjecture concerning Heidegger. The lack of moral sense which Murdoch analyses in Heidegger’s philosophy and the lack of moral sensibility evident in Heidegger’s life manifest an indifference towards the individual which can only be described as a kind of moral autism—it is as if he is untouched by the reality of others at all (in which he is akin to Lucas in The Green Knight). Such a concept of moral autism may indeed perhaps account for Heidegger’s strange and estranging silence and apparent disregard for the suffering even of close friends.23 For such moral autism Murdoch both impugns and, it seems, strangely pities him. She makes the somewhat puzzling suggestion that Heidegger must have suffered in himself because of the gulf between the good—signified to her by his early theological studies—and the evil in which his Nazi sympathies implicate him. This idea of Heidegger as suffering which Murdoch posits, and her persistent connection of him with the concept of remorse, is unsupported by biographical studies or by his public writings and private letters. Yet in Jackson’s Dilemma Murdoch makes Benet envision Heidegger suffering remorse. He wants to ‘lay out […] the history of Heidegger’s inner life, the nature of his sufferings’ and ponders 23  A sidelight on this is offered obliquely in The Message to the Planet; amongst the perceptions of Marcus that Murdoch offers is that of a nurse, Suzanne Moxon, whose ‘own view was that Marcus was a sufferer from Asperger’s Syndrome, a particular form of autism characteristic of very clever children, wherein a specialised brilliance […] was combined with a complete inability to feel affection for other people or even to communicate with them’ (MP 389). The inclusion of this diagnosis offers a hint that Murdoch too wonders whether such a psychological condition might be an explanation for Heidegger’s lack of remorseful feelings.

178 

F. WHITE

what ‘Heidegger said to Hannah Arendt after it was all over?’ (JD 14). The fact is, that—concerning the past—Heidegger said very little, to her or indeed to anyone.24 Remorse appears very much not to be a concept which sounded a bell with Heidegger, who seems to have lacked any experience of this tormenting re-biting, burning pain. It remains an enigma that Murdoch should so insistently yoke Heidegger and remorse together; an enigma which sheds light on Murdoch’s own mentality rather than on Heidegger’s. It is as if she cannot conceive of such a powerful mind being aware of having done evil and not suffering from remorse because of it. Her apprehension of good and evil and her own drive towards the good is so strong that Murdoch cannot imagine what it can be like to have such a total moral aporia in the mind. Jackson’s Dilemma, in which Murdoch reveals the tempestuous nature of her own thoughts and feelings about Heidegger and about remorse, has a stripped skeletal quality about it. The bare bones of her deepest concerns and obsessions are exposed by the brevity of the story and the lyrical quality of the writing. The novel has a darkness woven throughout, a sense of fearful foreboding which emanates equally from the progression of Murdoch’s disease, from her continued attention to the disturbing history of the twentieth century and from her final meditations on remorse. Heidegger—specifically his refusal to acknowledge remorse—preoccupied her to the end. Benet says of his work on Heidegger: ‘I thought it would be an escape—instead I am just involving myself in a dark spider’s web, the web of his mind […] Alas that awful darkness is there’, and then goes on to say, ‘but for me it is my darkness, it is my neighbour and my heavy chain’ (JD 47). Wariness of intentional fallacy does not wholly silence a sense that Benet’s experience of the effect of brooding upon Heidegger and the related issues of remorse, guilt, and evil expresses that of Murdoch herself during her own wrestling both with the nature and moral value of remorse and with this philosopher’s turbulent history. The questions Benet poses are those she asks in her own study of Heidegger but expressed in emotional instead of scholarly tones: ‘And did dear good Célan, they say, visit him in his mountain hut,—and Hannah 24  Some 120 letters between Heidegger and Arendt are extant and they met and conversed on many occasions when Arendt visited Germany, but none mentions his actions during the war.

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

179

Arendt forgive him—and he dare to take over great Hölderlin as well as the Greeks?’ (JD 47). Further, Benet’s resumé of his response to Heidegger’s philosophy puts in a nutshell the ambivalence and criticisms evident in Murdoch’s manuscript: Benet admired Sein und Zeit and loved […] the attractive image of man as the Shepherd of Being. Later Heidegger he detested; Heidegger’s sickening acceptance of Hitler, his misuse of the Pre-Socratic Greeks, his betrayal of his early religious picture of man opening the door to Being, his transformation of Being into a cruel ruthless fate, his appropriation of poor innocent Hölderlin, his poeticisation of philosophy, discarding truth, goodness, freedom, love, the individual, everything which the philosopher ought to explain and defend. (JD 13)

By placing these impassioned words in the mouth of her fictional character, Murdoch is able to disburden her heart of her reaction to Heidegger in a way which a formal academic monograph could not allow. Benet is able to speak of ‘his love-hate for Heidegger, and for Wittgenstein’ (JD 209), the two philosophers Murdoch herself characterises as ‘deeply disturbing’. He thinks ‘of late words of Heidegger: “Nur ein Gott kann uns retten.” “Only a God can save us.”’, and urges ‘Was he not then in despair?’ (JD 201), just as towards the end of her own manuscript Murdoch claims, ‘Heidegger was certainly capable of despair’. Despair, though, is not remorse. When Benet wonders, ‘Remorse?—Was that the very concept which sounded the bell?’, the metaphor of bellringing is an extension of a sentence earlier in the passage: ‘It seemed to him that after all his philosophical reflections, there was a sound which rang some deeper tremor of the imagination’ (JD 14). Nothing confirms that Murdoch is correct in imputing hidden torments of remorse to Heidegger. What is certain is that in Murdoch’s own philosophical reflections and imagination, remorse is the very concept which rings a deep tremor. Remorse functions in her work as a touchstone: the centrality of this concept in her thinking about the human condition and the moral domain is evident as it develops into one of the most profound and dominant themes in her fiction.

180 

F. WHITE

References Murdoch Criticism Alford, C. Fred, ‘Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch: Ethics as Exit?’, Philosophy and Literature, 26.1 (2002), 24–42 Antonaccio, Maria and William Schweiker, eds., Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Bayley, John, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998) Plant, Bob, ‘Ethics Without Exit: Levinas and Murdoch’, Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003), 456–70 Smith, Mick, ‘Worldly In(Difference) and Ecological Ethics: Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas’, Environmental Ethics, 29.1 (2007), 23–42 White, Frances, ‘Iris Murdoch and Hannah Arendt: Two Women in Dark Times’, in Roberts and Scott-Baumann (2010a), 3–33 White, Frances, ‘Jackson’s Dilemma and “The Responsible Life of the Imagination”’, in Rowe and Horner (2010b), 126–38 White, Frances, ‘“The world is just a transit camp”: Diaspora in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch’, Iris Murdoch Review, 2 (2010c), 6–13 White, Frances, ‘Murdoch’s Dilemma: Philosophy, Literature and the Holocaust’, in Araújo and Vieira (2011), 89–101

Other Works Gaita, Raimond, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) Gubar, Susan, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003) Hederman, Mark Patrick, The Haunted Inkwell: Art and our Future (Dublin: Columba Press, 2001) Hoffman, Eva, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) Kearney, Richard, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004) Kenny, Anthony, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Krishnan, Nikhil, A Terrible Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900–1960 (London: Profile Books, 2023) LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2001) Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, Heidegger, Art and Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)

5  REMORSE, HOLOCAUST STUDIES, AND HEIDEGGER: THE MESSAGE… 

181

Lang, Berel, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1988) Langer, Lawrence L., ed., The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975) Leak, Andrew and George Paizis, eds., The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable (London: Macmillan Press, 2000) Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise Than Being: or, Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1981) Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘Useless Suffering’, trans. by Richard Cohen, The Provocation of Levinas, ed. by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 56–67 Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘As if Consenting to Horror’, trans. by Paula Wissing, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989), 485–8 Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘Meaning and Sense’, Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 75–107 Levinas, Emmanuel, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. by Annette Aronowicz, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) Ludz, Ursula, ed., Letters 1925–1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, trans. by Andrew Shields (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004) Murray, Martin, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) Neske, Günther and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, trans. by Lisa Harries (1988); (New York: Paragon House, 1990) Ott, Hugo, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life trans. by Allan Blunden (London: HarperCollins, 1993) Proeve, Michael, and Steven Tudor, Remorse: Psychological and Jurisprudential Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History & Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004) Rosenfeld, Alvin H., A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980) Safranski, Rüdiger, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. By Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) Schwarz, Daniel, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2000) Sheehan, Thomas, ‘Heidegger and the Nazis’, New York Review, (16 June 1988), 38–47 Sicher, Efraim, ed., Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998)

182 

F. WHITE

Silbergleid, Robin, ‘“Treblinka, A Rather Musical Word”: Carole Maso’s Post-­ Holocaust Narrative’, Modern Fiction Studies, 53:1 (Spring 2007), 12 Steiner, George, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1977) Steiner, George, Heidegger, 2nd edn (London: Fontana, 1992) Vice, Sue, Holocaust Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

CHAPTER 6

Mystical Remorse: Saints and (Parenthetical) Heroes, and The One Alone

…every individual is ultimately alone… (MGM, 504)

Facets of Murdoch’s Focus on Remorse The gleefully fast-paced plotting and joyful celebration of existence (people, animals, nature, food, art, jokes) which make reading Murdoch’s novels such an exuberant experience are always counterbalanced by the shadow-side of her fictional world. She sustains an unflinching gaze on the suffering of humanity, and this study of remorse brings into focus how she recurrently directs attention to the dark side of human experience. Biographical and philosophical factors that relate to the increasing prominence of remorse in her work are connected with the darkening of Murdoch’s mature vision, voiced by her alter ego in Jackson’s Dilemma: ‘“The darkness, oh the darkness,” Benet said aloud’ (JD 14). Murdoch lived in dark times. As her life and the twentieth century drew to a close, the darkness increased on two levels. Personally, the cruel condition of Alzheimer’s was closing in on the ageing writer who told Conradi that she was ‘sailing into the darkness’ (Bayley 1998, 179), and she participates in the heightened sense of remorse generated by old age and illness which is an aspect of the human condition vividly imaged by Philip Larkin: ‘I suppose if one lives to be old one’s entire waking life will be spent

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8_6

183

184 

F. WHITE

turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse’ (Larkin 1992, 441). Publicly, Murdoch’s prophetic and prescient writing shares in what Baudrillard’s cultural analysis describes as ‘a perverse fascination with a return to the well-springs of violence, a collective attempt to hallucinate the historical truth of evil […] a desperate attempt to snatch a posthumous truth from history, a posthumous exculpation’ (Baudrillard 1988, 16–17). Her work on Heidegger and the Holocaust joins a widespread chorus of moral outrage that Saul Friedländer believes ‘may well stem from the belated remorse of a society that went to any length of compromise during the events themselves’ (Friedländer 1998, 349). Murdoch’s last works, it seems, deftly epitomise the late twentieth-­ century zeitgeist.

