Iris Murdoch and Morality

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Iris Murdoch and Morality

10.1057/9780230277229 - Iris Murdoch and Morality, Edited by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner

Also by Anne Rowe IRIS MURDOCH: A Reassessment (editor)

THE VISUAL ARTS AND THE NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH

Also by Avril Horner BODY MATTERS: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality (co-edited with Angela Keane) DAPHNE DU MAURIER: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (with Sue Zlosnik) EUROPEAN GOTHIC: A Spirited Exchange, 1760–1960 (editor) GOTHIC AND THE COMIC TURN (with Sue Zlosnik) LANDSCAPES OF DESIRE: Metaphors in Modern Women’s Fiction (with Sue Zlosnik) LE GOTHIC: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America (co-edited with Sue Zlosnik)



SACRED SPACE, BELOVED CITY: Iris Murdoch’s London (with Cheryl Bove)

Iris Murdoch and Morality Anne Rowe and

Avril Horner



Edited by

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Anne Rowe & Avril Horner 2010 Individual chapters © contributors 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13 978–0–230–22445–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For Iestyn Gareth Rowe, Samuel Kosey Horner and Felix Matthew Horner




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Acknowledgements

ix

Notes on Contributors

x

Notes on References and Abbreviations Introduction: Art, Morals and ‘The Discovery of Reality’ Anne Rowe and Avril Horner

xiii 1

Part I Morality and the Novel 1 Murdoch’s Mannered Realism: Metafiction, Morality and the Post-War Novel Bran Nicol

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2 The Preacher’s Tone: Murdoch’s Mentors and Moralists Priscilla Martin

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3 Stories, Rituals and Healers in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction Rob Hardy

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4 Laughing at Something Tragic: Murdoch as Anti-Moralist Peter J. Conradi

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5 ‘Refinements of Evil’: Iris Murdoch and the Gothic Avril Horner

70

Part II A Moral Union: Philosophy and Literature 6 Iris Murdoch, the Ethical Turn and Literary Value Simon Haines

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7 Murdoch’s Fictional Philosophers: What They Say and What They Show Scott H. Moore

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8 Death and Goodness: Bruno’s Dream and ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’ Mark Luprecht

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Contents

viii Contents

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Part III Morality without God: Iris Murdoch’s Secular Theology 10 ‘The Dream that does not Cease to Haunt us’: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness Anne Rowe

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11 ‘A Story about a Man’: The Demythologized Christ in the Novels of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White Pamela Osborn

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12 Do not Seek God outside your own Soul: Buddhism in The Green Knight Tammy Grimshaw

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13 The Moral Fate of Fictive Persons: On Iris Murdoch’s Humanism William Schweiker

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Index

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9 Jackson’s Dilemma and ‘The Responsible Life of the Imagination’ Frances White

The editors would like to thank Frances White for her assistance with editing and proof-reading and for helping with research for the introduction to this volume. Pamela Osborn also provided invaluable editorial help. John Ibbett gave generously of his time for consultation and advice. Extracts from Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals by Iris Murdoch, published by Chatto and Windus, are reprinted by permission of the Random House Group. US rights to use extracts from these titles were granted by Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. We are also grateful to Paula Kennedy of Palgrave Macmillan for her constant encouragement and support.

ix



Acknowledgements

Peter J. Conradi has been since 1997 Emeritus Professor of English at Kingston University and Honorary Research Fellow at University College, London. He is author of The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (1986; third edition 2001) and editor of Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (by Iris Murdoch). He is the author of Iris Murdoch: A Life, the authorized biography of Iris Murdoch, published in 2001. He is adviser to the Iris Murdoch Review to which he contributes articles and reviews. He has also written books on John Fowles, Angus Wilson and Dostoevsky. His At The Bright Hem of God: Radnorshire Pastoral was published in 2009 and his edition of Murdoch’s letters and a journal A Writer at War: Iris Murdoch 1939–45 is forthcoming in 2010. Tammy Grimshaw is a freelance writer who lives near Cordoba, Spain. She is the author of several literary publications, including Sexuality, Gender, and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (2005). She has also written recent articles for Modern Fiction Studies, The Explicator and The Literary Encyclopedia. Simon Haines is Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he is also Deputy Director of the International Centre for Human Values. He was formerly Head of the School of Humanities at the Australian National University. His publications include Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau: Romantic Souls, Realist Lives (Palgrave 2005) and Shelley’s Poetry: The Divided Self (Macmillan 1997) as well as articles and book chapters on Romantic and Victorian literature and on literature and ethics. His current projects include a sequel volume on the modern self in poetry and philosophy. Rob Hardy practised as a social worker in a psychiatric hospital and mental health area team before moving into further education. His most recent full-time post was Assistant Principal, Higher Education, at the Bournemouth and Poole College. He now teaches English part-time for the Open University. x




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Avril Horner is Emeritus Professor of English at Kingston University, London. She has co-authored three books with Sue Zlosnik, the most recent of which is Gothic and the Comic Turn (Palgrave 2005), as well as numerous articles and essays. They also co-edited Le Gothic: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America (Palgrave 2008) and have an edition of E.S. Barrett’s The Heroine in press. She is the editor of European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760–1960 (2002) and is currently writing, with Janet Beer, a book on Edith Wharton’s late fiction. She and Sue Zlosnik were Co-Presidents of the International Gothic Association, 2005–09. Mark Luprecht is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of books exploring the common intellectual heritage of Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler, and the last painting of Paul Klee in its intellectual setting. He is currently researching the circle surrounding Iris Murdoch and Elias Canetti. Priscilla Martin teaches English and classics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has also taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, Colorado, California, Hawaii, Washington and London. She is the author of Piers Plowman: The Field and the Tower and Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives and Amazons, and has also published on the Gawain Poet, Tyndale, Shakespeare and modern novelists. She is currently working on Literary Lives: Iris Murdoch with Anne Rowe for publication in 2010. Scott H. Moore is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Great Texts and Director of the Great Texts Program in the Honors College at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, USA. He is the author of The Limits of Liberal Democracy: Politics and Religion at the End of Modernity (IVP Academic) and is currently writing a book on Iris Murdoch’s ‘devilish metaphysics as a guide to morals’. Bran Nicol is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Portsmouth. His publications include The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (2009), Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (2nd edition: Palgrave, 2004), D.M. Thomas (2004) and Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader (2002). Pamela Osborn was awarded a PhD Studentship by Kingston University, in association with The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, in 2008. She gave a paper at the 2008 International Iris Murdoch Conference




xii Notes on Contributors

Anne Rowe is Director of the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University. She is the author of The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (2002), editor of Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (2006) and co-author with Cheryl Bove of Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (2008). She was Editor of the Iris Murdoch News Letter 1993–2007, and is now Lead Editor of the Iris Murdoch Review. She is currently working on Literary Lives: Iris Murdoch with Priscilla Martin for publication in 2010. William Schweiker is the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago where he is also the Director of the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion. Professor Schweiker is the author of many books, including Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (2004), and most recently, with David Klemm, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay in Theological Humanism (2008). He also contributed to and edited, with Maria Antonaccio, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (1996). Frances White is a research student at Kingston University, London, writing a thesis on remorse in the philosophy and fiction of Iris Murdoch. She is Assistant Editor of the Iris Murdoch Review and Assistant Director of the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies. She has published essays in the Iris Murdoch Review and the Literary Encyclopaedia Online. ‘ “The World is just a Transit Camp”: Diaspora in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch’ was awarded the CWWN Postgraduate Prize for 2008, and ‘Two Women in Dark Times: Iris Murdoch and Hannah Arendt’ is published in Iris Murdoch’s Scenes: An Anthology of Moral Imagination, ed. Simone Roberts (2009).



entitled ‘Redemptive Failure in The Unicorn’ and is currently researching mourning and bereavement in Murdoch’s novels.

References to the following texts refer to the editions indicated and are abbreviated as follows: Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997): EM. Peter J. Conradi, The Saint and The Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, 3rd edition (London: Harper Collins, 2001): SA. Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: Harper Collins 2001): IMAL. Gillian Dooley, From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003): TCHF. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992): MGM. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970): SG. Anne Rowe, ed., Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (London: Palgrave, 2007): IMAR. The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University is abbreviated as CIMS. Iris Murdoch’s novels are fully referenced at the first mention in each chapter. Thereafter page numbers appear in parentheses.

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Notes on References and Abbreviations




Introduction: Art, Morals and ‘The Discovery of Reality’

Art and morals are, with certain provisos [. . .] one. (EM, p. 215) Iris Murdoch’s insistence on the indissoluble link between art and morals is the underlying reason for the current renaissance in Murdoch studies. This volume is one of its progeny and illustrates the seriousness with which Iris Murdoch’s work is now being taken by moral philosophers, theorists of the novel, contemporary writers and theologians. Indeed her novels, literary theory, moral philosophy and theological beliefs are frequently referenced in ‘ethical turn’ criticism which has itself changed the face of literary criticism over the past ten years. Her work has sparked such interest because of her unique position as a working moral philosopher and practising novelist whose fiction tests and contests the moral stances to which she commits herself in her philosophical essays (despite the fact that she said repeatedly that she did not want philosophy to intrude into her fictional writing). Thus her novels do not function as mere illustrations of her moral philosophy but as meditations on, and counterpoints to, the positions she puts forward there. Her fears about the decline of religious faith in the West were not only related to the denial of a personal God (a position to which she herself subscribed), but also to an anxiety that a wholly secular society would no longer actively encourage quiet reflection on abstract matters such as truth, freedom, morality and the nature of goodness and evil. Her novels therefore offer themselves as a secular alternative ‘place’ for such moral reflection. Her passionate belief in the novel as a moral forum and her insistence that philosophers and theorists of language should not abandon the discussion and analysis of moral issues are just two of the reasons why her work became unfashionable during 1



Anne Rowe and Avril Horner


the years of high theory in the 1980s and 1990s, when the idea of literature having an ethical dimension was dismissed as soggy, old-fashioned, liberal-humanist thinking. Morality is at the centre of Murdoch’s thinking about the writing and reading of fiction simply because novels, by their very nature, reflect the ethical dilemmas of ordinary people in society. The novel is ‘close to ordinary life which is saturated with moral reflection’ (MGM, p. 89). Indeed, she understands the study of literature to be ‘the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture [. . .] since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations’ (EM, p. 326). Yet the novel’s moral status does not depend on authorial intent, because any novel about human beings and human behaviour will inevitably depict social and cultural relationships and explore moral values. ‘Good’ novels, however, also ‘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, pp. 89 and 97). For Murdoch, readers have responsibilities too, in distinguishing good art from mediocre or bad art: ‘the consumption of literature involves continual (usually instinctive) evaluation’ (MGM, p. 190). When what Murdoch calls the ‘co-operating pair’ that comprises writer and reader work in unison, so that the novel reveals a truth (however fragile and momentary) about the world and the reader, then the work of art contributes to that slow progression towards a state in which one perceives reality. For Murdoch reality is seeing the world stripped of the distorting veil of inner fantasy that destroys the moral sense. In this way she sees the ‘experience of the art of the novel as spiritual experience’ (EM, p. 282) – a broadening, challenging and, most importantly, humanizing experience of reading about those different from oneself that creates tolerance, sympathy, and just vision. This process is clearly not only beneficial to the moral well-being of individuals, but to society as a whole. Frances White’s chapter in this volume, ‘Jackson’s Dilemma and the “Responsible Life of the Imagination” ’, illustrates the ways in which Murdoch’s mature work broods deeply on the tragedies of the twentieth century and suggests deep soul-searching on Murdoch’s part as to how so many could be complicit with acts of great evil. White compares the unfinished manuscript of Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being, on which Murdoch was working shortly before her death, with her final novel and illustrates the ways in which both works reflect the author’s persistent wrestling with the nature of evil as manifested in the Holocaust. White demonstrates how Murdoch grappled with questions concerning the influence of philosophy on the moral life – such as whether



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good philosophy can be created by a morally culpable human being – and the problem of how writers can responsibly use the imagination following the collapse of confidence in the efficacy of language, liberal humanism and culture as civilizing forces. She suggests that these late works share George Steiner’s concern with the effect of the Holocaust on human consciousness and on the viability of art in an increasingly secular society. Murdoch’s moral position goes beyond the writer and the ordinary reader to make special demands of the literary critic. If the good writer must strive to portray the world and human beings truthfully and the reader must strive to see that truth, so must the good literary critic resist the seduction of fashionable theories that obscure or distort this essentially moral interaction. In her first novel, Under the Net (1954), which Peter Conradi rightly suggests is ‘decades ahead of its time’ in its concern with anxieties about art (SA, p. 41), Murdoch compares the artist with the saint – the man who generalizes with the man who particularizes. ‘All theorizing is flight’ says the good Hugo Belfounder, who understands that only by paying attention to what is ‘unutterably particular’ can one come close to the truth: ‘God is detail. It all lies close to your hand.’1 Murdoch disliked the imposition of theories on literary texts because she saw them as replacing affective responses to literature (she includes the ‘rousing of emotions’ in her definition of art [EM, p. 10]), and she resolutely championed the kind of writing that induced empathy in readers, which is, in itself, a moral affective response. In this sense she wanted to preserve certain aspects of the nineteenth-century realist tradition, both in the way novels were written and the way in which they were read: ‘any theory which cuts people off from the great literature of the past deprives them of a historical and moral education and a great deal of pleasure’ (EM, p. 25). She writes of her ‘absolute horror’ at the idea of putting theory into her own work and thinks that ‘critics are better off without any close-knit systematic background theory, scientific or philosophical’, arguing that they should ‘approach novels with an open-minded manner which does not exclude treating the tale as a “window into another world”, reacting to characters as if they were real people, making value judgements about them and about how their creator creates them’ (EM, p. 19). Such views were derided as curiously quaint when universities adopted a breathtaking range of theories (including structuralist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, new historicist, postcolonial and reader-response theories) in order to re-read literary texts during the 1980s and 1990s. While Murdoch fully understood why,





following the work of Derrida and Saussure, language itself came to be rigorously interrogated at this time, she saw such attacks on traditional fields of knowledge and understanding (including art) both as iconoclastic and as undermining our faith in a shared morality and in our responsibility to discern truth. She believed that the removal of the everyday referential qualities from language (the belief that ‘there is nothing outside the text’) would result in the loss of ‘old-fashioned and ordinary’ certainties, both experiential and moral (MGM, p. 194). The challenge now, as Murdoch saw it, was for writers to create ‘a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life’ and ‘a new vocabulary of attention’ rather than to retreat into postmodern play, embracing multiplicities of meaning (EM, p. 293). She insisted on the novel’s responsibility to tell the truth about the world (even if that truth could not be adequately defined or known) and believed that language can, in some common-sense way, communicate something of that truth; she also contended that excessive theorization ignored the contingent, and the deeply emotional and moral nature of literature and life. Finally, she held that, whether a writer intends it or not, the fact that characters make choices, and readers draw meaning from those choices, proves that the novel is inherently a moral medium (‘life is soaked in the moral; literature is soaked in the moral’ [EM, p. 27]). Because of these beliefs, both Murdoch herself and her novels were viewed with suspicion for some years. Interestingly though, a body of Murdoch criticism has sidestepped her own objections to theory (or, rather, her distaste for the blunt use of theory) and recent postmodern approaches to her work suggest that she was attempting to uphold divisions that she could not sustain in practice. The quite deliberate ambiguity and complexity of her novels lend them effortlessly to conflicting interpretations that have enriched and expanded readings of her work.2 The focus on morality in this volume is not intended to regress Murdoch criticism to earlier direct equations between moral philosophy and the novels. Rather, these chapters extend formalized and theoretical readings in order to accommodate her moral position; the result is a new respect for her insistence that authorial intention provides a legitimate subject for textual interpretation. For example, Bran Nicol’s chapter, ‘Murdoch’s Mannered Realism: Metafiction, Morality and the Post-War Novel’, suggests that Murdoch both shared, and attempted to deal with, postmodern incredulity towards realism. He argues that her aim was not to produce a pastiche of nineteenth-century realism but to draw readers into the novel’s textual artifice and advertise its aesthetic devices so that the text becomes its



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own critic, particularly in works such as The Philosopher’s Pupil. He suggests that Murdoch’s deconstruction of realism comes in fact from her excess of realism, so that the text becomes a critical tool, an authorial second ‘self’, providing a systematic commentary about itself as it progresses. He develops his argument, however, with the notion that the self-reflexive elements of Murdoch’s fiction do not turn it into something subjective and narcissistic; rather, they ‘manage to acknowledge the author’s situation in a post-war, postmodern context, but remain faithful to the moral conviction which underpins her approach to writing fiction, that the novel must always be an aesthetic artefact rather than the exemplification of a theory’. Nicol’s subtle moral focus does not negate the valuable work undertaken on Murdoch’s experimentalism. Part of her realism is to describe accurately in her novels how the human mind bestows reality on what it sees and she relied on the artifice of form to portray the dislocation between subjective and objective reality. The neglect of Murdoch as a writer and critic in the 1980s and 1990s extended to her moral philosophy, which similarly adheres to what were unfashionable positions during these decades. These positions included an anti-existentialist belief in the importance of vision rather than an emphasis on choice in moral matters, and the idea that morality stems from quality of consciousness rather than the will. She persistently rejects the fact/value distinction and ethical voluntarism3 and believed in the reality and unique importance of the individual.4 Critics frequently comment on how consistent and coherent Murdoch’s vision was, but it was a vision out of step with her times philosophically as well as theoretically. In her recent book on Iris Murdoch’s ethics, Megan Laverty suggests several possible reasons for this neglect: Murdoch’s ‘prodigious success as a novelist [which] eclipsed her early writings in philosophy, making her the “property” of literary critics; the dominance of analytic philosophy within Anglo-American academia [which] created an environment that was not receptive to alternative ways of engaging with philosophy’; and the dispersion of her writings before they were collected together as Existentialists and Mystics in 1997.5 The early 1990s witnessed what has come to be identified as an intellectual ‘ethical turn’ across disciplines. This ‘ethical turn’ was a direct response to the radical scepticism associated with post-structuralist or postmodernist theory which ‘risked becoming too easily caricatured as nihilistic’.6 The term derives from Martha Nussbaum’s drawing attention to the ‘absence of the ethical in literary theory’ in 19907 and also her observation that literary studies were beginning to take ‘a new turn





towards the ethical’.8 An important collection of essays, Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory, published in 1998, interrogates both the ‘ethical turn’ and Murdoch’s influence in its evolution. In this book, David Parker suggests that ‘there is a permanent need for a criticism that foregrounds the organising questions of ethics [and] a need for an ethical vocabulary’ and that ‘the most complex and exhaustive forms of ethical inquiry available [are] classic works of literature’.9 Maria Antonaccio suggests10 that interest in Murdoch’s moral philosophy revived because of the growing acceptance of three of Murdoch’s central philosophical premises: ‘the expansion of the domain of ethics beyond the confines of obligatory action; the importance of the inner life and the role of vision and imagination in moral reasoning and the attempt to retain the idea of the absolute at the centre of moral reasoning’ (IMAR, p. 15). Patricia Waugh argues that ‘a model of practical reason is beginning to emerge as a rival to epistemological paradigms in science and analytical philosophy. Affect and emotion, body as well as mind, are here regarded both as intrinsic aspects of cognition and of moral judgement.’ She describes Murdoch as ‘one of the first writers to put forward explicitly such a model of mind as the basis for ethics’, and as a philosopher who championed ‘fiction as providing a fundamental kind of human knowledge’.11 The work of these critics shows why, as the ‘ethical turn’ has gathered momentum, literary criticism has begun to re-accommodate Murdoch’s moral philosophy and her critical theory. Thinking about the novel as a moral form is no longer the anathema constructed by postmodern theory. Simon Haines suggests that ‘after twenty-five years of confusion and denial, literary criticism in English is starting to rediscover literature as a distinctive mode of thought about being human, and to regain confidence in itself as a manner of attending to that thought’.12 Haines develops his thinking on Murdoch’s place in the ethical turn in his chapter in this volume, ‘Iris Murdoch, the Ethical Turn and Literary Value’. He takes as a starting point Murdoch’s observation within ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’ that ‘Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton.’ Returning to the language of Milton’s poem, he argues that it offers us ‘a complex web of emotional-moral concepts in place of character’. This, he suggests, is what Murdoch meant when she claimed that ‘in moral philosophy we need what literature gives us, namely more concepts, richer and deeper ones, to express the value that will otherwise evacuate the world’. The kind of close attention thus evoked by literature delivers, Haines concludes, ‘the moral achievement’ – Murdoch’s ultimate form of realism



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which demands ‘the constant evolving recognition of the concepts we live with, live by’. ‘Imaginative attentiveness’ he writes, to the ‘mess’ of life is, in Murdoch’s words, a ‘moral training’. Patricia Waugh notes that now ‘theory is [. . .] represented as a betrayal of Enlightenment reason, the destruction of humanist values, and a breaking of the link between discourses of truth and those of justice’.13 Thus, with hindsight, we can see that the dislocation between Murdoch’s thought and the prevailing intellectual discourses of the latter part of the twentieth century arose because she was simply ahead of her time. Her brave refusal to subscribe to fashionable intellectual positions predicts and reinforces these recent developments and reversals in literary criticism as a return to truthfulness and moral responsibility. Arguably, Murdoch was in the vanguard of these shifts in both literary theory and moral philosophy. Murdoch’s marrying of fiction and philosophy consolidates her claim that the novel has become the most important form of moral discourse in a secular society, and this claim lies at the heart of the renewed ethical awareness within contemporary literary theory. It is arguable too that the ‘ethical turn’ could not have occurred without Murdoch’s prior engagement with the connections between morality and the novel.14 The moral focus within these essays necessarily results in a further blurring of boundaries across the hierarchical divisions within Murdoch scholarship itself that have identified her as ‘philosophical novelist’ as opposed to a committed social realist. Murdoch was politically and socially active throughout her life as well as philosophically engaged, and saw herself as continuing to uphold certain practices of the nineteenth-century realists who deal with the moral integration of characters into the society in which they are rooted. A number of the chapters in this volume draw attention to the ways in which her philosophy is always married to social realism and how her work engages actively with her readers. It offers guidance in dealing with the ethical dilemmas associated with suffering, remorse, freedom, loss, and with living in a world made terrifying by the absence of a benign and a loving God whose existence had been thrown into question by two world wars, the Holocaust and irrefutable advances in science. Both Frances White’s comparison of Murdoch’s unpublished Heidegger manuscript and Jackson’s Dilemma, and Avril Horner’s ‘ “Refinements of Evil”: Iris Murdoch and the Gothic’ analyse Murdoch’s exploration of individual evil, noting how – when conjoined with political power – such evil can have devastating repercussions on society. Horner argues that working within the Gothic mode enables Murdoch to play out in fictions her





belief that there are values and realities that transcend humanity. Murdoch’s use of Gothic tropes has been surprisingly neglected by Murdoch scholars, who have perhaps perceived her excursion into melodrama and the irrational as somehow inappropriate for someone of her literary and philosophical stature. Horner suggests that Murdoch’s use of Gothic plots and devices enables her to explore evil not just as the absence of good, but as a dynamic force to be recognized and rejected by those pursuing goodness. Michael Meade’s wondering in The Bell whether one could ‘recognize refinements of good if one did not recognize refinements of evil’15 echoes Murdoch’s own meditations on evil in her philosophical writings. Her appropriation of the Gothic mode, always self-conscious and sometimes parodic, explores desires which masquerade as love but which are founded on the need to control, manipulate and exploit others. Her Gothic novels also challenge the reader to read beyond the seductive surface effects of Gothic narrative and to recognize those effects as a self-conscious distancing from mere fantasy. Like Nicol, Horner sees Murdoch as an author who seeks to make the reader aware of the novel’s textual artifice while simultaneously creating a believable, if sometimes fantastic, fictional world. The tensions identified in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment between Murdoch’s moral philosophy and fiction are developed in this volume in Scott Moore’s chapter, ‘Murdoch’s Fictional Philosophers: What They Say and What They Show’. This discussion is illustrated by Moore’s reading of two fictional (very ‘Murdochian’) philosophers, Marcus Fisher in The Time of the Angels and Rupert Foster in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, both of whom demonstrate the ‘say-show’ distinction at the heart of Murdoch’s fiction. Both characters expound valid philosophical truths, but show through their lives that thinking philosophically does not always lead to the choice of the ‘Good’ over the ‘Nice’. Moore gets to the heart of one of Murdoch’s most disturbing truths about human nature – that one can have a sound theoretical understanding of psychological self-deception yet still fall victim to it. What these two philosophers say sounds like Murdoch; what they show is blinding self-deception. In a similar vein, Rob Hardy’s chapter, ‘Stories, Rituals and Healers in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction’, demonstrates how opinions expressed in her philosophy are challenged, even repudiated, in her novels. Hardy observes that although Murdoch identified Jung as ‘the enemy’ in her philosophy, her novels draw extensively on Jungian theory to help certain characters in extremis. Murdoch’s drawing on Jungian theory, then, suggests an awareness of the limitations of her theory of attention in healing the psyche when an individual is confronted with inconsolable grief or the



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terrible burden of remorse; the sufferer, it is implied, needs to be listened to, rather than subjected to purifying techniques. Hardy identifies two narrative voices in The Book and the Brotherhood: that of a compassionate healer who encourages the sufferer to heal through myth and stories, and that of a harsh moralist who identifies such practice as self-indulgent. Thus his chapter illustrates some interesting tensions in Murdoch’s work between the role of the novelist and that of the philosopher/moralist. The final section of this volume continues the foregrounding of Murdoch’s theology that opened the debates in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment. Even in the short time since that earlier volume was published, Murdoch’s theology has been recognized as radical and innovative. In 2007, her theology was deemed important because it brought the discipline itself to the fore after its forced exile by the intellectual preoccupations of postmodernism. Now, with the driving force that lies behind contemporary literary theory becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, a ‘turn to theology’ has evolved out of the ‘ethical turn’ in philosophy and literature. While the ‘ethical turn’ juxtaposes literature, literary theory and moral philosophy, the ‘theological turn’ adds theology to the equation. For example, the focus on Derrida’s theories of language that fundamentally influenced post-structuralism and deconstruction, has given way to the distinguishing of an ‘ethical’ Derrida from the more famous ‘historical or material’ Derrida. This distinction has, in turn, given rise to ‘Derridean theology’,16 which has culminated in a theological turn within deconstruction itself. Some critics now identify his work on theology as his most significant contribution to our time. But this ‘turn to theology’ has had more general significance; a number of contemporary eminent thinkers and writers are also participating in the debate. For example Terry Eagleton now stresses the need for knowing the historical Jesus, drawing on Christology for his more recent political reflections.17 Ian McEwan has explored fundamentalism and the idea of belief in a world purified by catastrophe, which he identifies as a real danger.18 These writers are, like Derrida, coming to understand that the well-being of the world is inextricably tied up with religion and faith in ways that demand to be understood. Murdoch knew this all along – that an understanding of human nature must include an understanding of belief systems. Thus several chapters in this collection are to do with Murdoch’s mysticism or the spirituality that she rigorously demands must not in any sense be transformed into ‘magic’ or a false consolation or flight from reality. Instead, she insists that writers must try to express an aspect of





human experience that lies beyond language. Mark Luprecht in ‘Death and Goodness: Bruno’s Dream and “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts” ’ looks at these two texts and the ways each meditates on death in order to understand virtue. He suggests that philosophical ideas are problematized in the novel in order to illustrate the idealistic nature of Murdoch’s concept of Good, as well as her insistence that art remains true to the world. But much of his chapter is devoted to an analysis of the problematic character of Nigel Boase, ‘a creation of mysticism and surrealism if not magic’, unique in Murdoch’s work. This seemingly supernatural character, a man who seems to exist beyond time, has been identified variously as Murdoch’s attempt to fictionalize the Weilian concept of attention; as a priest of Amor; as a Bodhisattva; as a priest of Shiva and as a representative from within the Islamic mystical sect of dervishes founded by Rumi. Luprecht links Nigel to Murdoch’s attempts to articulate the Wittgensteinian mystical position ‘whereof we cannot speak [. . .] thereof we must be silent’ in her fiction.19 Anne Rowe’s chapter, ‘ “The Dream that Does Not Cease to Haunt Us”: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness’, suggests that a tension between the denial of God and the desire for God haunts Murdoch’s novels, and that The Time of the Angels (1966), which evocatively portrays the nihilism and spiritual vacuum of post-war Britain, also acutely predicts the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century. Rowe explores ways that Murdoch’s novels aesthetically and thematically offer both spiritual nourishment and practical devices that can satisfy the emotional vacuum caused by the retreat of faith. This practice enables her readers to subscribe to atheistic positions without destroying a respect for Christian ethics, with which her novels walk hand in hand. Pamela Osborn in ‘ “A Story about a Man”: The Demythologized Christ in the Novels of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White’ continues Stephen Mulhall’s exploration in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment in examining how Murdoch weaves her godless theology out of the Christian tradition.20 Osborn emphasizes the concept of Christ as an example of human goodness in a secular society. She compares Murdoch’s Christ figures with those in the novels of the Australian post-war writer, Patrick White, in order to claim that both locate their Christ figures within ordinary domestic situations in order to assert the importance of experiencing and practising goodness in everyday life. These Christ figures associate morality with the ordinary and the domestic and remind us that, in the attempt to be good, we are doomed to failure, but the acceptance of that fact does not absolve us from the moral demand that we must nonetheless try. Both Rowe and Osborn align earlier identifications of secular Christ figures with Murdoch’s ‘good men’