Transcendence and Mysticism Personal and historical factors are inadequate to account for the moral depth that remorse acquires in Murdoch’s moral psychology, a depth which additionally demands acknowledgement of a mystical transcendent realm. Murdoch holds that ‘there is a “moral unconscious” [which] is how morality naturally leads into mysticism’ (MGM 301). Throughout her philosophy, ‘the term “transcendence” is present in a moral sense’ (MGM 296), and she believes ‘the truthseeking mind is magnetised by an independent transcendent multiform reality’ (MGM 301). Murdoch’s conception of remorse is essentially ethical, as this study has demonstrated, but her conception of morality—and therefore of remorse—is transcendental and essentially mystical. Murdoch maintains a vital connection between ethics and transcendence. She shares with her mentor, Plato, ‘the assumption […] that the whole of life is on a moral scale, all knowledge is a moral quest, and the mind seeks reality and desires the good, which is a transcendent source of spiritual power, to which we are related through the idea of truth’ (MGM 56). Further, her sense of the transcendent necessarily involves the element of mysticism. She stresses the Wittgensteinian insight, ‘Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical’ (Tractatus 6.44), from her first philosophical treatise, The Sovereignty of Good (EM 70), to her last, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM 31). But whereas Wittgenstein thinks that ethics falls outside the intelligible scope of philosophy, being part of the realm ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’ (Tractatus 7), Murdoch believes that it is the task of both philosophy and

6  MYSTICAL REMORSE: SAINTS AND (PARENTHETICAL) HEROES… 

185

art to articulate and manifest the connection between morals and the mystical. She claims that ‘the background to morals is properly some sort of mysticism’ (EM 360), because ‘morality is, in the human world, something unique, special sui generis, “as if it came to us from elsewhere”: it is an intimation of “something higher”’ (MGM 26). Murdoch’s unfashionable tenacity towards the transcendent mystical realm sets her apart from the narrowly empiricist philosophy of her time, imbues her thinking with a neo-theological twist, and makes her work crucial to the current shift in epistemological emphasis that is embodied in the ethical turn and the turn to theology. Murdoch’s art presents remorse on different levels. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she says, ‘It is terrible to be human. It is deinos’ (MGM 498), and her fiction dramatises her belief that, ‘there are dreadful human fates, even in “sheltered” lives there is black misery, bereavement, remorse, frustrated talent, loneliness, humiliation, depression, secret woe’ (MGM 498–9). Remorse as depicted in the novels discussed in this study is indeed a dreadful fate. Yet it is also an ‘emissary of the eternal’ in Kierkegaard’s mystical phrase (qtd Gaita 2004, 59) which conveys the sense in which remorse points to the transcendent realm where Murdoch locates good.

Murdoch’s Saints and Heroes Murdoch’s revelation of the darkest experience of remorse and of a mystical element in this subtle and unstable concept is discovered in the interstices of her philosophy and in a little-known play, even more powerfully than in the novels which overtly present case-studies of remorse. Traces of her sensibility to the extreme moral dilemmas which certain individuals face, and the subsequent suffering in unknown lives, recur throughout Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals in which she brings to the fore people who live at the moral cutting edge, where choosing good over evil has harsh, irreversible consequences and to choose the good is personally costly. Murdoch describes such a situation thus: It has in this century been the fate of so many to be confronted with totally ruthless unshakeable evil and to have to choose between degrees of compromise and an absolute opposition which will tear mind and body to tatters, ruin the lives of family and friends, and perhaps never even be heard of or known of to be an example to others. (MGM 120)

186 

F. WHITE

She thinks of ‘prisoners who are quietly shot in the back of the head on some unrecorded morning’ (MGM 121), and of ‘innumerable unknown saints and martyrs, such as the dissident who is shot down crying out the truth, or perishes incognito in prison’ (MGM 429). Knowledge that such things are happening to people all over the world while the more fortunate go quietly and happily about their business is disturbing. These unknown saints and martyrs are a locus of inspiration to Murdoch in that they offer an example of selfless goodness and courage without reward and may even be a spiritual touchstone in some ineffable manner. In a passage which veers towards the mystical, she seems to suggest that contemplation of such lives may have a moral effect: ‘There are many points at which the virtuous suffering of another may be related to our own consciousness of sin. People remote from us, such as dissident protestors against oppressive regimes, may stir us in this way, with or without the mediation of imitatio Christi’ (MGM 132). Against the ‘romantic, ambitious, egocentric’ courage of the ‘demonic man’ who is an ‘emanation of existentialism’, she contrasts the ‘pure heroic selfless courage’ of ‘(Wallenburg, Bukovsky, Scharansky, and numberless other heroes of our time)’ (MGM 354). These briefly mentioned names refer to Raoul Wallenburg (1912–1947), a Swedish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust who disappeared, Vladimir Bukovsky (1942–2019), a Russian dissident, and Natan Scharansky (1948–), a Soviet dissident and Zionist. Murdoch places their names in parenthesis as if to emphasise the bracketing of these lives by history and also to suggest that these three nameable individuals represent the thousands of un-named, unknown, and unremembered heroes. Murdoch’s concentrated investigation, through the person of Heidegger, into the effects of an extreme absence of moral awareness evinced by failure of attention to the Other, runs in tandem with her equally strong focus on the consequences of an extreme presence of moral awareness evinced by courageous opposition to evil and the sacrifice of self for the sake of an—often unknown—Other. The rare individuals who stand up for the Good and suffer for so doing are her unconventional pantheon of saints and heroes: a few have names but she is also conscious of the many others who are anonymous because they vanish with their virtue and courage unheard of. Murdoch speaks openly of her ‘great admiration for dissidents, and calls them “the true heroes and heroines of our time”’ (Gillard 1987, 16). Such people preyed on her mind. Not only are they given honourable mention in her philosophy, but they also feature in the margins of her fiction. These ‘saints and martyrs’ inhabit the

6  MYSTICAL REMORSE: SAINTS AND (PARENTHETICAL) HEROES… 

187

background of the novels. The most striking example comes from An Accidental Man, in which Matthew Gibson-Grey, a comfortable, wellnourished and cultured ex-diplomat, who is a man of spiritual sensitivity and wisdom in the eyes of his acquaintance, tells his young American friend Ludwig Leferrier about a scene he once witnessed in Russia which haunts him: I saw this group of people standing in the open space and then I realized that they were demonstrating [….] They were holding a board protesting against the trial of a writer [….] They looked lonely and gratuitous and aslant […] like something in the corner of a painting […] everyone who passed by looked the other way [….] Then I saw a man […] who looked as if he too would pass by. He hesitated and he looked round, and then he came back and began shaking hands with them. That shaking hands […] it was suddenly as if that place had become the centre of the world. He was still standing there when the police arrived [….] They were all taken away, including the chap who had joined them. (AM 230)

Later Matthew learns who some of the people were and that some went to labour camps and some to mental hospitals, including, he supposes, that man. Ludwig’s immediate reaction is, ‘So pointless’, and they debate the usefulness or uselessness of self-sacrifice. Matthew says ‘One can face suffering and one cannot imagine death. But the destruction or perversion of one’s personality, could one face that? And for nothing’. To which Ludwig responds, ‘For nothing. And yet—’ (AM 231). This ‘and yet—’ suggests that Ludwig is, in Murdoch’s term from the passage quoted above from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, ‘stirred’ by the contemplation of such an apparently pointless self-sacrifice. Matthew continues, imagining the future of such detainees: ‘To live on to regret the just action, to forget the just action, to forget justice itself’. It is clear that he shudders at the thought, and Ludwig agrees that, ‘Anyone might regret acting rightly if the circumstances were awful. But [.…] These great actions exist and are known of [….] Who knows what deep effect they may not somehow have?’ (AM 231). Matthew concurs in words close to those Murdoch uses in her philosophy: Yes, these are the great actions of our century. These are our real heroes. These are the people whose courage and devotion to goodness goes beyond any dream of one’s own possibility. Courage is […] the virtue of the age […] perhaps the only name of love that can mean anything to us. (AM 231)

188 

F. WHITE

The courage to stand up to evil on behalf of and alongside (often unknown) others, simply because it is right to align oneself with goodness against evil, is the form of love which it is possible to offer in conditions of tyranny. It takes more than an ordinary measure of un-selfing love to put the good of the Other, the good indeed of Good itself, before the safety of the self. Murdoch’s fiction discloses how few manage to rise to this ethical-­ spiritual height. At the close of the novel, Matthew knows that ‘he would never be a hero’; he can only feel a ‘poignant sense of connection’ with ‘the solitary conscientious Russian who had walked over to join the protestors […] and who had possibly in that one instant wrecked his entire life’ (AM 372). He wonders whether it may be ‘enough to have these as one’s heroes, and to recognise and imitate them’ (AM 372), but this is a dangerous form of self-consolation by which Murdoch indicates the gap between recognising and actually practising heroism. Matthew is always a spectator of, not an actor in, the moral drama, ‘a perpetual moral tourist’ (Cunningham 2003, ix). Ludwig, by contrast, is forced to be an actor through his personal and historical circumstances as an American citizen during the Vietnam war, which put him in the moral dilemma of deciding whether to obey his conscription orders or stay in England as a conscientious objector. So his discussion with Matthew is not an academic question for Ludwig, who is imagining how it would feel to regret acting rightly himself. He decides that he must return to America, too late to comply with his draft, but to serve a prison sentence for failing to do so—an apparently quixotic act which the Murdochian Chorus of commentating characters in An Accidental Man finds ‘so pointless’, as Ludwig said of Matthew’s Russian hand-shaker. It is hard for Ludwig even to discern what acting rightly in his situation would be, and he is liable to regret whichever action he chooses to take. As he faces impending imprisonment in the United States, Ludwig wonders ‘Would he in later years detest the Ludwig who had made that sacrifice and would his life be soured by hatred for that feckless person? Perhaps that bitter disfiguring regret […] would be his reward for this decision. Not wholeness, but to be devoured by obsessive remorse’ (AM 367). And so the question is raised as to whether remorse will be the outcome of Ludwig’s decision, which also prompts the question of whether the un-named Russian, only mentioned as an illustration in debate by Matthew (and, as it were, put into brackets within the

6  MYSTICAL REMORSE: SAINTS AND (PARENTHETICAL) HEROES… 

189

world of Murdoch’s novel just as the dissidents, Wallenburg, Bukovsky, Scharansky are put into brackets within Murdoch’s philosophy) will also suffer remorse for his moment of impetuous solidarity.