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and identify Christ’s features also in less obviously good, more marginalized female characters, such as Anthea Barlow in The Time of the Angels, Brownie Wilsden in The Good Apprentice and Sefton Anderson, the ‘Soldier’, in The Green Knight. Recognizing these characters, Osborn argues, ‘helps readers to recognize not only those whom we may save, but those who may save us in a world in which God is no longer responsible for doing either’. Tammy Grimshaw, by contrast, follows in Suguna Ramanathan’s footsteps in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment by reading Murdoch’s neo-theology from within the Eastern tradition, and suggests that Murdoch’s mystical figure of Christ occupies a place analogous to the Buddha. In her chapter, ‘Do Not Seek God outside your own Soul: Buddhism in The Green Knight’, Grimshaw considers the ways in which Buddhism’s emphasis on the inner life of the individual bears much resemblance to Murdoch’s moral philosophy and draws parallels between that and the teachings of the Buddhist ‘middle way’, with particular reference to the character of Bellamy James in The Green Knight. The concluding chapter, William Schweiker’s ‘The Moral Fate of Fictive Persons: On Iris Murdoch’s Humanism’, offers a subtle philosophical meditation on Murdoch’s exploration of the relationship between morality and art, and argues that this exercise is in fact an exploration of what it means to be human. Schweiker claims that the tension arising from the necessity for virtue and the necessity of death, always present as the background to the moral fate of Murdoch’s fictional characters, suggests that Murdoch anticipated many concerns found in the current renewal of humanism. Schweiker also notes that the kind of humanistic outlook that can be found in Murdoch’s thinking is open to religious reflection in ways that other neo-humanist positions are not, and suggests that her work ‘helps fight the forces of the inhuman and identifies her thought on art and morals as an important bulwark against illusion, fanaticism and fantasy’. Murdoch’s influence is also currently being felt in contemporary British fiction, as echoes of her novels and her moral philosophy can be identified in the work of mainstream British writers such as Zadie Smith, who thinks that novels are a way of ‘doing moral philosophy’. Smith now recognizes with hindsight that, like many writers of the time, she previously subscribed too readily to highly theorized responses to texts that dismissed the moral affective response to literature and suggests that ‘along with the bathwater we threw out the baby’.21 Like Murdoch, she attempts to preserve those aspects of the nineteenth-century novel that stimulated the affective response. Ian McEwan, once identified as





an amoral enfant terrible of British culture, now says that ‘imagining yourself into the minds of other people is a [. . .] fundamental human act of empathy, which lies at the base of all our moral understanding’.22 Philip Pullman reasserted the necessity for literature to engage with morality when he warned that we live in a ‘Godless and uncertain age and unless writers wrestle with the larger questions of moral conduct they [will] become useless and irrelevant [. . .] You can’t leave morality out unless your work is so stupid and trivial and so worthless that [nobody] would want to read it anyway.’23 Murdoch always knew this, yet, as a number of the chapters in this volume acknowledge, although she is a moral writer, she is not a moralist in the nineteenth-century sense. Peter Conradi’s chapter on Murdoch’s ‘tragi-comic’ sense is a timely reminder that Murdoch criticism has also underplayed her comic sense and that her passion and persuasiveness as a moralist has resulted in critics too often reading her novels as moral sermons. Conradi suggests that Murdoch’s comedy is at odds with this false seriousness. Instead he explores how the varieties and illusions of love are sharply presented through comedy, how interest in human resilience and survival marks her work and how Shakespearean comedy provided a model for her supposed over-plotting and witty symmetries. As Scott Moore points out, Murdoch’s is the task of showing not telling, and she has no need or desire to preach. Priscilla Martin’s chapter, ‘The Preacher’s Tone: Murdoch’s Mentors and Moralists’, notes that the moral high-ground is, in fact, often a target in the novels, and that Murdoch very rarely makes a direct moral address to her readers. Giving advice is often, in fact, presented as bad for both the giver and receiver. Martin also notes that in two very late novels, The Book and the Brotherhood and The Message to the Planet, the message of the great book that is at the centre of each plot, is either never revealed or is destroyed. These two novels seem to Martin to be ‘millennialist’, in that the apocalyptic nature of the twentieth century and its ending inspired fundamentalism, cults and the collective desire for mentors. But ‘perhaps these novels, written towards the close of the century and the close of Murdoch’s career, are not millennialist but anti-millennialist’, she suggests, and she finally concludes that ‘their message is that there is no ultimate message’. That there is no ultimate message may be true, but there are many moral possibilities to be meditated upon, many emotions to be re-experienced and much to be learned. The moral work of the novel is to raise awareness, refine perception, evoke sympathy and love. But ultimately, moral responsibility lies with readers themselves,



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who must resist the temptation to deify the writer in any way. Anne Rowe, Tammy Grimshaw and Priscilla Martin each independently quote the lines from The Green Knight in this context, where Father Damien tells the spiritual seeker Bellamy James, ‘Do not expect any word or sign from me. Your will is free, upright and sound, it would be wrong not to be ruled by its good sense. And so, master of yourself, I crown you and I mitre you.’24 And, as Priscilla Martin points out, when the two greatest mentors in Western history make guest appearances in Murdoch’s art, Christ in Nuns and Soldiers and Socrates in Acastos: A Dialogue about Art, their message is very simple and very clear: Socrates tells Plato that goodness is so simple we do not need anyone to define it, and Christ tells Anne Cavidge ‘I am not a magician. I never was. You know what to do. Do right. Refrain from wrong.’25

Notes 1. Murdoch, Under the Net (1954; London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), p. 258. 2. See, for example, Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), Barbara Stevens Heusel’s Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s Novels of the 1970s and 1980s (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995), and Suguna Ramanathan’s chapter ‘Iris Murdoch’s Deconstructive Theology’, in IMAR, pp. 35–44. 3. Stephen Mulhall, review of Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity, Fergus Kerr (1997), Iris Murdoch News Letter, 12 (1998): 10. 4. The concept of the individual recurs throughout Murdoch’s work: ‘the notion of the fundamental existence and value of the individual should not be, need not be, and ultimately cannot be obliterated’ (MGM, p. 365). 5. Megan Laverty, Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of her Romantic Vision (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 1. 6. In ‘Mixing Memory and Desire: Psychoanalysis, Psychology and Trauma Theory’, in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2006), hereafter, LTC, Roger Luckhurst describes a ‘wider realignment of cultural and literary theory in the early 1990s’ and says that ‘in what has come to be called an “ethical turn” in criticism, there was a sense that the radical scepticism associated with poststructuralist or postmodernist theory risked becoming too easily caricatured as nihilistic’ (p. 503). 7. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 8. David Parker, ‘Introduction: The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s’, in Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory, eds Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 13 (hereafter, RE). 9. David Parker, ‘Introduction’ (RE, pp. 1–17). 10. See Maria Antonaccio ‘Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy and Theology’, in IMAR, pp. 15–22.





11. Patricia Waugh, ‘Visceral Perturbations and Human Judgement’, in On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, eds Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez-Falquina (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 32–3 and 36–7. 12. Simon Haines, ‘Ethics, Literature and Philosophy’, in RE, p. 21. 13. Patricia Waugh, ‘Introduction: Criticism, Theory, and Anti-Theory’, in LTC, p. 8. 14. We are grateful to Frances White for her help with this part of the introduction on ‘the ethical turn’. The essay from which this material is taken is ‘ “Art is for life’s sake . . . or else it is worthless”: The Innovatory Influence of Iris Murdoch’, forthcoming in Iris Murdoch and Her Work: Proceedings of the 16th METU British Novelists Conference Held by the Department of Foreign Language Education Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 15–16 December 2008, eds Mustafa Kırca and Sule Okuroglu (Stuttgart: Ibedem-Verlag, 2009). 15. Murdoch, The Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 117. 16. See Hugh Rayment-Pickard, Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). There is a significant body of interdisciplinary scholarship on religious theology by writers such as Richard Kearney, Mark C. Taylor, John D. Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion and Kevin Hart. Mark C. Taylor is particularly interested in Derridean theology. 17. Roland Boer, ‘Terry Eagleton and the Vicissitudes of Christiology’, http:// eserver.org/clogic/2005/boer.html (accessed 9 February 2009). 18. Ian McEwan, ‘The Day of Judgement’, Guardian ‘Review’ Section, 31 May 2008: 1–3. 19. Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream (New York: Viking Press, 1969), p. 88. 20. Stephen Mulhall, ‘ “All the world must be ‘Religious’ ”: Iris Murdoch’s Ontological Arguments’ (IMAR, pp. 15–22). 21. Zadie Smith, ‘Love Actually’, Guardian ‘Review’ Section, 1 November 2003: 5. 22. Ian McEwan, http://ebc.chez.tiscali.fr/ebc81.html (accessed 3 March 2008). 23. Philip Pullman in ‘Pullman Lays Down Moral Challenge for Writers’, Guardian, 12 August 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/aug/12/ bookshumanities (accessed 30 March 2009). 24. Murdoch, The Green Knight (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 269. 25. Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 297.



14


Part I

Morality and the Novel





Murdoch’s Mannered Realism: Metafiction, Morality and the Post-War Novel Bran Nicol

In ‘From Realism to Reality’ (1955), one of the essays in his influential collection For a New Novel (1963), Alain Robbe-Grillet claims that ‘[a]ll novelists believe they are realists. None ever calls himself abstract, illusionistic, chimerical, fantastic, falsitical’. Realism, he reasons, is not ‘a theory, defined without ambiguity’ but an ideology ‘brandished’ by novelists against one another in order to champion their own efforts to depict ‘the real’. ‘[I]t has always been the same’, he concludes: ‘out of a concern for realism each new literary school has sought to destroy the one which preceded it.’1 This insistence, by one of the most famous of literary innovators in the post-war period, suggests that all novelists, however far they depart from the methods and values of traditional realism, tend to believe that the novelist has a particular moral duty to present life as it actually is (or as he or she perceives it to be). If this is the case, then distinguishing twentieth-century fiction from earlier incarnations may well be simply a matter of recognizing how complicated this duty becomes. Modernist and postmodernist fiction rests on the assumption that fiction, no matter how ‘realist’ or ‘experimental’, is always (to use the pair of terms which Robbe-Grillet employs in ‘From Realism to Reality’) a matter of ‘constructing’ rather than ‘transcribing’. Transcription is in fact impossible because the act of representing something external to the text actually ensures that a separate, aesthetic version of it is created in the pages of the novel, and therefore in the minds of the writer and reader. The novel, Robbe-Grillet writes, ‘does not serve to set forth, to translate things existing before it, outside it. It does not express, it explores, and what it explores is itself’ (RR, p. 160). 17



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Post-war writing is beset by what we might call – paraphrasing Lyotard’s famous definition of the postmodern2 – an incredulity towards realism. This is most directly expressed in the work of nouveau romanciers like Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. Indeed, Sarraute’s The Age of Suspicion presents realism as something very like Lyotard’s declining metanarrative, arguing that the realist novel is ‘a faith that is waning’ in the minds of writers and readers alike. Her view is that: not only has the novelist ceased to believe in his characters, but the reader, too, is unable to believe in them; with the result that the characters, having lost the twofold support that the novelist’s and the reader’s faith afforded them, and which permitted them to stand upright with the burden of the entire story resting on their broad shoulders, may now seem to vacillate and fall apart. The reader no longer believes in the author’s imagination – the invented character and plot ‘which winds itself around the characters like wrappings’.3 Essentially, Sarraute’s view is that the new writing needs to deal with a new form of reading. Realism is now consumed by a reader who ‘has been learning about too many things, and [. . .] is unable to forget entirely all he has learned’ (AS, p. 63). More precisely she is thinking of the lessons of interiority, ‘the infinitely profuse growth of the psychological world and the vast, as yet almost unexplored regions of the unconscious’ (AS, p. 63), as imparted by modernist novelists such as Joyce and Proust, and thinkers such as Freud. Their writings demonstrate that time is more complex, the motivations and meanings behind actions more multiplicitous and mysterious than in the past, and that these changes have been accompanied by new, or newly-defined, emotions and sentiments, as well as complications of the old ones. The nouveau roman of the 1950s may have turned out to be a relatively localized, short-lived development in the history of the modern novel, but it nonetheless set the tone for the work of many writers of the age in so far as the pronouncements of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute encapsulated a climate of suspicion towards the realist novel in which writers from the 1950s on had inevitably to work. In particular they cast doubt on the modern novelist’s entitlement to adopt what J.G. Ballard, one of the British writers in question, called the stance of ‘moral authority’ favoured by the writers of realist novels. In the 1975 Preface to the French edition of his novel Crash (reproduced in later English editions) he argues that the author’s task is no longer to



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‘preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance’, inventing ‘a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world’ and disregarding questions about his own ‘motives, prejudices and psychopathology’. Rather he ought to ‘offer [. . .] the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives’.4

Aesthetics and Ethics: Murdoch and B.S. Johnson The example of Ballard shows that post-war British writing – despite its reputation as the conservative ‘poor relation’ of the experimental French and American traditions – was driven by the impact of the incredulity towards realism. The years from 1964 to 1973 in particular saw a concentration of talented young writers trying to expand the possibilities for fiction – more, in fact, than there had been at any time in Britain since the high-point of modernism in the 1920s. Most of these novelists are cited in a roll-call of names of those who were ‘writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter’,5 at the end of B.S. Johnson’s polemical introduction to his collection Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? published in 1973: Samuel Beckett, John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle and Stefan Themerson. To Johnson’s list we might add Ballard, as well as other figures who produced notable ‘experimental’ work in the 1960s and the 1970s, such as Muriel Spark, John Fowles, Doris Lessing and Lawrence Durrell. Johnson is especially notable for his own uncompromising metafictional response to the crisis in realist writing, and for the particularly moralistic nature of his polemic. His introduction effectively argues for a version of ‘committed’ writing – though one committed to an ‘ethics of the real’ rather than any political cause along the lines of Malraux or Sartre. As he famously put it, indicating his debt to the nouveau roman: ‘Nathalie Sarraute once described literature as a relay race, the baton of innovation passing from one generation to another. The vast majority of British novelists has dropped the baton, stood still, turned back, or not even realised that there is a race’ (NT, p. 167). Johnson felt the realist tradition was fundamentally dishonest in that it not only attempted to reflect a reality quite unlike the one that pertained in the late twentieth century, but that in so doing it relied on the pretence that there were real people in the novel (other than the author), and that all their actions could somehow be linked together. In



Murdoch’s Mannered Realism


other words, what Johnson objected to most of all, like Sarraute, were the two staples of the traditional realist novel: character and plot. In his own fiction, as a result, he makes it clear that the only real character is himself; all others are acknowledged bluntly as authorial puppets. The most (in)famous example of this is in his 1964 novel Albert Angelo, when Johnson ‘himself’ bursts abruptly into an otherwise conventional description of the eponymous character’s thoughts to exclaim ‘directly’, ‘oh, fuck all this LYING!’6 It is interesting to compare Iris Murdoch with a contemporary like Johnson, despite – or rather because of – their differences. Both writers were preoccupied with incorporating the accidental into their work as a safeguard against falsifying reality. Where Johnson developed techniques intended to inject genuine randomness into the process of reading writing, most notoriously in his 1969 novel-in-a-box, The Unfortunates, Murdoch tried to do this in more subtle ways by, for example, engineering the sudden unexpected deaths of characters in her novels, most notoriously with the brutal gunning-down of Harriet, a bourgeois housewife, in a random act of airport terrorism in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). In terms of the aesthetic of each writer – and the ethics underlying the aesthetic – the two novelists seem poles apart. Murdoch’s essays ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) and ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ (1970) indicate that she shared Johnson’s view that contemporary fiction as a whole is not up to the job of depicting contemporary reality accurately, but diverges strikingly from him in that she assumed that realism was not part of the problem but part of the solution. In ‘Against Dryness’ she argues that the poverty of contemporary philosophy shows that we have ‘suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary’, chiefly resulting in an inadequate conception of the human personality. The contemporary novel, in its two main incarnations, the crystalline and the journalistic, are equally unable to ‘engage [. . .] with [this] problem’.7 Her solution was to re-inject into contemporary fiction the practice of novelists such as Tolstoy and George Eliot who created characters who seemed to exist ‘independently’ of their author and the demands of the plot. This effect was the counterpart of the activity at the very heart of Murdoch’s own ethics: the necessity of attending to the world outside the self and the other people who inhabit it without misperceiving it through the prism of personal fantasy. One of the foundational rules of Murdoch’s approach to fiction was that character and plot must not be subordinate to a framework of ideas, but that any system imposed



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by the author must respect the plausible actions of the characters, and consequently the plot which develops out of these. It is important not to misunderstand Murdoch’s calls, in early essays like ‘Against Dryness’, for a continuation of the realist tradition. Her aim was never to produce a kind of pastiche of the nineteenth-century novel, nor did she ever do so. In any case, as Andrzej Gasiorek wisely cautioned over 15 years ago, it is misleading to present the different currents in post-war fiction as a simple binary opposition between ‘realists’ like Murdoch on the one hand, and ‘experimentalists’ like Johnson on the other.8 Gasiorek argues convincingly that even the most apparently experimental writers were actually engaged (as Johnson’s comment in his introduction about ‘twentieth-century reality’ suggests) in reconceptualizing realism and, conversely, the most apparently traditional writers were busily revitalizing an older form rather than simply imitating it. This is true of Murdoch, and one of the things I want to go on to explore in this chapter is the extent to which her fiction – which can, broadly speaking, be termed ‘realist’ – actually defamiliarizes the nineteenth-century tradition she so admired. In fact, in her attempts to write fiction along realist lines she demonstrates another, perhaps more unexpected, similarity with a writer like B.S. Johnson, and that is the postmodern sense of ‘belatedness’ which haunts her writing.

Murdoch’s ‘Mannerism’ Postmodern fiction, a more ironic and ‘double-coded’ mode of writing than the French nouveau roman, emerges out of the recognition that the author is working in a period following especially innovative developments in the novel. The two most enduringly significant statements of this aspect of the postmodern condition come from the novelists John Barth and Umberto Eco. Barth’s essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (1967), regards the contemporary novel as troubled by the growing sense that ‘certain forms or [. . .] certain possibilities’ in fiction are ‘used up’9 and looks to Beckett, Nabokov, and mainly Borges, to provide a solution, as these authors produce fiction which is self-consciously about exhaustion itself. Eco fleshes out this viewpoint in his Postscript to the Name of the Rose (1985) by contending that the postmodern emerges at the point at which whatever is ‘modern’ in a particular era, that is the avant-garde, recognizes that it cannot go any further without lapsing into silence. It reaches this point because in the pursuit of the new, artists have to ‘destroy’ the past. But art must continue, and so the only solution





for those who come after the moderns is to engage with the past once again – but this time, and here Eco echoes Barth, they do so via irony.10 The sense of dealing with what Eco terms ‘the already said’ can keenly be felt behind the urgency and anxiety that motivate Johnson’s writings about the future of the novel and in his ironic fictional strategies, too. But it can also be detected, I think, in the unmistakeable valedictory tone of Murdoch’s essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics’, which represents a significant shift from the confidence of ‘Against Dryness’, written nearly a decade earlier. Early in ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ Murdoch comments that ‘[t]he most obvious difference between nineteenth-century novels and twentieth-century novels is that the nineteenth-century ones are better’ (EM, p. 221). This makes the essay sound like an obituary for the novel, perhaps even a companion-piece to the fears about the death of the novel that were taking place at the time, for example in the writings of Gore Vidal, or in Ronald Sukenick’s 1969 story, ‘The Death of the Novel’.11 The essay draws to a close with self-conscious pessimism: As we can see into the human future there will doubtless be bad novels, cheering people up and probably not doing them too much harm. It is an index of the fears that sometimes haunt one that even an endless vista of bad novels seems so happy and humane a prospect. (EM, pp. 233–4) This deliberately comic image, of the novelist as a lonely, isolated figure, writing fiction in a time when great fiction cannot be written, gives an impression of writing after everything has already been said, which is the motivation behind ‘postmodern’ manifestos from the likes of Barth and Eco, as well as the fiction of Fowles or even Ballard. It seems significant, in this respect, that Murdoch’s fiction itself becomes more self-reflexive in the decade stretching from 1973 to 1983. Her most ‘experimental’ and postmodernist novel, The Black Prince, was published in 1973, the same year as Johnson’s Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? – and at the point when British avantgarde fiction was at its height. Its paratextual structure, the enveloping of its main narrative within a range of other texts, means that The Black Prince, like postmodern fictions such as Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), or Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), never allows its readers to forget that storytelling is not an ‘innocent’ act, involving a natural sequence of events which can simply be somehow ‘extracted’ and represented in prose or on screen. Narrative



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is selective and partial. Thus the experimentalism of The Black Prince implicitly deconstructs Murdoch’s favoured mode, realism. Perhaps an even more striking exercise in ‘self-deconstruction’ is The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983). On the face of it, this is the ‘standard’ Murdoch realist novel – vast, packed with different characters, and carefully dissecting the social network which envelops them all. It has an omniscient narrator, a version of the moralizing nineteenth-century realist narrator, who knows everything that happens in the world of the novel and can report the thoughts and conversations of the characters. But there is one key difference between him and his forebears: he is a ‘dramatized’ narrator. The fact that we know who he is, and a few things about him, has the effect of exposing the sheer partiality of the thirdperson narrator, for this knowledge relegates him from the extradiegetic level of narration to the level of diegesis, that is, to the same level as the other characters. The result is to make everything that ‘N’ describes (and he is a finicky, pedantic narrator who describes everything) seem pregnant with some extra meaning, the exact nature of which is unclear, but which makes the reader aware of some hidden significance to his narration. In other words, The Philosopher’s Pupil forces us to become suspicious readers. In ‘The Age of Suspicion’ Nathalie Sarraute notes the frequency of novels presided over by a new kind of narrator, ‘an anonymous “I”, who is at once all and nothing, and who as often as not is but the reflection of the author himself, [and] has usurped the role of the hero, occupying the place of honour’ (AS, p. 56). This change is something Sarraute welcomes. For where it be might assumed that the apparent ‘egocentricity’ of having a single figure dominate a work of fiction is proof of the novel’s regression to ‘an infantile state’ – rather than evidence of its developing as a form (AS, p. 56) – because it would make such a text seem like nothing less than a self-gratifying fantasy, Sarraute considers it in fact a demonstration of ‘an unusually sophisticated state of mind’ exhibited by both author and reader, the basis of a productive new attitude of mutual suspicion between them both. The writer reminds the reader that the world is fictional and the characters in the novel are unreal. The reader is thus kept on guard because the novel chooses not to hide its aesthetic quality and denies the reader a ‘familiar’ position, that of the reader of traditional realism. As models, Sarraute looks to the refusal of the realist paradigm in Proust, who boasted that ‘[n]ot once does one of my characters shut a window, wash his hands, put [on] his overcoat, utter a phrase of introduction’ (AS, p. 69), or Kafka and Joyce, who name their heroes





with initials (K and H.C.E., respectively), so that the reader is constantly reminded of these figures’ dependence on the person doing the naming. The value of this ‘dispossession of the reader’ is that he or she becomes ‘entice[d] [. . .] into the author’s territory’ so that the reader ‘is on the inside, exactly where the author is, at a depth where nothing remains of the convenient landmarks with which he constructs the characters’ (AS, p. 71). The role of ‘N’ means that something similar happens in The Philosopher’s Pupil, albeit in a far more subtle way than in a nouveau roman. ‘N’ is a narrator who is ‘everywhere yet nowhere’ and, as a result of his domination over the whole world of the novel – Ennistone, which is of course ‘N’s town’ – we cannot really believe in the other characters. The shadowy narrator’s detailed portrayal of Ennistone figures as an analogy of the way that Murdoch constructs her fictional universe. Ultimately The Philosopher’s Pupil has a deconstructive effect on Murdoch’s other fiction – her more typical updated version of traditional realism – because ‘N’ is practically indistinguishable, most of the time, from the narrative voice she typically employs in her third-person novels. Of course, this effect is engineered deliberately, to some extent at least, by Murdoch through her decision to narrate The Philosopher’s Pupil in such a mischievous, self-reflexive way. However, we might suggest that even her more typical, non-experimental, brand of realism ends up advertising its aesthetic status, despite the efforts of the author to ensure that the reader focuses on the fictional world and its inhabitants rather than on the form that contains them. In a 1983 essay, ‘Sacred and Profane Iris Murdoch’, the American author Joyce Carol Oates identifies what she sees as a striking contradiction in Murdoch’s fiction. Although Murdoch ‘has defined the highest art as that which reveals and honours the minute “random” detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of its integrity, its unity and form’, her own fiction is characterized by sheer excess: ‘the many novels [. . .] many characters, and many wildly, at times frantically, inventive plots’, ‘the hundreds of interiors, meticulously described [. . .] hundreds of costumes; and a small galaxy of observations about the quality of the air, the sun’s setting or the sun’s rising, the condition of London in the summer, or in the fall, or in the rainy winter, or the bright misleading spring’. In her plots there are ‘innumerable loves’, ‘characters who are “enchanters” [. . . and] who are enchanted’, ‘convoluted plots reminiscent of the worst of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, and the most cheerfully muddled of Restoration comedies’, ‘defiantly tidy endings’ (The Time of the Angels and The Italian Girl) and ‘unresolved, troubling,



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provocative endings’ (for example A Word Child, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Henry and Cato and The Sea, The Sea). She concludes that ‘there is a dizzying profusion, then, of characters, incidents, settings, endings, so much so that even admirers of Murdoch’s fiction often complain that they cannot remember a novel only a few days after having read it’.12 Oates’s characterization of Murdoch’s fiction, with its excessive deployment of realist tropes and devices, usefully pinpoints what can come to seem a kind of mannerism. Mannerism is something Umberto Eco regards as a typical product of postmodern irony (indeed, he wonders whether ‘postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism as metahistorical category’ [NR, p. 66]). It is the result of continuing to write fiction after the avant-garde has threatened to end it for good. It is realism, but realism done to excess. There is a sense, then, in which Murdoch’s realism is mannered. This impression is surely created by the effect on readers of encountering realist modes of writing in ‘the age of suspicion’. In his essay ‘Time and Description in Fiction Today’ (1963) Robbe-Grillet notes how nineteenth-century novels ‘are crammed with houses, furnishings, costumes, exhaustively and scrupulously described, not to mention faces, bodies, etc.’ Where the original function of all this description was ‘to make the reader see’, convince him or her ‘of the objective existence – outside literature – of a world which the novelist seemed merely to reproduce, to copy, to transmit, as if one were dealing with a chronicle, a biography, a document of some kind’, description does not work in the same way for the late twentieth-century writer, or rather, the reader. Description used to ‘reproduce a pre-existing reality; it now asserts its creative function’. Where ‘once it made us see things, now it seems to destroy them’.13 The descriptions in Murdoch’s novels, even those (for example, Nuns and Soldiers, The Book and the Brotherhood, The Good Apprentice, The Green Knight) without the self-reflexive narration of The Philosopher’s Pupil, inevitably remind us of the aesthetic quality of her fiction, the fact that the worlds that readers are invited to inhabit when reading her novels are artificial constructs set up by the author rather than transparent windows on to a realistic world.

Metafiction and fabulation This effect is typical of metafiction, but it is a long way from the ‘frame-breaking’ of the classic metafictions of the 1960s by the likes of Fowles, Johnson, Coover or Barth. It seems to me that this is because





Murdoch’s self-reflexive fiction always strives to retain a referential function rather than to cast final doubt on the capacity of fiction to refer to the real world. To put it another way, Murdoch’s self-referentiality is not intended to justify or illustrate an idea about fiction (though of course she did have a number of strongly held ideas about fiction, as revealed in her philosophy and essays on literature) in the way that B.S. Johnson’s novels are founded upon his convictions about modern writing. Because the self-reflexive elements of Murdoch’s work do not function so obviously as ‘theory-as-practice’ as do Johnson’s, classifying Murdoch as a ‘metafictional’ writer is no easy matter. What is more, the established definition of metafiction as literary ‘self-consciousness’, as developed in a series of important works in the decade stretching from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s (for example, Robert Alter’s Partial Magic, Robert Scholes’s Fabulation and Metafiction, Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction, and Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative14 ), has recently come under scrutiny. Critics such as Mark Currie and Nicholas Royle have taken issue in particular with the problematic implications of the term ‘self-consciousness’ in a late twentieth-century critical context. As Currie puts it, ‘the idea of self-consciousness is strangely inconsistent with most postmodern literary theories which would attribute neither selfhood nor consciousness to an author, let alone a work of fiction’.15 This is a complex issue, and one beyond the scope of the present chapter, but the possibility of an expanded, revised understanding of metafiction offers the potential for thinking of the ways in which Murdoch’s self-reflexivity is different from the self-reflexivity of contemporaries like Johnson, Fowles, Coover or Barth but nonetheless remains a significant element of her work. It is important to recognize that the metafictional impulse does not necessarily spring from a theoretical source, nor are its effects (as Currie goes on to say, oversimplifying the question he had usefully complicated) purely a process of dramatizing ‘the boundary between fiction and criticism’ (IM, p. 3). This may be one of the effects of metafiction, but it is not the only one. Emphasizing the ‘self-conscious’, ‘theoretical’ nature of a metafiction risks misrepresenting it as an entity that has a theoretical capacity of monitoring, even overriding, the aesthetic – as if it is possible for a text somehow to function as a rational critic, a kind of authorial ‘second self’ overseeing the creative self as it composes the work, developing a systematic commentary on the work as it goes along. As Nicholas Royle has argued, thinking of metafiction as ‘theory-as-practice’ invokes a now-outdated ‘scientific’ approach to the way a literary text works as a kind of ‘ “systematic”, method-determined “artefact”’ reminiscent of structuralism’.16



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It seems obvious that there are other explanations for the selfreferential dimension of fiction other than inbuilt criticism: play, surprise, unconscious compulsion, the need to provide a solution to an aesthetic problem (‘how can I get my plot/character to . . .?’) These would certainly be more applicable to Iris Murdoch’s fiction. The idea of any work of literature being ‘method-determined’, or functioning as ‘theoryas-practice’, was anathema to her. Her ethics of fiction emphasized consistently, from her book on Sartre to Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, that a work of art is neither polemic nor a work of philosophy nor a contribution to literary theory. Murdoch always insisted that the self-referential elements of her work were no more than ‘play’. Speaking at a conference in Amsterdam in 1986, she described the reappearance of Septimus Leech, a minor character in The Black Prince, in the next novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, as just ‘a little game to amuse a small number of kindly readers’.17 The statement was followed by a discussion of overtly metafictional authors like Fowles and Lodge, and it is clear from the transcript that Murdoch’s intention in making the remark was to distance herself from experimental or postmodern currents within the contemporary novel. Bearing in mind that play still has its effects, I think here we can take Murdoch at her word, at least to an extent. Her writing is self-referential, but it does not conform to a notion of metafiction predicated on the model of the author building a literary-critical element into her work, as if aware of all its meanings. The self-referentiality of Murdoch’s fiction comes from her attempts to solve aesthetic problems rather than theoretical ones. To explain this further we could turn to a text which is an important precursor to the theory of metafiction as it developed in the 1970s, Robert Scholes’s The Fabulators (1967). This book contains the germ of Scholes’s theory of ‘self-conscious’ fiction, developed fully in Fabulation and Metafiction (1975), one of the key initial attempts to define metafiction. But, interestingly, the earlier book suggests how we might conceive of a text which advertises its aesthetic status without performing the kind of explicit ‘frame-breaking’ authorial intervention characteristic of more overtly metafictional work in the 1960s and 1970s (for example, Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Coover’s ‘The Magic Poker’18 ). Scholes identifies a tradition that he calls modern ‘fabulation’, a descendant of the convoluted structures of fifteenth-century romance, such as ‘tales within tales’ and the like. Fabulation displays ‘an extraordinary delight in design. With its wheels within wheels, rhythms and





counterpoints, this shape is partly to be admired for its own sake. A sense of pleasure in form is one characteristic of fabulation’ and it is this feature that distinguishes it from related modes such as the novel or the satire.19 One of the key effects of fabulation is that the very ‘shapeliness’ of the structure ‘asserts the authority of the shaper, the fabulator behind the fable’ (TF, p. 10). But the fabulator is not the author-as-critic, but author as storyteller and artist who takes a ‘pure’ pleasure in the aesthetic design of his or her work. The value of fabulation, Scholes argues, is that it provides ‘one answer to the great question of where fiction could go after the realistic novel’ (TF, p. 11). Scholes suggests the nouveau roman is something of a wrong turning for the contemporary novel. The nouveau romanciers may have been (as Robbe-Grillet acknowledges in ‘From Realism to Reality’) essentially realists, because they attempt to ‘neutralize’ language. But words, Scholes argues, ‘can never be neutral’ because they are ‘human creations and they inevitably lend their referents a human meaning and human value’ (TF, p. 11). By contrast, a (potentially) wordless art, such as cinema, can resist this dimension quite naturally. This accounts, Scholes argues, for the appeal of cinema for practitioners of the nouveau roman (as well as, we might add, British ‘avant-gardist’ writers like Johnson or Ballard, whose polemics often assume that fiction is in competition with cinema to depict a peculiarly twentieth-century reality). The nouveau romanciers choose to ‘side’ with cinema and try to produce an equivalent form in prose, by ‘dehumanizing’ language. But, for Scholes, this is doomed to failure, because ‘all language is a human product and thus must humanize all it touches’ (TF, p. 12). (This accounts, in fact, for the distinctive effect of reading Robbe-Grillet’s novels, where his detached, camera-like perspective inevitably become rationalized by the reader as the product of a particular, usually obsessive or pathological, kind of psyche.) The significance of fabulation for Scholes is therefore that its delight in the power of words to humanize and to generate meaning, its inability to be ‘neutral’, marks a valuable return to a more verbal and indeed aesthetic mode of fiction, ‘less realistic and more artistic’ than classic realism, while being ‘more concerned with ideas and ideals, [and] less concerned with things’ (TF, p. 12). He champions Murdoch as one of the new breed of ‘fabulators’, analysing her 1963 novel The Unicorn. Although this novel’s brand of Gothic romance was not something she would replicate so enthusiastically in her mature phase as a writer (from the late 1960s to the 1990s), the example of The Philosopher’s Pupil suggests that, in one way, Scholes’s depiction of Murdoch is sound. It shows



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us that Murdoch was neither a ‘dehumanizing’ realist like the writer of nouveau romans nor a modern incarnation of the nineteenth-century realist novelist but an author who delighted in the aesthetics – and ethics – of fiction in the manner of Scholes’s ‘fabulator’. This brings us back to Umberto Eco, another theorist of postmodern fiction who emphasizes its connections with medieval aesthetics. Though it may sound like it, Eco’s point about the compulsion of postmodern writing to revisit the past with irony is not in fact a critique along the lines of Fredric Jameson’s well-known lament about the meaninglessness of postmodern pastiche.20 Rather, for Eco, the ironic strategy is a vital, productive one, a way in which a writer can accept ‘the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated’ (NR, p. 67) yet can still continue to express him or herself, even to say something ‘new’. The self-reflexive elements of Murdoch’s fiction do not turn it into something directly subjective in the way that Johnson’s selfreflexivity does in his works. They manage to acknowledge the author’s situation in a post-war, postmodern context while remaining faithful to the moral conviction that underpins her approach to writing fiction: that the novel must always be an aesthetic artefact rather than the exemplification of a theory.