Remorse in The One Alone The One Alone, Murdoch’s radio play with music, broadcast on Radio 3, 13 February 1987, takes her discussion of remorse to a yet more profound and subtle level of complexity than is found in her novels as, in this work, she dramatises the extreme situation of unjust imprisonment which haunts the shadows of her philosophical and fictional writing.1 The play disturbs any easy conceptualisation of remorse. The primary disquieting question that dissidents and martyrs force Murdoch to ask is this: if one has lost one’s freedom, even one’s life, for a moment of brave resistance to evil, but that resistance has had no effect, has changed nothing for the better, then is it appropriate to experience remorse for one’s action and to wish one had done differently? This question is given a further edge if the people on whose behalf one made this gesture and thereby lost one’s freedom and life are unworthy and ungrateful. Remorse is clearly the appropriate response to a bad action—causing the death of another is a straightforward reason for remorse. But can remorse also be an appropriate response to a good action? The play also dramatises the effects of imprisonment, particularly solitary confinement. Murdoch is haunted by ‘terrible pictures […] of solitary prisoners with no term of release’ (MGM 501). She says, ‘One may remind oneself that human beings are remarkably good at surviving and people make jokes in dark situations which would appal the outsider. All the same one’s thoughts return to the imprisoned and the starving and to experiences of loss, ignominy, or extreme guilt’ (MGM 502), and also, ‘Extreme suffering, from one cause or another, is likely to be the lot of everyone at some time in life; and innumerable lives are hideously darkened throughout by hunger, poverty and persecution, or by remorse, guilt or abandoned loneliness and lack of love. Here every individual is ultimately alone’ (MGM 504). The recurrent vocabulary in such passages accentuates darkness, loneliness, guilt, and remorse. Dark loneliness may be an 1  All references are taken from the published edition (London: Colophon Press with Old Town Books, 1995) which is not page numbered.

190 

F. WHITE

internal state of affairs, caused by guilt and remorse—Hilary in A Word Child is imprisoned within his own mind. But it may also be an external state of affairs, and the dark loneliness of being physically imprisoned may in itself actually cause guilt and remorse to be experienced. Murdoch interrogates the meaning of remorse in such a context. In The One Alone she places the concept under the microscope of a very particular circumstance, which both complicates understanding of remorse as an experienced emotion and also puts in question whether remorse is actually the cause of the tormented mind of an innocent prisoner or the effect of being so psychologically tortured. The result is that this play is Murdoch’s most mystical, enigmatic, and flexible treatment of remorse. Remorse is a state of mind, an unpleasant and distressing one. Solitary confinement renders human beings exceptionally vulnerable to unpleasant and distressing states of mind, hence its use as a tool with which to break people. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch asks, ‘What do you do with your mind when you are in prison? Or bereaved or suffering irremediable injustice, or crippled by awful guilt?’ and she answers her question with the statement, ‘What you are able to do with it then will depend very much on what you were doing with it before’ (MGM 323). In The One Alone, Murdoch dramatises the condition of an individual placed in the dark situation, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, to which she alludes. It is as if Murdoch here follows Matthew’s unknown, un-named Russian from An Accidental Man, to see what indeed becomes of him after his brave gesture for good against evil. The genre of a play with music rather than a novel offers artistic freedom to bypass realism and focus purely on states of mind. The music for The One Alone was composed by Gary Carpenter, who made a hearing of it available (for the first time since its single performance 35 years ago) at the tenth International Iris Murdoch Conference at the University of Chichester on 25 June 2022 and discussed his collaboration with Murdoch with conference delegates. In Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music Sounds and Silences, Gillian Dooley gives a full account of the genesis and development of the play and analyses the work from a musicological perspective, but The One Alone has largely suffered critical neglect. This art form, unusual for Murdoch, enables her to pare away all extraneous matter and reveal the bare kernel of her thinking on the central issue of whether remorse is an appropriate response to the evil consequences of good actions. The One Alone attempts to understand remorse in this specific

6  MYSTICAL REMORSE: SAINTS AND (PARENTHETICAL) HEROES… 

191

context and to weigh its appositeness as a descriptive marker for the actual experience undergone. The short play is simply structured, with a cast of an un-named Prisoner, an Interrogator, an Angel, and two Choruses. The poetry of the sung text is syntactically unambitious and the vocabulary undemanding; the phrasing, repetition, and use of Choruses acknowledge the influence of T.S.  Eliot without parodic effect—Murder in the Cathedral is casually evoked.2 The one who is alone is an unidentified woman prisoner of conscience, condemned to solitary confinement, for saying ‘no’ and ‘Stop’! (OA, Section 1) to an unspecified tyrannical regime. She is visited by the Interrogator and by the Angel, and she hears Choruses of People and of Children—some or all of which figures may be hallucinatory visions and/ or imaginary voices inside the Prisoner’s head (‘What do you do with your mind when you are in prison?’), but who are also allegorical figures. The devilish figure of the Interrogator negates all meaning in the Prisoner’s actions and drives her towards despair: Dooley finds him ‘somewhat reminiscent of O’Brien in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (Dooley 2022, 142). The counterbalancing figure of the Angel offers alternative interpretations of her ordeal and of the potential significance of her actions, whilst rejecting any sense of connection with the divine—when the Prisoner asks ‘Are you from God?’, the response is ‘I cannot fully understand / That Archaic word’ (OA, section 2). David Gillard’s review of The One Alone suggests that ‘the angel could be interpreted as the woman’s conscience, or according to Murdoch, “the voice of the good observer on our history”’ (Gillard 1987, 16). But the closure is bleakly inconclusive—the more positive ideas of the Angel do not succeed in counteracting the demonic nullification of the Interrogator’s taunting, and Murdoch characteristically refuses to offer bland consolation. In the dialogue between the Prisoner and the Interrogator, the Prisoner reiterates that what she did was right, that she ‘saw what was evil and […] defied it’, ‘heard what was false and […] denied it’. Her conviction is undermined by the Interrogator to whom she says ‘You poison, corrupt and decay in my mind’, because he interprets her motivation as vanity, egoism, and desire for love, admiration, and fame. He suggests that her deeds were ridiculous, small, uncreative, and idiotic, just a ‘vain whim’, for 2  For a fuller account of the links between The One Alone and Murder in the Cathedral see White (2012).

192 

F. WHITE

which she has ‘sacrificed everything for nothing’. He tells her, ‘Now you are one alone / you have achieved your one alone’, and leaves her to scream in solitude, regretting her wish ‘to be a hero’. The ‘destruction or perversion of one’s personality’, which Matthew dreads, is here enacted as the Interrogator drops suggestions of remorse like poison into the Prisoner’s ear, invading her mind with negation of value and goodness. The ensuing dialogue between the Prisoner and the Angel identifies this figure as the vision of her certainty, her faith, and her truth. The Angel knows that ‘motives are always mixed’, but also sees her ‘love of truth’, ‘hatred of cruelty’, ‘misery at the lie’, and ‘dream of freedom’, which were the ‘very small’ good kernel of her actions. The Prisoner repeatedly queries, ‘Why did I do it’, and the Eliotesque People’s Chorus suggests that those whom she wanted to save by her actions are weak, fearful, cowardly, and apathetic, a dull and unheroic people who want nothing but ‘peace’— that is to be left alone. They are indifferent to, and ungrateful for, her efforts. They care neither about her action nor her plight. So the Angel unconsolingly tells her, ‘What you did, you did for nothing’. This echoes Murdoch’s beliefs expressed in The Sovereignty of Good: The Good has nothing to do with purpose, indeed it excludes the idea of purpose. ‘All is vanity’ is the beginning and the end of ethics. The only genuine way to be good is to be good ‘for nothing’ [….] That ‘for nothing’ is indeed the experienced correlate of the invisibility or non-representable blankness of the idea of Good itself. (EM 358)

It is a bleak vision without consolation. Yet through the Angel’s words Murdoch distinguishes acting ‘for nothing’ from the Interrogator’s taunt of sacrificing ‘everything for nothing’ because, as the Angel tells the Prisoner: Your nothing is different from his. His nothing is filled with bitterness and remorse And desire for what is unreal and false. Your nothing, which seems like a black hole, Brims over with what is most real And with that precious stuff your cup is full.

Murdoch sets a positive concept of a state of ‘nothing’ against a negative concept of a state of ‘nothing’. The positive state results from true

6  MYSTICAL REMORSE: SAINTS AND (PARENTHETICAL) HEROES… 

193

un-selfing, demonstrated by self-sacrifice for the sake of the Other, which is doing good without any desire for personal gain or recognition but simply for the sake of the good itself. The negative state, full of ‘bitterness and remorse’, results from regretting such sacrifice as a futile waste. Murdoch here places goodness and remorse in diametrical opposition through her subtle differentiation between a selfless and, in some immeasurable way, positive ‘nothing’ and a still self-directed and wholly negative ‘nothing’. The One Alone implies that remorse is not an apposite response to the consequences of taking virtue to the extreme, however painful and apparently fruitless such self-sacrifice seems. Goodness ‘for nothing’ is an end in itself, regardless of its effect. The paradox of the connection between a good ‘nothing’ and remorse is re-enforced in the final interchange between the Prisoner and the Angel. The Prisoner vainly tries to comprehend this connection which she is unable to accept for herself: Prisoner: I died for nothing What was it you said—? Angel: There is a nothing which is simply deprivation, Bitterness and remorse and negation. There is another nothing which is real And full of pain, but if you can, Full of joy as well. Prisoner: I can’t, I can’t it is not for me. [….] Angel: No, I suppose you can’t—I got carried Away—I am sorry—it’s true all the Same. No ending could be more bleak. Human pain obliterates the possibility of joy in such deathly experience which can only feel like ‘deprivation, bitterness and remorse and negation’, and the Angel’s words accept this psychological reality of torture, the harsh truth which the play does not soften. Yet, his final words enigmatically maintain Murdoch’s conviction that in some inaccessible metaphysical way joy is linked to such goodness ‘for nothing’, simply because it is Good. By presenting this dual vision Murdoch distinguishes feelings of anguished regret from the strictly defined concept of remorse and suggests that while such anguished regret is the inevitable reaction to extreme suffering, remorse may not be the

194 

F. WHITE

accurate concept to be applied to this situation. This very difficult distinction is left unresolved by The One Alone. The play fades out to a lyrical children’s song which offers only the suggestion that truth (which ‘shall tell / And ring like bell’) and the word (which ‘is heard’) somehow stand fast beyond the destinies of individual lives. Listeners are left to sift the play for interpretations of the ‘truth’ it may contain. When The One Alone is read with the analysis of remorse as the focal lens of attention, the play extends the parameters of Murdoch’s philosophical, spiritual, and psychological repertoire on this concept as presented in her novels. The Angel’s words indicate that remorse, defined as a conscious acknowledgement that one has done ill through one’s own fault and that one ought to have acted differently, is a conceptually inappropriate response to the consequences of the Prisoner’s choice to defy evil. Remorse is a component only in the Interrogator’s version of ‘for nothing’, not in the Angel’s. Murdoch sustains her belief that fidelity to the good is not futile, even though it be ‘for nothing’, and that remorse is not actually what the Prisoner should feel, because she is right that what she did was good and she should not have acted differently. Remorse would be a negative response to this situation, and it is associated here with evil—the Interrogator. But this metaphysical conclusion concerning remorse is abstract and acknowledged to be of no human comfort. Notwithstanding her philosophical rejection of remorse as an apt response to suffering for the sake of Good in The One Alone, Murdoch accepts that agonising regret (the wish that one had not chosen the severe path of goodness, which has led to such suffering for oneself with so little evidence of having thereby benefited others) is an inevitable torment for a person imprisoned for doing what they believe to be right. To such people her thoughts constantly returned.