Notes 1. Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘From Realism to Reality’, in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 157–8. Hereafter, RR. 2. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxiii. 3. Nathalie Sarraute, ‘The Age of Suspicion’, in The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: George Braziller, 1963), p. 55. Hereafter, AS. 4. J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Crash (London: Vintage, 1995), pp. iv–vi. 5. B.S. Johnson, Introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? in Malcolm Bradbury, ed., The Novel Today (London: Fontana, 1990), pp. 151–68. Hereafter, NT. 6. B.S. Johnson, Albert Angelo, in B.S. Johnson Omnibus (London: Picador, 2004), p. 167. 7. Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’, EM, p. 291. 8. Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction (London: Arnold, 1995). 9. John Barth, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, in Bran Nicol, ed., Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 138. 10. Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985), p. 67. Hereafter, NR.





11. Ronald Sukenick, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (Normal, IL: Fiction Collective Two, 2003). 12. Joyce Carol Oates, ’Sacred and Profane Iris Murdoch’, New Republic, 14 November 1978, http://www.usfca.edu/∼southerr/murdoch.html (accessed 24 November 2008). 13. Robbe-Grillet, ‘Time and Description’, in RR, pp. 146–7. 14. Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979); Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Routledge, 1984); Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (London and New York: Routledge, 1984). 15. Mark Currie, ‘Introduction’, in Currie, ed., Metafiction (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 1–18. Hereafter IM. 16. Nicholas Royle, ‘Memento Mori’, in Martin McQuillan, ed., Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 189–203, here p. 191. 17. Murdoch, interview with Richard Todd, from Encounters with Iris Murdoch, in TCHF, p. 190. 18. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969); Robert Coover, ‘The Magic Poker’, Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions (New York: Grove Press, 2000), pp. 20–45. 19. Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 10. Hereafter TF. 20. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 151–68.



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The Preacher’s Tone: Murdoch’s Mentors and Moralists Priscilla Martin

Nothing is as beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm [. . .] It seems, therefore, that immorality is inseparable from literature, which chiefly consists of the fictional [. . .] Writers with pretensions to high morality are no less immoral than the others, they are merely worse writers [. . .] But it is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost entirely composed of fiction. (Simone Weil, ‘Morality and Literature’)1 A philosopher and a novelist, Iris Murdoch was influenced by her great predecessors in philosophy as well as in fiction: Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, Sartre. She also deeply admired Simone Weil and we can recognize some of Murdoch’s own convictions in the above passage. Most of it could have been written by Murdoch and most of us would agree with it, especially that ‘fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm’. In the work of some writers, the good characters are often disastrously less interesting than the villains and this feels unintended and a weakness in the moral realization of the fiction. One can think of obvious Victorian examples, such as Dickens. The virtuous characters seem insufficiently imagined or implausible or limited by a simplistic view of complex situations. ‘Flat’ seems exactly the right word, recalling E.M. Forster’s distinction between flat and round characters. The innocent Lucie Manette 31



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is never as compelling as the murderous Madame Defarge, the virtuous Charles Darnay never as heartrending as his compromised tormented doppelgänger Sidney Carton. But one feels that the author, who gave Darnay his own initials C.D., loves Charles and Lucie and expects his readers to do so. In Murdoch’s fiction, however, the lack of vitality in some of her best characters is intended, programmatic, a moral statement in itself. Some of her obviously good characters, such as Ann in An Unofficial Rose or Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat or Kathleen in The Red and the Green, are perceived as boring and deadening, especially by their partners. Conversely, her villains, such as Mischa Fox and Julius King, are charmers: creative, amusing, seductive, compelling. Julius puts the case for villainy with his characteristic eloquence in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Indeed, he ascribes his eloquence to his villainy: As for evil being dreary, that’s an old story too [. . .] Grown men show [a] facility for making completely absurd metaphysical assumptions which they feel instinctively to be comforting – for instance the assumption that good is bright and beautiful and evil is shabby, dreary or at least dark. In fact experience entirely contradicts this assumption. Good is dull. What novelist ever succeeded in making a good man interesting? It is characteristic of this planet that the path of virtue is so unutterably depressing that it can be guaranteed to break the spirit and quench the vision of anybody who consistently attempts to tread it. Evil, on the contrary, is exciting and fascinating and live. It is also very much more mysterious than good. Good can be seen through. Evil is opaque [. . .] What passes for human goodness is in reality a tiny phenomenon, messy, limited, truncated, and as I say dull. Whereas evil (only I would prefer some less emotive term for it) reaches far away into the depths of the human spirit and is connected with the deepest springs of the human mind.2 Julius hints in his parenthesis at a philosophical position that Murdoch combats – the view that moral language should be emotionally neutral because its values cannot be verified – but he and other sinister characters such as Mischa, Beautiful Joe and Crimond do excite and fascinate with terrible effect. Murdoch differs, however, from Weil in suggesting that good people are boring in life as well as in literature. They are unlikely to be ‘fresh and surprising’. The exemplars of goodness which she proposes in her philosophical work – the virtuous peasant, the inarticulate mothers of



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large families – cannot explain what it is like to be good or how to be good. Indeed, one suspects that they might not be very interesting on any subject. There is a consistency in Murdoch’s rather depressing view of the attractiveness of bad people and the dullness of the good in both literature and life. Iago is more interesting and more successful than Desdemona because he can say anything, whereas she is usually restricted to telling the truth and trusts others to do the same. Cordelia says ‘Nothing’ at a crucial moment. And for Murdoch this holds a mirror up to life. Intelligent creative people often put on a performance, act with an image of themselves, gild the lily, improve the anecdote, court the admiration they excite. For Murdoch it is suspect not only to be interesting but also, often, to be interested, at any rate in oneself and one’s own situation. In A Fairly Honourable Defeat Morgan and Rupert are fatally manipulated by Julius because each becomes interested in the tangle of the other’s supposed infatuation. The words ‘interesting’ and ‘interested’ often act as a flashing red moral traffic light in Murdoch’s fiction. Murdoch concurs with Weil in her suspicion of literature and for the same reason: that it is generated by and generates fantasy. Weil claims that fiction generates immorality in both literature and life. But both make exceptions for the greatest authors and their short lists are similar. For Weil: ‘Aeschylus and Sophocles, certain plays of Shakespeare [. . .] Racine’s Phèdre alone among French tragedies [. . .] several comedies of Molière [. . .] the Grand Testament of Villon’.3 Murdoch’s list includes Homer, some Greek tragedy, Shakespeare. And she refuses to demarcate the work of art to exclude moral teaching: ‘Good art, however complex, presents an evident combination of purity and realism: and if we think at once of moral teachings which do the same (the Gospels, St Augustine, Julian of Norwich, parts of Plato), it has to be admitted that these are in their own perfectly natural way art.’4 Murdoch is, as a novelist and a philosopher, deeply concerned with questions of morality. And although she insisted that the two kinds of writing were quite different for her, she can be very explicit in her fictions on the subject of moral values. There is a good deal of ‘moral teaching’ in her novels. Here again, I think, she differs from Weil, who stated unequivocally that ‘writers with pretensions to high morality are no less immoral than the others, they are merely worse writers’. The quotation in my title is taken from Auden. He admitted to adopting ‘what I most disown, / The preacher’s loose immodest tone’ and I think that many of his contemporaries would share his distaste for that tone.5 Clearly Simone Weil did. So for the most part do we. The phrase



The Preacher’s Tone: Murdoch’s Mentors and Moralists 33


‘high moral tone’ is rarely uttered approvingly and we see the moral high-ground as offering the perfect target. The Victorians, while very sensitive to pious hypocrisy, could take more moralizing than we can. The amount of moral advice in Murdoch’s novels is unusual, I think, among twentieth-century writers, though this is presented by characters rather than, as, for example, in George Eliot’s fiction, by an omniscient narrator. There is little narratorial judgement in Murdoch’s novels. (An unlovely exception is ‘none of them was any good’ in Henry and Cato, where the narrator is clearly an Oxford don dismissing the members of a minor American college.6 ) Here is a striking passage from Middlemarch: An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent – of Miss Vincy, for example.7 The image is beautiful and apt, though we might now wince at the disingenuous appeal to the authority of the ‘eminent philosopher’ and the ‘light of science’, the assumption that the reader has a housemaid, the heavy-handed mock-courtesy of ‘any person now absent’ excluding present company from an obvious generalization, and the archaic biblical ‘lo!’ Yet the scientific reference does cohere with the question raised in the first sentence of the novel of ‘how the mysterious mixture [man] behaves under the varying experiments of Time’ and the pervasive suspicion that human behaviour, could it be observed as by a microscope or telescope, might prove as predictable and determined as much else in the natural world. In Murdoch’s novels, too, we find the fear that human behaviour is mechanical (Julius, who manipulates it so skilfully and describes it as a machine, is a scientist) and that human perception is organized by egotism. But this is conveyed through action, dialogue and interior monologue – Rosa’s inability to listen to Nina’s



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desperate appeal for help, Morgan and Rupert’s understanding of every detail as evidence for an imaginary situation, Charles’s obsessive construction of a world in which Hartley still loves him – rather than by authorial address to the reader. One may, however, feel as irritated by some of Murdoch’s moralizing characters as by Eliot’s moralizing narrator. Eliot is not the only Victorian novelist with a tendency to preach to the reader but such edifying intervention is unusual in modern literature. Possibly it seemed more acceptable in an age of religious belief (‘lo!’ ‘These things are a parable’) and shared values. But perhaps the fact that the nineteenth century was not entirely an age of faith and consensus makes us uneasy at much of its didacticism. Despite its touches of biblical language the ‘parable’ in Middlemarch does not depend upon religious belief. Eliot’s faith and doctrine are very similar to Murdoch’s. For both, the basis of morality is the strenuous attempt to surmount one’s natural egotism and to believe in the equal and different being of others. In a climactic chapter of Middlemarch Dorothea refuses to remain ‘in the besotted misery of a consciousness that only sees another’s lot as an accident of its own’ (p. 845). In a similarly painful and enlightening episode in Under the Net it seems to Jake ‘as if, for the first time. Anna really existed now as a separate being and not as a part of myself’.8 Literature can embody and evoke such sympathy with its characters and has no need to preach it: Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality [. . .] To say that the essence of art is love is not to say, is nothing to do with saying, that art is didactic or education. It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were, accidental.9 For Murdoch, nineteenth-century novelists and Shakespeare, with his huge cast of various and individual characters, are pre-eminent in this way. She claims that in contrast to a medieval writer, Malory, Shakespeare had no need to moralize: Of course, Malory’s writings are beautiful, but [. . .] Shakespeare created his own symbols. The powerful image of the Grail would have been a nuisance in one of his plays, and I suspect that he found it alien [. . .] Shakespeare’s plays have their own special moral and religious atmosphere. Morality and religion do not appear in abstract or doctrinal guises in the plays. Shakespeare’s great intelligence and





high moral and religious understanding are otherwise on display, transformed by the poet into densely particular work. The plays are pre-eminently about the difference between illusion and reality, and the battle between good and evil, they shine with a positive sense of goodness, which is, by all those words, shown rather than explicitly or laboriously said. (MGM, pp. 141–2) There is plenty of moralizing in medieval literature. In, for example, the story of the Grail, which Murdoch thinks alien to Shakespeare, questing knights meet hermits in the forest who explain the symbolism of the day’s events and counsel them on their moral and spiritual condition. Sir Lancelot receives a stern but charitable account of himself from one: ‘Sir,’ seyde the ermyte, ‘ye ought to thank God more than ony knyght lyvynge, for He hath caused you to have more worldly worship than ony knyght that ys now lyvynge. And for youre presumpcion to take uppon you in dedely synne for to be in Hys presence, where Hys flesh and Hys blood was, which caused you ye might nat se hyt with youre worldely yen, for He woll nat appere where such synners bene but if hit be unto their grete hurte other unto their shame. And there is no knyght now lyvynge that ought to yelde God so grete thanke os ye, for He hath yevyn you beaute, bownté, semelynes, and gret strengthe over all other knyghtes. And therefore ye ar the more beholdyn unto God than ony other man to love Hym and drede Hym, for youre strengthe and your manhode woll litill avayle you and God be agaynste you’.10 I do not share the hermit’s beliefs but I find his speech authentic, cogent and moving. And I do not think it alien to Murdoch, who did not share those beliefs either. Perhaps it speaks to that common timeless human experience that success often proves empty and mysteriously irrelevant. Some of Murdoch’s characters feel this acutely. Hugo abandons several dazzling careers for the quixotic reason that they are too successful. Montague Small despises his best-selling detective stories and wishes he had been a serious novelist or a scholar. Some would like to have had the hermit’s priorities. The distinguished diplomat Matthew Gibson Grey thinks, ‘how could a successful career vanish and seem to leave so little behind?’ and yearns to be a Buddhist monk instead.11 Thomas McCaskerville, a successful psychiatrist and unbeliever, ‘wondered if he were not engaged in the wrong occupation’ and ‘saw the empty scheme of an impossible religious solution’.12



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Murdoch has her own versions of Malory’s hermits. The word ‘mentor’ occurs a good deal in her work. There are many professional counsellors in the novels, priests, teachers, heads of communities, psychiatrists and analysts, though there is often a good deal wrong with them and some have a welcome habit of dismantling their own authority. There are ex-priests, such as Gildas in The Message to the Planet and Damien in The Green Knight, who as Father Damien gives the avid Bellamy very sensible advice in letter after letter, expresses doubts about the value of this compulsive correspondence and finally closes it with the news that he has left his order and priesthood and lost his faith. He signs off with the farewell of Virgil to Dante in the Paradiso: ‘Non aspettar mio dir più nè mio cenno: / libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio, / è fallo fora non fare a sui senno: per ch’io te sovra te corona e mitrio.’13 Clement translates it for him: ‘Do not expect any word or sign from me. Your will is free, upright and sound, it would be wrong not to be ruled by its good sense. And so, master of yourself, I crown you and I mitre you’ (p. 268). Bellamy should take responsibility for himself rather than depending on a remote and idealized mentor. There are also ex-nuns, Lisa in Bruno’s Dream and Anne in Nuns and Soldiers. And there are preachers, amateur and professional: Michael and James in The Bell, Father McAlister in The Book and the Brotherhood, who, like Weil, dwells on affliction. His sermons are very popular: people trek from the next village to hear them. ‘Masochism has always been one of the charms of Christianity’, says Gerard.14 Like other of Murdoch’s priests, as well as ex-priests, Father McAlister is no longer a believer but he does have the insight to recognize the afflicted, and the faith he has lost can still offer them support. The Abbess in The Bell is unusual in being an adviser who is treated without irony, her spiritual authority uncompromised perhaps because of her absence from the action. Murdoch has been described as simultaneously schoolgirl and headmistress. She admired and kept up with her own headmistress and wrote a poem to her, ‘Miss Beatrice May Baker, Headmistress of Badminton School, Bristol, from 1911 to 1946’, emphasizing in the first stanza both her high moral tone and its unusualness in the 1930s: Your genius was a monumental confidence To which even the word ‘courage’ seems untrue. In your art deco pastel ambience You sat, knowing what to do. Pure idealism was what you had to give, Like no one now tells people how to live. (IMAL, p. 72) 10.1057/9780230277229 - Iris Murdoch and Morality, Edited by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner




Iris Murdoch herself, in her youth could dispense good advice. She made rather a habit of it in her correspondence with Marjorie Boulton, who was only a couple of years younger but whom she sometimes addresses as ‘child’, ‘kid’, ‘ma petite’. In one letter she describes herself wryly as ‘Aunt Katish’ and exclaims: ‘I must stop this moralizing – and you must stop encouraging me to moralize. It’s bad for me. Like writing propaganda leaflets.’15 What is wrong with wanting or giving advice? After all, as Murdoch observes in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals ‘effective moral motivation’ may include ‘a wish to please a virtuous mentor’ (p. 331). But it may be bad for both adviser and advised. The adviser may enjoy a sense of power. In A Fairly Honourable Defeat both Simon and Hilda take pleasure in the thought of helping Morgan to ‘pick up the pieces’ (pp. 40 and 44). In The Book and the Brotherhood, ‘Father McAlister specialised in desperate cases. Over Tamar, he might positively have been said to gloat. His eyes sparkled’ (p. 487). He is not the only one. ‘Lily could not help feeling a little cock-a-hoop, it was a feather in her cap, she felt an access of power’ when Tamar seeks her advice (p. 327). It can encourage dependence and hero-worship in the advised and a sense that something has been achieved when it has not: ‘Today [Tamar] was going back to talk to Lily again, as if this had become a significant and fruitful way of passing the time’ (p. 326). Sometimes Murdoch’s characters are rather sickened by themselves when they give advice. Matthew in An Accidental Man thinks, ‘Did I really want to be his mentor and set up as his judge? No’ (p. 416). Ludens tries to calm and counsel Franca about how to cope with the three people in her marriage and thinks that she has ‘responded quickly to his pious rigmarole’ which has actually had the unintended effect of making her think ‘Now I’m in love with him.’16 He feels that his ‘pious rigmarole’ has been priggish and this is a note which is often sounded in Murdoch’s novels. It can be infectious. Peter Conradi remarks, perhaps reflexively, ‘It must be confessed that Murdoch’s admirers have not always escaped a certain priggishness’ (SA, p. 365). The characters in the novels who are writing works of moral philosophy, Marcus in The Time of the Angels, Rupert in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, do not conduct their own personal lives very successfully. Some of the characters who have the best things to say are the least pretentious, such as Arthur in A Word Child, who is rather despised by the brilliant, educated and controlling narrator. Action may be more effective and exemplary than words. One of Murdoch’s most virtuous characters, Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, cannot explain why stealing is wrong, while Rupert, the philosopher, only bemuses him



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with a long speech on the subject. But the apparently ineffectual Tallis is one of the most effective characters, the person who ends the violence in the Chinese restaurant by hitting one of the thugs, even a match for Julius when he makes him telephone Hilda and confess his plot to her. And, as Murdoch states repeatedly, reasonable adults know good from bad. Except when studying or writing philosophy, they do not need to demonstrate that stealing is wrong. We most of us, thank goodness (I refrain from writing ‘thank God’), usually think and act as if it is. Murdoch respects characters, such as Ann in An Unofficial Rose and Maisie in The Book and the Brotherhood, who simply follow the rules of their religion. The no-nonsense atheist headmistress Norah in The Time of the Angels says briskly to the philosophical Marcus and the liberal bishop, ‘Goodness is good conduct, and we all know what that is’, a view that the author sees as unexamined but largely right.17 Two of the greatest mentors in Western history actually appear in Murdoch’s fictional as well as her philosophical work. In Nuns and Soldiers Anne has a vision of Jesus, who has characteristically Murdochian things to tell her. Like Murdoch he cautions against the Christian emphasis on suffering rather than on death: ‘If there were wounds they have healed. If there was suffering it has gone and is nothing.’ ‘But your pain – is not that –’ ‘The point? No, though it has proved so interesting to you all! [. . .] Pain is a scandal and a task, but it is a shadow that passes. Death is a teaching. Indeed it is one of my names.’ And he insists that Anne must help herself rather than fly to his bosom. When she asks ‘What shall I do to be saved?’ he does not give the traditional answer ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ’ but replies, ‘You must do it all yourself, you know.’ And he emphasizes that good and bad are not a mystery: ‘I am not a magician, I never was. You know what to do. Do right, refrain from wrong.’18 The Jesus of Anne’s vision, perhaps of Anne’s creation, certainly of Murdoch’s creation, seems more Buddhist than Christian in his emphasis on death rather than resurrection. He is very different from the Jesus of the Gospels in his gentle refusal to take responsibility for Anne, to preach to her, to be a mentor. One of Murdoch’s own masters is Socrates, who usually disclaims the role of mentor and defines his only wisdom as the fact that he knows that he does not know. Although Socrates’ parade of ignorance can seem ironic and the dialogue form with its pretended equality between the





speakers disingenuous, he does not encourage his interlocutors to adopt the role of disciples or to accept any teaching on trust. Although in the Platonic dialogues we do not know exactly how much is Socrates and how much is Plato, Murdoch differentiates sharply between them in her own Platonic Dialogues. Socrates is patient and tolerant, Plato irritably in search of absolutes: Socrates: Stay close to what’s obviously true, what clever people may miss entirely. We’ve been told that religion is superstition, that it’s socially useful, that it’s the love of goodness, and now that it’s the harmony of good and evil. But instead let’s say something simple. The most important thing in life is virtue, and virtue isn’t a mystery, it’s truthfulness and justice and kindness and courage, things we understand. Anybody can try to be good, it’s not obscure! [. . .] Plato: But we can change, we can be enlightened, we can be saved? Socrates: If we do good things which are near to us we may improve a little; don’t make a drama of it, my dear. To tell the truth, that is an exercise which is always available. Goodness is simple, it’s just very difficult.19 Since what is good is obvious, no one should need a teacher to define or advocate it. The role of the mentor seems to grow during the course of Murdoch’s fiction and to become more ambiguous. Little advice is given in the earliest novels and it is sometimes the more telling. The philosopher Dave says to Jake early in Under the Net, ‘Always you are thinking of your own soul. Precisely it is not to think of your soul but to think of other people’ (p. 27). He adds that Jake should take a job and write in the evening. Jake leaves, seeing that Dave is in one of his bad moods, but at the end of the novel he plans to do exactly that. However, in The Sandcastle Bledyard merely succeeds in angering Mor with a vehement condemnation of his relationship with Rain. His advice is unsolicited and intrusive but he expresses values which Murdoch emphasizes in her fiction and non-fiction. He urges attention to reality and to the actuality of others. He dismisses fantasy, existentialist emphasis on freedom and romantic reverence for extremity. He delivers an axiom which could serve as epigraph to most of Murdoch’s novels: ‘The gifts of the spirit do not appeal to the imagination.’20 All the members of the Imber community in The Bell prize and long for the Abbess’s counsel but Michael realizes too late that he should have acted on it. The two sermons are absolutely at odds



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with each other, both are forceful and deeply felt and neither has any effect on anyone’s behaviour. Two characters in novels of the 1970s give very explicit advice and accounts of their religious views, which, despite their commitment to particular faiths, seem close to the religionless religion of Murdoch’s philosophical works. Brendan Craddock expresses a Christianity which sounds close to Buddhism as he tries unsuccessfully to dissuade Cato from abandoning his faith and priesthood. In The Sea, The Sea James gives a Buddhist interpretation of Charles’s suffering and delusions, an exposition which could well be described as telling, not showing. Both mentors disappear, Brendan to India and James in an apparently willed death. Two of the late novels, The Book and the Brotherhood and The Message to the Planet, present a group desire for a mentor and are ironic about it. In one case the mentor may be malign, in the other meaningless. In The Book and the Brotherhood a group of friends who met as students finance for many years the brilliant and ruthless Crimond to write a great book on political philosophy. As time goes on they doubt whether he is really writing the book and, if he is, whether they should continue to support it. As they have grown older they have moved right, towards the political centre, while Crimond still favours some revolutionary postMarxist politics and perhaps terrorism. His personal behaviour can be seen as terrorist and he has no scruples about betraying his benefactors. He does finish the book, which confronts all previous political philosophy and moves on from it, and it is powerful and horrifying. But we are given no idea what it says. The book is a gap in The Book and the Brotherhood. The book in The Message to the Planet, apparently some sort of philosophical, atheist metaphysical work which confronts all previous philosophy and again moves on from it, seems to exist only in vague incoherent conversations between the former mathematical genius and ex-painter Marcus and his eager possessive academic disciple Ludens; unlike Crimond, Marcus does not appear driven and productive but puzzled and helpless. Perhaps he is really mentally ill. His person and his alleged healing powers rather than his ideas become the message. As the ex-priest Gildas remarks ‘Christ was revered for his miracles, not his wisdom’ (p. 247). To the sympathetic atheist and to the Jesus that Anne meets, this is the wrong way round. Marcus attracts, as well as the usual late-Murdochian group of old friends, a large number of young seekers, then reporters and mere spectators, and he becomes temporarily a cult figure, until he himself disowns the role and dismisses his followers. After Marcus’s death, Ludens, as literary executor, is approached by publishers who want Marcus’s book or books about Marcus. Marcus,





however, has left instructions, which Ludens has honoured, that his papers are to be destroyed after his death. If there was anything, nothing remains. These two novels seem millennialist, particularly in the movement from the political to the metaphysical and from the personal ‘brotherhood’ to the global ‘planet’. Perhaps the apocalyptic nature of the twentieth century and its ending inspired fundamentalism, cults and the collective desire for mentors. Perhaps these novels, written towards the close of the century and the close of Murdoch’s career, are not millennialist but anti-millennialist and their message is that there is no ultimate message.

Notes 1. The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay Co. Inc., 1977), p. 290. 2. Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 223–4. 3. The Simone Weil Reader, p. 293. 4. Murdoch, ‘The Fire and the Sun’, in EM, p. 459. 5. W.H. Auden, ‘New Year Letter’, in Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), p. 202. 6. Murdoch, Henry and Cato (1976; London: Vintage, 2002), p. 7. 7. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 845. 8. Murdoch, Under the Net (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 238. 9. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good’, in EM, pp. 215 and 218. 10. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 518. 11. Murdoch, An Accidental Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 126. 12. Murdoch, The Good Apprentice (1985; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 82. 13. Murdoch, The Green Knight (1993; Harmondworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 266. 14. Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (1987; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 281. 15. Privately owned, unpublished, undated letters (probably written in the early 1940s). 16. Murdoch, The Message to the Planet (1989; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 234. 17. Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), p. 201. 18. Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 296–7. 19. Murdoch, Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1987), p. 120. 20. Murdoch, The Sandcastle (London: Penguin, 1960), p. 213.