References Murdoch Criticism Bayley, John, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998) Cunningham, Valentine, Introduction to Vintage Classics edition of Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man (2003) Dooley, Gillian, Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music Sounds and Silences, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Gillard, David, ‘Musical Murdoch’, Radio Times (7–13 February 1987), 16

6  MYSTICAL REMORSE: SAINTS AND (PARENTHETICAL) HEROES… 

195

White, Frances, ‘Post-Christian Martyrdom and the Murdochian chorus: The One Alone on the margins of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral’, in Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts, Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 177–191

Other Works Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Hunting Nazis and Losing Reality’, New Statesman, (19 February 1988), 16–17 Friedländer, Saul, ‘Afterword: the Shoah between Memory and History’, in Sicher (1998), 345–357 Gaita, Raimond, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) Larkin, Philip, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985, ed. by Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber & Faber, 1992)

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Remorse as a Challenge to Be Met—Biography and Bibliotherapy

Remorse is memory awake, Her companies astir,— A presence of departed acts At window and at door. Its past set down before the soul, And lighted with a match, Perusal to facilitate Of its condensed dispatch. Remorse is cureless,—the disease Not even God can heal; For ‘tis His institution,— The complement of hell.

—Emily Dickinson

The three stanzas of this elliptical poem encapsulate the parameters of the problem posed by remorse in Murdoch’s thought. What remorse is— caused by memory and departed acts; what remorse does—tortures the soul with the past; what can cure it—nothing. Murdoch may appear to assent to Dickinson’s bleak analysis, yet I contend that through her work she offers more. The cri de coeur that runs through Jackson’s Dilemma is Murdoch’s plea that readers and critics truly attend to her aesthetical and ethical emphasis © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8_7

197

198 

F. WHITE

on remorse. One reviewer remarked, ‘emotions in this novel are stronger than characters’, and remorse is the strongest emotion of all in this last work (Kelloway 1995, 1). Dipple immediately noted that the novel asks, ‘How can religion and art mirror or mediate the experiences of happiness, pain, and above all remorse?’ and observed that ‘Again and again in this novel, characters are associated with remorse in a repetitive mantra’ (Dipple 1995, 7). More recently, Rowe has declared that ‘Remorse is the great theme of the novel’ (Rowe 2019, 40). But until now this theme in Murdoch’s work has not been accorded full critical attention. Her peculiar insistence on remorse towards the end of her writing life suggests that it holds particular philosophical and personal significance for her. The question thus presents itself of what Murdoch was so emphatically saying to her readers before she died. In Jackson’s Dilemma, the painter Owen Silbury expresses the view that ‘there is no redemptive suffering […] only remorse—remorse is what is real—’ (JD 21); this ‘unfinished’ work does not explain or substantiate this claim but, rather, lyrically emphasises and allusively illustrates it.1 Three times in the novel Murdoch isolates the word remorse to form a sentence by itself: when Benet regrets not having revealed his love for his dead parents, ‘Remorse’ (JD 8); when Jackson, Benet’s manservant, agonises over his vocation and pities himself for his own burden and lost dreams, ‘Remorse, remorse’ (JD 122), and when Benet loses Jackson through his own fault, Murdoch further italicises the isolated word, ‘Remorse’ (JD 213). Here she also offers a description of remorse as ‘his helpless desire to recover what would now never be found again’ (JD 213)—reminiscent of the phrase from a quarter of a century earlier in The Nice and the Good: ‘the frail crying wish that it had all never happened at all and that things were as they once were’ (NG 175). Remorse is given universal application in this last novel, as Murdoch broadens the theme from the lives of these two protagonists. Benet hears ‘a sort of warm ringing undertone, a gentle compassionate light or sound, an awareness of the tragedy of human life, good and evil, crime and punishment, remorse’ (JD 10, Murdoch’s italics), both in the history of his Uncle Tim’s life and in the tales he passed down to his nephew, tales which include Macbeth, Othello, Kafka, T.E. Lawrence, and Conrad’s Lord Jim. And when Benet contemplates the omnipresence of remorse in life and art 1  I concur with Spear, who says of Jackson’s Dilemma, ‘I personally persist in seeing it as Murdoch’s “unfinished novel”’ (Spear 2007, 136).

7  CONCLUSION: REMORSE AS A CHALLENGE TO BE MET—BIOGRAPHY… 

199

with Owen and the holy woman Mildred Smalden, they intermix characters from within the novel they inhabit with Shakespearean characters in their list of those who know remorse; Uncle Tim, and Jackson, who talks to Mildred of ‘remorse’ (JD 238), Macbeth, Othello, and Prospero, who ‘was suffering secret agonies of remorse’ (JD 232). Their survey of the remorse-stricken widens to include historical figures, not just Heidegger, but Titian and Shakespeare too. Here Murdoch suggests that acquaintance with the terrible common human woe of remorse is a pre-requisite for great art: ‘Artists know all about it,’ said Owen. ‘How Titian must have felt it, when he was very old, The Flaying of Marsyas—the pain, the pain, the old man must have felt it very deeply at the end …’ (JD 64, Murdoch’s ellipsis) ‘We must expect that Shakespeare felt remorse,’ said Benet (JD 64) [and] ‘Shakespeare too felt remorse, his great soul was filled with remorse.’ (JD 232)

As an artist Murdoch too knows all about remorse and her soul seems, towards the end of her life, to be filled with it. The accumulation and critical assimilation of knowledge about Murdoch’s life both informs and troubles new readings of her work. Conradi’s ground-breaking biography, supplemented by Purton’s useful Chronology, has been enriched both by nuanced reflections of her life in memoirs by her contemporaries (Elias Canetti, M.R.D. Foot, Devaki Jain, Mary Midgley, Mary Warnock, among others) and by the publication of her letters in 2015. Her journals, which were added to the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives in 2016, are being transcribed and made increasing use of by Murdoch scholars, only the first volume having as yet been published as Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War.2 From the fuller picture of Murdoch’s complex and paradoxical personality that is rapidly emerging, it becomes evident that her ‘novels are crafted from the rich raw material of an active, politically engaged, friendship-filled existence’, as Purton observes (Purton 2007, x). In an essay reflecting on the task of editing Living on Paper and the very mixed reception it received from reviewers, Rowe considers the connection of Murdoch’s personal life 2  For examples of scholarly use made of the journals since their arrival in the archive, see Browning (2018a), Hämäläinen and Dooley (2019), Oulton (2020), White (2020), and Panizza and Hopwood (2022).

200 

F. WHITE

with her moral philosophy and art: ‘Her letters clearly indicate that both were forged out of bitter experience and self-reflection as much as they were out of cool philosophical attention to metaphysical ideas’ (Browning 2018b, 25). Use of these very personal materials is a source of disquiet for Murdoch scholars, many of whom share the sense of unease to which Browning gives voice in Why Iris Murdoch Matters: ‘Given that Murdoch did not want her letters and journals […] to be published we use these resources after some reflection. Their use is justified in that they […] generally harmonize with what is maintained in her published texts’ (Browning 2018a, 25). I use them here with shared reservation and justification, for just as Nicol finds in The Retrospective Fiction that ‘the correspondence between masochism in Murdoch’s life and work shows how a greater knowledge of the author can open up new ways of reading her fiction’ (Nicol 2004, 169), so it is legitimate to research biographical resources for insight into the predominance of remorse in her thought. Rowe admits that ‘publishing such intensely personal and potentially damaging letters was always a risk and a moral challenge to the editors’, who were forced to ‘rest in the belief that she would have wanted the conflicting demands between art and life to be known and understood’ (Browning 2018b, 26). The firm belief that the publication of the letters means that ‘Murdoch scholarship now has a unique insight into the changing states of Murdoch’s mind and the emotional upheavals that impacted upon the production of her fictional and philosophical texts’ (Browning 2018b, 26) is the editors’ justification, with which I concur. For the letters do confirm that Murdoch suffered much ‘personal guilt and deep remorse’ (Browning 2018b, 28) and endured ‘heartfelt remorse for the damage she caused’ (Browning 2018b, 31). This is also clear from her journals in which glimpses of situations about which Murdoch experienced remorse occur. In December 1953 her ‘journal is full of remorse and grief for Franz [Steiner]’ (Purton 2007, 62). Murdoch was early aware of the danger that she ‘ate people up’. Conradi comments that ‘“May I not harm so-and-so” is no accidental journal-refrain’ (IMAL 452); he infers that Murdoch was unhappy about the roles she played in her relationships with Michael and Philippa Foot and with Donald McKinnon and he draws a penetrating parallel between Murdoch and Orestes, with whom she identified—both of them are ‘tormented by the

7  CONCLUSION: REMORSE AS A CHALLENGE TO BE MET—BIOGRAPHY… 

201

Erinyes of selfish uncreative remorse’ (IMAL 259). In a letter not included in the selection in Living on Paper, the editors tell us that, ‘Confiding in Marjorie Boulton in 1943 she wrote, “I have all my life made terrible mistakes with people. I say this with real agony and remorse”’ (LOP 24), and in her account of Murdoch in the Writers and Their Lives series, Rowe concludes that all her ‘experiences, along with biting remorse for the pain she caused others, provided emotional fodder for her art’ (Rowe 2019, 5). The novels further sustain Morgan’s (as yet biographically unverified) hint in his memoir of Murdoch that she may have possessed personal knowledge of the remorse caused by abortion. Exploring Murdoch’s focus on remorse augments the growing critical sense of what Priscilla Martin and Anne Rowe describe as her ‘participation in the darker realms of human experience [which] qualified her better to write about it’ (IMLL 63), because, as Purton remarks, ‘what appears as wild fantasy often turns out to be closely modelled on the Byzantine complexities of Murdoch’s emotional life’ (Purton 2007, xi). In The Black Prince, the narrator observes that ‘the artist […] appears, however much he may imagine that he hides, in the revealed extension of his work’ (BP 12), though Murdoch’s own work is far from simplistically autobiographical. The raw remorse evident in her life is metamorphosed by her art which transmogrifies specific personal experience into the universally experienced quintessence of remorse. Murdoch states clearly that she ‘would include the arousing of emotion in the definition of art’ (EM 10) and her fiction exploits her first-hand experience of remorse to arouse the emotional impact of it in her readers; she then requires them to think about the place of remorse in the moral scheme. The range of experiences of remorse and modes of recovering from it which are dramatised in her novels variously display the capacity of chronic remorse for causing psycho-spiritual paralysis and, alternatively, the function that lucid remorse may perform in the pilgrimage towards the Good. This function is well articulated by the remorse theorist ̇ Ilham Dilman: in remorse one loses oneself altogether and, in doing so, one finds one’s soul. Furthermore, in finding one’s soul one comes to oneself. There is no paradox here and one can put the same thing in different words: in remorse one loses the ego, all thought of oneself, and in one’s thought for others one enters into a world of give and take in which one grows in moral maturity and finds greater authenticity and autonomy. (Dilman 1999, 325)

202 

F. WHITE

Murdoch’s presentation of the positive potential of remorse in her novels concurs with this picture of moral and spiritual gain through the pain of remorse. The chief dynamic in Murdoch’s literary work is communication with the moral life of her readers. Her ‘ideal reader is someone who likes a jolly good yarn and enjoys thinking about the book as well, thinking about the moral issues’ (TCHF 230), and she valued letters which gave her the ‘pleasing news’ that her novels ‘have helped them in some way’ (TCHF 234). Murdoch is adamant that her ‘novels are not moral tracts. They are works of art’ (TCHF 99), but she nonetheless exhibits a ‘passionate belief in the novel as a moral forum’ (IMM 1). Speaking of Tolstoy, she insists that it is his ‘great apprehension of the whole moral scheme which makes his novels great’ because ‘the moral perception and depth of the writer is something very important’ (TCHF 157). Likewise, it is Murdoch’s own apprehension of morality that gives her fiction the inexhaustible depth and richness found in her work by successive generations of readers and critics, and this quality is rooted in her parallel work in philosophy. The one is not a simple key to the other (as some early Murdoch criticism naively posits). Rather, as Rowe remarks, her ‘marrying of fiction and philosophy consolidates her claim that the novel has become the most important form of moral discourse in a secular society’ (IMAR 4). Browning pinpoints her ‘multidimensional perspective’ in which Her novels are not a disguised form of philosophy, but imagined worlds of intersecting individuals that are aligned with her philosophical analysis of the meaning of individual freedom and moral development. (Browning 2018a, 2)

Rowe’s work in partnerships with Bove, Horner, and Martin makes the even more far-reaching claim that following ‘the decline of religious faith in the West’ Murdoch’s novels ‘offer themselves as a secular alternative “place” for […] moral reflection’ (IMM 1). As such, the theme of remorse and its antidotes is aligned with her neo-theology. In interviews Murdoch admits that ‘having thought about […] moral philosophy, does sometimes affect the way I set up a problem in a novel’ (TCHF 3), remarks that ‘a novel is a drama, and dramas happen where there is trouble’ (TCHF 133), and thinks that ‘novels are interesting objects [because] they explain particular cases in very great detail’ (TCHF 109). This study illustrates the ways in which she experimentally sets up the problem of remorse from a wide variety of different perspectives in her

7  CONCLUSION: REMORSE AS A CHALLENGE TO BE MET—BIOGRAPHY… 

203

fiction. Murdoch’s philosophy isolates remorse as a form of trouble which creates its own intense moral drama, but the novel is the forum which enables her to detail and explore particular cases of remorse. Conradi describes Murdoch’s first novels as ‘five different debuts’ (IMAR xvi), and this study identifies as many different approaches to remorse in her work. Murdoch believes her novels function ‘as part of an unending investigation rather than as a means of finding any resolution’ (Barrows, qtd Purton 2007, 86). As such she approaches the theme of remorse over and again, circling round the problem in an effort to provide fresh moral insights and means of survival for her readers, with whom lies the responsibility for managing remorse in their own moral lives. That the moral significance of the common experience of remorse is best mediated through fiction is, as Rowe and Horner remark, ‘simply because novels, by their very nature, reflect the ethical dilemmas of ordinary people in society’ (IMM 2). Murdoch’s readers are such ‘ordinary people’ who find their own experience of remorse mirrored in and analysed by her novels, in which she not only identifies the moral nature of remorse but also offers practical devices for recovering from its ill effects, no matter what the cause of the reader’s remorse might be. This dynamic interaction between the novels and readers’ lives is Murdoch’s distinctive literary-moral achievement which ensures that future reading generations will discover her timeless relevance to their own ethical dilemmas. The success of her endeavour is testified to by readers as I have outlined in an essay on ‘How Iris Murdoch can change your life’ in The Murdochian Mind. Critical work on Murdoch’s concerns, such as this study of remorse, is rooted in practical ethics and aesthetics which accounts for the burgeoning interest in her work world-wide. For even more now than a decade ago when Martin and Rowe published their literary biography, there is strong evidence of the truth of their claim that ‘within Murdoch scholarship a renaissance is underway: she is at the forefront now in certain areas of current literary theory and her work is hailed as a paradigm for interdisciplinary, morally responsible fiction to which attention should be paid’ (IMLL 163). This renaissance in Murdoch studies is manifest in the many volumes of literary criticism and philosophical appraisal which have been produced in the twenty-first century, to which this series, Iris Murdoch Today, is contributing. This study identifies the extensive and pervasive theme of remorse in Murdoch’s novels and illuminates the importance of the way this central

204 

F. WHITE

concept finds expression in her fiction. In so doing it expands critical awareness in the field of Murdoch scholarship and also responds to James Gilligan’s comment—‘What is surprising is the relative paucity of investigations into remorse’ (Cox 1999, 33)—by extending and enriching the scope of current investigations in the field of remorse theory. Remorse as a concept is at the cutting edge of new theories of moral psychology. The fact that during this very period when philosophers, psychologists, and theologians are beginning to theorise remorse as a philosophically non-­ substitutable category, Murdoch was writing novels which not only imaginatively investigate the impact of remorse on individuals but also philosophically conceptualise remorse as a crucial moral indicator, reveals her prophetic role in this area, as in other newly emergent discourses such as Queer Theory and Diaspora studies. Analysis of her constantly developing fictional engagement with remorse also confirms links between Murdoch’s work and the discourses of Holocaust Studies and Trauma Theory. So this study of remorse in her work expands the range of theoretical discourse which can fruitfully be considered in construing Murdoch’s moral philosophy and interpreting her novels. Although she does not consciously and overtly engage with such theories, her work nonetheless retrospectively interacts with them because of the uniquely enriching contribution which her novels make to these theoretical perspectives. In conclusion to this study which deals with remorse as an ethical dilemma, a form of loss, a spiritual as well as psychological malaise, and a response to the Holocaust, I propose that Murdoch’s fictional engagement with remorse is offered to her readers as a form of bibliotherapy. This image of reading as healing articulates both the practical and the spiritual aspects of her ‘passionate concern for conveying moral concepts so rare among contemporary young novelists that Miss Murdoch refuses to fit into the usual critical judgement of fiction’, which an anonymous reviewer of her first four novels percipiently identified at the outset of Murdoch’s career (qtd Spear 2007, 131). Sixty-five years later Murdoch is still eluding categorisation, and moreover, she embraces potentially conflicting interpretations of her work: ‘I think the novel is allowed to be ambiguous. I mean it’s not surprising if people interpret a novel in different ways. And the author is very likely to be tolerant to different interpretations—or, at least, I am’ (TCHF 180). For Murdoch—both as philosopher and as novelist—just as for her character Tom McCaffrey,

7  CONCLUSION: REMORSE AS A CHALLENGE TO BE MET—BIOGRAPHY… 

205

remorse is ‘a challenge to be met’ (PP 499). This robustly courageous approach to the common human woe is the gift her fiction offers which takes her beyond the bleak portrayal of remorse in Dickinson’s poem, and as such it is Murdoch’s distinctive contribution to her readers’ lives.

References Murdoch Criticism Browning, Gary, Why Iris Murdoch Matters (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018a) Browning, Gary, ed., Iris Murdoch on Truth and Love (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018b) Dipple, Elizabeth, ‘Fragments of Iris Murdoch’s Vision: Jackson’s Dilemma as Interlude’, Iris Murdoch Newsletter, 9 (Autumn 1995), 4–8 Hämäläinen, Nora and Gillian Dooley, eds, Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Kelloway, Kate, Review of Jackson’s Dilemma, Observer (1 October 1995), 16 Nicol, Bran, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Oulton, Lucy, ‘Loving by Instinct: Environmental Ethics in Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good and Nuns and Soldiers’, Études britanniques contemporaines, 59 (2020) Panizza, Silvia Caprioglio and Mark Hopwood, eds., The Murdochian Mind, Routledge Philosophical Minds (London: Routledge, 2022) Purton, Valerie, An Iris Murdoch Chronology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Rowe, Anne, Iris Murdoch, Writers and Their Work Series (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019) Spear, Hilda D., Iris Murdoch 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) White, Frances, ‘Anti-Nausea: Iris Murdoch and the Natural Goodness of the Natural World’, Études britanniques contemporaines, 59 (2020)

Other Works Cox, Murray, ed., Remorse and Reparation (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publications, 1999) ̇ Dilman, Ilham, ‘Shame, Guilt and Remorse’, Philosophical Investigations, 22 (1999), 312–29

References

Novels and Plays by Iris Murdoch Murdoch, Iris, Under the Net (1954): (London: Vintage, 2002a) ——— Flight from the Enchanter (1956): (London: Vintage 2000a) ——— The Bell (1958): (London: Vintage, 2004) ——— A Severed Head (1961): (London: Vintage, 2001a) ——— The Unicorn (1963): (London: Vintage 2000b) ——— The Italian Girl (1964): (London: Vintage 2000c) ——— The Time of the Angels (1966): (London: Vintage, 2002b) ——— The Nice and the Good (1968): (London: Vintage, 2000d) ——— Bruno’s Dream (1969): (London: Vintage 2001b) ——— A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970): (London: Vintage, 2001c) ——— An Accidental Man (1971): (London: Vintage, 2003)) ——— The Black Prince (1973): (London: Vintage, 1999a) ——— A Word Child (1975): (London: Vintage, 2002c) ——— Henry and Cato (1976): (London: Vintage, 2002d) ——— The Sea, The Sea (1978): (London: Vintage, 1999b) ——— Nuns and Soldiers (1980): (London: Vintage, 2001d) ——— The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983): (London: Vintage, 1983) ——— The Good Apprentice (1985): (London: Vintage 2000e) ——— The Book and the Brotherhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987) ——— The Message to the Planet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989a) ——— The Green Knight (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993a)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8

207

208 

REFERENCES

——— Jackson’s Dilemma (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995a) ——— The One Alone, Radio 3, 13 February 1987 (London: Colophon Press With Old Town Books, 1995b)

Other Works by Iris Murdoch Murdoch, Iris, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1953) [epigraph]; (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989b) ——— Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992) ——— Existentialists and Mystics, ed. by Peter Conradi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997) ——— Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, ed. by Yozo Muroya and Paul Hullah (Okayama: University Education Press, 1998 ——— Heidegger (1993b). Unpublished typescript from the Peter Conradi Archive at Kingston University Archives and Special Collections (KUAS6/5/1/4) ——— Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 ed. by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015)

Murdoch Criticism Alford, C. Fred, ‘Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch: Ethics as Exit?’, Philosophy and Literature, 26.1 (2002), 24–42 Antonaccio, Maria, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Antonaccio, Maria, A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Antonaccio, Maria and William Schweiker, eds., Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Araújo, Sofia de Melo and Fátima Vieira, ed., Iris Murdoch, Philosopher Meets Novelist (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011) Askew, Reginald, ‘The Occasional Clergyman’, Iris Murdoch Newsletter, 12 (Summer 1998), 7–9 Bayley, John, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998) Blum, Lawrence, ‘Murdoch and Politics’, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 424–437. Bove, Cheryl, and Anne Rowe, Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) Broackes, Justin, ed., Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2011)