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Stories, Rituals and Healers in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction Rob Hardy

In this chapter I will ask if Iris Murdoch’s narratives of suffering and healing might justifiably make us think of Murdoch as a healer of the soul as much as a moralist. I will consider the narratives of Tamar, a young woman hideously tortured by remorse after the abortion of her baby in The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), and of Edward, a young man similarly tormented after causing the death of his best friend by giving him LSD in The Good Apprentice (1985). Both these narratives relate the recovery of their sufferers to the actions of healers (a priest in Tamar’s case, a psychiatrist in Edward’s). I will also consider two further narratives where healing occurs without the agency of another: that of Stuart, the lonely, troubled and misunderstood older brother in The Good Apprentice, and of Moy, a sixteen-year-old girl in The Green Knight (1993), gripped by what a mental health diagnostician might classify as obsessive compulsive disorder, but who defies such a classification when seen through Murdoch’s compassionate eyes. I make no apology for an approach to Murdoch’s fiction which appears in danger of treating it as a series of case studies: in a groundbreaking approach to D.H. Lawrence, Gerald Doherty shows the extent to which Lawrence uses prior sexological discourse in his fiction.1 I contend that discourses from the two greatest depth-psychologists, Freud and Jung, are embedded in Murdoch’s writing, and that her approach to the suffering of her characters would not have taken the form it has without her deep knowledge of Jung. Towards Freud Murdoch’s attitude is conflicted. Several critics have discussed her use of Freud,2 with Conradi arguing that ‘not the least original aspect of her genius is the extraordinary marriage between Freud and Plato that she has effected, between a mechanical model of the psyche and a moral one’ (SA, p. 77). However, although Murdoch’s model 43



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of the psyche is deeply influenced by and endorses Freud, her portrayal of the practical help that Freudian psychoanalysis can actually offer suffering people is satirical. The psychotherapists Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head (1961), Francis Marloe in The Black Prince (1973), Blaise Gavender in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) are all the subject of Murdoch’s wit: she shows them as dangerous at worst or comically useless at best. In his biography Conradi describes Iris Murdoch’s duel with the psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell: (Murdoch) would allow analysis only demerits: the analyst had illicit power which he might abuse [. . .] She felt that psychoanalysis generated self-concern, gave too abstract and crude a picture to account for human variousness, left the spiritual out of account [. . .] Our energy should in any case be turned outwards in close loving attention of the quiddity of the world, not inwards, which tended to reinforce habitual pattern. (IMAL, p. 494) In Murdoch’s view the self-deceiving forces of the human psyche are not to be managed by Freudian means. On the face of it Murdoch is not at all conflicted about Jung, the other great depth-psychologist. She dismisses him as ‘the enemy’.3 Her theoretical writings do not suggest that the psyche is to be managed by Jungian any more than by Freudian means. On the contrary, Murdoch’s own magisterial account in The Sovereignty of Good of how to manage the psyche, which I will discuss below, outlines a coolly rational approach (with no suggestion of working with the unconscious) involving ‘effort’ and ‘attention’ and, as she put it later in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1993), ‘the inhibition of unworthy fantasies’ (p. 503). A central argument of this chapter will be that, perhaps despite herself, Murdoch does draw extensively on Jung (and on Jung’s view of the unconscious) when she portrays in her fiction the help her suffering characters need. But before justifying that statement I will show why Murdoch’s account of how to manage the psyche outlined in The Sovereignty of Good is not an adequate response to the suffering she describes so graphically in her fiction. After Freud, Murdoch suggests, we can no longer believe that an authentic mode of existence is attainable by intelligence and force of will alone. Suggesting that we are nearly, but not quite, slaves to Freud’s ‘mechanical model of the psyche’ (SA, p. 77), Murdoch offers terms for its control, illustrated in The Sovereignty of Good by the story



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of the mother (M) trying to be more just towards her daughter-inlaw (D) whom she dislikes for being ‘pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile’ (SG, p. 17). In Murdoch’s story the mother, judging herself ‘old-fashioned and conventional’, possibly ‘snobbish’ ‘prejudiced and narrow-minded’ as well as, certainly, ‘jealous’ (p. 17), learns to control her dislike of the young woman through a deliberate effort of attention until her view of D genuinely, not superficially, begins to change: ‘M looks at D, she attends to D, she focuses her attention [. . .] M is engaged in an endless task’ (p. 23). The Sovereignty of Good is full of words such as ‘effort’ and ‘struggle’: M is engaged in an internal struggle; the great artist, the best example of the moral pilgrim, tries to pierce the veil hiding reality; learning a foreign language is ‘difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable’ (p. 89). Through the techniques – Murdoch’s word – of effort, struggle, trying to see justly, trying to see beyond our relentless egos, we can learn to control our psyche’s ‘system of quasi-mechanical energy’ (p. 51) and attain a measure of peace. How does this model of psychic management relate to the four narratives of suffering in The Book and the Brotherhood, The Good Apprentice and The Green Knight to which I have referred? One answer is that while one can imagine the story of M and D unfolding in the elegant peace of an English country house (D’s demerits include, according to M, her ‘lacking in dignity and refinement’), Murdoch’s four narratives are reports from ‘the battle-front of human suffering’. All of us, she suggests, will fight on this battlefield at some time in our lives (‘Extreme suffering [. . .] is likely to be the lot of everyone’, where we will confront the adversaries ‘remorse or guilt or abandoned loneliness and lack of love’ [MGM, p. 504]). I suggest that against such enemies the model of psychic management I have just outlined is as much use as a horse against a tank and that Murdoch knew this. I will make what I mean clearer by comparing Murdoch’s different use of the same image – that of a kestrel – in a novel and in an essay. The first example is set in the peace of a scholar’s study, the second in an urban wasteland which mirrors the mind of the man walking there – a priest suffering the deep grief of losing his faith in God. First, the scholar’s story, taken again from The Sovereignty of Good: I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered [. . .] And of course this



Stories, Rituals and Healers in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction 45

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Now the priest’s story, taken from Henry and Cato: Then he saw the kestrel. The brown bird was hovering, a still portent, not very high up, right in the centre of the waste, so intent yet so aloof, its tail drawn down, its wings silently beating as in a cold immobile passion [. . .] Cato looked at it, aware suddenly of nothing else. Then as he looked, holding his breath, the bird swooped. It came down, with almost slow casual ease, to the ground, then rose again and flew away over Cato’s head. As he turned, shading his eyes, he could see the tiny dark form in its beak, the little doomed trailing tail. My Lord and my God, said Cato aloud. Then he laughed and set off again in the direction of the mission.4 Elizabeth Dipple argues that the priest’s response – Cato’s laughter – is a sign of a career dangerously set free from discipline5 but I contend that it is an act of justified rebellion against the disciplines of soul management, which include prayer, attention and meditation as exemplified in the mother’s and scholar’s stories. This second kestrel story, which reads like an ironic commentary on the first, faces the fact that kestrels, however beautiful, live by killing and eating small animals. Cato’s ironic laughter, signifying his refusal to learn from this graceful destroyer in the way recommended to the watcher in the Sovereignty of Good, connects with his refusal to do that enjoined on him by his mentor, the priest Brendan Craddock, to ‘suffer for God in the intellect, go on and on taking the strain’.6 What Cato in the end refuses to do is precisely that recommended by Murdoch in her account of M’s reorientation towards D: to take the strain, endlessly. Something calls to Cato deep from within his own psyche that he is no longer able to subdue with ‘techniques’. Attention, contemplation, effort, inhibition of unworthy fantasies, all have their place, but what is one supposed to do if one’s whole being rises up against them? Cato says to his mentor Brendan ‘I can’t pray. I try to, but it’s a lie, a level of myself that’s a lie’ (p. 173). Perhaps here, despite herself, Murdoch suggests that the psyche needs to be listened to (note the change of metaphor), not merely controlled with purifying techniques. Murdoch’s account of how to manage the soul in The Sovereignty of Good is not, when her characters are in extremis, enough. Self-management by effort and attention is fine if the greatest problem



is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care. (SG, p. 54)

you face is how to think better of your daughter-in-law. But what are you supposed to do when faced with the catastrophe of inconsolable grief or the terrible burden of remorse, or both? What techniques are available to control the psyche then? And here we must turn to Murdoch the novelist and healer, not the moralist and philosopher. Applying D.H. Lawrence’s words to Murdoch’s work, it is in her novels that she ‘can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science or any other book-tremulation can do.’7 The word ‘healer’ can have perhaps only a metaphorical meaning when applied to a novelist, although Lawrence would have disagreed: he also wrote that ‘at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be a dead man in life.’8 We should not, therefore, underestimate the power of Murdoch of all novelists to heal the souls of her troubled readers, to help them live. In thinking about Murdoch as healer rather than moralist I will now justify my argument for her use of Jung, despite strong evidence to the contrary. Her comment to Haffenden that he is ‘the enemy’, which I have already mentioned, is only one example. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Murdoch devotes five consecutive pages to dismissing Jung. She does so because central to Jung’s thought is the idea that we can choose mythical fates. To choose a mythical fate is, according to Murdoch, ‘egoistic and self indulgent’ (MGM, p. 316) – terms which recall her dislike of Sartre’s ‘totalitarian man’ who ‘seeks to cure himself’ of his neurosis by unfolding a myth about himself’9 or her dismissal of the hero’s attempt, in Sartre’s novel La Nausée, to make sense of his life through writing a novel. Real people and fictional characters who try to impose form on their lives by seeing in them the clarity of a work of art, including story and myth, have committed the cardinal Murdochian sin of honouring their egos rather than the world’s contingent detail. This is fine, of course, from the lofty standpoint of the moralist; from the position of those trying to help others racked by grief things look different. I contend that Jung’s idea of finding one’s life through myth and story is one of the most powerful weapons in the helper’s armoury; that Murdoch the healer knows it, and that this knowledge causes her to struggle not only with her own characters following a Jungian path but also with herself as moralist and philosopher. We can hear the struggle most clearly in the conflict between her narrators’ voices. For example, we can hear the moralist’s voice in the narrative use of the verb ‘slither’ to describe the movements of men searching for their own stories like Blaise Gavender of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) or Tim Reede of Nuns and Soldiers. (1980). We can also hear this dismissive voice in the narrator’s report of the internal convolutions of





the unbelieving priest Father McAlister of The Book and the Brotherhood when he is confronted with the terrible suffering of Tamar, convinced after the termination of her pregnancy that she will die of grief. That Tamar does not die of grief but is saved is the result of the priest offering her a myth that will make sense of her suffering, a story in which he does not believe: the story of Christ’s death and resurrection. We hear the moralist in the narrator’s description of the priest’s enactment on Good Friday of Christ’s passion: ‘That the priest performed this task in agony, with tears, did him no credit. Rather the contrary.’10 It is this narrative voice which led Martha Nussbaum to say that she often feels, ‘as reader, that Murdoch does not altogether like me, that she would have me be quite other than I am’.11 But another, wiser narrative voice which tells of Tamar’s agony knows that she is on the battlefront of suffering and this voice is complicit with, rather than dismissive of, Father McAlister. This voice, inward with Tamar’s own, reports Tamar’s tormented consciousness of the ‘terrible crime’ she has committed, ‘the irrevocable crime for which one suffers death’ (p. 65), and knows that Tamar seeks some words, some ritual act, which can match her own perception of her deed. Peter Hawkins describes Murdoch, in A Word Child, as pointing out ‘the predicament of people who are burdened by guilt, but who have no God to forgive them, no sacrament of reconciliation’.12 Hawkins does not refer to Jung, but might pertinently have done so. For Jung described many of his patients as lost sheep and their suffering as the result of their loss of belief, and their search as the search for the opportunity to live the symbolic life and follow the story and ritual denied them by their exile from a place of worship.13 Tamar’s narrative might be a case study of just such a patient, with Murdoch the moralist waging an internal battle with Murdoch the healer. This internal battle is best observed in the poignant description of the funeral ‘rite’ for the vanished embryo: Tamar murmured that she acknowledged her transgressions and her sins were ever before her, that she had been poured out like water and all her bones were out of joint, that she desired to be washed and to be whiter than snow, that a broken and contrite spirit might not be despised, that broken bones might after all rejoice, and she might put off her sackcloth and be girded in gladness. (p. 493) On one level the tone is that of the sophisticated narrator ironically repeating words from the Bible (Psalms 22, 30 and 5114 ) opportunistically stitched together by Father McAlister and comically



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mismatched to the pitiful event; on another it is that of the compassionate Jungian healer who, inward with Tamar’s consciousness, knows that this is precisely the device that Tamar, out on her own battlefront, needs. If the evidence that Murdoch presents a Jungian healing programme in The Book and the Brotherhood is strong, in the next narrative I will consider, that of Edward in The Good Apprentice, published two years earlier, it is incontrovertible. The novel is, despite everything she was later to say about him in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch’s mature and sustained tribute to Jung. It recounts the history of two brothers, Edward and Stuart, and its first words – an allusion to the parable of the Prodigal Son: ‘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 more worthy to be called thy son’15 – alert the reader to the fact that the novel is to be an examination of the role of myth and story in healing lives. In the case of the priest Father McAlister and Tamar in The Book and the Brotherhood, Murdoch the moralist is at odds with Murdoch the healer, but in The Good Apprentice she is less so because the agent of healing, Thomas the psychiatrist, is for her a more sympathetic figure than the priest. Jack Turner has rightly argued that Thomas is the one psychiatrist in Murdoch’s fiction who is not a caricature;16 he is wrong, however, to suggest that Thomas is a Freudian when he is clearly a follower of Jung. Indeed, Thomas’s words to Edward – the young man crucified by remorse after the death of his friend to whom he gave LSD and whom Thomas sends on a mythical journey to find his father – sound at many points like Jung’s. A few examples: early in the novel, Thomas refers to the necessity of Edward ‘enacting a mythical drama’ (going to Seegard and finding his father) (p. 37); Jung speaks of patients whom nothing can help but ‘the dialectical development of the mythological material which is alive in the sick man himself’.17 Both Jung and Thomas value the unconscious, Thomas describing it as more than ‘just an abode of monsters, it’s a reservoir of spiritual power’ (p. 141); Jung wrote that ‘The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semi-human and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine”.’18 Both indeed stress the relation of healing to the word ‘spiritual’ – Edward tells Thomas that he is spiritually ill, Thomas tells Edward that he is going on ‘a spiritual journey’ (p. 72); Jung speaks of a neurosis which is ‘an entirely spiritual form of suffering’.19 Both stress the dangers of their kind of psychotherapy: Jung wrote that ‘[to] dabble in psychotherapy is to play with fire [. . .] It is particularly dangerous when the mythological layer of the psyche is uncovered’, 20 while Thomas describes his own ‘weak magic [. . .] pale and wan against that blackness like a failing torch’ 10.1057/9780230277229 - Iris Murdoch and Morality, Edited by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner




(p. 77). In seeking to develop ‘the mythological material which is alive in the sick man himself’, Thomas demonstrates himself to be Jung’s disciple – a discipleship endorsed by the narrative voice’s inwardness with Thomas’s own, and its absence of critical distancing from the healer of the kind we saw in The Book and the Brotherhood. One can argue, however, that Murdoch’s admiration for Jung in this novel is qualified. Thomas, meditating on the meaning of the word ‘myth’, distances himself from Jung by suggesting that ‘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’ (p. 78). At the end of his ‘mythical journey’ Edward, in a moment of annihilating despair, is reported as crying that ‘the awful fact was that he had not moved an inch, all movement all journeying, had been an illusion, he was back at the beginning, back with Mark, back in hell’ (p. 511). Here, Murdoch seems to say, the Jungian programme of developing the mythological material which is alive in the sick man himself just doesn’t work. But Edward’s despairing words are not the end of the novel, and it is worth juxtaposing a passage from the novel which shows Edward in a calmer frame of mind with one from Jung’s work, to illustrate finally what Murdoch takes from Jung: his fight for meaning in the face of meaninglessness. First, Edward: Of course I’m thinking about it in two quite different ways, thought Edward. In a way it’s all a muddle starting off with an accident [. . .] In another way it’s a whole complex thing, internally connected, like a dark globe, a dark world, as if we were all parts of a single drama, living inside a work of art. Perhaps important things in life are always like that, so that you can think of them in both ways. Of course one works at things in one’s mind, one doesn’t want to think that what happens ‘does nothing’ or doesn’t matter, as if it was wasted, it’s much more comforting if it’s part of one’s fate or one’s deep being somehow. Perhaps that working is a kind of magic, like what made Stuart run away. It’s dangerous, but I don’t see how we could get on without it. (p. 518) Now, Jung: The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If



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meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaning of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development. But that is – or seems to me – not the case. Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true. Life is – or has – meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.21 Any story can be told many ways, as Hilary Burde, first-person narrator of A Word Child says,22 and The Good Apprentice also narrates the meaninglessness of Edward’s story through the words of his stepfather, Harry, who had told him to forget any idea that he was going through ‘a great spiritual drama’ (p. 17) and accept simply that he was ill, that he would be treated, that he would recover (p. 13). But there is also a sense, after all, in which Thomas’s Jungian programme to enable Edward to discover and develop his own meaning, his own story, has indeed ‘worked’ and been endorsed by Murdoch, despite Harry’s compassionate view that that story was really only ‘a muddle starting off with an accident’.23 The last two instances I shall take of Murdoch’s examination of how those stumbling over battlefronts of suffering might find Jungian devices to help them are the most moving, since they are ones made without companions. Stuart, Edward’s older half-brother in The Good Apprentice, shares Murdoch’s mistrust of mythical journeys and wants to live life without recourse to the Freudian or Jungian unconscious (‘one soon comes to the end of psychology’ [p. 143]) because he ‘doesn’t fancy the idea’ of the unconscious mind (p. 141). Like M trying to reorientate herself towards D in The Sovereignty of Good, Stuart uses conscious effort to enable him to face jealousy – he deals, for instance, with the possibility that ‘some twinge of old jealous resentment might [. . .] make him the tiniest bit glad that his popular brother was in trouble’ (p. 51) by thrusting such thoughts down, ‘as if drowning them, with no misgivings about repression’ (p. 51). Indeed, he has carried M’s programme of change through effort and attention much further – Murdoch describes him as blessed with the ability to enter a quiet meditative state at will where from ‘a higher viewpoint’ (p. 50) he is able periodically to distance himself from the ‘terrible untouchable sufferings of others’ (p. 50). Yet Stuart is not able to stay on this high place: driven by loneliness and grief to leave it, he has to go literally and metaphorically underground in order to encounter the self which he consistently denies by ignoring the unconscious. This is the self which, the narrator reports, if left undeveloped, would have made him like ‘an unreflective soldier, perhaps not likely to survive for long’ (p. 50). Indeed, for much of the novel it seems





possible that Stuart will not survive, or that he will settle into the life of a strange lonely outcast. Verbally abused and physically assaulted by his father, and through his intense sensitivity carrying the burden of the suffering of others, he retells their stories simply as tales of ‘pure affliction, utter loss, innocent suffering, pointless suffering’ like that of Jesus or of the girl who on the day of her death in Auschwitz had woken up from sleep ‘and plaited her hair – so carefully’ (p. 148). Any story can be told many ways, and this saddest way of all is how Stuart, a priest in the world without God, dedicated to a life without self-delusion or drama or recourse to the healing of the unconscious, has to tell stories. Godless, friendless and fatherless he leaves his father’s house and sets off into the world alone, enacting another version of the journey of the prodigal son. Anthony Stevens, the Jungian psychiatrist, suggests that: Of all the metaphors for life that the human imagination has conceived [. . .] the most evocative is that of the departure, the journey and the return: the departure, so full of the sadness of separation and excitement for the adventures to come; the journey, a series of hazards and transitions, of setbacks and triumphs; the return, marked by final transformation, fulfilment and completion.24 Stuart’s return to himself, in one of the most astonishing moments of the novel, takes place in the London Underground. There he finds what he has been looking for (and what he believes it is weak of him to want): a sign. The nearest he had come to such a sign before was in the unbearable image of the girl plaiting her hair which was ‘a sort of – particular – absolute thing’ (p. 148). In Oxford Circus Underground station he encounters another particular absolute thing, a light in his darkness, when his distress is greatest: As Stuart stood upon the platform waiting for the train he felt a new and dreadful feeling of shame, a shameful loneliness and sadness and grief, as if he were both banished from the human race and condemned for eternity to be a useless and detested witness of its sufferings. (p. 447) It is then that he sees a mouse searching for food on the ‘black sunken concrete floor of the track’ and takes in the truth that ‘It was not trapped. It lived there’ (p. 447). The revelation bathes him ‘like a shrouded sun which warmed his body until it glowed as if it too



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were all radiantly alight’ (p. 447). The particularity of the revelation explodes Stuart’s thought, opening the possibility that ‘there are signs everywhere, everything is a sign’ (p. 508). Anthony Stevens writes that ‘attainment of a new stage of life seems to demand that symbols of initiation, appropriate to that stage, must be experienced. If society fails to provide them, then the Self produces them.’25 Stuart’s image of the mouse is the symbol of initiation produced by his unconscious – yet it is not his alone. The mouse is a living creature in the real world outside Stuart. When Jung described synchronicity he spoke of an acausal connecting principle between the inner and outer which makes the world – once the idea is grasped – a stranger place.26 It is to this stranger, more beautiful, more exciting place that Stuart has come. Released from the dungeon of his misery in a psychological and literal Underground, he is set free to live a new life, connected to others in a believable future where sadness will not be the only theme. The last of Murdoch’s narratives of healing I will briefly take, from The Green Knight, tells of a 16-year-old girl who, with no help from anyone, finds and enacts a story to help her with suffering. Like Stuart, Moy is reminiscent of those who, according to Jung, search for the opportunity to live the symbolic life and follow a story and ritual denied them by their exile from a place of worship. Like Stuart, too, she has no one with whom she can share her story. Towards the end of the novel, racked by secret griefs (her desperate yearning for the young man who becomes her sister’s lover, her mourning for the dog from whom she has been suddenly parted, and a cumulative isolation and loneliness), Moy becomes obsessed with the idea that a stone, which she had removed from its place close to a rock on a hillside by the sea and taken home to London, is desperately missing its friend, the rock. She returns to the hillside with the aim of reuniting the stone with the rock. Moy’s despair when she is unable to find the rock is of the same order as Stuart’s: ‘What did it matter? It was just a stone. It was nothing. She was nothing.’ But then she finds the rock and the place where the stone had been:

Moy lowered the stone into the hole. It fitted exactly. Moy felt something snap inside her as if her heart had snapped. The heart-string, she thought – what is the heart-string? Tears came into her eyes. She touched the stone, pressing it firmly into its hole. Kneeling, she kissed it. Then she hurried to the rock and kissed it. Then, after caressing the mysterious message of its criss-cross cracks, not looking back, she ran quickly out of the dell and onto the open hillside.27





What is one to make of this? It would seem that Iris Murdoch’s narrator, fully complicit with the voice and thought of the character, Moy, becomes the healer and friend whom Moy herself lacks. Hilary Burde in A Word Child recalls of his dead lover, Anne, that being seen by her was ‘like being seen by God’ (p. 122). The narrator’s vision of Moy is an image of what it indeed might be like to be seen by God, to be understood and healed, to be given the space and love in which to tell one’s story. A school of psychotherapy – narrative therapy, which clearly owes much to Jung – asks what difference it would make to a person situated in a story of deep secret sorrow if she had her own story-telling rights restored so that she was enabled to become her own author.28 Moy’s story is an answer to that question. In giving to Moy her own storytelling rights and, in a life starved of external ritual, giving her access to a healing ritual of her own devising, Murdoch offers a view of the soul and its capacity to heal itself which offers the same kind of hope that Jung offered. Moy, radiating her creator’s light, is an image of a person who has to find her own way without the help of psychotherapist or priest. But Murdoch also knew of those whom priests or psychotherapists can help – and one of her triumphs as a novelist is that she so intuitively and delicately distinguishes between the two kinds of person. And in controlling her disapproval of the ritual devised by a disbelieving priest to bring a young woman out of hell, in entering into the mind of a Jungian psychiatrist trying to rescue another of hell’s inhabitants, and in telling the story of a young man searching for a healing sign despite himself, Murdoch shows us that the psyche is, in the sense in which Jung meant those words, spiritual and divine.

Notes 1. Gerald Doherty, Oriental Lawrence: The Quest for the Secrets of Sex (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). 2. For example: Jack Turner, Murdoch vs. Freud: A Freudian Look at an AntiFreudian (New York: Peter Lang, 1993); Douglas Brooks-Davis, Fielding, Dickens, Gosse, Iris Murdoch and Oedipal Hamlet (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989); SA, 1989 edition. 3. John Haffenden, ‘John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch’, in TCHF, p. 135. 4. Murdoch, Henry and Cato (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 221. 5. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 252. 6. Quoted in ibid., p. 253. 7. Lawrence, Phoenix (London: Heinemann, 1970), p. 535. 8. Ibid., p. 538.



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9. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, Yale Review, XLIX (Winter): 254. 10. Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 541. 11. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual’, in Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (eds), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 49. 12. Peter S. Hawkins, The Language of Grace: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and Iris Murdoch (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1981), p. 118. 13. See, for example, C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 264. 14. I am grateful to Frances White for pointing this out to me. 15. Murdoch, The Good Apprentice (1985; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 1. 16. Jack Turner, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Good Psychoanalyst’, Twentieth Century Literature, XLIII (1994): 302. 17. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Vol. 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy (1954; London: Routledge, 1993), p. 17. 18. Ibid., p. 192. 19. Ibid., p. 16. 20. Ibid., p. 15. 21. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. R. and C. Winston (1963; London: Fontana, 1995), p. 391. 22. Murdoch, A Word Child (1975; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 122. 23. For a more extended consideration of Murdoch’s use of Jung in The Good Apprentice and The Black Prince, see Robert Hardy, Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2000). 24. Anthony Stevens, On Jung (1990; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 64. 25. Ibid., p. 130, quoted in Robert Hardy, Psychological and Religious Narratives in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction, p. 66. 26. C.G. Jung, ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle’, in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Vol. 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (1960; Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 417–519. 27. Murdoch, The Green Knight (1993; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 471. 28. See David Epston, Michael White and Kevin Murray, ‘A Proposal for Re-authoring Therapy: Rose’s Revisioning of her Life and a Commentary’, in Shelia McNamee and Kenneth J. Gergen (eds), Therapy as Social Construction (London: Sage Publications, 1992), pp. 96–115.




Laughing at Something Tragic: Murdoch as Anti-Moralist Peter J. Conradi

‘Georgie once pleased me [. . .] by saying I had the face of someone laughing at something tragic’.1 Criticism has long ignored or underplayed Iris Murdoch’s comic sense, because it is somehow at odds with traditional moralities. There is, to date, one brief monograph only on the topic, and it is not strong. Murdoch was, of course, not only a novelist but also a professional philosopher with a passionate and urgent ethic that has influenced modern theology and philosophy alike. As a result, criticism has too often read the fiction as moral tract or sermon. The very titles of many well-known critical studies – Byatt’s Degrees of Freedom, Dipple’s Work for the Spirit, my own Murdoch: the Saint and the Artist, Gordon’s Fables of Unselfing – all point to Murdoch’s ethical strenuousness.2 One important departure came with A.S. Byatt’s revelatory 1976 British Council pamphlet on Murdoch (in the series ‘Writers and their Work’),3 with its wonderful exposition of the influence of Shakespearian comedy on Murdoch’s novels. It began to be clear that we needed more discussions of the comedy and poetry of her work, and less of its ‘contingency’ (SA, p. 373). Early critics, for example, tended to return to the tedious issue of Murdoch’s over-plotting. How odd this is! We do not criticize Twelfth Night or Much Ado for their manifold improbabilities, which belong within what Bakhtin calls the Carnival world;4 to do so would be to miss the joyous point of the plays, and would look foolishly literal-minded. Studying Shakespeare – especially the comedies – gave a new authority to Murdoch’s long-standing need to go beyond ‘average probability’5 in her plotting. The aspects of human life that she wished to illuminate are either improbable, or in some literary and generic sense ‘beyond’ probability. 56



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As C.L. Barber puts the latter point: ‘it is not the credibility of the event that is decisive but what can be expressed through it’.6 And what can be expressed through a Murdoch plot is her schematic sense of her characters’ unconscious enslavement to repetitive life-myths, or what Buddhists term ‘karma’. The comical aspect of such enslavement has not yet won the exploration it merits. This might be an approach that could defuse what Bakhtin memorably called ‘false seriousness’.7 Throughout The Saint and the Artist I too tried to argue that her fiction is not merely moral philosophy in disguise, is therefore more and other than simple allegory, and is hence in some ways subversive of its author’s own moral position. Some years later, a comparison between Murdoch’s use of the comic and her admired Dostoevsky also seemed timely: the funniest moments in the novels of both are often the most painful. Through humour they exhibit the sheer irrational confusion of life, but with a sense of tolerance as well as a sometimes savage glee. We laugh in their skandal scenes at the affront to our own modesty, an affront that draws us into acknowledging membership in a community of fools. This comic sense, I argued then, penetrates our self-importance and relaxes our painful sense of separateness.8 Indeed, A Severed Head, to take another instance, both as a novel and also in its stage adaptation, is wildly funny. Murdoch is comedic in her interest in the varieties and illusions of love and in her interest in human resilience and survival. She is also comedic in her fascination with and ability to learn from Shakespearian comedies that license the over-plotting she loves, and that positively delight in wanton and witty symmetries. And yet if Murdoch’s best novels are comedies, they are comedies of a special sort. ‘How can such a terrible planet dare to have any art at all?’ she asked in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, before putting in a plea for tragi-comedy and the ‘sad-comic’ (MGM, p. 92). It is important to try to see why she invites us to join her in laughing at pain. And so this chapter represents a sketchy and necessarily inconclusive attempt to open up debate about such issues. I begin with the question of Irish Protestant magic; move through the question of the critical false seriousness that underestimates Murdoch’s delight in her own comical demons; try to outline her disdain for ‘poetic justice’ and propensity for ‘laughter-through-tears’; and end by briefly exploring passages from five representative comic fictions. There are digressions on Shakespeare, connected with the theme of love and judgement. ∗ ∗ ∗



Laughing at Something Tragic: Murdoch as Anti-Moralist


I would like to start by adumbrating some thoughts about power and magic, themes that connect for me with the comic distress that has long haunted her novels. While dining around 1968 in a taverna in Delphi, Murdoch saw waiters flapping their napkins at a big moth.9 Upset and protective about this beleaguered insect, she rose from the table, somehow communicated personally with the moth, persuaded or willed it to come to her and John Bayley’s table, then released it outside. This little drama recalls others within the fiction: Dora, in The Bell, rescuing a butterfly on the train to Imber and thereby forgetting her husband Paul’s valise; Morgan’s frantic and surreal attempts to liberate the pigeon from a Piccadilly Circus Underground escalator in A Fairly Honourable Defeat; Gabriel’s purchase in The Philosopher’s Pupil of a live but threatened fish. These imaginary events, and the real incident alike, share the quality of unusual closeness or communication between the human and the non-human worlds. For Murdoch, as for the Romantics, the world is alive and energetic in ways that, even when sinister, are always mysterious. Thus Jake in Under the Net advises us that in his experience, ‘the spider is the smallest creature whose gaze can be felt’.10 Not many can boast of having experienced the gaze of a spider. Miles in Bruno’s Dream notes, ‘the communion of two discarded shoes’; the narrator in An Unofficial Rose records two tall plants in the Kentish garden nodding towards each other ‘with the secret gestures of friends’.11 And Moy in The Green Knight is overheard apologizing to a piece of lemon-peel. This sense of the world’s living otherness extended always into Murdoch’s experience. On 21 February 1949, she recorded that she had a curious hesitation about burning a sheet of paper: ‘There is a sort of animism which I recognize in myself & in my parents. We are surrounded by live & rather pathetic objects.’12 This animism, this sense of the secret life and pathos of objects – this sensitivity to the gaze of spiders – arguably all relate to what the historian, Roy Foster, has called ‘Protestant Magic’: a propensity of Irish Protestants who, having lost political and economic power, compensate by seeing the world in ways that appear to others fey, superstitious or occult.13 A recent list of the greatest Irish writers included, out of a total of fourteen, no fewer than nine Irish Protestants. And like W.B. Yeats, Murdoch was famously hospitable to the paranormal. Levitation, among other forms of magic, features in The Sea, The Sea; there are flying saucers in The Nice and the Good and telekinesis in The Green Knight. That Murdoch’s weird relationship with the Delphi moth apparently went beyond any such cultural construction, of course, remains mysterious. Perhaps the ultimate use



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of compensatory magic on the part of Irish Protestants is making up fictions.14

There may be phases in the reception of a major writer. At first the prophetic ‘message’ gets expounded. Later, the art itself is celebrated. It would be strange to read criticism today of Tolstoy or Lawrence whose chief emphasis was still Tolstoy’s simple-lifery, or Lawrence’s hatred of sex-in-the-head. Discipleship at some point gives way to criticism. I do not want to underplay Murdoch’s ‘message to the planet’, and I am convinced that the writer who described Stuart in The Good Apprentice knew much about the mystic’s path, and its possible fruition. Yet to concentrate on the message can generate false seriousness. Maybe such false seriousness was inevitable in early Murdoch studies – which either directly invested in Murdoch’s own philosophic agenda or, by opposing it, secretly colluded with that agenda anyway. It is arguably false seriousness for the critic to try to turn literary criticism into a missionary cause or activity. To fixate on Murdoch’s message or, for that matter, to fixate on the excesses of symmetry and coincidence in her work, seem to this observer (as they did to my teacher Lorna Sage15 ) dead-end projects, falsely serious, teaching us little. Those who attack portentousness and false seriousness alike within Murdoch’s work are often her demons. In a 1968 letter to Philippa Foot, Murdoch mentioned that she was growing fond of one demon in a work-in-progress.16 This was Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. The notion that she could be fond of her demons – Mischa Fox, Palmer Anderson, Carel Fisher, Julius King, Charles Arrowby, Lucas Graffe – is instructive. And they are, after all, not just disturbing creations, but comic ones too. Possibly we have had enough monographs about her virtuous characters and now need studies of her demons? The cruelty and power-play that her demons are variously spokespersons for belong to their author too. Her admiration for Mishima and John Cowper Powys had something to do with the fact that both shared her interest in cruelty and power-play; or sadomasochism. Such cruelty and power-play are evident in her desire to provide plots that will test her characters’ high-mindedness to breaking-point.17 The Sacred and Profane Love-Machine, for example, shocked in 1976 because Harriet was felt to be hounded to death by her author’s secret cruelty,18 while the character of the undeserving Emily was improved by good luck. There is little ‘poetic justice’ in this novel. Murdoch’s demons are the visible agents



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of their author’s desire to unmask her characters, to make them understand that they, too, are (in Nietzsche’s famous phrase) ‘human, all-too human’; and that it is power – and not poetic justice – that mostly rules our world. In Guy Openshaw in Nuns and Soldiers she created a character who ‘represses his own cruelty’;19 if Murdoch saw such suppression as one aspect of a virtuous life in her novels, by contrast, she was free to play with such dark forces. Susan Sontag brilliantly pointed out that the thought-systems of Simone Weil, and of Elias Canetti – both of whom influenced Murdoch profoundly – are ‘oddly similar’.20 Weil is obsessed by saintliness and her vision is tragic while Canetti’s vision is arguably comedic. Yet both thinkers analyse human relations mainly in terms of power, a startling parallelism surely meriting further investigation. For power is the element within which all Murdoch’s characters subsist. Power typifies them; it is what they breathe. Yet the criticism that might have come out of this has not yet materialized. Another approach has been to enfranchise comedy as part of the author’s moral purposiveness, making her sound an optimistic rationalist like George Eliot, rather than a pessimistic and irrationalist moralist like Dostoevsky whom, after all, she praised as ‘deeply, darkly funny’.21 Such criticism tidies up her comedy itself as part of her seriousness, instead of something vital and redeeming at the edge of her vision, where forces can play that are inadvertent or subversive. The comedy, I will argue here, is in league with imperfection, and usually accompanies distress. And it enshrines and safeguards complexity of feeling. Murdoch is, I want to argue, essentially a comic novelist. She wrote in The Black Prince that: Almost any tale of our doings is comic [. . .] The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if he existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.22 This elegantly sustained balance of what is horrible or distressing with what is comic makes The Black Prince a difficult book to teach. The young can find this comic-horrible equipoise, which marks many of her best novels, hard to grasp. But it is important to try to do so, and to see why she invites us to join her in laughing at pain.