 REFERENCES 

209

Browning, Gary, Why Iris Murdoch Matters (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018a) Browning, Gary, ed., Iris Murdoch on Truth and Love (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018b) Burns, Elizabeth, ‘Murdoch and Christianity’, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 382–94. Byatt, A.S., Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965); (London: Vintage, 1994) Carter, William C., ‘Proustian Resonances in Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice’, Proust Research Association Newsletter, 25 (Summer 1986), 55–7 Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 2001a) Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, 3rd edn (London: HarperCollins, 2001b) Conradi, Peter J., ed., Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1939–45 (London: Short Books, 2010) Cunningham, Valentine, Introduction to Vintage Classics edition of Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man (2003) Cupitt, Don, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Case of Star-Friendship’, in Rowe and Horner (2012), 11–16. Dipple, Elizabeth, Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen, 1982) Dipple, Elizabeth, ‘Fragments of Iris Murdoch’s Vision: Jackson’s Dilemma as Interlude’, Iris Murdoch Newsletter, 9 (Autumn 1995), 4–8 Dooley, Gillian, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2003) Dooley, Gillian, Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music Sounds and Silences, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Düringer, Eva-Maria, ‘Murdoch and Weil’, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 306–317 Fiddes, Paul, Iris Murdoch and the Others: A Writer in Dialogue with Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2022) Gillard, David, ‘Musical Murdoch’, Radio Times (7–13 February 1987), 16 Gordon, David J., Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing (Colombia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995) Gowans, Christopher W., ‘Murdoch and Buddhism, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 395–408 Griffin, Gabriele, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 1993) Grimshaw, Tammy, ‘Do not Seek God outside your own Soul: Buddhism in The Green Knight’, in Rowe and Horner (2010), 168–193 Hague, Angela, Iris Murdoch’s Comic Vision (Pennsylvania: Susquehanna University Press, 1984)

210 

REFERENCES

Hämäläinen, Nora and Gillian Dooley, eds, Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Hardy, Robert, Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2000) Hawkins, Peter S., The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 1983) Heusel, Barbara Stevens, Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s Novels of the 1970s and 1980s (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995) Horner, Avril, ‘“Refinements of Evil”: Iris Murdoch and the Gothic’, in Rowe and Horner (2010), 70–84 Jacobs, Alan, ‘Go(o)d in Iris Murdoch’, First Things, February 1995 http://www. firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3997 Kelloway, Kate, Review of Jackson’s Dilemma, Observer (1 October 1995), 16 Mustafa, Kırca and Şule Okuroğlu eds., Iris Murdoch and her Work: Critical Essays, (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2010) Lazenby, Donna J., A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) Leeson, Miles, Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (London: Continuum, 2010) Leeson, Miles, ed., Incest in Contemporary Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018) Leeson, Miles ed., Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (Devizes: Sabrestorm, 2019) Lovibond, Sabina, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2011) McKay, Sheena, ‘A Fabulous Storyteller’, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, ed. by Yozo Muroya and Paul Hullah (Okayama: University Education Press, 1998), 56–68 Martin, Priscilla and Anne Rowe, Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave, 2010) Mattheew, Minnie, ‘The Sea, The Sea: A Reading in the Light of the Bhagavad Gita’, in Kırca and Okuroğlu (2010), 139–48 Mole, Christopher, ‘Attention, Self and The Sovereignty of Good’, in Rowe (2007), 72–84 Morgan, David, With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (Kingston: Kingston University Press, 2010) Nicol, Bran, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Nityanandam, Indira, ‘An Indian Reading of Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good’, in Kırca and Okuroğlu (2010), 149–54 Osborn, Pamela, ‘“A Story about a Man”: The Demythologised Christ in the Novels of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White’, in Rowe and Horner (2010), 156–67 Oulton, Lucy, ‘Loving by Instinct: Environmental Ethics in Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good and Nuns and Soldiers’, Études britanniques contemporaines, 59 (2020)

 REFERENCES 

211

Oulton, Lucy, ‘Nature and the Environment’ in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 453–467 Pachau, Margaret L., Construction of Good and Evil in Iris Murdoch’s Discourse (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007) Panizza, Silvia Caprioglio and Mark Hopwood, eds., The Murdochian Mind, Routledge Philosophical Minds (London: Routledge, 2022) Panizza, Silvia Caprioglio, The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil (London: Routledge, 2022) Plant, Bob, ‘Ethics Without Exit: Levinas and Murdoch’, Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003a), 456–70 Purton, Valerie, An Iris Murdoch Chronology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Ramanathan, Saguna, Iris Murdoch: Figures of Good (London: Macmillan, 1990) Ramanathan, Saguna, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Deconstructive Theology’, in Rowe (2007), 35–44 Read, Daniel, Degrees of Evil in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction and Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) Roberts, Simone M.F., and Alison Scott-Baumann, eds., Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination (North Carolina: Macfarland Press, 2010) Rowe, Anne, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2002) Rowe, Anne, ed., Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Rowe, Anne, ‘“The best moralists are the most satanic”: Iris Murdoch – On Art and Life’, in Browning (2018), 21–42 Rowe, Anne, Iris Murdoch, Writers and Their Work Series (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019) Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner, eds., Iris Murdoch and Morality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner, eds., Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Schaumburger, Nancy E., ‘The Conversion of Hilary Burde in A Word Child’, Iris Murdoch Newsletter, 6 (Summer 1992), 3–4 Seale, Carey, ‘The Maze of Murdoch’, review of Iris Murdoch: A Life, Yale Review of Books, 4:3 (2001), http:/www.yale.edu/yrb/fall01/review07.htm Seidler, Victor Jeleniewski, ‘Murdoch and Jewish thought’, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 409–37 Smith, Mick, ‘Worldly In(Difference) and Ecological Ethics: Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas’, Environmental Ethics, 29.1 (2007a), 23–42 Spear, Hilda D., Iris Murdoch 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Tabensky, Pedro, ed., The Positive Functions of Evil (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) Vice, Samantha, ‘The Ethics of Self-Concern’, in Rowe (2007), 60–71 White, Frances, ‘“Art is for life’s sake ... or else it is worthless”: the Innovatory Influence of Iris Murdoch’, in Kırca and Okuroğlu (2010a), 27–40

212 

REFERENCES

White, Frances, ‘Iris Murdoch and Hannah Arendt: Two Women in Dark Times’, in Roberts and Scott-Baumann (2010b), 3–33 White, Frances, ‘Jackson’s Dilemma and “The Responsible Life of the Imagination”’, in Rowe and Horner (2010c), 126–38 White, Frances, ‘“The world is just a transit camp”: Diaspora in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch’, Iris Murdoch Review, 2 (2010d), 6–13 White, Frances, ‘Murdoch’s Dilemma: Philosophy, Literature and the Holocaust’, in Araújo and Vieira (2011), 89–101 White, Frances, ‘Post-Christian Martyrdom and the Murdochian chorus: The One Alone on the margins of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral’, in Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts, Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 177–191 White, Frances, Becoming Iris Murdoch (Kingston: Kingston University Press, 2014) White, Frances, ‘How Iris Murdoch can change your life’, in Panizza and Hopwood (2022), 94–107 White, Frances, ‘Anti-Nausea: Iris Murdoch and the Natural Goodness of the Natural World’, Études britanniques contemporaines, 59 (2020) Widdows, Heather, ‘Murdochian Evil and Striving to be Good’, The Positive Functions of Evil in Tabensky (2009), 81–97 Wilson, A.N., Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003)

Other Works Adamson, Jane, Richard Friedman and David Parker, eds., Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998) Adamson, Jane, ‘Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral Philosophy’, in Adamson, Friedman and Parker (1998), 84–112 Arendt, Hannah, ‘Heidegger at Eighty’, Heidegger and Modern Philosophy Critical Essays, ed. by Michael Murray, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 293–303 Auden, W.H., Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 (London: Faber & Faber, 1966) Baron, Marcia, ‘Remorse and Agent-regret’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XIII (1988), 259–81 Bartov, Omer, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Hunting Nazis and Losing Reality’, New Statesman, (19 February 1988), 16–17 Baudrillard, Jean, The Illusion of the End (1992), trans. by Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994)

 REFERENCES 

213

Bernasconi, Robert and David Wood, eds., The Provocation of Levinas (London: Routledge, 1988) Blond, Phillip, ed., Post-secular philosophy: between philosophy and theology (London: Routledge, 1998) Bourgeaud, Michael and Caroline Cox,’ “The Most Dreadful Sentiment”: A Sociological Commentary’, in Cox (1999), 135–44 Cairns, Douglas L., ‘Representations of Remorse and Reparation Classical Greece’, in Cox (1999), 171–8 Canetti, Elias, Party in the Blitz (London: Harvill Press, 2005) Caputo, John D., and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999a) Caputo, John, and Michael J. Scanlon, ‘Apology for the Impossible: Religion and Postmodernism’, in Caputo and Scanlon (1999b), 1–19 Caruth, Cathy, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995) Cerney, Mary S., ‘“If Only …” Remorse in Grief Therapy’, in Stern (1989), 235–48 Collini, Stefan, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Conradi, Peter J., Family Business: A Memoir (Bridgend: Seren Books 2019) Conradi, Peter J., ‘Fox on the Loose’, review of Party in the Blitz by Elias Canetti, the Guardian, Saturday 7 July 2005 Cordner, Christopher, Ethical Encounter: The Depth of Moral Meaning (London and New York: Palgrave, 2002) Cox, Murray, ed., Remorse and Reparation (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publications, 1999) Cunningham, Valentine, Reading After Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) Cupitt, Don, After God: The Future of Religion (London: Phoenix, 1997) Deleuze, Gilles, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by Robert Hurley (1970); (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988) Derrida, Jacques, ‘Heidegger’s Silence’, Excerpts from a talk given on 5 February 1988 at a colloquium in Heidelberg, ‘Heidegger—Portée philosophique et politique de sa pensée’, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, ed. by, Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, trans. by Lisa Harries (1988); (New York: Paragon House, 1990) Derrida, Jacques, On the Name, trans. by David Wood, John P. Leavey and Ian McLeod, ed. by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) Des Pres, Terrence, ‘Holocaust Laughter?’, Writing and the Holocaust ed. by Berel Lang (London and New York: Holmes and Meier, 1998), 216–33 Dickinson, Emily, The Complete Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 365 ̇ Dilman, Ilham, ‘Shame, Guilt and Remorse’, Philosophical Investigations, 22 (1999), 312–29 Dublin, James, ‘Remorse as Mental Dyspepsia’, in Stern (1989), 161–74