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It may also be relevant to stress how unsatisfactory are her attempts at ‘straight’ tragedy. The Unicorn convinces and grips at the start, but as its final four deaths approach, some conviction is spent and lost. The spiritual life is not tragic, the novel famously and wittily asserts, and has no story. But that elegant adage does not make up for the want of persuasive power within the plot. Nor is the ending of A Word Child, which may be an hommage to King Lear, a strong element, for me, in that novel.23 For all her praise of the achievement of great novelists in, as one might express this matter, ‘writing death’, her own treatment of the subject – with the possible exception of Bruno’s Dream – is usually perfunctory and unsatisfactory. She is comic in her interest in the varieties and illusions of love, in her interest in human resilience and survival, in her fascination with and ability to learn both from Shakespearian comedy as from Dostoevsky’s use of skandal. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she puts in a special plea for tragi-comedy or for what she terms the sad-comic: It is an important fact, neglected by philosophy, that the funny is everywhere to be found [. . .] a morally high sense of the comic is ubiquitous in literature [. . .] much of the greatest literary art is a tragicomic, or perhaps one should say sad-comic, condensation, a kind of pathos that is aware of terrible things, and which eschews definition and declared formal purpose. Such pathos is everywhere in Shakespeare. We also see it in the great novels. (MGM, pp. 92–3) These ‘terrible things’ relate to the absolute absence, in the real world, of ‘poetic justice’. Murdoch expressed contempt for idea of ‘poetic justice’; she approves of Schopenhauer for pioneering the same view. To the wisdom of Schopenhauer here she opposes the simplicity of Samuel Johnson, who found the deaths of Desdemona and Cordelia ‘intolerable’. Johnson she rebukes for the naiveté and ‘dullness’ of his demand for poetic justice, just as Schopenhauer is commended for the startling perception that ‘the real sin the hero atones for is not his own but the crime of existence itself – ‘original sin’ (MGM, pp. 100–1). Schopenhauer startles us here because he seems to jump forward a century to Kafka: we are guilty for no reason, or just because we exist anyway, and are imperfect. As Bergman puts it in Wild Strawberries, ‘We are guilty of guilt.’24 This ‘pathos that is aware of terrible things’ (see above) to which Murdoch is pointing follows on from human imperfection, and is comical, just as Kafka and Dostoevsky are comical too.





When Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals was published, I recall reading this illuminating passage about ‘a kind of pathos that is aware of terrible things’ with the sense that – at last – someone had recorded with exactitude why Shakespearian comedy is marvellous. It was, inter alia, Shakespeare’s cavalier willingness to mix the comic and the tragic that famously led to his being undervalued, before 1830, in neoclassicallyminded France. Of course, Murdoch is not the first to want to make a special place for this mixture of the comic and the sad in Shakespeare. Both W.H. Auden and C.L. Barber celebrate this too. Barber writes of how, in As You Like it, judgement is left free to mock what the heart embraces, and he writes wonderfully of how Shakespeare’s comedy depends on a shared and intimate understanding of the pathos of man’s imperfection. One thinks too of the curious adjective Auden employs for Twelfth Night: ‘whiffy’. Auden felt that that play accommodates so much pain that it risks losing the audience’s sympathy.25 One of the best younger critics, James Wood, recently ascribed the idea of ‘laughter through tears’ first of all to Gogol and then to Freud, who valued ‘the humour that smiles through tears’ and thought it functioned when a prepared sympathy is blocked by a comic occurrence. Freud believed that this sympathy was not merely not dissipated by such comic blockage, but intensified by it. Like Murdoch, Wood also invokes Shakespeare in this connection, as the progenitor of the English novel. Wood, who admires Murdoch’s theorizing more than he enjoys her novels, also argued recently for ‘a kind of tragi-comic stoicism that might best be called the comedy of forgiveness (laughing with) – opposed to the comedy of correction (laughing at)’.26 And this, too, is close to Murdoch. ∗ ∗ ∗ The roots of Murdoch’s interest in the sad-comic go back to the beginning of her writing life. The interest changes emphasis in different periods and I will finish by sketching some changes here. As early as 1947 Murdoch recorded her admiration of ‘that vertiginous heart-breaking absurdity which Queneau achieves by his ambiguous serio-comic play. Oh, oh, I wish I could write like that.’27 ‘Serio-comic play’ of course brilliantly predicts Murdoch’s usage in Under the Net. One aspect of this might be brought out here. Jake’s acceptance of his loss of Anna Quentin, and his turning to Sadie instead at the end, mark his author’s desire to distance herself from Anna’s emotional promiscuity. But Anna is not only promiscuous: she also suffers from



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false seriousness. Anna, we learn, ‘had a taste for tragedy [. . .] She takes life intensely and very hard’ (p. 31). In 1942 Murdoch’s Oxford friend Leo Pliatzky wrote to Frank Thompson that Murdoch ‘finds the world tragic and moving, but that is not unusual’ (IMAL, p. 162). The murder of Frank Thompson in 1944 and the death of Franz Steiner in 1952 were arguably tragic events. Certainly Murdoch experienced them as both personal and public tragedies. Each figure joined her private pantheon of martyrs. And if she designed the character of Anna to parody her own taste for the tragic, she could not have done better. An eerie and prescient self-awareness haunts Murdoch’s ironic selfportrait as Anna. The false-serious facility with which Anna enters into and plays with intimacy – and her taste for tragedy alike – are subject to a judgement, and one that we are invited to share. Anna, we might say, is wanting in a sense of the comic. There is a moment of equal interest in A Severed Head, when the narrator, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, describes himself as having the face of someone ‘laughing at something tragic’ (p. 15). His wife, Antonia, fell in love with Martin’s brother, Alexander, many years before, soon after her engagement party, and Martin has been a cuckold ever since. All the characters act out stale and compulsive roles for whose logic the demonic Palmer Anderson is spokesperson – Palmer being just as much caught up in unfreedom and power as his creatures. This group repetition-compulsion marks most of Murdoch’s plots. But here it is comic, not tragic. Georgie’s suicide attempt fails, and she, like Martin, at the end survives, only to fall into further comic repetition. The distress of the book, as of its fine successors, such as A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea, is a comic distress. The critic who found A Severed Head ‘unbearably funny’ was not alone (IMAL, p. 436). And yet the reasons why Murdoch’s comedy is so hard to discuss are interesting. The comedy is so embedded, so much part-andparcel of the texture of each book, and – one is tempted to say – of the truthfulness of each story, each situation. Our laughter is a token of our surrender to this truthfulness, and of the stoical recognition of human imperfection that the truthfulness points to. Murdoch’s desire to connect the serious and the comic took on a new guise in 1967. She wrote then: ‘Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of all is to join this sense of absolute mortality not to the tragic, but to the comic. Shallow and Silence. Stepan Trofimovich Verhovensky.’28 She admired the scene in Act III of Henry IV part 2 in which these two old men, Shallow and Silence, reminisce, comparing notes about the deaths of mutual friends – ‘And is old Double dead?’– and at the same time





trying to track the progress of economic inflation: Shallow enquires as to how much bullocks, and, later, ewes, currently fetch at auction. No accident that she was then writing Bruno’s Dream, which attempts to place the death of Bruno within an essentially comic landscape. Bruno’s morally intense daughter Gwen jumped off Battersea bridge one March to save a child whom she thought to be in trouble. The child swam to safety; Gwen suffered a heart-attack and died. Gwen was always morally quixotic in just this kind of way, and the description of her death is comical. If not exactly belonging to ‘dark comedy’ and implying some authorial glee or Schadenfreude, it is nonetheless a joke about the possible consequences of the high-mindedness that is one of the book’s themes, when uncorrected by common sense. Her death was ‘terrible’ and yet has weathered, through time, into something simultaneously comical, and full of pathos. A distant cousin of this ‘pathos that is aware of terrible things, which eschews definition and declared formal purpose, and is everywhere in Shakespeare’ (MGM, p. 93) appears in chapter 30 of Bruno’s Dream, in the marriage scene between Adelaide de Crecy and the overbearing Will Boase, who has long claimed her as his rightful possession. The chapter starts with Adelaide’s attempts to stop crying. She was mistress for years to the feckless Danby, for whom she pines. Moreover, Will Boase, referred to in The Sea, The Sea as ‘that ass’, is given to alarming tantrums and to bullying. With Will, we are informed, Adelaide is to find unexpected consolation in bed. Meanwhile, she weeps: ‘Where do they come from, these tears? She pictured a great lachrymose reservoir, the tears of a life-time: and at the thought of how many she would still without doubt have to shed, the flowing stream redoubled’ (p. 238). She fears damaging her eyes. At the Register office: ‘ “I’m the groom,” said Will. “Oh Ad, turn off the water-works will you? [. . .] Anyone would think you were going to be executed” ’ (p. 241). ‘I think we all feel a bit like that on our wedding day, ha ha,’ said the registrar. Next, tears begin to course down the face of Auntie, who, despite knowing only Russian, can accurately follow the emotional logic of the situation. Then the face of Nigel, still smiling, is streaming. Finally, first Will, and then almost at once, the registrar succumb:

‘Oh Christ!’ said Will. His face became red, and his eyes filled and overbrimmed with tears. ‘Christ! Sorry, Ad’. ‘And your father’s name – Oh dear – Oh dear me –’ The registrar’s pen faltered and he began to reach for his handkerchief. (p. 242)



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This is funny because of the contagiousness of tears: as with yawning, one person involuntarily sets off another. Next, as the registrar suggests, in bad times a marriage resembles a sentence of death, or a life-sentence: marriage in old comedies ends the story, but in life is often the start of new kinds of trouble.29 Finally, there is the communion of grief, the rising tide of water that echoes the flooding Thames just before Will and Adelaide’s marriage takes place, grief at the lacrimae rerum with which Murdoch’s novels are replete: and the knowledge that, whatever the point of life might be, it is not simply the pursuit of happiness. Such grief by the way, like so much else in Britain, is subject to a class system. Towards the end of The Nice and the Good, Casie-the-maid comically cries at a rubbishy TV soap, while the educated Theo and Willy grieve at concentration camp betrayal and at love. Murdoch does not consider these two styles of grief to be equal; the lower, by parodying the higher, also validates its greater significance. And yet, the luck or chance of education apart, Murdoch is none the less asserting grief’s universality. This universal grief might take us back to Shakespeare, to his dual sense of sin and of instinctive charity. Of the lodging and entertaining of the players in Hamlet Polonius famously tells Hamlet that: POLONIUS: I will use them according to their desert. HAMLET: God’s bodikins, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping? (II.ii.561) The emphasis can fall here on Hamlet’s half-meant generosity or on his cynicism – everyone secretly deserves to be whipped for undisclosed crimes. Of course, the world of Hamlet includes Gertrude and Claudius, whose adulterous love and treachery towards Hamlet’s father have – thus far in the play – been rewarded by a crown, by power and by the fruits of power. They deserve whipping. Yet Hamlet urges that we be treated better than our sins warrant. Though tragedy and comedy differ, inter alia, by the degree of good or bad luck afforded their characters, they must none the less coexist within the same public world. And that the comedies too have just such a dual perspective – a bitter realpolitik, accompanying a generous forgiveness – was noted by C.L. Barber in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. The comedies are full of pain. Thus a potentially murderous fraternal rivalry powers the plot not just of Hamlet and the sub-plot in King Lear, but, equally, of Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and The Tempest.





So Polonius’s remark and Hamlet’s rejoinder are echoed, or foreshadowed, by an equally famous exchange between Hippolyta and Theseus watching the antics of the mechanicals playing Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: to Hippolyta’s ‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard’, Theseus ripostes, ‘The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them’ (V.i.213). Both exchanges emphasize generosity towards actors appearing in a play-within-the-play and then again, by implied analogy, towards all the human agents for whom play-actors, as also in As You Like it or The Tempest, are figures or images. Indeed, Hyppolita’s first harshly dismissive judgement soon softens to ‘Beshrew my heart but I pity the man.’ ∗ ∗ ∗ A different mixture of love and judgement is to be found in An Accidental Man. A surprising small scene towards the end vouchsafes a dog’s innocent point of view on the human affairs to which the fate of dogs is subject: Pyrrhus, a large black labrador, rescued, not for the first time, from the Battersea Dogs’ Home looked up anxiously from his place by the stove and wagged his tail. Pyrrhus’s lot had always been cast with couples who fought and parted, abandoning him on motorways, on lonely moors, on city street corners. He had been called Sammy and then Raffles and then Bobo. He had only just learnt his new name. He had been happy for a while in the snug cottage and the rabbity wood with his new humans. Now perhaps it was starting up all over again. He heard the familiar sounds of dispute, the cries, the tears, and he wagged his tail with entreaty. A virtuous affectionate nature and the generous nobility of his race had saved him from neurosis despite his sufferings. He had not a scrap of spite in his temperament. He thought of anger as a disease of the human race and a dread sign for himself.30 The adjective, ‘rabbity’, like the phrase ‘his new humans’, is wellinvented to put us directly and intimately into his vision of things. Risking sentimentality, as I observed elsewhere, this becomes, instead, a species of Empsonian pastoral. Doggy simplicities oppose the neurotic human addiction to pain. Pyrrhus, like so many Murdoch dogs, is a crypto-Houyhnhnm, looking in wonder at our ‘fallen’ human realm. Pyrrhus was, of course, a king whose victory was so expensive as to be ambiguous and therefore unwelcome. ‘Another victory like this,



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gentlemen’, as John Bayley likes to tell the story, ‘and we’re finished.’31 Mitzi, who is fighting to keep her lover, Charlotte, wins this battle, but her victory, like that of King Pyrrhus, is close to failure or defeat. Indeed, the scene ends with Charlotte, her bags packed, shedding defeated tears: ‘her tears were like those of married people who love each other, cannot stand each other, and know they can never now have any other destiny’ (p. 408). Charlotte’s tears, like Adelaide’s, are comical as much as affecting, and draw us once more into a communal understanding that is worldly in the best sense. Even though it seems unlikely that rows between the very different Charlotte and Mitzi are going to end soon and may continue to disturb Pyrrhus’s peace of mind, for the dog who values human loyalty and fears human anger, this ending is happiest. A competition between pains is implicit: the guilty pain of the human realm; the innocent pain of the animals that we victimize. ∗ ∗ ∗ The Green Knight, Murdoch’s penultimate novel, is among her finest; an achievement of high art, mixing joy and grief inextricably together. But I have found no obvious passages bearing analysis as separate wholes. So I would like to end with The Black Prince. Here, Bradley Pearson asks three relevant questions: ‘What is, and what can be, the range of the sufficiently serious heart?’; ‘Must he who makes happy be a liar?’ And, connected with these, ‘And shall the artist have no cakes and ale?’ (p. 349). Bradley tells us he has no answer to these questions. The novels themselves offer answers. The sufficiently serious heart encompasses a sense of the comedy of life. Thus he who makes happy is not necessarily, or always, a liar. And the artist, who is and must be complicit with the themes both of power and of magic, deserves his occasional cakes and ale. So does the reader. False seriousness is an enemy in art, as in criticism.

Notes 1. Martin Lynch-Gibbon in Murdoch’s A Severed Head (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 15. 2. A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (London: Macmillan, 1986); Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen, 1982); Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist (London: Macmillan, 1986); David J. Gordon, Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995).





3. A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch (London: Longman Group; published for the British Council in 1976 as No. 257 in their ‘Writers and their Work’ series). 4. M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. William Rotsel (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1973), passim. 5. A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom (1965; London: Vintage, 1994), p. 319. 6. See C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 241. 7. Bakhtin points out that it is the function of the holy fool Myshkin to cut through false seriousness, in a carnival spirit, in The Idiot, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 146. 8. ‘Murdoch and Dostoevsky’, in Encounters with Murdoch, ed. R. Todd (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Free University Press, 1988); reprinted in Dostoevkii and Britain, ed. W. Leatherbarrow (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1995), pp. 277–91. 9. Murdoch was, I think, giving British Council lectures in Greece. Honor Tracey was of the party, and Murdoch and Barbara Pym’s friend Robert Lidell was the BC representative in Athens. 10. Murdoch, Under the Net (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 46. 11. Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream (1969; London: Triad/Panther, 1980), p. 37 and An Unofficial Rose (1962; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988), p. 79. 12. Unpublished journal entry, 1949. 13. Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1993), chapter 11: ‘Protestant Magic’. 14. Murdoch noted on 4 April 1948 (unpublished journal): ‘All speech is seduction’; within ‘speech’ may be included novel-writing. 15. See, for example, Lorna Sage, ‘Female Fictions’, in The Contemporary English Novel, eds M. Bradbury and D. Palmer (London: Arnold, 1979), pp. 67–87; ‘No Tresspassers’ (review of The Fire and the Sun), New Review (September 1977): 49–50; ‘The Pursuit of Imperfection’, Critical Quarterly, xix(2) (Summer 1977): 67–87; Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 72–83; ‘In Praise of Mess’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1999: 12. 16. Letter to Philippa Foot, undated, 1968 (in private collection). 17. See Mary Midgley’s view in Owl of Minerva: A Memoir (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 183: ‘My impression was that she was somehow looking down from above at their struggles and repeatedly lobbing down bizarre challenges, just to see what they would do.’ 18. EM, p. 458 on ‘the secret cruelty’ even of good art and its possible legitimacy. 19. Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 23. 20. ‘Mind as Passion’, New York Review of Books, 25 September 1980. 21. See my ‘Iris Murdoch and Dostoevskii’ in Dostoevkii and Britain, ed. W. Leatherbarrow (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1995), pp. 277–91. 22. Murdoch, The Black Prince (1973; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 55. 23. Murdoch wrote that ‘Lear wants to enact the false tragic, the solemn, the complete. Shakespeare forces him to act the true tragic, the absurd, the incomplete’ (EM, p. 240). 24. This is the verdict given by the judge sentencing Professor Isak Borg in the famous nightmare trial scene in Wild Strawberries. When Borg asks what his punishment is to be, the judge answers, ‘Loneliness’.



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25. See, respectively, C.L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, and W.H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand (London: Faber, 1955). 26. James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 13. See also my review, ‘Laughing Matters’, Independent, 4 June 2004. 27. Murdoch, unpublished journal entry, 12 July 1947. 28. EM, p. 372. She paid the life and death of Verkhovensky, which she had celebrated in 1967, the tribute of imitation in The Sovereignty of Good. Verkhovensky the superannuated liberal in The Devils/Possessed, father of the demonic Peter, lived as remittance-man, free-loader and possible onetime suitor in a state of love-hate with his patron Stavrogina, in her big house for decades. In the same way Lucius lives with and on Gerda in her big house in Henry and Cato. A joke shared by both novels features a furious disagreement as to whether the parasitic man (Verkhovensky/Lucius) offered marriage thirty years ago or so, or not. No one, at this distance in time, can accurately remember. In both novels the woman-patron anathematizes her ageing male admirer – Stavrogina memorably calls Verkhovensky, with the love-turned-bitter ‘you stupid, futile, futile always pointless man’. In both novels also, the man dies, and in their descriptions of this death, both Dostoevsky and Murdoch attempt to tie the death to the comic and not only to the tragic. Dostoevsky succeeds better: Verkhovensky, as Murdoch saw, is among the greatest of his characters. Lucius’s death, while writing out one of his own haikus, a poem movingly concerned with how edifying death should be, is too didactic. The poem provides the novel-section with its title, ‘The Great Teacher’, and one incidental problem about Lucius is that his poems are so good – eloquent, evocative, expert – that he cannot convincingly represent, as he is meant to, failure. 29. ‘Men are April when they woo, December when they wed’ (As You Like it, IV.i.150). 30. Murdoch, An Accidental Man (1971; London: Triad Grafton Books, 1985), p. 405 (emphasis added). 31. Conversation with the author.




‘Refinements of Evil’: Iris Murdoch and the Gothic Avril Horner

Evil is terrible and also very close. (MGM, p. 103) It is a truism that whereas earlier Gothic authors relied on supernatural effects to induce fear in the reader, modern Gothic novelists look into the human psyche and its obsessive desires, murderous impulses and dysfunctional fantasies in order to explore the origins of evil. They continue to evoke a sense of the uncanny1 – an essential ingredient of any Gothic text – but they tend to do so in a more subtle and self-conscious manner than their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, producing works that often both exploit and parody Gothic effects. During her writing career, which spanned over forty years, Iris Murdoch produced a handful of novels that critics have identified as Gothic,2 among them The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), The Unicorn (1963) and The Time of the Angels (1966). Other works of this period, The Bell (1958) and The Italian Girl (1964), also include Gothic elements. In this chapter I confine my discussion to The Bell, The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels. These novels are structured through obvious Gothic effects which include, respectively, a legend concerning a drowned nun and the tolling of a spectral bell which forewarns of an imminent death; a young woman incarcerated in an isolated building in a Celtic landscape; and a fallen priest who sexually exploits his daughter in a godless world. At the time Murdoch was writing these novels, Gothic fiction was generally dismissed by academics as popular trash or as the rather puzzling underside of high Romantic art and writing.3 Given Murdoch’s reputation as a philosopher and intellectual, why would she have wished to engage with it all? I suggest that Murdoch’s use of Gothic effects constituted a writing experiment in two senses. 70



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First, the Gothic allowed her to explore the representation of evil by adapting plots and devices from a mode defined by its (sometimes salacious) preoccupation with the forces of darkness. In an essay entitled ‘Against Dryness’, first published in Encounter in 1961, she wrote: ‘It is curious that modern literature, which is so much concerned with violence, contains so few convincing pictures of evil’ (EM, p. 294). For a writer and philosopher so preoccupied with the Platonic good, the fictional representation of evil must have presented a particular and inevitable challenge. In her ‘Gothic’ novels, she was able to explore 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.4 She was also, at this time, especially interested in how far, in an increasingly secular society, ‘evil’ could remain a valid construct. Moral good in Murdoch’s fiction is demonstrated by the ability of certain characters to love unselfishly and wisely. Conversely, in ‘the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego’ (SG, p. 52). In her appropriation of the Gothic mode Murdoch explores desires which masquerade as love but which are founded on the need to control, manipulate and exploit others. As Zoreh T. Sullivan has noted: ‘Her demons are not literal ones, but psychological and existentialist oppressors whose evil emanates from their obsessive need to define and remake others according to their private formulas for existence.’5 Second, in drawing on Gothic devices and conventions, Murdoch chose very obviously to draw attention to the seductive power of narrative. The Gothic is a mode of fiction that tends to encourage in its readers responses opposite to those that Murdoch’s philosophy endorses. Whereas her essays advocate mature and dispassionate objectivity of thought, the Gothic novel relies on sensationalism, melodrama, the irrational and excess for its effects. These effects are used to evoke emotions such as fear, terror, horror – and to provoke actual bodily responses (the hair rising on the back of the neck, the chill running down the spine). Murdoch condemned what she called ‘fantasy’: In bad art fantasy simply takes charge, as in the familiar case of the romance or thriller [. . .] Fantasy is the strong cunning enemy of the discerning intelligent more truly inventive power of the imagination, and in condemning art for being ‘fantastic’ one is condemning it for being untrue. (EM, p. 11) One might reasonably assume that the Gothic – as a form of romance – would be included in this definition of fantasy. Indeed, many readers



‘Refinements of Evil’: Iris Murdoch and the Gothic 71


in the past have expressed alarm at its potential morally to corrupt the reader – perhaps, most famously, Coleridge, who wrote of Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel, The Monk (1796) that it was ‘a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter he might reasonably turn pale’.6 There is no doubt that Murdoch’s interest in the Gothic was fuelled by her interest in the power of narrative and the reader’s engagement with it.7 Such power is a corollary of the power wielded by certain characters in the novels. In adopting, adapting and occasionally parodying the Gothic in these three novels, Murdoch is, in one sense, deliberately offering the reader a particular ‘refinement of evil’ in literary form. Her responsibility, as an author, is to ‘bare the device’. The reader’s responsibility is to escape the ‘net’ of Gothic sensationalism by becoming acutely aware of form and narrative, the cues for such an escape having been offered by the author herself, not least through the many intertextual references in all three novels to stories, legends, myths and fantasies. Despite – or perhaps because of – her pronounced antipathy to much poststructuralist philosophy, Murdoch was intensely interested in narrative and in problems of representation; she also, however, sought to keep questions of good and evil firmly within her creative and intellectual remit at a time when such terms were regarded in many quarters as absolutes (and therefore as invalid). Working with the Manichean world of the Gothic enabled her to play out in fiction her belief that there are values and realities that transcend humanity. The Bell (1958) presents itself as a realist work in which time and place are very clearly identified – London and Gloucestershire in the 1950s. As a decayed country house and estate that contains within its boundaries an enclosed community of Anglican Benedictine nuns but which also houses a lay community, Imber Court is a liminal space in which the secular and the spiritual, the sublime and the abject are played out. The lay residents are described by the Abbess as ‘a kind of sick people’, who, ‘disturbed and hunted by God’, ‘can live neither in the world nor out of it’.8 The bell of the title is the focus of the novel’s overt Gothic and supernatural dimension which relates to the legend of a fourteenthcentury nun who had a lover. Early Gothic fiction is peppered with such nuns, the most famous perhaps being Agnes (a young woman confined by relatives to a convent in order to separate her from her lover) in Lewis’s The Monk. Agnes has a ghostly doppelgänger, the ‘bleeding nun’, who appears each year at midnight on 5th May. Charlotte Brontë subtly reworked this Gothic legacy in Villette (1853), which also contains the story of a nun whose love for a young man proved tragic. In the legend



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that underpins Murdoch’s novel, the nun’s young lover broke his neck while climbing the convent wall and when both Abbess and Bishop were unsuccessful in eliciting a confession from the guilty nun, the Bishop placed a curse on the abbey which, the legend has it, caused the great bell to fly ‘like a bird out of the tower’ and to fall into the lake (p. 42). The distraught nun then ran out of the abbey gates and drowned herself. According to the legend, the bell occasionally rings from the bottom of the lake, portending a death. As Dora Greenfield and Toby Gashe arrive, the community is looking forward to the consecration and installation of a new bell for the Abbey. Murdoch’s debts to the Gothic novel are very clear in this aspect of the plot. However, it is in the topography of Imber, especially its lake, that the more subtle Gothic aspects of the novel are to be found. A ‘real’ place, Imber also functions as a symbolic liminal space. Gothic fictions focus on the liminal in order to interrogate the boundary between supposedly opposite states, such as the quick/the dead, natural/supernatural, eros/thanatos, pain/pleasure and heimlich/unheimlich.9 Such a concern with the permeability of boundaries, it has been suggested, reveals a deep anxiety about the coherence of the modern subject: ‘The Gothic may evince no single dialectic, but there is broad agreement that the Gothic represents the subject in a state of deracination, of the self finding itself dispossessed in its own house, in a condition of rupture, disjunction, fragmentation.’10 As ‘fragmented’ subjects, the inhabitants of Imber display various degrees of dysfunctionality – treated in some cases comically and in others tragically. Michael Meade is a tragic figure whose desire for young men has been kept in check since his passionate friendship with a past pupil, Nick Fawley. Yet he is tempted in a rash moment to kiss the unsuspecting and understandably surprised Toby. It is, perhaps, his transgressive desire – illegal in 1950s Britain – that isolates him in many ways and that makes him sensitive to a world beyond the material. He hears the tolling of the spectral bell, a sound which is absorbed into his ‘sinister and uncanny’ (p. 78) repetitive dream in which nuns (having possibly committed murder) drag a corpse out of the lake.11 He thinks of the dream as ‘evil’ (p. 79) and then (in a typically secular post-Freudian manner) seeks to explain its origin as something internal: Michael wondered what his dream could signify and what it was in the depths of his mind which made him attribute something so terrible to those innocent and holy nuns. He had this thought with an




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Michael is not an evil figure and he is right to reject the idea that ‘there was anything inherently evil in the great love which he bore to Nick’ (p. 105). He does, though, in Bran Nicol’s words, fall into the temptation of ‘living according to the “logic” of the “personal fable” ’12 and his subsequent failure to engage with the emotionally damaged Nick has horrific consequences. The liminal space of Imber has revealed the limits of his ability to love and has caused him to reflect upon the nature of goodness: ‘Could one recognize refinements of good if one did not recognize refinements of evil, Michael asked himself’ (p. 117). It has also revealed to him that the good person need not always (by definition) be powerless, for ‘one of the most good people that he knew was also one of the most powerful: the Abbess’ (p. 85). And it is the Abbess who tells him: ‘Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect’ (p. 235). Against the misuse and seductions of emotional power, the novel thus offers a fictional validation of Murdoch’s belief in love as humanity’s redeeming feature: 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 [. . .] Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination. (EM, pp. 215 and 216) It is the same space of Imber, however, that allows the demonstration of true ‘refinements of evil’ in the figures of Nick Fawley and Paul Greenfield. In the best Gothic tradition, both men are emotional sadists who enjoy and exploit their power over others. Dora, we learn, finally married her husband ‘because of the demonic intensity of Paul’s desire for her’ (p. 8). Paul dominates, humiliates and intimidates his wife, claiming to love her while making no secret of his contempt. Nick has appeared again in Michael’s life only to destroy him by intuiting Michael’s attraction to Toby and persuading the boy to ‘confess’ Michael’s kiss to James Tayper Pace. Both men ‘love’ self-absorbedly, destroying others in the process; for Murdoch, as for Simone Weil, this would indeed have constituted a ‘refinement of evil’. The novel even intimates that Catherine, Nick’s twin sister, is destroyed by his obsessive and probably incestuous



intimation, not so much of the pressure of dark forces upon him, as of the reality within himself of some active and positive spring of evil. (p. 79)

love for her: ‘Nick told Michael of his twin sister whom he loved, he swore, with a Byronic passion’ (p. 104). Seen in this context, Catherine’s suicide attempt and subsequent mental collapse take on a particularly sinister hue. The water of the lake – the disturbed resting place of the ancient bell – carries ambiguous symbolic resonances: it represents the rite of baptism and rebirth within the Christian faith, fertility and growth in pagan belief – but it is also the medium of dissolution and death. It is therefore at once the site of the sublime and the Kristevan abject.13 In contrast with the experience of Paul and Nick, the liminal space of Imber becomes for Dora a space of liberation. Almost drowned in trying to save the suicidal Catherine, she emerges from the lake newly strengthened and able to resist her husband. Catherine, however, emerges ‘in a completely distracted condition’ (p. 281) which is subsequently diagnosed as schizophrenia. Both women have encountered death and have been saved by the ‘amphibious nun’ (p. 303), Mother Clare, but the outcome for each of them is dramatically different. Whereas Catherine is consumed by the Gothic sublime, which results in a negative loss of self in the form of madness (a state that particularly interested Edgar Allan Poe), Dora experiences a transcendence of a previously trivial and constrained life which results in a sense of the positive sublime as defined by Murdoch via Kantian and Romantic philosophy: ‘ “The sublime” is an enjoyment and renewal of spiritual power arising from an apprehension of the vast formless strength of the natural world’ (EM, p. 283).14 As the community dissolves, Dora remains at Imber with Michael through the summer and into the autumn. She decides not to return to her emotionally abusive husband. She learns to swim and discovers a love of music. At the end of the novel she is seen leaving to complete her art studies, which she abandoned on marriage, and is contemplating a career in teaching. The novel itself is a liminal space, just like Imber Court. It invites different levels of response, from mere enjoyment of plot through to a philosophic engagement with death, the uncanny, the sublime and the nature of love. What the reader takes from the novel depends on the level with which it is engaged. However, Murdoch laces The Bell with so many ‘hauntings’ that the thinking reader is encouraged to dwell selfreflexively on the nature of the reading act itself. The past – as in all Gothic texts – intrudes into the present moment; the legend superimposes an uncanny patina on the realist content of the novel. As we have seen, certain parallels and repetitions – drowning or near-drowning, for example – seem to offer characters obvious destinies (death for the nun;





madness for Catherine) in line with the trajectory of a classic Gothic novel. This trajectory is always dislocated at some point, however (as is Michael’s own sense of destiny). Toby’s experience in the cemetery challenges both his fate as anticipated by the legend and the conventional Gothic portrayal of death as violent and horrific (reinstated by Nick’s suicide, however). In climbing the wall, Toby repeats the action of the doomed nun’s lover but instead of dying, he is met by two benign nuns who treat him like a child, even inviting him to take a turn on the swing. In seeking the unheimlich in the forbidden space, Toby finds only the heimlich: the nuns do not fear death; it is merely the next stage in life. The Bell is also marked by patterns of verbal repetition, the words ‘menace’ and ‘rebarbative’ being repeated throughout. The novel thus both draws attention to the fact that ‘human beings repeat themselves irrationally’15 and to its own sophisticated, fugue-like structure. At the heart of the novel lie moral questions concerning the use and abuse of power. What makes emotional power a corrupting moral force and how can complicity with this be avoided? In what ways can power be exercised for moral good? In what ways do narratives (‘personal fables’ as well as those to be found in novels) exert power over us? How, as readers, can we simultaneously enjoy, resist and learn from the narrative seductions the novelist employs? In what sense is the novel, like the bell, a ‘truth-telling voice’ (p. 267)? Aside from this seriousness, however, Murdoch’s novel can also be read in part as a sophisticated parody of the Gothic. Indeed, the metropolitan journalist, Noel Spens, echoes Jane Austen’s narrator in Northanger Abbey when he comments: ‘After all, this is England, not southern Italy’ (p. 263).16 Like Northanger Abbey, The Bell both parodies the Gothic and uses it to offer subtle insights into a more quotidian darkness, the ‘refinements of evil’ that are to be found in the apparently civilized society of England, represented by the casual cruelty of General Tilney in Austen’s novel and by the complete egocentricity of Paul and Nick in Murdoch’s. The Unicorn (1963) positively creaks with standard Gothic effects: the coastal Irish landscape is described as ‘appalling’ and ‘sublime’;17 much of the action takes place in an isolated and threatening house called ‘Gaze’; Gerald Scottow is a powerful and charismatic individual, just like the villain who drives the action of many traditional Gothic novels; in Violet Evercreech we see a sinister housekeeper who might remind us of Mrs Danvers in du Maurier’s Rebecca or (in her surveillance tendencies) Mme Beck in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette; Hannah Crean-Smith appears to be cast in the mould of the vulnerable and persecuted heroine who is the focus of virtue in many eighteenth and nineteenth-century



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Female Gothic texts. But Murdoch’s Gothic effects are so extravagant in this novel that they frequently tip over into the parodic, leaving us unsure how to read it. Just as we begin to construct the meaning of the plot through such intertextual references, the parallels are exploded: ‘We’re not living in the Middle Ages’ says Marian (p. 60). Indeed, the fake medievalism and the mythical element of the novel are highly suspect: Hannah is neither ‘la princesse lointaine’ nor the unicorn. Despite her obvious suffering, she is not Christ; indeed the very staginess of her pain throws into doubt this symbolic interpretation of The Unicorn at the same time that the novel invites it. We learn that Hannah tried to murder her husband, Peter, by pushing him over a cliff and that she succeeds in murdering her jailer-cum-lover, Gerald, by shooting him. Hannah is no innocent vulnerable heroine; indeed, it is her collusion with other characters’ narratives of her as such that finally renders her insubstantial: ‘a figure so blurred and uncertain that it might have been a ghost’ (p. 244). However she is at times presented as innocent and vulnerable. What are we to make of this puzzle? Rather than providing a clear answer, Murdoch’s novel increasingly draws attention to itself as a literary artefact by referencing other forms of storytelling, including myth, legend, the Bible, fairytales, narrative poetry, Gothic stories and Jacobean and Shakespearean drama. It thus asks us to think about the ‘spell’ of fiction itself rather than to fixate on the spell cast by the enchantress Hannah. Indeed, Hannah describes herself as playing a part in a dream, at which point Marian finds herself succumbing to an ‘enchantment’ and a ‘terrible spell’ (p. 218), just as Le Fanu’s narrator feels herself succumbing to the female vampire’s spell in the Gothic tale ‘Carmilla’.18 Not for nothing does Jamesie announce near the end of the novel that ‘the Vampire Play’ is over (p. 253). At the novel’s heart is a gripping scene in which one of the main characters, Effingham Cooper, becomes lost in a malignant Gothic landscape, full of dangerous bogs and strange bright lights. His common sense tells him that these lights are due to the bog’s natural chemistry but his imagination renders them as part of an eerie, supernatural world which feels evil and ‘menacing’ (as I have noted, the word, or variations of it, is used heavily in The Bell; it also tolls repeatedly throughout The Unicorn). Effingham’s near-death experience in the bog prompts an epiphany: This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death. He looked, and knew with a clarity which was one with the increasing light, that with the




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The fact that Effingham is a weak and suggestible character prone to delusions and self-deception does not invalidate this insight. However, just as important is the fact that this episode, like the near-drowning experiences in The Bell, is itself part of a pattern of textual and uncanny repetition. It is preceded by Jamesie’s tale of a man who died in the bog ‘two years ago’ – ‘They heard him calling all night, but no one could get near him and he sunk in and died’ (p. 46) and it is followed by Hannah’s suicidal plunge into that same bog. Reader expectations are thus set up: we expect Effingham to drown in the bog because of Jamesie’s tale – but he does not. Because of Effingham’s experience, we might expect Hannah to apprehend mystically a sense of liberation and to survive – but she does not. As in The Bell, Murdoch works with uncanny repetition in order to subvert the expected trajectory of plot – a feature which interrogates our expectations as readers. The Unicorn, like The Bell, is concerned with the nature of liberty and how it relates to power and entrapment (including self-entrapment). At the level of plot this is obvious in Hannah’s imprisonment for a fairytale seven years and the various references to the ‘prison house’ throughout the novel; at the level of character it allows for debate on the nature of true liberty (Max’s discourse on the nature of Ate, power and suffering, for example). As Peter Conradi has noted, ‘Both the central image of incarceration, and then the whole weirdly beautiful Gothic atmosphere and plot machinery alike, are all designed to subvert and educate a facile view of freedom’ (EM, p. xxiv). The choice for the reader is whether to collude emotionally (as Hannah does) with the fantasy elements of this curious world (described by Marian as a ‘devil’s shadow-play, a mere nightmare of violence’ [p. 263]) or whether to move up a reading level. The latter requires the reader to engage morally with the novel’s portrayal of desire and to understand how misuse of emotional power can result in the thraldom of sadistic/masochistic relationships. Murdoch has mischievously constructed, in terms of narrative, a Gothic labyrinth but she gives us enough clues to find a way out to clear vision if we are good enough readers. ‘Good novels’ she wrote in her essay on the comic and the tragic, ‘concern the fight between good and evil and the pilgrimage from appearance to reality’ (MGM, p. 97). In The Time of the Angels, published in 1966, Murdoch continues to examine issues of freedom and entrapment through a Gothic lens



death of the self the world becomes quite automatically the object of a perfect love. (p. 167)

but without the use of supernatural paraphernalia. Just like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the novel focuses on the fall of a religious man into nihilism and sexual depravity. Carel Fisher, a rector who no longer believes in God, nevertheless continues to hold his position as a man of the Church, and has recently been moved to a new parish in East London. He sees no reason to heed any form of morality and describes the void left by his loss of faith to his headmaster brother, Marcus, in the following words: ‘Suppose the truth were awful, suppose it was just a black pit, or like birds huddled in the dust in a dark cupboard? Suppose only evil were real, only it was not evil since it had lost even its name? Who could face this? [. . .] There is only power and the marvel of power, there is only chance and the terror of chance. And if there is only this there is no God, and the single Good of the philosophers is an illusion and a fake.’19 Such nihilism, Murdoch suggests, is one aspect of the mid-twentiethcentury crisis of faith that has followed on the heels of the Holocaust. It seems to portend not only a secular, but also an amoral society, which would be Gothic in its embrace of evil. Carel lives in a large cold house with Elizabeth (his niece), Muriel (his daughter) and his housekeeper, Pattie O’Driscoll, who has also been his mistress for the last thirteen years. Also in the house live Eugene Peshkov, a kind Russian who has survived the experience of being imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Nazis, and his devious and lying son, Leo, whose ‘defiant masochism’ (p. 19) (a counterpart to Elizabeth’s passive masochism) evokes sadistic tendencies in Marcus. Carel, a dark and tyrannical presence, neglects his duties and refuses to leave the house. Elizabeth, rendered an invalid by an unexplained back problem, is (like Hannah Crean-Smith) virtually a prisoner in her own room, and Muriel, companion to her cousin, rarely goes out. The emotional claustrophobia of the household is exacerbated by a Gothic fog which hangs over a Waste Land-like London until the very end of the novel.20 Muriel, hiding in the linen cupboard one day, sees through a crack in the cupboard her father rising naked from Elizabeth’s bed. As Pattie later reveals, Elizabeth was the result of an affair between Carel and his brother Julian’s wife – so Carel has committed incest with his own daughter, an act reminiscent of many Gothic fictions in which parents have sexual intercourse with their own children or brothers and sisters become lovers. (Gothic novelists often dwell on families in which exploitation,





abuse and dysfunctionalism are rife, rejecting the optimistic Enlightenment narrative that family and state are protective structures.) The denouement sees Carel committing suicide, Eugene moving back into a church hostel and Muriel experiencing the depths of despair: ‘She had never more positively felt the utter and complete absence of God’ (p. 220). Recognizing how jealousy has been her own demonic ‘angel’, Muriel commits herself to caring for Elizabeth for the rest of her life. In The Time of the Angels, myth, legend and the supernatural are replaced by urban claustrophobia and scenarios of abuse which have their larger counterpart in a world still recovering from the terrible excesses of another world war. One of the uncomfortable areas the novel probes is how individuals, not evil in themselves, become so easily complicit with corrupt power systems and evil deeds. Indeed, at one point Muriel even expresses horror at her own complicity with evil in terms of Gothic fictional excess: ‘Yet why did she suddenly think of it all as a diabolical plot? If it was a plot it was one with which she had herself long cooperated’ (p. 138). Taking angels as metaphors for psychic and other drives, Murdoch explores how the world appears when such forces roam free after the death of God. For Carel, the result is chaos: ‘we are creatures of accident, operated by forces we do not understand’; for Marcus, the Fall repeats itself: ‘He realized that his mouth was open wide for crying like a banished Adam’ (p. 174). Unlike the world of The Bell, in which the nuns are able to sustain their faith in a world in crisis, The Time of the Angels shows us a society which is dark because Christianity can no longer be sustained – or perhaps Christianity can no longer be sustained because the world has become so dark – and in which there is therefore no spiritual touchstone for morality. Characters are entirely ‘free’ to embrace good or evil. They deal with this in different ways: Carel Fisher and Leo Peshkov (the latter in existential mode) turn entirely to self-gratification; Marcus Fisher seeks an answer in radical theology (as did John Robinson and Don Cupitt historically);21 Eugene consoles himself with love objects (Pattie and his icon); Muriel seeks salvation in art (she writes poetry); Elizabeth colludes passively with the forces of evil that surround her. Anthea Barlow, a minor character, offers a slightly comic variation on this theme: no longer a member of the Communist Party and having lost her faith in God, she announces: ‘I’m not even a proper Christian any more I’m afraid. I suppose I’m a sort of Buddhist now really’ (p. 229).22 In so far as the novel closes with Anthea and Marcus arranging to have dinner together, it offers some hope for a less dysfunctional and desolate future. For the other characters, however, their lives and happiness



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are threatened or ‘menaced’ (that word recurs frequently in this novel too) by malevolent forces in human form. Evil and the uncanny are no longer associated with the supernatural (since God is dead); they are part of the everyday. Writing of Thérèse Desqueyroux, Murdoch notes that Mauriac portrays with great skill: ‘how easy it is to continue doing evil, when it becomes habitual, a way of life, something which one just “has to go on with”. (Compare Hannah Arendt’s much quoted remark about the banality of evil.)’ (MGM, p. 103) Also drawing on Hannah Arendt’s work, Judith Halberstam comments: modernity has eliminated the comfort of monsters because we have seen, in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, that evil often works as a system, it works through institutions and it works as a banal (meaning ‘common to all’) mechanism. In other words, evil stretches across cultural and political productions as complicity and collaboration and it manifests itself as a seamless norm rather than as some monstrous disruption [. . .]23 ‘Evil is a sort of machinery’ comments Otto in The Italian Girl, adding that he is himself ‘caught’ in it.24 ‘Tout ce que nous nommons le mal n’est que ce mécanisme’ noted Simone Weil of a natural world bereft of God’s grace.25 In these three novels, then, Murdoch deliberately appropriated the Gothic mode in order to explore the nature of evil in relation to the use and abuse of power. There is, however, less authorial game-playing in The Time of the Angels, perhaps because the need for moral clarity had become more urgent by the mid-1960s. The element of the uncanny in these texts leads discerning readers not towards a naive belief in the supernatural, but towards an examination of themselves as readers and as possible collaborators with various fantasies and ‘refinements of evil’. To dismiss certain kinds of narrative as fantasy alone is, as Murdoch noted in conversation with Brian Magee, to ‘dismiss a story as implausible when we have not really understood what sort of story it is’ (EM, p. 13). To dismiss these three novels as mere flirtations with the Gothic fantastic would, then, be to miss their deeper moral resonances. We are, as Peter Conradi points out, ‘invited out of our ordinary world in order better to apprehend the forces which underlie it’.26 It is the Gothic elements of these novels which lend colour and force to the threat and menace of human evil; it is also through their Gothic elements that Murdoch sets up hermeneutic riddles and seductive traps for the reader.





If we allow ourselves to be seduced by mere surface effects, we can only ever be second-best readers. At the same time – and rather remarkably – these three novels seem to encapsulate the development of the Gothic novel itself, from an evocation of ancient legends, hauntings and religious superstitions (redolent of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel) in The Bell, through the use of sinister landscapes and individuals in The Unicorn (suggestive of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction) to a more modern Gothic in which horror derives solely from the death of God and the banality of evil. ‘The novelist is potentially the greatest truth-teller of them all, but he is also an expert fantasy-monger’, wrote Murdoch (EM, p. 233; emphasis added). Through her use of the Gothic in these three novels, Murdoch became a ‘fantasy-monger’ so as to become a particular sort of ‘truth-teller’. She appropriated Gothic effects in order to explore the dark side of human nature and to challenge us to recognize our own complicity with powerfully seductive narratives, whether they emanate from people or from texts.

Notes 1. In his famous essay ‘The Uncanny’, published in 1919, Freud drew on the work of Schelling in order to define the uncanny as ‘that (which) ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light’. Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gradiva, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Freud Library, 1985), pp. 339–76. 2. See, for example, Zoreh T. Sullivan, ‘The Contracting Universe of Iris Murdoch’s Gothic Novels’, Modern Fiction Studies, 23 (Winter 1977–78): 557–69; Dorothy A. Winsor, ‘Solipsistic Sexuality in Murdoch’s Gothic Novels’, in Harold Bloom, ed., Iris Murdoch (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 121–30; and Peter Conradi’s discussion of Gothic effects in some of Murdoch’s ‘closed’ novels in Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986). 3. Although several books on Gothic fiction were published early in the twentieth century, it was only after the publication of David Punter’s The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980) that scholars began to regard the Gothic as a respectable field of academic enquiry. 4. See Heather Widdows, ‘Murdochian Evil and Striving to be good’, in Pedro Tabensky, ed., The Positive Functions of Evil (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 81–97 for an excellent discussion of Murdoch’s philosophic reflections on evil. 5. Zoreh T. Sullivan, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Self-Conscious Gothicism’, Arizona Quarterly (1997): 49–50. 6. In Critical Review, Vol. 19 (February 1797): 194–200; reprinted in E.J. Clery and Robert Miles, eds, Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 185–9.



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7. See Bran Nicol, ‘The Curse of The Bell: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Narrative’, in IMAR, pp. 100–11 for a good essay on this aspect of Murdoch’s work. 8. Murdoch, The Bell (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 81. 9. Freud explores the connotations of these German words in order to define the uncanny in his famous essay of 1919. If the ‘heimlich’, or homely, is that which is kept close to or within the home (that is, what is familiar) then it can also strangely merge with the ‘unheimlich’ - something secreted within the home (that is, not known outside its boundaries and a source of the unknown, or uncanny). 10. Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750–1820 (1993; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 3. 11. Many early Gothic novels were rabidly anti-Catholic and contain nuns who seek to bring about the death of innocents, usually because the Roman Catholic Church had become complicit with the wishes of a decaying Catholic aristocracy. Examples include Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797). 12. Nicol, ‘The Curse of The Bell’, p. 105. 13. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980; New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), trans. L. Roudiez. For Kristeva the abject is what ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’; the ‘in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’; what ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (p. 4) and therefore challenges the coherence and integrity of the self. 14. The dawn of both Romanticism and the Gothic novel was, of course, inspired in part by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). 15. Peter Conradi, in SA, p. 78. Nicol, in ‘The Curse of The Bell’, also draws attention to the numerous repetitions in the novel. 16. Compare ‘Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works [. . .], it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for [. . .] Italy, Switzerland, and the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented [. . .] But in England it was not so [. . .]’, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818; Harmondsworth: Penguin English Library, 1974), p. 202. 17. Murdoch, The Unicorn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), pp. 7 and 11. 18. A.S. Byatt draws attention to the vampiric element of the novel and its debts to Le Fanu’s story in Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), pp. 167 and 169. ‘Carmilla’ can be found in Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, first published in 1872 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 19. Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966) p. 172. 20. Fog is often a feature of Gothic novels or novels which employ Gothic effects, suggesting metaphorically obscurity and disorientation. Examples include Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). 21. Murdoch’s novel seems to echo the concerns of John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963) and anticipates the work of Don Cupitt, which includes Taking Leave of God (Norwich: SCM Press, 1980), The Long legged Fly (Norwich: SCM Press, 1987) and After God (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997). All these works postulate the ‘death’ of an objective God as a presence ‘out




22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

Iris Murdoch and Morality there’ and argue for the ‘internalization’ of God. Murdoch clearly invites the reader to raise an eyebrow at her own solution – the writing of The Sovereignty of Good, which was in progress as she wrote The Time of the Angels and which is reflected in Marcus’s struggle to write his ‘philosophical treatise upon morality in a secular age’ (p. 17). Again, Murdoch is perhaps using Anthea here wryly to reflect another of her own solutions to the ‘death’ of God. Buddhism has no godhead but it does offer a spiritual pathway to clear vision and goodness. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 162. Murdoch, The Italian Girl (1964; London: Vintage, 2000), p. 41. Attente de Dieu (Paris, 1950), p. 90, cited in Byatt, Degrees of Freedom, p. 147. SA, p. 126.



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A Moral Union: Philosophy and Literature



Part II




Iris Murdoch, the Ethical Turn and Literary Value Simon Haines

It is now a piece of received wisdom in the recent history of ideas that around the mid-1980s a large-scale ‘turn to ethics’ was taking place in literary studies, while a parallel ‘turn to literature’ was happening in moral philosophy.1 Various collections of essays and special editions of journals appearing at the time seemed to mark this period as the apex of the turn.2 On the one hand a number of philosophers were criticizing both mainstream twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon ethics (intuitionism, emotivism, behaviourism) and ‘punctual’ Kantian and Cartesian conceptions of the self, while frequently arguing for literature as exemplary of their ‘thick description’ – often Aristotelian or Wittgensteinian – cases against both groups. On the other hand literary critics and theorists of both continental and Anglo-Saxon persuasions were calling for less formalism and more ‘humanism’; one might say, a closer attention to literature’s finer and richer conceptions of the human subject.3 For the continentals this brave new ethics was often a convenient way of reviving the tired old politics of suspicion. For the Anglos it was often a return as much as a turn: weren’t Irving Babbitt and the self-styled ‘New Humanists’ speaking of the ‘ethical imagination’ as long ago as the early years of the twentieth century? Still, one felt that the century was at last deviating from its protracted, infatuated pursuit of the meaning of ethical language and the non-meaning of literary language: an infatuation ultimately traceable to Moore and Saussure though not really the fault of either. The old ‘linguistic turn’ (a phrase invented by Gustav Bergmann, according to Richard Rorty)4 was finally being corrected by the new ‘ethical turn’ (originally Martha Nussbaum’s phrase, according to David Parker).5 Of course the drive during the subsequent twenty-five years has not been quite as scenic as an enthusiastic ethical-turner might have 87



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wished. The approaches of Greenblatt and even Foucault have continued to loom large in literary studies, still preponderantly historicist and contextualist in their general ethos.6 As for philosophy, even within ‘normative’ ethics, leaving aside the ‘meta-’ and ‘applied’ categories, one is diverted only too rarely by ‘virtue ethics’ (the phrase itself is an unhappy déformation professionelle) from the eternal wrestling match between deontologists and consequentialists. But my business here is not so much with the last twenty-five years as with the preceding twenty-five.

Murdoch, Sartre and Kant That ethical turn, or cresting wave, first began to form as long ago as the 1950s. Indeed Stuart Hampshire’s ‘Fallacies in Moral Philosophy’ appeared in 1949, with its diagnosis of a Kantian disease in moral philosophy, an ‘unbridgeable’ split between fact and value introduced into ethics by an overwhelming concern with judgement, as opposed to Aristotelian agency. But Hampshire’s persuasive anticipation, or rather inauguration, of many later ‘thick description’ arguments merely reintroduces the split at a deeper level. Value returns as pure choice or will. ‘The decision depends on how we see the situation’: situations are made rich and dense by our seeing them. So far, so good. But ‘we’ are still only binary, seeing-and-acting creatures, selves of more or less informed belief – and of will. ‘Ultimately we must simply choose.’ There is no more to ‘us’ than that. Hampshire resolves the fact-value divide in favour of fact. Moral arguments are either arguments about facts and beliefs about facts, or matters of an arbitrary or spontaneous choice between two incommensurable systems of terminology.7 Hampshire’s picture of the self was represented as archetypal a few years later by another philosopher who has been cited with notable consistency, at numerous key moments in modern accounts of the ethical turn, as having been not just a presence at its inception, but its true initiator. It is no accident that Iris Murdoch was the first philosopher mentioned in Charles Taylor’s monumental revisionary history of the making of the modern identity. She has received similar attention from Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum and other seminal philosophical expounders of the ‘ethical turn’, as well as being an obvious precursor of many more, including Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty.8 Perhaps because Murdoch was that rare creature, a literary artist who was also a philosopher, her understanding of ‘the good’ as ‘the privileged focus of attention or will’, in Taylor’s words,9 or of moral agency as ‘a just and



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loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’, in her own words, was at the same time an understanding of literary study as ‘the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture’, where ‘culture’ means something like ‘moral growth’, and study implies something like ‘obedience to’ or ‘unselfish immersion in’ the object of attention. The ethical turn is a literary turn. If ‘it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place’, if ‘we need more concepts than our philosophies have furnished us with’, if ‘morality is a matter of attention not of will’ (Murdoch is here quoting Simone Weil), then this ‘new vocabulary of attention’ is only to be found in literary study.10 But Iris Murdoch was also another kind of rarity: an Oxford philosopher who was at the same time something of a phenomenologist in the continental style. ‘Existentialism has shown itself capable of becoming a popular philosophy and of getting into the minds of those (e.g. Oxford philosophers) who have not sought it and may even be unconscious of its presence’ (EM, p. 338).11 Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) was the first serious book published in English on the existentialist novelistcum-philosopher, and Murdoch’s inwardness with him and with the tradition he sustained both broadened the range of her criticism of modern moral philosophy and developed it in literary terms. This was already apparent in ‘The Sickness of the Language’, Part III of the book.12 Since roughly the era of Impressionism and Symbolism, she says, though the roots of the condition go much deeper (she does not elaborate here, but they go down to Romanticism and its antecedents), ‘we can no longer take language for granted as a medium of communication’. We have become mesmerized by the glass of the window we used simply to look through. Poets ‘began to see the world with a dreadful particularity, as a great ineffable mass of inextricable processes’. Some reacted to what was in effect a loss of shared conceptual understanding by ‘attempting to make language into the perfect expression of this over-rich world’ (for example, Rimbaud, and later Surrealism); others attempted ‘to draw language out of the ineffable flux altogether, and to erect it into a pure and non-referential structure on its own’ (for example, Mallarmé). ‘Their attention is fixed upon language itself to the point of obsession, and their poems are thing-like, non-communicative, non-transparent to an unprecedented degree’ (again, Poe and his masters Coleridge and Shelley come to mind). At the same time, or just a little later, language for the philosophers ‘was suddenly construed on the model of the scientific definition’: ‘no longer thought of as naming things’, it became instead ‘the determining framework of reality’. Even when language subsequently fell back into focus it was seen as a mere part of a disunited



Iris Murdoch, the Ethical Turn and Literary Value


world, no longer as the transparent window onto a common one. This world of Surrealist literature (the non-meaning of literary language) and linguistic philosophy (the meaning of ethical language) was experiencing a ‘crisis of value’ because value was not in it, as Wittgenstein said – Murdoch quotes Tractatus. Value was not in the world because it was excluded from language. And Sartre, she says, with some unorthodox lateral references to Stuart Hampshire, Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer, wanted to resolve this crisis of language and identity, but in effect perpetuated it. Sartrean man is trapped between an ‘intense egocentric conception of personal life’ and a ‘pragmatic utilitarian view of politics’, while Sartre as novelist ‘seems blind to the function of prose, not as an activity or an analytical tool, but as creative of a complete and unclassifiable image’.13 This early account of Sartrean man and his language turned out to be foundational for Murdoch’s influential representation of the crisis of modern identity. Here is a celebrated passage from the 1967 ‘Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’: The idea of life as self-enclosed and purposeless is of course not simply a product of the despair of our own age. It is the natural product of the advance of science and has developed over a long period. It has already in fact occasioned a whole era in the history of philosophy, beginning with Kant and leading on to the existentialism and the analytic philosophy of the present day. The chief characteristic of this phase of philosophy can be briefly stated: Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in the age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-god [. . .] This man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d’être of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal [. . .] It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it. In fact Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton; his proper name is Lucifer. (EM, pp. 365–6) The face of Murdoch’s ‘Kantian man’, as he had now become, can be seen looking out of innumerable subsequent accounts of the modern self, including most of those mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.



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Her prescient ability to see simultaneously through the twin lenses of the continental and Anglo-Saxon traditions she mentions is even more profoundly realized in that succinct final glide from Kant to Milton; no association between a philosopher and a poet could be more suggestive. T.S. Eliot, for example, never made it, because for him Hegel prevented such an understanding of Kant. Yet this is in its way a picture of ‘dissociation’. We will return to it in the last section of the chapter.