214 

REFERENCES

Eaglestone, Robert, ‘From behind the Bars of Quotation Marks: Emmanuel Levinas’s (Non)-Representation of the Holocaust’, in Leak and George Paizis (2000), 97–108 Eliot, T.S., Collected Poems 1905–1935 (London: Faber & Faber, 1936) Eliot, T.S., The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1969) Farias, Victor, Heidegger et le nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987) Firman, John, and Ann Gila, Psychosynthesis: A Psychology of the Spirit (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002) Foot, M.R.D., Memories of an S.O.E Historian (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2008) Friedländer, Saul, ‘Afterword: the Shoah between Memory and History’, in Sicher (1998), 345–357 Gaita, Raimond, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) Gibson, Andrew, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) Gilligan, James, ‘The Agenbite of Inwit, or, The Varieties of Moral Experience’, in Cox (1999), 33–47 Gorelick, Kenneth, ‘Wielder of Many Swords: Remorse and its Transmutations’, Psychotherapy Patient, 5 (1989), 219–234 Gubar, Susan, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003) Haar, Michael, ‘Nietzsche and the Metamorphosis of the Divine’, in Blond (1998), 157–176 Hartman, Geoffrey, ‘On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies’, New Literary History, 26:3 (1995), 537–63 Hederman, Mark Patrick, The Haunted Inkwell: Art and our Future (Dublin: Columba Press, 2001) Hoffman, Eva, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) Hoyt, M.F., ‘Concerning Remorse: With Special Attention to its Defensive Function’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 11 (1983), 435–444 Jacobsen, Bjarne and Alice Theilgard, ‘Kierkegaard and Remorse: Remorse as an Existentialist Concern’, in Cox (1999), 189–99 Jain, Devaki, The Brass Notebook: A Memoir (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books, 2020) James, Henry, The Wings of the Dove (1902): (London: Penguin Classics, 2008) Janicaud, Dominique, ed., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: the French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000) Kant, Immanuel, Practical Philosophy, in Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Writings Vol. 48, ed. by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

 REFERENCES 

215

Kearney, Richard, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004) Kenny, Anthony, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Kingsley, Jessica, introductory ‘Publisher’s Note’ in Cox (1999), 7–8 Krishnan, Nikhil, A Terrible Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900–1960 (London: Profile Books, 2023) LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2001) Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, Heidegger, Art and Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) Lang, Berel, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1988) Langer, Lawrence L., ed., The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975) Larkin, Philip, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985, ed. by Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber & Faber, 1992) Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923) Leader, Zachary, ed., On Modern British Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Leak, Andrew and George Paizis, eds., The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable (London: Macmillan Press, 2000) Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage International, 1988) Levinas, Emmanuel, De’Existence à l’Existant (Paris: Editions de la Revue Fontaine, 1947) Levinas, Emmanuel, En Découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: J.Vrin, 1949) Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise Than Being: or, Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1981) Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘Useless Suffering’, trans. by Richard Cohen, The Provocation of Levinas, ed. by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 56–67 Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘As if Consenting to Horror’, trans. by Paula Wissing, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989), 485–8 Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘Meaning and Sense’, Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 75–107 Levinas, Emmanuel, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. by Annette Aronowicz, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)

216 

REFERENCES

Luckhurst, Roger, ‘Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis and trauma theory’, in Waugh (2006), 497–507 Ludz, Ursula, ed., Letters 1925–1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, trans. by Andrew Shields (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004) McGrath, Alister E., Christian Theology: An Introduction 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell,1997) Marion, Jean-Luc, God without being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) Midgley, Mary, The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir (London & New  York: Routledge, 2005) Mitchell, Juliet, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008) Murray, Martin, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978) Neske, Günther and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, trans. by Lisa Harries (1988); (New York: Paragon House, 1990) Nietzsche, Frederick, The Will to Power: In Science, Nature, Society and Art, trans. by Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollindale (London: Vintage Books 1968) Ott, Hugo, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life trans. by Allan Blunden (London: HarperCollins, 1993) Ozick, Cynthia, Roundtable Discussion in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. by Berel Lang (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 277–84 Painter, Rebecca M., ‘Fiction and the Growth of Moral Consciousness’, in Tymieniecka (2006), 235–58 Parker, Ian, Psychoanalytic Culture: Psychoanalytic Discourse in Western Society (London: Sage, 1997) Plant, Bob, ‘Ethics Without Exit: Levinas and Murdoch’, Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003b), 456–70 Powell, Anthony, Books do Furnish a Room, A Dance to the Music of Time: Volume 10 (1971); (London: Mandarin, 1997) Proeve, Michael, Remorse: its description and its interpersonal effects, 2001, University of South Australia http://arrow.unisa.edu.au:8081/1959.8/25016 Proeve, Michael, and Steven Tudor, Remorse: Psychological and Jurisprudential Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Richardson, Alan and John Bowden, eds., A New Dictionary of Christian Theology (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1983) Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History & Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004) Rosen, Norma, ‘The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery’ Midstream 33.4 (1987), 56–9 Rosenfeld, Alvin H., A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980)

 REFERENCES 

217

Rosthal, Robert, ‘Moral Weakness and Remorse’, Mind, New Series, 76:304 (October 1967), 576–9 Safranski, Rüdiger, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. By Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, ‘Un-doing: Social Suffering and the Politics of Remorse’, in Cox (1999), 145–70 Shafranske, Edward P., ‘The Significance of Remorse in Psychotherapy’, in Stern (1989), 19–34 Schopenhauer, A., On the Basis of Morality (1840), trans. by E.F.J.  Payne (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) Schwarz, Daniel, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2000) Seeskin, Kenneth, ‘Coming to terms with failure: A Philosophical Dilemma’, in Lang, (1988), 110–121 Sheehan, Thomas, ‘Heidegger and the Nazis’, New York Review, (16 June 1988), 38–47 Sicher, Efraim, ed., Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998) Silbergleid, Robin, ‘“Treblinka, A Rather Musical Word”: Carole Maso’s Post-­ Holocaust Narrative’, Modern Fiction Studies, 53:1 (Spring 2007), 12 Smith, Mick, ‘Worldly In(Difference) and Ecological Ethics: Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas’, Environmental Ethics, 29.1 (2007b), 23–42 Spinoza, Baruch de, Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, Spinoza: Complete Works, trans. by Samuel Shirley, ed. by Michael L.  Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002) Steiner, George, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1977) Steiner, George, Heidegger, 2nd edn (London: Fontana, 1992) Stern, E. Mark, ed., Psychotherapy and the Remorseful Patient (New York: Haworth Press, 1989) Thomas, Alan, ‘Remorse and Reparation: A Philosophical Analysis’, in Cox (1999), 127–133 Thompson, William Irwin, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin 1916 (Massachusetts: Lindisfarne Press, 1967) Tudor, Steven, Compassion and Remorse: Acknowledging the Suffering Other (Leuven: Peeters, 2001) Tymieniecka, Anna Theresa, ed., Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Five: The Creative Logos. Aesthetic Ciphering in Fine Arts, Literature and Aesthetics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006) Verrier, Nancy Newton, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child (Baltimore: Gateway Press Inc., 1996) Vice, Sue, Holocaust Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) Warnock, Mary, Mary Warnock: A Memoir—People and Places (London: Duckworth, 2000)

218 

REFERENCES

Warnock, Mary, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics (London: Duckbacks, 2001) Waugh, Patricia, ed., Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Weil, Simone, First and Last Notebooks, trans. by Richard Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970): French editions, Cahiers (1970) and La Connaissance surnaturelle (1950) Weil, Simone, Waiting on God, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London: Collins, 1977): French edition, Attente de Dieu (1950) Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge, 2002): French edition, La pesanteur et la grâce (1947) White, Stephen Ross, Don Cupitt and the Future of Christian Doctrine (London: SCM, 1994 Whitehead, Anne, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) Wilkes, Kathleen V., ‘The Good Man and the Good for Man in Aristotle’s Ethics’, Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. by Amélie Rorty (California: University of California Press, 1992), 341–57 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1974) Wolfreys, Julian, ‘Trauma, Testimony, Criticism: Witnessing, Memory and Responsibility’, Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century, ed. by Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 126–148 Wolin, Richard, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) Zoch, L.N., ‘Remorse and Regret: A Reply to Phillips and Price’, Analysis (1986), 54–57

Index1

A Adamson, Jane, 7 Adorno, Theodor, 151 Alford, C. Fred, 167, 168 Antonaccio, Maria, 1, 2, 5, 77, 78n5, 78n6, 173 Arendt, Hannah, 153, 153n4, 157n9, 176–178, 176n19, 178n22, 180–181, 180n24 Aristotle, 173 Askew, Reginald, 94n20

Boulton, Marjorie, 203 Bove, Cheryl, 92n19, 204 Bowden, John, 87n16 Broackes, Justin, 24n23, 148n1 Bronzino, Agnolo, 58, 58n12, 59 Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, 58 Browning, Gary, 2, 3, 6, 19, 202, 204 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 188, 191 Burnham, Jonathan, 172 Byatt, A.S., 18n17, 121

B Baron, Marcia, 14 Barrows, John, 205 Bartov, Omer, 29 Baudrillard, Jean, 3, 186 Bayley, John, 2, 177n21, 185 Blond, Phillip, 138n14 Blum, Lawrence, 6 Book of Common Prayer, 75

C Cairns, Douglas L., 42 Camus, Albert, 18 The Outsider, 18 Canetti, Elias, 201 Caputo, John. D., 26n25 Carpenter, Gary, 192 Caruth, Cathy, 110n1, 112 Célan, Paul, 151, 180

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. White, Iris Murdoch and Remorse, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8

219

220 

INDEX

Cerney, Mary S., 126 Coetzee, J.M., 18 Disgrace, 18 Collini, Stefan, 5, 6 Conrad, Joseph, 4, 19, 41, 42 Lord Jim, 19 Conradi, Peter J., 2, 5–7, 11, 18n17, 19n18, 25, 48, 55, 96, 98, 101n27, 120, 121n4, 121n5, 133, 148, 148n1, 149, 172, 185, 201, 202, 205 Cordner, Christopher, 5, 16, 39, 44, 45n5, 70 Cox, Murray, 4, 10, 16, 18, 22, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 61, 70, 71, 109, 143, 206 Cunningham, Valentine, 23, 23n22, 24, 190 Cupitt, Don, 5, 79 D Deleuze, Gilles, 65n15 Derrida, Jacques, 26, 173–175, 175n18 On the Name, 26 Des Pres, Terrence, 155n7 Diamond, Cora, 5 Dickens, Charles, 25 Dickinson, Emily, 18, 199, 207 ̇ Dilman, Ilham, 203 Dipple, Elizabeth, 24, 200 Doi, Takeo, 10 Dooley, Gillian, 192, 193 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 4, 12n8, 41, 63n13, 84 Crime and Punishment, 12n8, 175 Notes from Underground, 84 Dublin, James, 114 Düringer, Eva-Maria, 18n17, 19