Murdoch, Milton and Kant It might help us to gain a deeper understanding of that ethical turn away from Kant which is also a literary turn towards richer concepts if we focus our ‘moral attention for a moment’, as Murdoch suggests, on the greatest of English poems and the masterwork of modern European philosophy, respectively. In particular, we have to attend to their use of concepts, which is a measure of their readiness to trust language. ‘If we take the view that moral differences are [. . .] “conceptual” and not exclusively behaviouristic we shall also be able to see moral philosophy itself as a more systematic and reflective extension of what ordinary moral agents are continually doing’, wrote Murdoch in 1956, in ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ (EM, pp. 82–3). ‘Great philosophers coin new moral concepts and communicate new moral visions [. . .] the task of moral philosophers has been to extend, as poets may extend, the limits of the language, and enable it to illuminate regions of reality which were formerly dark’ (EM, pp. 84 and 90). These are insights of great power in that they apply a literary model of rich concept thought to moral philosophy. As Murdoch admits, however, ‘it is not difficult to see why such a view of morals and of moral philosophy is regarded in some quarters with suspicion [. . .] What linguistic analysts mistrust is precisely language’ (EM, p. 83). Not only linguistic analysts but literary theorists too: while their masters of suspicion, the masters of modern moral and linguistic suspicion itself, were Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Are there mistrustful poets, then? Those who perhaps do not extend the limits of language as much as one might imagine?14 At the core of Milton’s characterization of Satan is a cluster of interlocking concepts. In Isaiah, Genesis and the patristic and rabbinical commentators the poet found a Satan who was a thin cartoon of only three of these: pride, envy and ambition; hardly more than the ‘adversary’ or ‘plotter-against’ which the name denotes in Hebrew (the thought that these concepts are so to speak the three ‘primary colours’ of morality, which when mixed in the right proportions form all other concepts, is just the kind





of thought one ought to resist, according to a point of view like Murdoch’s). In Marlowe’s Faust, on the other hand, Milton found, not so much in Mephistopheles as in Faust himself, a new, living alloy of emotions, forged out of the twin crucibles of morality play and Renaissance humanism. This was the enriched Luciferian material Milton poured back into his Puritan mould. This Faustian Satan became ‘Kantian man’. Well, then, one might ask, isn’t Kantian man much the same as Faustian man? Wasn’t Goethe, after all, beginning to compose his version of the Faust story just as Kant was writing the first Critique? Why did Murdoch turn to Milton rather than to Goethe, Kant’s contemporary, or to Marlowe, Milton’s inspiration, for her ‘glorious incarnation’? Doesn’t Faust have impeccable adversarial credentials himself? Originally Gnostic and Manichaean (Augustine himself tells us of a Faustus who was Mani’s apostle), later the archetypal Renaissance alchemist (the historical Georg Faust was a kind of minor Paracelsus, a proto-scientist), the legendary Johann Faust also shows distinct traces of Pelagian humanism. He is the anti-Augustine. But Milton only wanted so much of him as he needed to flesh out his anti-Christ. Faust is human. He loves Gretchen and desires Helen. He does not want to be God or even a ‘man-God’. What he craves above all is experience, knowledge. This is Adam, not Satan. Milton wanted his resentful angel differentiated from his disobedient man. Satan must retain enough of Faust’s humanity to engage our sympathy: in particular his free will, that most Pelagian and heretical of attributes, and his inability to repent. But apart from that Satan is a thought experiment, a diagnostic blueprint, rather than a dramatic human character. Here is a small but typical sample (emphases mine): [I do not] repent or change, Though changed in outward luster, that fixed mind And high disdain, from sense of injured merit, That with the mightiest raised me to contend . . . What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield [. . .] [. . .] how glorious once above thy sphere; Till pride and worse ambition threw me down Warring in heav’n against heav’n’s matchless King [. . .] [. . .] yet all his good proved ill in me, And wrought but malice; lifted up so high 10.1057/9780230277229 - Iris Murdoch and Morality, Edited by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner


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[. . .] is there no place Left for repentance, none for pardon left? None left but by submission; and that word Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame [. . .] So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse [. . .]15 Throughout Satan’s own crucial speeches in Books I–V – the early passages in Hell, the first glimpses of Eden, the recapitulations of the revolt in Heaven – we are given a complex web of emotional-moral concepts in place of a character: disdain, a sense of impairment, shame, despair, the inability to feel gratitude except as indebtedness, rage, malice, revenge, spite, fruitless remorse, and of course envy, ambition and pride. The thought is everywhere subtle and synthetic (the analysis of gratitude is wonderfully penetrating, and influenced important Romantic accounts of this moral emotion by Wordsworth and Coleridge more than 130 years later); the web is strong and coherent; but Satan is a concept pattern in human or quasi-human form. Milton made, he wanted to make, a figure or schema for an immortal, obdurate, slighted and vengeful dispossession. Unfortunately, thanks to Blake, Byron and Mary Shelley, and those lingering traces of Faust, his essentially hollow concept-shell became the prototype for a thousand post-Romantic figures of the lonely and obsessive anti-social hero from Childe Harold to Che Guevara: the archetype of ressentiment. But the hallmark of Milton’s own man-God is disaffiliation; he is a punctual, dissociated will to which are attached essentially self-contained though complex concepts: hence Murdoch’s description of him as ‘free, independent, lonely, powerful’; and hence his congeniality with Romanticism. Milton’s language certainly isn’t ‘sick’, as according to Murdoch Rimbaud’s was, or Mallarmé’s; but it too is an experience of absence, of a loss of shared, dynamic concepts only partially remedied by a magnificent but solitary attempt to recreate them. What about ‘rational, responsible, brave’, then? How does lonely Kantian man consort with fallen Miltonic angel? ‘We ourselves bring into the appearances that order and regularity in them we call nature [. . .] the understanding is itself the legislation for nature’. What would Satan not have given to be able to say this, perhaps the most famous pronouncement in the first Critique (A125–6)?16 This ‘understanding’,



I sdained subjection, and thought one step higher Would set me highest, and in a moment quit The debt immense of endless gratitude [. . .]


which is repeatedly and significantly called by Kant a ‘spontaneity of cognition’, arises directly out of the ‘faculty of concepts’ – or of judging (‘they come down to the same thing’, says Kant at A126 and B150). Judging, the use of the concept faculty which synthesizes all impressions under the various basic conceptual configurations of the mind (necessity, causality, unity, negation and so on), is ‘an action of the understanding’, an ‘act of its self-activity’, ‘an act of the spontaneity of the power of representation’ (B130). At the heart of the Kantian account of experience is a universe-legislating, spontaneously cognizing, conceptusing self-consciousness. The Latin sponte means ‘of free will’, ‘of one’s own accord’, ‘of one’s self’, ‘voluntarily’, ‘willingly’. The verb root is spondere, to bind, engage, or solemnly or sacredly promise or pledge oneself; this was derived in turn from a Greek verb spendo, to ‘pour out’, as in a libation. Sponte expresses a sacred commitment, a pledging or pouring out of the self. The Kantian free will, heir of the Augustinian liberum arbitrium, is the core of the non-derivative, self-generating, autonomous self (the free will ‘must be viewed as also giving the law to itself’, writes Kant in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals).17 In the first Critique freedom of the will is defined as ‘an absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself’ (A446/B474), and is set outside the natural world of causation, as belonging to the transcendental realm of things in themselves, in which the moral agent must see himself as belonging. The autonomous self-legislator of Kant’s ethics is continuous with the autogenous self-knower of his epistemology. Kant’s ethics, just like his epistemology, notoriously depends upon a kind of event horizon, over which we cannot see and yet from the far side of which issue imperatives arising from reasons. At the heart of his philosophy is a model of the self, insofar as it is active, as spontaneous: at its centre an ultimately mysterious, creative, self-generating, fountain-like sacred core. But we have to remember that this nuclear core is a function of the concept or judging faculty. There is no accounting for that bringing of impressions under fixed concepts which makes the world the objective one we ‘know’; we just spontaneously do it. As with Milton, we confront here a supreme solitary attempt to reconstruct a lost world of shared concepts: an attempt that in the end acknowledges its own arbitrariness.

Murdoch, literature and morals Just as a number of indivisible and universal metaphysical concepts spontaneously applied to impressions of objects are the self-making and self-legislating Kantian person, so a number of richer, ‘smaller’ but still



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indivisible moral concepts spontaneously applied to God’s creation are Milton’s would-be self-making and self-legislating Satan, impeded only by a God soon to be abolished by Kant. Murdoch says that in moral philosophy we need what literature gives us, namely more concepts, richer and deeper ones, to express the value that will otherwise evacuate the world. And surely, one might say, that is Milton’s peculiar achievement in creating Satan. Disdain is de-dignare, de-dignifying, reducing worth or merit; impairment is im-peiorare, making worse, diminishing; despair is de-sperare, annihilation of hope; repenting is punishing oneself, re-paenitere; revenge is ‘speaking force back’, re-vim-dicere; envy is in-videre, looking in upon, the precursor to in-vadere, which is coming in upon. All this Milton the classicist knows; his predominantly Latinate concepts precisely and intricately embody his enriched Satan. But, and this is the big ‘but’: Satan is a scholar’s compendium, a thesaurus, of the vocabulary of disaffection and alienation. He is artificial: a Frankenstein creation, as Mary Shelley saw. Compare Homer’s Achilles: likewise alienated, resentful, malicious, disesteemed; but also grieving, loving, remorseful, and in the end self-recognizing, not self-making. He comes to understand himself as something both given and evolving, rather than creating himself as something self-chosen. Homer’s passional and moral concepts, crucially, interact: and as they do they change their value (though not their meaning). As we shall see shortly, this is the heart of Murdoch’s ‘case for literature’. Milton’s concepts (I speak here only of Satan, not Adam or Eve – but how far would the same be true of them?) remain stable and unchanging, for all their collective weight: just as Satan is himself. This is what enables Kantian man. Free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, alienated: in a word, fixed. There is nothing fluid here, nothing interactive. Even the source of his power, the spontaneous nuclear reaction at the core, is not something infused into the texture of this utterly conceptual, articulated being, but separate from it, of a different quality. So what are we to make, what, finally, did Murdoch make, of her conception of literature as the paradigmatic, complex vocabulary of attention, the case of morals as much as a case? (EM, p. 348). As a counterweight to the mere agglomeration of atomic concepts, so dangerously plausible a facsimile of real character, which is the KantianLuciferian man-God, she suggests in ‘On “God” and “Good” ’ that ‘if we reflect upon the nature of the virtues we are constantly led to consider their relation to each other [. . .] the best kind of courage is steadfast, calm, temperate, intelligent, loving’ (EM, p. 346). Moral attention delivers us not so much a deepening of our understanding of single concepts





in themselves, but a growing sense of their relationship to each other. This kind of attention, this kind of awareness of value and (or in) personality, culminating in contemplation as a kind of prayer, is the moral achievement, and Murdoch calls it ‘realism’. Art ‘presents the most comprehensible examples’ of this ‘vision of reality’, this ‘unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention’ to a reality which transcends us (EM, pp. 352–3). And literature is in some sense the supreme art of conceptual recognition, of the constant evolving recognition of the concepts we live with, live by. If the ‘awareness of the unity and interdependence’ (EM, pp. 346–7) of the whole of moral reality is an awareness of the Good, then literature is the paradigm of moral awareness. The trouble with Paradise Lost might be that the concepts converge only on, are defined only in relation to, Milton’s somewhat unfortunate God. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch’s last and longest work of philosophy, returns to us again and again, with a marine ebb and surge, this same cluster of linked central insights (the book has always provoked correspondingly equivocal responses, starting with Frederic Raphael’s ‘razor blades buried in mashed potato’).18 The most helpful point d’appui, unsurprisingly, is Kant, whose Categorical Imperative, a ‘unique command from elsewhere’ (MGM, p. 167), is represented by Murdoch in this book as a quasi-ontological argument, a manifestation of Kant’s ‘superb certainty about the fundamental and unconditional nature of the moral demand’ (MGM, p. 442), an ‘established vision of an absolute at the centre of human existence’ (MGM, p. 439). This voice from a noumenal nowhere, from an alien radiant core, cannot speak to our ‘extremely various experience’ (MGM, p. 507; emphasis in original here and in the following extracts); in its terms ‘the mess of actual consciousness is without value’ (MGM, pp. 171–2). Kant ‘was not concerned with detailed secondary moral concepts, the middle-range mediating moral vocabulary which carries so much of our ever-changing being’ (MGM, p. 268). And yet this messy evolving being in its via media, in the ‘daily momently quality of consciousness’, is ‘soaked in value’; our personalities and temperaments ‘must be thought of as an organic part of our morals’ (MGM, p. 167) – must be thought of, one can’t help but feel, precisely as organic. Kant operates by ‘juggling together a [small] number of large concepts’ (MGM, p. 437), rather than by fusing or, so to speak, metabolizing the ‘vast numbers of secondary more specialized moral terms [which] are for us instruments of discrimination and mentors of desire’ (MGM, p. 385). That is the literary-metaphoricalimaginative-organic way of thinking value, of living with concepts, and it may be the ‘best model for all thought’ (MGM, p. 169). ‘Concepts



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are not solitary individuals [. . .] if we study one we soon see it as an aspect of another’ (MGM, p. 323); understanding value lies in ‘deepening’ concepts through a sense of their relation to each other as a complex densely textured network. Murdoch also reminds us that the imagination in Kant, like the reason in its deliverance of the moral law, is ‘spontaneous’ (MGM, pp. 308–9, 312–14: and see above). It produces ‘conceptless objects’ (MGM, p. 313) rather than, as one might say, objectless concepts: but Kant wants to call both kinds of production ‘spontaneous’. And between these two remote peaks of spontaneity, as Murdoch points out in one of her profoundest insights, yawns a chasm down which the whole Kantian enterprise could plunge. ‘One might almost say that “imagination” is the name of the transcendental problem, or is used as a convenient blanket to cover it up. Kant had to invent the idea’ (MGM, p. 310). He had, that is, to re-invent it: to convert imagination from ‘the effortful ability to see what lies before one more clearly, more justly’ (MGM, p. 322) into a spontaneous, inexplicable annunciation, ‘pure, strong and free’, a ‘clean clear light agile movement’ issuing ‘as it were automatically’ from ‘beyond and above what is dull, jumbled and senseless’: or from a sui generis, punctual core, one might add (MGM, p. 156): this last passage is actually about Sartre again, interestingly, comparing the pour-soi with the en-soi. The metaphor from Murdoch’s first philosophy book is still operant in her last. The imagination, especially the literary imagination, in its preKantian, pre-Romantic sense, is our evaluative faculty. Imaginative attentiveness to the ‘mess’, ‘looking carefully [‘patiently’, ‘continuously’] at something and holding it before the mind’, is ‘moral training’ (MGM, p. 3), a true ‘source of divine (purified) energy’, delivering not ‘an occasional leap, into an external (empty) space of freedom’, the ‘liberation of the individual into an open space wherein to construct his morality’ (MGM, p. 40), but ‘a change of one’s whole being in all its contingent detail’ (MGM, p. 25). In this way art, especially literary art, packed with ‘secondary’ moral terms, is analogous with virtue (MGM, p. 86), is ‘the most profound generally accessible form of moral reflection’ (MGM, p. 89). ‘Literature is full of values’, and its ‘consumption [. . .] involves continual evaluation’ (MGM, p. 190). At its heart is not the ‘large concept’, Kantian and also Miltonic (Milton’s concepts are smaller but still impermeable), but the metaphor, the key device (or organ) for metabolizing concepts, interpenetrating virtues (MGM, p. 295). ‘Metaphors are not rhetorical speech-aids [but] fundamental modes of understanding’ (MGM, pp. 305–6), small intricate analogues of the ever-evaluative self.





But if ‘metaphor is everywhere in our thinking’, it is also ‘apprehended by the thinker as ultimate or pointing beyond’ (MGM, p. 171). In our moral thought ‘we deploy a complex densely textured network of values’: but we do so ‘around an intuited centre of good’ (MGM, p. 325; my emphasis). We seek unity (MGM, p. 1). The ‘idea of absolute’ is there in all our evaluative thought ‘as a distant moral goal’ (MGM, p. 304). ‘What is experienced as most real in our lives is connected with a value which points further on’ (MGM, p. 430). And yet this ‘centre of good’, this distant goal of morality, is not Kant’s ‘established vision of an absolute’. The ‘unity and fundamental reality of goodness’, which is ‘an image and support of the unity and fundamental reality of the individual’ (MGM, p. 427), is certainly grasped by us as ‘absolute, above courage and generosity and all the plural virtues [. . .] unshadowed and separate, a pure source, the principle which creatively relates the virtues to each other in our moral lives’ (MGM, p. 507). But Murdoch wanted her big book to consolidate a view of the Platonic Image, not the Kantian Imperative, as the true ‘Ontological Proof of the necessity of Good’,19 the ‘bridge between morals and religion’ (MGM, p. 511). Metaphor’s way of ‘pointing beyond’ is not symbol’s way: it is an interactive way. ‘The sovereign Good is not an empty receptacle into which the arbitrary will places objects of its choice. It is something which we all experience as a creative force’ (MGM, p. 507). Not as a spontaneous epiphany from the outside (or the deep mysterious inside) of the self, but as a hard-earned integrative movement of our whole being, a way of seeing and saving its plurality as one. For Murdoch ‘God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent nonrepresentable and necessarily real object of attention [. . .] moral philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept which has all these characteristics’ (EM, p. 344). ‘I am aware of the danger of inventing my own Plato’, she says (MGM, pp. 510–11), and we should all be aware of the danger of inventing our own Murdoch.20 But I suspect – though maybe this is just invention – that this ‘central concept’, the Good, is more Aristotelian than the Platonist Iris Murdoch realized. She did say, after all, quoting Wittgenstein’s ‘what has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life’, that ‘moral philosophy should remain at the level of the differences, taking the moral forms of life as given, and not try to get behind them to a single form’ (EM, p. 97). Value converges in the single richest and most interactive of all concepts, in the idea, itself non-representable, of the interdependence and interactivity of the whole of moral reality. The more we attend to all the other concepts



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(and only literature can finally attend to all of them) the richer this one gets. But it is not a source; it is the river.21

1. See Michael Eskin’s excellent survey ‘The Double “Turn” to Ethics and Literature?’, Poetics Today, 25(4) (2004): 557–72. 2. For example the 1983 issue of New Literary History entitled ‘Literature and/as Moral Philosophy’, and the ‘Symposium on Morality and Literature’, Ethics, 98(2) (January 1988). 3. See Eskin’s article for a comprehensive list; and also my ‘Deepening the Self: the Language of Ethics and the Language of Literature’, in Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, eds J. Adamson, R. Freadman and D. Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 21–38. 4. See Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (1982; Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991), p. xxi. 5. See David Parker’s ‘Introduction: the Turn to Ethics in the 1990s’, in Adamson et al., Renegotiating Ethics, p. 13. Also see Martha Nussbaum, ‘Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory’, in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 170 (‘a turn to philosophy can offer valuable illumination here’). 6. Nussbaum’s 1990 remark that literary critics by and large had not turned to moral philosophy still holds true, unfortunately (Love’s Knowledge, p. 170). 7. ‘Fallacies in Moral Philosophy’, Mind, 58 (1949): 466–82, reprinted in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, eds Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), pp. 51–67. 8. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 3 (Murdoch called Taylor’s book a ‘wise and learned work’ [MGM, p. 166]); Rorty, Consequences, p. 185; Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 2, and Love’s Knowledge, pp. 142n, 251; Cora Diamond, ‘Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy is’, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1995), pp. 373–7; Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London and Glasgow: Fontana, 1985), p. 218. As will be obvious, I am particularly indebted in what follows to Maria Antonaccio’s fine essay ‘The Virtues of Metaphysics: a Review of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 29 (2) (June 2001): 309–45, which also, but much more comprehensively, views Murdoch’s philosophy through the twin lenses of Existentialists and Mystics and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. 9. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 3. 10. For the quotations from Murdoch in this paragraph see ‘The Idea of Perfection’ (1962), in EM, pp. 326–7, and ‘Against Dryness’ (1961), EM, pp. 292–5. The essays collected and edited by Anne Rowe in her ‘interdisciplinary anthology’ (p. 1), Iris Murdoch: a Reassessment (Basingstoke:



Notes

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

Iris Murdoch and Morality Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), have done a great deal to guide Murdoch studies back towards the centre of contemporary literary-philosophical debate. I have found the contributions by Stephen Mulhall, Edith Brugmans and Christopher Mole especially enlightening. In his preface to Iris Murdoch: a Reassessment Conradi reminds us of Taylor’s observation that Murdoch ‘“jumped the box” of Oxford analytic philosophy’ (IMAR, p. xvi). Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953; Brighton: Harvester, 1980), pp. 26–35. See Sartre, Part X (pp. 70–6). That there are many such poets is one of the central claims of my Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau: Romantic Souls, Realist Lives (the title is intentionally Murdochian) (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). Milton, Paradise Lost, I: 96–103; IV: 39–52, 79–82, 108–9. References are to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), by the conventional ‘A’ and ‘B’ numbers denoting the 1781 and 1787 editions. I offer a much fuller version of these suggestions about Kant in ‘English Bards and German Sages’, in English Now, ed. Marianne Thormählen (Lund: Lund University Press, 2007), pp. 72–81: the subject of comparison there is Wordsworth, however, not Milton. In Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 82. Sunday Times, 25 October 1992. Brugmans and Mulhall both focus valuably on the importance of the ontological argument in Murdoch’s philosophy (IMAR, pp. 23–33, 47–52). All readers of Murdoch’s philosophy, including this one, will henceforth owe a great deal to Maria Antonaccio’s magisterial Picturing the Human: the Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For me its key features are the account of Murdoch on Sartre, the emphasis on vision, and the complex placing of Murdoch between Kant and, ultimately, Aristotle. But the foregoing is very much in its shadow. I am most grateful to Anne Rowe and Avril Horner for their encouragement and helpful advice with this essay. Its shortcomings, needless to say, are entirely my responsibility. I would also like to thank Mark Platz, who thirty years ago gave me my first copy of The Sovereignty of Good.



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Murdoch’s Fictional Philosophers: What They Say and What They Show Scott H. Moore

In numerous interviews, Iris Murdoch claimed that her fiction-writing and her philosophy-writing were two entirely separate endeavours. Her readers, of course, know better. At the very least, her readers know that her novels are populated by philosophers and by people who think and talk about philosophical subjects. There are more writers than philosophers in the novels, and a number of these writers make a point of reminding the reader that they are not philosophers. This is an important confession, because many of them sound like philosophers. If the reader is aware of Murdoch’s philosophical works, she will recognize at once that Murdoch’s fictional philosophers do not merely sound like generic philosophers; several of them sound a lot like Iris Murdoch herself. They say the sorts of the things that Murdoch said. In several instances, specific ideas and even idioms from her philosophical works appear in novels that were being written at the same time. If most of them say things similar to Murdoch’s philosophy, they show something entirely different, however. This chapter will contribute to the thesis that there is a ‘say-show’ distinction at the heart of Murdoch’s fiction. Murdoch believes that fiction can show what philosophy can only say. The same is true of her fictional philosophers and other writers. The philosophies they espouse inevitably pale in comparison to the picture they paint with their lives. In some cases, they are subjected to withering critique and satire. Is Murdoch merely poking fun at herself or does she have a deeper purpose? While she is certainly not above poking fun at herself, I believe that there is indeed a deeper purpose. To state the obvious, for Murdoch, the moral life is not about getting the moral philosophy right: it is not about merely saying the correct 101



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philosophical propositions or formulating the right philosophical theory. The moral life is seen in those who possess a certain sort of moral vision and in those whose habits and instincts exemplify the unselfishness and the honesty that pursue the good for its own sake, without threat of punishment or promise of reward – including the philosophical rewards of reason, coherence and intellectual persuasion. By way of illustration, I want to examine two of her fictional philosophers: Marcus Fisher of The Time of the Angels (1966) and Rupert Foster of A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). Both of these figures demonstrate what I have described as Murdoch’s unique ‘say-show’ distinction, which exists at the heart of her moral philosophy and her fiction. After examining these characters, I will address an important objection that might be raised against this argument before concluding with some larger implications that I believe follow from this reading of Murdoch’s novels.

Marcus Fisher (The Time of the Angels) Marcus Fisher is the younger brother of Carel Fisher, the priest of a nonfunctioning Anglican parish in East London in Murdoch’s 1966 novel The Time of the Angels. Marcus is the headmaster of a small independent school in Hertfordshire, and he has taken two terms off to complete a philosophical treatise on morality in a secular age about which he has reflected and on which he has worked intermittently for years. Marcus envisions that his work will resemble Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and has tentatively entitled it Morality in a World without God.1 Like Murdoch, Marcus is a Platonist and an atheist, but he has an affection for religious belief. In fact, his book will have an entire chapter devoted to the Ontological Argument (p. 89). In response to Norah Shadox-Browne’s dismissive remark that society needs to get the vestiges of religious belief ‘out of our system’, Marcus replies, ‘I wonder. Do we really want to get it all out of our system?’ He calls himself an ‘amateur of Christianity’ and we learn that his ‘favourite reading was theology’ (pp. 14–15). All of these descriptions might apply to Murdoch herself. The most telling evidence for the similarities between Marcus’s philosophy and Murdoch’s are found in Marcus’s text itself. At the beginning of Chapter Twelve, the reader is given a lengthy paragraph from Marcus’s book: Those who thought to rescue the idea of Good by attaching it to the concept of will intended chiefly to prevent the corruption of that sovereign value by any necessary connection with specific and ‘too



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too human’ faculties or institutions. Since a good conceived of as absolutely authoritative was deemed an insult to human freedom, the solution in terms of action was tempting. If goodness resided in a movement or in a pointing finger its very mobility would preserve it from degeneration. I have already argued that such a theory commits the fallacy it professes to avoid by proving to be but the covert praise of a certain type of personality. Will, choice and action are also the names of the ambiguously human. If the idea of Good is severed from the idea of perfection it is emasculated and any theory which tolerates this severance, however high-minded it professes to be, is in the end a vulgar relativism. (p. 116) Those who know Murdoch’s philosophical essays ‘The Idea of Perfection’ and ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, can hear her thought clearly in Marcus’s words. So much of it is there: the critique of Stuart Hampshire and R.M. Hare’s identification of good with will; the unintended marriage of action-theory to a certain personality type (‘Kantian existentialism’ in Murdoch’s own delightful idiom); the vulgar relativism which results from severing the good from the idea of perfection. It is Murdoch’s own early moral philosophy. ‘The Idea of Perfection’ was published in 1964, and ‘The Sovereignty of Good’ was the Leslie Stephen Lecture of 1967. The Time of the Angels was published in 1966. What Marcus says sounds like Murdoch. Marcus, however, shows the reader something quite different. Marcus, we are told, had returned to his book ‘as to a definite consolation’ (p. 117). Consolation is almost always suspect in Murdoch’s philosophy. In ‘On God and Good’, Murdoch asserts that ‘The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside of one (SG, p. 57; emphasis added). And in ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, she asserts, ‘Any story which we tell about ourselves consoles us since it imposes pattern upon something which might otherwise seem intolerably chancy and incomplete. It is the role of tragedy, and also of comedy, and of painting to show us suffering without a thrill and death without a consolation’ (SG, p. 85). For Marcus, moral philosophy is a consolation. And it is a consolation that Marcus needs. He feels guilty about the way in which he has responded to the moral challenges that he has had to face. Self-righteousness led to self-delusion (and humiliation) in his dealings with young Leo Peshkov at his school, and though



Murdoch’s Fictional Philosophers


he is legally the co-guardian of his niece Elizabeth, he has not seen her in years. Elizabeth lives with his brother, and their relocation to London is disconcerting because Marcus can no longer avoid assuming his responsibility, and this responsibility will entail a confrontation with his brother Carel. And a confrontation with Carel is surely not to be ‘nice’. Now it seems to me that one of the most consistent features of Murdoch’s say-show distinction is that the spoken (the said) moral philosophy of her fictional philosophers usually functions as a justification for the ‘Nice’ as the ‘Good’. This is the case with Marcus Fisher and it will be the case with Rupert Foster as well. It is also the case with numerous non-philosopher writers who appear in other novels and give voice to Murdoch’s theories about moral vision, habit, alleged unselfing, and all the rest. For instance, Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea2 and Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince3 both turn to writing as a consolation, and the writing invariably has Murdochian philosophical overtones. Ironically, both men exemplify the very blindness which comes from the construction of self-serving fantasies, and yet their ‘theories’ of moral excellence are all the more ironic for the very content they affirm. What we find obliquely in these writers we find explicitly in Murdoch’s fictional philosophers. Above, I note that consolation is almost always suspect in Murdoch’s philosophical thought; it is not inevitably so. The two most important exceptions to this rule concern austerity and love, and Marcus, we will see, violates both. Concerning austerity, Murdoch notes, ‘if there is any consolation it is the austere consolation of a beauty which teaches that nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous’ (SG, p. 85). Marcus, we are told, ‘liked to think of himself as an austere man’ (p. 119), but he is not. He consistently bows to the temptations of extravagances. At the opening of the novel he is found enjoying a huge segmented cherry cake, toasted scones with greengage chutney served in a Waterford dish. He tells himself that he likes the plainness of his little flat and wonders, ‘Why on earth had he agreed to move into Norah’s top flat, where there would be endless fuss about cushions and curtains?’ The narrator remarks, ‘He appeared to have agreed’ (p. 119). He is not austere, though thinking of himself as such is another consolation. Likewise with love. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch affirms that ‘In spite of all of the warnings mentioned above, love, love of lovers, of family, of friends, is an ultimate consolation and an ultimate saviour’ (MGM, p. 346). And yet, for Murdoch, love – perhaps more than any passion or experience by humankind – is prone to self-deception.



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Marcus, in the end, will deceive himself into believing that love will save Carel, and thus save himself. He even interprets Carel’s striking him as an act of love. Marcus is oblivious to the fact that Carel has just been discovered by his daughter Muriel to be in an incestuous affair with the ward Elizabeth (who is actually Carel’s daughter). The central scene in the novel consists of a difficult and deeply philosophical and theological argument between Carel and Marcus. One might argue that it is Carel, and not Marcus, who speaks the words of Murdoch’s philosophy. It is Carel, after all, who instructs Marcus in the awful consequences of the ‘death of God’: that it is not a flippant, trivial thing from which a realm of reason can be born. It is Carel who utters the Murdochian dictum that one must be ‘good for nothing’ (p. 172). Here one sees what Murdoch does so well. Carel asserts the insight ‘goodness for nothing’ which she affirms. But she knows that ‘goodness for nothing’ (for neither reward nor punishment) can easily be confused with ‘all is permitted’, which she rejects. She wants to show two versions of how one can articulate the moral philosophy truthfully and still fail to exemplify goodness. Murdoch can show that both men understand something of the truth but neither can actualize what they know or suspect to be the truth. In both cases, it looks like madness. When he is not being taken in by his arguments, Marcus consistently wonders if Carel is sane, and when Marcus comes to his insight about love being the only way to save Carel, Norah Shadox-Brown decides that it is now Marcus who has taken leave of his senses (p. 195). Marcus, like many of Murdoch’s characters (and most of her philosophers), is a victim of self-deception. What makes Marcus’s case interesting is that he has a theoretical understanding of psychological self-deception and yet still falls victim to the trap, in spite of this knowledge (p. 14). After retrieving, purchasing, and returning the stolen icon to the rectory and having had the difficult conversation with Carel, Marcus becomes blissfully happy and invents all sorts of fantasies to rationalize both his brother’s behaviour and his own intentions. He happily believes the ridiculous tale that Leo Peshkov tells him about the motorbike and his ‘good luck’ at the dog track. Once again, filled with his own self-righteousness, he sternly lectures Leo about the evils of gambling and sends him on his way with sound advice about returning to his studies. What Marcus says sounds like Murdoch; what Marcus shows is a picture of blinding self-deception. In the end, Marcus will first be convinced that he must abandon his book and later decide only that the book must be very different, or perhaps, written by one cleverer than himself. After Carel’s death,





the fog clears over East London, the sun appears, and Marcus stumbles upon Anthea Barlow, an old flame with whom all of the Fisher brothers (Marcus, Carel and Julian) had at one time been in love. Marcus has an inkling of the truth that the moral philosophy he must write cannot actually be written. ‘It might be that what he wanted to say about love and about humanity was true but simply could not be expressed as a theory.’ He has an inkling that it cannot be expressed satisfactorily as moral theory, as philosophy, but the prospect of a new ‘Nice’, namely the return of Anthea Barlow, blinds him and keeps him from considering this important insight. The reader is told, ‘Well, he would think about all that later on. What he needed now was relaxation, perhaps a holiday’ (p. 231).