E Eaglestone, Robert, 168 Eliot, George, 4 Eliot, T.S., 49, 54, 54n10, 55, 88–90, 94, 193 Four Quartets, 54, 54n10, 88n18 Murder in the Cathedral, 54n10, 193 Eyre, Richard, 2 F Farias, Victor, 178 Fiddes, Paul, 1, 5 Foot, M.R.D., 44, 201, 202 Foot, Philippa, 202 Fraenkel, Eduard, 154n6 Freud, Sigmund, 87n17, 112, 112n3 Friedländer, Saul, 186 G Gaita, Raimond, 5, 16, 16n14, 17, 21, 22, 25, 39–42, 44, 45n5, 61, 65, 66, 68, 70, 149, 187 Gamwell, Franklin, 5 Gibson, Andrew, 6 Gillard, David, 188, 193 Gilligan, James, 43, 206 Gordon, David J., 20, 21, 24 Gorelick, Kenneth, 4 Griffin, Gabriele, 18 Gruber, Ruth Ellen, 162 Gubar, Susan, 151 H Haar, Michael, 138n14 Hague, Angela, 31 Hall, Peter, 151 Hardy, Robert, 81, 95, 95n21, 100, 103, 104, 122n6, 123 Hartman, Geoffrey, 110, 110n1

 INDEX 

Hauerwas, Stanley, 5, 78n5, 78n6 Hawkins, Peter S., 80, 81, 88n18, 91, 94 Hederman, Mark Patrick, 4, 5, 7, 170 Hegel, G.W.F., 155, 173 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 10, 24, 29, 30, 143, 147–181, 186, 188, 201 Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), 30, 171, 172, 176, 181 Heusel, Barbara Stevens, 121n5 Hicks, David, 38n1, 41n4 Hitler, Adolf, 60, 61, 148, 149, 153, 154, 160, 163, 169, 174, 175, 177, 181 Mein Kampf, 171 Hoffman, Eva, 148, 154, 162–168 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 157, 181 Horner, Avril, 2, 26, 40n3, 78, 204, 205 Hoyt, M.F., 115 Hume, David, 173 J Jacobsen, Bjarne, 17, 43 Jain, Devaki, 201 James, Henry, 4, 41 The Wings of the Dove, 41, 41n4 James Tait Memorial Prize, 27 Jaspers, Karl, 158, 176, 176n19 Jung, Carl, 123 K Kafka, Franz, 200 Kant, Immanuel, 39, 39n2, 65n15, 76, 173 Kearney, Richard, 165, 166 Kelloway, Kate, 200 Kenny, Anthony, 155 Kerr, Fergus, 5 Kettering, Emil, 170n16, 175n18

221

Kierkegaard, Søren, 13n10, 17, 39, 187 Krishnan, Nikhil, 170 L Lacan, Jacques, 112, 112n3 LaCapra, Dominick, 30, 110n1, 162n11, 170n16 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 175n18 Lang, Berel, 155n7, 161, 162 Langer, Lawrence L., 151 Larkin, Philip, 185, 186 Lawrence, D.H., 104, 104n31 Lawrence, T.E., 200 Leak, Andrew, 168 Levi, Primo, 61 Levinas, Emmanuel, 29, 45, 110, 147, 148, 153, 167, 168, 170, 171 Locke, John, 173 Lovibond, Sabina, 5, 18, 19 Luckhurst, Roger, 110–112, 110n2 Ludz, Ursula, 157n9 M Mackenzie, C. MacKinnon, Donald, 202 Man Booker Prize, 27 Martin, Priscilla, 203, 205 Marx, Karl, 173 Maso, Carole, 164 McEwan, Ian, 4, 18 Atonement, 4, 18 McGrath, Alister E., 5, 79n7, 79n9 McKay, Sheena, 4 Midgley, Mary, 201 Mill, John Stuart, 173 Mitchell, Juliet, 137 Morgan, David, 2, 30, 97, 143, 203 Mulhall, Stephen, 5

222 

INDEX

Murdoch, Iris, 1–31, 37–48, 75–82, 109–113, 147–155, 172–181, 185–191 novels; An Accidental Man, 10, 15n11, 15n12, 30, 113, 133, 154, 189, 190, 192; The Bell, 9, 13, 19, 82n15, 112; The Black Prince, 17, 27, 28, 48–49, 64n14, 97n24, 128, 203; The Book and the Brotherhood, 9–11, 25, 28, 50, 51, 75–106, 112, 113, 154; Bruno’s Dream, 133; A Fairly Honourable Defeat, 10, 47, 97n24, 134, 143, 155, 167; The Flight from the Enchanter, 6, 19, 154n5; The Good Apprentice, 4, 9, 11, 13, 18, 24, 28, 40, 42, 45, 46, 52, 70, 71, 95, 97n24, 98, 100, 109–144, 154, 160; The Green Knight, 9, 13, 15n11, 28, 47, 95n21, 109–144, 179; Henry and Cato, 15, 16, 97n24, 133; The Italian Girl, 97n24, 133; Jackson’s Dilemma, 10, 30, 113, 147–181, 185, 199–201, 200n1; The Message to the Planet, 4, 9, 11, 17, 29, 50, 112, 147–181; The Nice and the Good, 14, 23–25, 37–71, 154, 164, 167, 200; Nuns and Soldiers, 15n11, 15n13, 81, 121n5, 129, 154; The Philosopher’s Pupil, 9, 11, 24, 25, 37, 42, 95n21, 97n24, 98, 112, 126, 133, 157, 207; The Sea, The Sea, 13, 15n11, 27, 28, 132; A Severed Head, 21n21, 66n16, 97n24, 122n6, 133; The Time of the Angels, 66n16, 82n15, 95n21, 135, 154, 176; Under

the Net, 22, 157; A Word Child, 4, 9, 11, 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 40, 46–48, 51–55, 54n11, 60, 63n13, 70, 71, 75–106, 112, 119, 128, 129, 142, 143, 160, 192 other works; Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being, 147–181; interviews, 8, 80n13, 81n14, 204; Journals, 201, 202; letters, 2, 23, 30, 56, 124, 172, 202; The One Alone (radio play), 24, 30, 31, 185–196 philosophy; Existentialists and Mystics, 7, 8, 18n17, 19–22, 19n18, 21n21, 30, 37–39, 41, 46, 47n7, 50, 50n9, 51, 54n10, 62, 76n3, 78, 78n5, 79, 87n17, 91, 92n19, 103n29, 111, 126n8, 140, 148, 149, 153, 165, 166, 168, 172, 186, 187, 194, 203; ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,’ 21, 92n19, 126n8; ‘A House of Theory,’ 5; ‘The Idea of Perfection, 140; ‘Knowing the Void,’ 19n18; Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 4, 8, 11, 12, 19, 21n21, 26, 27, 29, 30, 38, 39, 39n2, 41, 43, 44, 47–52, 50n9, 54n10, 61, 64n14, 71, 76, 78, 78n4, 79, 79n8, 80n11, 86, 91–93, 98, 101, 102, 102n28, 106, 111, 117, 123, 132, 135, 138, 143, 149, 151, 153, 158, 159n10, 160, 163, 169, 174, 175, 186–189, 191, 192; ‘On “God” and “Good,”’, 78; Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 8, 71, 172; The Sovereignty of Good, 19, 153, 186, 194

 INDEX 

N Neske, Günther, 170n16 Nicol, Bran, 10, 26, 48, 63, 202 Nietzsche, Frederick, 17, 39, 65, 65n15, 135, 138, 138n14, 174 Nussbaum, Martha, 5, 7 O Orwell, George, 193 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 193 Ott, Hugo, 171, 172 Ozick, Cynthia, 162 P Painter, Rebecca M., 47n8 Paizis, George, 168 Panizza, Silvia Caprioglio, 18n17 Parker, Ian, 114 Plato, 20, 21, 39, 39n2, 50n9, 173, 186 Powell, Anthony, 124 A Dance to the Music of Time, 124 Proeve, Michael, 11n5, 13n10, 16, 17n15, 17n16, 18, 39, 70, 115, 165 Proust, Marcel, 116, 129, 130n9 A la recherche du temps perdu, 129 Purton, Valerie, 201–203, 205 R Ramanathan, Saguna, 23, 50, 100, 121n5 Richardson, Alan, 87n16 Ricoeur, Paul, 29, 148, 165, 166, 170, 171 Rosenfeld, Alvin H., 148n2, 170n15 Rossuet, David, 151

223

Rosthal, Robert, 13n10 Rowe, Anne, 2, 6, 22, 23, 26, 58, 59, 75, 78, 81, 82, 94, 100n26, 134, 200–205 Ryle, Gilbert, 170 S Safranski, Rüdiger, 157, 158 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 15, 71, 172, 174 Scanlon, Michael J., 26n25 Scharansky, Natan, 188, 191 Schaumburger, Nancy E., 31 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 4 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 38, 38n1, 39 On the Basis of Morality, 38 Schwarz, Daniel, 29, 149, 150, 164 Schweiker, William, 5, 77, 78n5, 78n6, 173 Seale, Carey, 5 Seeskin, Kenneth, 161 Setiya, Keiran, 5 Shafranske, Edward, P., 118 Shakespeare, William, 4, 19, 41, 42, 133, 143, 201 Macbeth, 19, 38, 118 Othello, 200, 201 The Tempest, 133, 143 A Winter’s Tale, 133 Sheehan, Thomas, 154n6 Sicher, Efraim, 160, 165 Silbergleid, Robin, 29, 150, 151, 153, 164 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 137, 142 Smith, Adam, 10 Spear, Hilda D., 134, 200n1, 206 Spinoza, Baruch de, 17, 65, 65n15 Steiner, Franz Baermann, 149, 202

224 

INDEX

Steiner, George, 18n17, 152, 153, 169, 170, 172, 175n18 Stern, E. Mark, 16, 39, 44, 114, 118, 126 T Taylor, Charles, 5 Theilgard, Alice, 17 Thomas, Alan, 5, 16n14, 44–46, 65, 100, 109, 118–120, 122–126, 123n7, 130, 143 Thompson, Frank, 124, 149 Thompson, William Irwin, 7 Titian, 201 The Flaying of Marsyas, 201 Tolstoy, Leo, 204 Tracy, David, 5, 77 Trigg, Roger, 14 Tudor, Steven, 13n9, 16–18, 17n15, 17n16, 39, 44, 53, 65, 65n15, 70, 165 Tymieniecka, Anna Teresa, 47n8 U United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 59, 149, 154n5

V Verrier, Nancy Newton, 132, 136n13, 141 Vice, Samantha, 130n10 Vice, Sue, 151 W Wallenburg, Raoul, 188, 191 Warnock, Mary, 15, 201 Weil, Simone, 6, 18–22, 18n17, 19n18, 27, 28, 77, 83, 84, 98, 119, 121, 125 Waiting on God, 83 Whitehead, Anne, 23, 29, 110, 111, 142 Williams, Rowan, 5 Wilson, A.N., 2, 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 178, 181, 186 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 186 Wolfreys, Julian, 111, 112, 114 Wolin, Richard, 170n16 Woolf, Virginia, 147 Z Zoch, L.N., 14