Rupert Foster (A Fairly Honourable Defeat) The best instance of the say-show distinction of Murdoch’s fictional philosophers, however, is found in Rupert Foster of A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Rupert denies that he is a ‘proper philosopher’, preferring the title of ‘Sunday metaphysician’.4 Rupert and his wife Hilda are testimonies to the power of the Nice. The novel begins in the early evening of their twentieth wedding anniversary; Rupert and Hilda are sitting outside by their ‘diminutive swimming pool’, awaiting the guests who will help them celebrate their exuberant happiness. Hilda asks, ‘Is it awful of us to have started drinking champagne before our guests arrive?’ ‘No.’ Rupert replies. ‘Anything is permitted to us.’ ‘Is it disgraceful to be so happy?’ ‘A grace not a disgrace, Hilda.’ ‘Too much at home in Zion?’ ‘Natural Zionites.’ (p. 8) Long before Rupert will articulate his moral philosophy, we are given this fulsome picture of the Fosters, for whom anything is permitted. As is so often the case with Murdoch’s novels, the reader is introduced to the dramatis personae of the narrative through a conversation by two of the principals. In this case, Rupert and Hilda bemoan the state of their fated friends, siblings and children. The conversation concludes with a most revealing exchange:



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‘I am sure that love tells in the end, Hilda. There are times when one’s just got to go on loving somebody helplessly, with blank hope and blank faith. When love just is hope and faith in their most denuded form. Then love becomes almost impersonal and loses all its attractiveness and its ability to console. But it is just then that it may exert its greatest power. It is just then that it may really be able to redeem. Love has its own cunning beyond our conscious wiles.’ (p. 18). (This is straight from Murdoch’s own philosophy. Love that is consoling cannot redeem, but unconsoling love [‘beyond our conscious wiles’] may be able to redeem.) Hilda responds, ‘You have so much instinctive wisdom and goodness of heart. It sometimes worries me that you’re putting it all into a book’ (p. 18). Hilda is uncomfortable with the attempt to put moral instinct down on paper. She actually has better instincts than Rupert. She thinks that it will not be quite right when it is committed to the page. She knows that the best of Rupert cannot be said (or put in a book). Here, Hilda’s own instincts are shown to be similar to Murdoch’s (even if she does believe that true love will result in a tidy home – definitely not a Murdoch sentiment). But Rupert has none of these worries. He replies, ‘The book is about real virtue, not instinct’ (p. 18). Peter Conradi notes that in Rupert’s philosophy the reader hears ‘very much the voice of The Sovereignty of Good, and a voice heard at some point in most of the novels. What Rupert is criticized for is not the philosophy but his consistently clumsy inability to live by it’ (SA, p. 218). It seems to me that this assessment is not quite sufficient. It is surely the case that Rupert does not live by his philosophy. For instance, while he is philosophically opposed to ‘lying’ he systematically engages in deception about matters both significant (his deception of Hilda concerning his ‘affair’) and trivial (he wants Morgan to convince Hilda that she should dye her hair). He does not see the contradiction. The question is not really one of having the right philosophy and then failing to live by it. The moral life is about vision and apprenticeship, about developing the right sorts of habits and moral ‘instincts’. Rupert thinks that there is a difference between ‘real virtue’ and instinct. Tallis Browne – the one truly virtuous character in the novel – does not think about his virtues but acts on instinct. Rupert affirms a variety of



Rupert says:


Murdochian insights. He is described as a Platonist. He longs for a truthful vision that will inform right action (p. 232). He affirms that ‘the top of the moral structure [is] no dream, and he had proved this [. . .] in loving attention’ (p. 330). He even understands the limits of philosophy. Speaking of his big book of moral philosophy, he remarks, ‘No philosopher ever did produce a guide to behaviour, even when he thought that that was what he was doing’ (p. 37). Though he sounds much like Murdoch in her own essays from the period, he becomes a farcical character because even the ‘correct’ moral philosophy when directed toward the Nice will end up making one look foolish. It is not merely that he fails to apply his true ideas (Conradi’s assessment); Rupert has fundamentally misunderstood the relation of virtue and moral sense (‘instinct’ in A Fairly Honourable Defeat). The tension between professed virtue and tacit moral instinct runs throughout the novel. The most moral character in the book, Tallis Browne, has excellent instincts, but he cannot quite come up with a satisfactory explanation for why stealing is wrong. When he asks Rupert ‘Why is stealing wrong?’ Rupert offers an extended exposition on the nature of private property and its role in societal structure (pp. 166–7). Rupert understands all about virtue, but he is incapable of giving an answer to this simplest of questions. He has ‘no guide to morals’; he has poor instincts, and Rupert (like all the rest, save Tallis) is grist for Julius’s mill to show how easily, and how quickly, lovers and friends will betray one another. When Rupert ends up drowning in his own diminutive swimming pool, the reader is fully prepared for this quintessential expression of moral failure. What Rupert says is no match for what he shows.

No philosophy in the novels? It seems to me that there is a potential objection to this argument that needs to be addressed for my thesis to be persuasive. One might argue that to insist that there is an intentional ‘say-show’ relationship demonstrated by Murdoch’s fictional philosophers is to demand that her novels are doing philosophical work, and Murdoch rejected this claim in countless interviews and essays. If the novels are to be strictly segregated from the philosophical work, then there can be no say-show distinction in the novels. Is this potential objection persuasive? I am not persuaded by it. Murdoch’s rejection of the title of ‘philosophical novelist’ is well known. To Bryan Magee in 1978 she famously asserted, ‘I feel in myself



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such an absolute horror of putting theories or “philosophical ideas” as such into my novels. I might put in things about philosophy because I happen to know about philosophy. If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships’ (EM, p. 20). And again, ‘The literary writer deliberately leaves a space for his reader to play in. The philosopher must not leave any space’ (EM, p. 5). Is it not reasonable to suggest that Murdoch’s own extra-textual comments definitively show that her novel-writing and her philosophy-writing were two entirely separate endeavours? If this is true, then the novels are not doing the philosophical work of showing what professional philosophy can only say. This is an important objection, but it seems to me that there are at least five ways of demonstrating that it does not obtain. One can respond (A) by simply looking at the philosophical content found in the novels themselves; (B) by noting the potentially specious character of a hermeneutic that only allows the author’s interpretation of a text; (C) by reviewing Murdoch’s own philosophical work on the nature of art, especially literary art; (D) by examining more closely the interview record; and (E) by clarifying the nature of the philosophical work done with this say-show distinction. Given the limitations of the current chapter, I will focus only on (D) and (E), but I would like to make a brief comment about the first three. (A) seems to be self-evident. In all twenty-six novels (and in the plays as well), Murdoch’s characters not only discuss philosophical concepts but also reflect and act upon explicitly philosophical implications. Indeed, it is because of the obvious philosophical interests of Murdoch’s characters that interviewers repeatedly returned to this subject. Moreover, this current chapter itself seeks to provide two instances of (A): both Marcus Fisher and Rupert Foster show that there is indeed philosophical content to be found in the novels. (B) is more controversial. There is widespread disagreement within literary theory and philosophical hermeneutics about the nature and relevance of authorial intent for the interpretation of texts, especially texts which are artistic creations. Turning to the author of a text to ask for the correct interpretation becomes problematic for numerous reasons. At the very least, demanding that a second text (the interview) is necessary to interpret correctly a first text (the novel) undermines the integrity and self-sufficiency of the novel and might even call for an infinite regress of subsequent interviews and comments. On any account, simply to cite Murdoch’s comments from an interview is not sufficient to establish what may or may not be going on in any particular novel. (C) is a subject of broad literary and philosophical interest. There is a growing body of secondary





literature exploring and developing Murdoch’s provocative work on the nature of art and its relation to philosophy. To explore that literature goes beyond the scope of the current chapter. This leaves (D) and (E) for greater clarification. At first glance, the objection seems persuasive, but upon closer examination the external evidence from Murdoch’s interviews (D) turns out to be quite mixed. She says a great many things about the role of philosophy in her novels, and these comments are not always consistent. Indeed Murdoch qualifies her famous rejection in numerous ways in different interviews. For instance, in a 1962 interview with Harold Hobson, in answer to the question ‘Do you express a philosophy in your novels?’ she answers, ‘In the strict sense, certainly no. But having thought about philosophy, especially moral philosophy, does sometimes affect the way I set a problem up in a novel [. . .] In The Bell I offer three extremely clear types of moral reaction to a certain situation and I indicate to the reader which is the right one. I don’t know what more he wants.’5 In 1968, in response to a question from W.K. Rose about whether her philosophy-writing and her fiction-writing were ‘complementary or conflicting’, she noted that there was certainly a conflict in terms of the time required to do both well. She adds, ‘I think in other ways they are, for me, perhaps increasingly complementary. I felt a little worried about this for a while, but I think I am not now so worried. More philosophy seems to be getting into the novels. The reason, I think, is that I have now got a philosophical viewpoint, a more organized position than I had earlier’ (TCHF, p. 20). Rose responded by asking her if this more organized position was that which is asserted in the Leslie Stephen Lecture (‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’), and she acknowledged that this was correct. She followed this comment with the confession that ‘I am a little worried about how far one should let the philosophy come in. I think that sometimes it comes into the very centre of the plot, as it did in The Time of the Angels. But more often, I think, it comes in through a character wanting to talk in a kind of metaphysical way’ (TCHF, p. 21). Many more comments from Murdoch’s interviews could be cited to show how she offered clarifications and nuances to her understanding of the relation between her fiction-writing and her philosophy-writing. As Gillian Dooley has noted, ‘some of the apparent contradictions that arise from time to time on topics – for example, the role of philosophy in her novels – might result only from different responses to different interviewers’ (TCHF, p. xviii). It is certainly the case that some of these comments express judgements that are quite contradictory to my thesis:



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at a 1986 symposium at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, on the subject of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, she claimed ‘there’s nothing in the novel to do with the philosophy’ (TCHF, p. 182). And yet on other occasions she speaks quite openly of the relevance of philosophy for her literary work. It seems to me that no conclusive argument can be made merely on the basis of extra-textual comments in interviews. The more interesting rejoinder to the objection lies in (E), understanding the nature of the philosophical work being done in the novels. This point is absolutely essential for understanding Murdoch’s use of philosophy. On the whole, when she refers to ‘philosophy’ she is referring to ‘philosophy as such’ – professional philosophy as it was and is studied, taught and practised in the university. She believed that ‘philosophy as such’ is inappropriate for the novels, because professional philosophy is as much form as content, and as such, does not work in the novel. To Jack Biles in 1977 she noted very explicitly that she did not consider herself a philosophical novelist (‘Or, if I am, it’s in the same sense in which Dostoevsky is and not in the sense in which Simone De Beauvoir is or Sartre is’). Explaining how she employs her ‘definite philosophical views’, she notes, ‘of course, any seriously-told story may have metaphysical aspects and will certainly have moral aspects. And morality does connect with metaphysics; so, in this sense, any novelist has got a kind of metaphysic. But I don’t want philosophy, as such, to intrude into the novel world at all and I think it doesn’t’ (TCHF, p. 58). ‘Philosophy as such’ for Murdoch is something quite particular. As practised in the Oxford analytical establishment (within which she was both student and lecturer), it is principally directed toward conceptual clarification through propositional analysis. To Magee she asserted that ‘Literature [. . . .] does many things, and philosophy does one thing’ (EM, p. 4). On another occasion she noted that ‘philosophy is fantastically difficult and I think those who attempt to write it would probably agree that there are very few moments when they rise to the level of real philosophy [. . . .] I don’t think I’ve done it in more than a few pages in all the stuff that I’ve written about philosophy’ (TCHF, p. 78). This is not false modesty on Murdoch’s part. It is a particular understanding of what philosophy is. As such, it is not surprising that she would be sceptical about the integration of literary art and ‘philosophy as such’. As she said to John Haffenden in 1985, ‘if you’re not doing philosophy pretty well, you’re not doing it at all’ (TCHF, p. 125). There must be no confusion on this point. Iris Murdoch was a moral philosopher, but she became deeply suspicious of what professional philosophy had become and of the pretensions to grandeur to which it was given.




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Conclusion In Wittgenstein, the ‘say-show’ distinction is utilized to demonstrate that language is inadequate to present certain states of affairs – some things cannot be said, they must rather be shown. Murdoch’s use of this distinction is different from Wittgenstein’s. She is, after all, a moral philosopher, and morality (for Wittgenstein in the Tractatus) is chief among the things that cannot be said. But it seems to me that she was acutely aware of certain inadequacies of our profession (that is, philosophy), and she understood that certain ways of practising philosophy end up blinding the practitioner to the very reality which was to be illumined. Marcus Fisher and Rupert Foster illustrate (that is, show) this point quite well. How better to show this insight than to have her examples – her fictional philosophers – speak the truth as she understood it while using them to show that there is so much more to truth than merely speaking the truth. What cannot be said, must be shown.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (1966; London: Vintage, 2002), p. 67. Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978). Murdoch, The Black Prince (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973). Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970; New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 18. 5. Harold Hobson, ‘Lunch with Iris Murdoch’, Sunday Times, 11 March 1962, in TCHF, p. 3.



Given this understanding, it is not at all surprising that she would recognize that literature can show something which ‘philosophy as such’ can only say.

Death and Goodness: Bruno’s Dream and ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’ Mark Luprecht

Iris Murdoch’s novel Bruno’s Dream (1969) and her essay, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’ (1970)1 were conceived in tandem in 1967 and, taken together, shed light on Murdoch’s thinking at the time, as well as allowing an insight into the means by which her ideas found expression.2 In his biography, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch,3 Peter Conradi quotes Murdoch, in 1968, as being ‘ “profoundly bored with my thoughts, notably with the whole long [. . .] train which led up to ‘The Sovereignty of Good’. Not that I think this is all ‘wrong’ but I just sense it as fearfully limited and partial”.’4 What becomes evident in juxtaposing the contemporaneous novel and essay is not only the abounding creativity and imagination of Bruno’s Dream, but the large degree of shared concern, within this pairing, between Murdoch’s art and her moral philosophy. The author’s disclaimers about writing philosophical novels notwithstanding, Bruno’s Dream is certainly in many ways a fictional playing-out of ideas presented in ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’. This is not to say that the novel represents her philosophy, but rather that it stands as one test of it; and because Murdoch’s fiction is plotdriven, Bruno’s Dream, like her other novels, has the potential to show the difficulties, or better, the idealistic nature of her philosophy. The connection of fiction and certain philosophical ideas is nothing new in Murdoch’s thought. Near the end of her study of Sartre, published in 1953, Murdoch writes, ‘the novel, the novel proper that is, is about people’s treatment of each other, and so it is about human values’.5 The purpose of the philosopher’s argument in ‘Sovereignty of Good’ has to do with human values, and indeed, Bruno’s Dream appears to highlight the two principles of moral philosophy enunciated by Murdoch 113



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in her essay. First, the examination of human behaviour should be realistic, that is, it must take into account the ‘discoverable attributes’ of human nature. Second, moral philosophy ‘should commend a worthy ideal’, it should address the question: ‘ “how can we make ourselves better?” ’ (SG, p. 76). Bruno’s Dream is very clearly concerned to explore both real human nature and a worthy ideal, and does so with what Conradi lovingly terms ‘a sweet sanity’ (SA, p. 27). The core of both Murdoch’s novel and essay is death and the implications of truly grasping one’s mortality. ‘Goodness’, Murdoch writes near the end of ‘Sovereignty of Good’, ‘is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance, which is psychologically so difficult, can we understand the full extent of what virtue is like’ (p. 100). This link between acceptance of mortality and virtue is exemplified in Bruno’s Dream, but can also be found in another well-known essay of the same period, ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ (1970). There, the literary characters of Cordelia (King Lear) and Patroclus (The Iliad) are cited as ‘good or decent people’ (EM, p. 229), while in ‘Sovereignty of Good’, the same figures serve as examples of ‘real death’ and ‘great deaths’ (SG, p. 85). Also in ‘Existentialists and Mystics’, Murdoch extends her argument by noting that ‘the utter chanciness of human life and the fact of death make virtue [. . .] something gratuitous, something which belongs in the absolute foreground of our existence’ (EM, p. 233). In her discussion of virtue, Murdoch is again harking back to Plato/Socrates: the good life requires philosophical examination, and as one reads in the Phaedo: ‘true philosophers make dying their profession’.6 Death is of course the ultimate reality (to go back to Murdoch’s first principle of moral philosophy) and living consistently, in the light of its implications – so psychologically difficult, as she says – is the ‘worthy ideal’ (Murdoch’s second principle). The inevitable loss of self which death represents becomes the model for moral human behaviour. Consequently, goodness is associated with selflessness, or ‘the attempt to see the unself’: virtue being ‘the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is’ (SG, p. 91). Two lesser virtues, true love and humility, contribute to goodness. The former, when it is ‘true’, can provide the answers to moral questions. ‘The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self pity’ (SG, p. 89). Again here, Murdoch seems to be espousing an ideal, particularly as the return to self and self-pity can be



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so very swift and stealthy. Similarly, humility takes on a significance of gigantic proportions: it is not merely ‘a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is selfless respect for reality’ (SG, p. 93), that is, the recognition that reality exists without, in both senses of the word, the self. Or, as Murdoch continues at the very end of her essay: ‘the humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are [. . .] and although he is not by definition the good man perhaps he is the kind of man who is most likely of all to become good’ (SG, p. 101). A final and fine point in Murdoch’s essay requires mention. Immediately after asserting that ‘nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous’, Murdoch continues, cryptically: ‘masochism is the artist’s greatest and most subtle enemy’ (SG, p. 85). The following sentence does nothing to clarify this statement or connect it to its predecessor. For amplification, one must turn to an essay written a couple of years later, ‘On “God” and “Good” ’ (1969). Here we can find allusion to, and explanation of, what was in Murdoch’s opinion a great obstacle on the road to selfless virtue: ‘the system to which the technical name of sado-masochism has been given’ (SG, p. 66). Subordinating one’s desires or comfort to those of another might appear to others and oneself as selflessness, but may actually provide pleasure, and more significantly, might produce a sense of accomplishment and subsequently an inflated sense of self. This subservience can indeed work in subtle ways, and ‘can produce, almost all the way to the summit, plausible imitations of what is good’. Selfless service is a key element in virtue, but ‘the Good has nothing to do with purpose [. . .] the only genuine way to be good is to be good “for nothing”’ (SG, pp. 66 and 69). That sadomasochism presented itself, to Murdoch, as a fundamental issue in human motivation was to some extent, no doubt, wrought by self-observation.7 Partly, too, the syndrome’s significance was observed by the author in the life, work, and thought of French philosopher Simone Weil, whose influence on Bruno’s Dream is substantial, as will become apparent. In reading Bruno’s Dream, one discovers a very close parallel of thought and sentiment between Murdoch’s moral vision and her art, but the philosophical ideas are now problematized. The failed aspirations of several characters to embody at least some of the virtues cited in ‘Sovereignty of Good’ indicate the idealistic nature of Murdoch’s concept of Good as well as her insistence that art remain true to the exigencies of this world. Three characters, Nigel Boase, Lisa Watkin and Diana Greensleave (née Watkin), are Bruno Greensleave’s caregivers, and are at the centre of the author’s fictional presentation of the struggle for



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Good. Nigel is certainly the most interesting and problematic, for he is a creature and creation of mysticism and surrealism, if not of magic, as will be seen.8 Bruno’s Dream is a novel about death; indeed, as Elizabeth Dipple notes, it ‘presents an anatomy of death’.9 Bruno’s dreams, and particularly his most significant last dream, are all about the ‘End’. The octogenarian is dying of an unnamed disease that has caused his face to become extremely large and ugly, much like, as he realizes, the spiders that are and always have been his great love (p. 7). There are several other deaths that shape the action and reactions of characters in the novel: Bruno’s daughter Gwen, married to Danby, who has become a surrogate son to Bruno, jumped to her death in an (as it transpires) unnecessary attempt to save a child from drowning; Bruno’s wife Janie died of cancer shortly after discovering his infidelity with Maureen, who may have suffocated while attempting to take off her dress. Parvati, pregnant wife of the protagonist’s son Miles, died in an aeroplane crash. Finally, but significantly, the reader learns of the earlier death of the father of Lisa and Diana, a death which acts as a parallel to Bruno’s own. With the exception of the last-named, the deaths, all in the past as the novel opens, are related en passant, though Bruno is plagued throughout by guilt for the death of his wife. It is Bruno’s slow demise and the events and actions surrounding it which constitute the engine of the novel’s plot. One thinks here of another literary explication of human mortality: Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’ – and Conradi has correctly, albeit briefly, noted Nigel’s resemblance to the butler Gerasim in Tolstoy’s story (SA, p. 129). But unlike Tolstoy’s character, Nigel is both quite fully developed and seemingly supernatural. Like the Russian servant, he embodies the healer – Bruno calls him ‘Nigel with the angel fingers’ (p. 4) – and the ascetic, but he is much more. In Gabriele Griffin’s monograph concerning the influence of Simone Weil on Murdoch, Nigel is of particular interest, as he represents ‘the male equivalent’ of the French thinker: ‘he has mystical experiences like Weil [. . .] he attends to others’ needs, especially Bruno’s, in a practical way as Weil did; he lives frugally like her’.10 While the differences between the character and the philosopher are evident, Nigel can be read as representing, as Griffin asserts, Murdoch’s attempt to fictionalize the Weilian conception of attention. He is the focus of the novel’s third and ninth chapters, in which his actions are narrated, uniquely, in the present tense, making him, in a sense, beyond time. Altogether, the phantasmagoric Chapter Three is unique in Murdoch’s oeuvre, I believe. Nigel, a creature of darkness and



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night, reflecting one likely root of his name (‘niger’: Latin for “black”) is here dressed completely in black: ‘thin as a needle, thin as a straight line, narrow as a slitlet through which a steely blinding light attempts to issue forth into a fuzzy world’ (p. 27). This black next-to-nothing then begins what can best be described as a dervish’s whirling. Here is just a taste: [C]oncentric universe. Faster and faster now sphere within sphere revolves and sings. The holy city turns within the ring of equatorial emerald, within the ring of milky way of pearly, within the lacticogalactic wheel, the galaxy of galaxies, that spins motionless upon a point extensionless. (p. 27) There follows a close description of Nigel apparently trying to meditate, but in fact ‘brooding on self’. He sees, or imagines, ‘two indistinct and terrible angels encircl[ing] the earth [. . .] both oned and oneing in magnetic joy. Love and Death, pursuing and pursued’. There follows, presumably, the arrival of the god Amor/Eros: ‘Nigel trembles, pants and shudders. His wide-open eyes see nothing, he, Nigel, the all-seer, the priest, the slave of the god [. . .] He is near [. . .] Love is death. All is one’ (p. 28). This abstruse narrative ends with Nigel falling forward with his face on the ground, forehead striking the floor: ‘Annihilation. All is one’ (p. 29). Griffin notes that Nigel’s worship is ‘flawed’, not only because he fails to escape the self during meditation, but also because his combination of mysticism with sexual energy creates a fantasy about himself. His homoerotic nature finds its ultimate expression in his description of death as a ‘jet black orgasm’ (p. 102).11 More directly, Murdoch suggests Nigel’s lack of compassion, an essential virtue, by ending Chapter Three with the calling and crying of Bruno, noticed but ignored by the prostrate Nigel. This nuance provides a clue to a more problematic side of the mystical, surreal nurse, one that is developed later: his self-deification. Here is the chapter’s final paragraph in full: ‘Later, far away in another world, an old man calls out, calls out, then weeps alone in the dark slow hours of the night. With magnified precision Nigel hears the calling and the weeping. He lies prostrate upon the floor of the world’ (p. 29, emphasis added). Such behaviour may befit an aloof, transcendent deity, and Nigel will make this identification later on. In doing so, he also provokes questions about his sanity, an issue discussed below. Interestingly, Conradi cites the speculative chapter ‘Amor as the God of Death’ in Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958) as an influence on Murdoch, and Nigel certainly can be read as a priest





of the god of love-death (SA, pp. 386–7, n. 23). The description of his worship-dance in Chapter Three, with its sexual and religio-mystical vocabulary, unmistakably weaves together love and death. And his irrational staging of the potentially fatal duel between his two great loves, his brother Will Boase and Danby O’Dell, and the sublime thrill their encounter provides him, attests to the significance of a love-death connection for Nigel, as well as again raising the spectre of his mental instability (p. 286). Yet Nigel has many other facets. In Chapter Nine, the narrator remarks a-syntactically and memorably that: ‘up any religion a man may climb’, a sentiment repeated much later by Nigel himself (pp. 86, 237). So we can place Nigel in various roles: as priest of Amor, or as a Bodhisattva, a priest of Shiva, one who selflessly helps others to seek Nirvana. Further, given Nigel’s dance at the beginning, and his posture at the end of Chapter Three, it is difficult not to place him as well within the Islamic mystical sect of dervishes founded by the thirteenth-century poet Rumi. For both Rumi and Murdoch, virtue is a breakthrough, a departure from the self. I cited Murdoch’s comments regarding virtue as a tearing through the veil of selfish consciousness (SG, p. 91); for Rumi, ‘virtue is the “natural” state of man before his fall, a state which is attained through the removal from man of all which is opaque and prevents the radiation of the divine light’.12 Of course, different strands of mysticism may share common threads. I am merely suggesting here that Nigel represents a type of mystic unusual, if not unique, in Murdoch’s work. I offer one last comparison to underline this – an example of Nigel acting other than one might expect of a priest of Amor. When Diana, in despair over her husband’s reciprocated love for her sister Lisa, steals Bruno’s sleeping pills with obvious suicidal intent, she encounters Nigel for the first time, outside the sickroom. We might have a clue to Murdoch’s affection for Nigel from the way he introduces himself: ‘I suppose I should say [I am] the male nurse, the way people say women writers, though I don’t see why they should, do you, as more women are writers than men are nurses’ (p. 235). Nigel lures Diana into the drawing room and thrusts her onto the sofa. He then informs her that Danby, upon whose loving support she had depended, is like Miles, in love with Lisa. Diana’s response is to feel, for consolation, for the sleeping pills inside her bag. But Nigel insists she must not be desperate, and when she asks him how he knows ‘all these things’, he responds: ‘Because I am God.’ He attempts to mitigate what sounds like an insane claim, but a little later defends his self-proclaimed love of all people with: ‘Didn’t I tell you I was God?’



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Take the famous [for Sufis] utterance ‘I am God’ [said by the martyr al-Hallaj]. Some men reckon it a great pretension; but ‘I am God’ is in fact a great humility. The man who says ‘I am the servant of God’ asserts that two exist [. . .] but he who says ‘I am God’ has naughted himself and cast himself to the winds.13 Indeed, in Chapter Nine, Nigel is given the adjective ‘unpersoned’ (p. 86). Without the plausible explanation provided by Rumi’s reasoning, and perhaps even with it, Nigel’s self-deification borders on insanity. Altogether, he is a very problematic character, as noted especially by Dipple and David J. Gordon. The former calls him ‘the crazy Nigel’, but notes the great amount of good that he does.14 The possibility of insanity seems supported by his reckless manipulation of people, which culminates in a truly life-threatening duel between Danby and Will, an arrangement that bears witness at least to a strong sadomasochism, as he stands to lose one or both of his great loves. Here is Nigel’s description of the event in his farewell letter to Danby: ‘The other great love of my life is, well you can guess who. To have you both before me pointing loaded pistols at each other was the acting out of a fantasy. And how absolutely [. . .] you were both of you clay in my hands [. . .] But I must not think about my godlike power [. . .] Not knowing the outcome was heavenly pain, was Russian roulette of the soul. Forgive me.’ (p. 286) The possibility of his mental instability is increased by Nigel’s similarity, both by virtue of his name and in the power of his dancing, to the famous Russian dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky. Housed in the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University is Murdoch’s copy of Colin Wilson’s well-known study, The Outsider, which the author sent to her with an inscription. Wilson’s fourth chapter: ‘The Attempt to Gain Control’ – a task so vital to Murdoch’s Nigel – contains a large section about the dancer. Apparently, he uttered the same sentence as Nigel: ‘I am God’, repeatedly, empowered as he was by the art of dance. He wrote in his diary that he wanted to do everything and to love everybody.



(p. 237). In one of his Discourses, Rumi provides an explanation that is ideally suited to Nigel:


Ultimately, of course, Nijinsky was institutionalized.15 But, there are two significant aspects of this possible identification of Nigel with the Russian. First, Murdoch is suggesting thereby the possibility of art as an avenue for proper (that is, selfless) attention and for doing good. Second, and typical of Murdoch, the good can be performed by very imperfect human beings, even those residing at the borders of insanity. Nigel’s significance is highlighted by his association with spiders, Bruno’s preoccupation in life. While lecturing to Diana on forgiveness, in the scene cited above, Nigel behaves rather like an arachnid that has ensnared its prey. He ‘slide(s) his arms round the back of her shoulders’; she struggles but ‘he was amazingly strong’; further: ‘her arms were pinioned, his grip tightened’ (pp. 237 and 238). Nigel’s dance, related above, is also evocative of a spider at work, in the construction of a concentric universe (p. 27). But conclusive for this identification of Nigel with spiders is his activity in Chapter Twenty-Three, in which he has trapped his sleeping, but physically superior twin brother Will in an intricate snare of rope wound around the bed and Will’s body, and capable of being tightened at Nigel’s whim. When Will awakes, furious but helpless, Nigel injects the venom of truth – as he had done with Diana – relating that their cousin Adelaide with whom Will has been in love for years, has been Danby’s mistress for years as well.16 The importance of Nigel’s association with spiders becomes evident at the end of the novel. In a – typical for Nigel – nocturnal scene, during which he somewhat assuages both Bruno’s pain and fear, their conversation turns to God. There is a great deal of Simone Weil and Murdoch in this dialogue, concerning waiting and suffering, but I want to focus on Nigel’s answer to Bruno’s query concerning what God is made of. ‘Why not spiders’? he responds, ‘The spiders were a good idea’ (p. 101). This is to suggest that God may be defined as that which one loves best. But soon Bruno’s despair returns, and he claims that Nigel, who argues that death must be something beautiful, simply does not understand. ‘You know what I think?’ Bruno concludes, ‘I think God is death’ (p. 102). These elements – beauty, God, death and love – all come together in the last chapter, relating Bruno’s end. We are told by the narrator that Bruno’s last dream is about God; it is his only dream to go beyond unconcealed guilt feelings for the deaths of his wife and mistress. As suggested by Nigel, God takes the form of the beautiful spider Eresus niger, a very rare, extremely sought-after specimen, which, significantly, was formerly thought to be extinct. The dream is ambivalent: the spider, which can be associated with Nigel most clearly here, as it contains the root for his name as well as the grace of his movements, dangles a fine thread



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for Bruno to grasp, but he cannot take hold, and the thread touches his body, ‘accompanied by an agonizing and yet delightful physical sensation’ (p. 301). Then, slowly, the ever-growing spider transforms into the face of his father – a man who had always found Bruno wanting – and comes to fill the sky. Murdoch’s protagonist, it seems, falls short of that final grace which Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych finds. And yet, after waking, a significant realization does make it through Bruno’s consciousness. Incapable of facing what he feared was his wife’s dying curse, Bruno had ignored her final screaming requests to see him. Now, on the cusp of death, Bruno realizes that ‘only in the presence of death [can one] see so clearly what love ought to be like’ (p. 305). At this point, he understands that his wife must have wanted to forgive him. He is now ready for death, and the dressing gown which he associates with the end, ‘moved forward towards him and was standing at the foot of the bed’ (p. 305). The remaining pages of the novel are told from Diana’s perspective. Before discussing Bruno’s death, a few more words need to be said about his nurses. Like Chapter Three, the novel’s ninth chapter is devoted to Nigel. Here he is presented as a priest of Shiva, a bit more mundane than he appears in the earlier chapter, but still not merely human. Variously described as ‘unpersoned’, a ‘god’, and a ‘slave’ (p. 86), he crouches outside various London windows peeping in at what tend to be sadomasochistic human interactions. Dressed in black, his hands red with rust – the two colours of the Eresus niger – he ‘strides noiselessly [. . .] his bare feet not touching ground’ (p. 86). The last vignette he witnesses before returning home is that of Miles and Lisa quoting the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein on death, until they are interrupted by Diana. We are informed that ‘ “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through” ’ and ‘ “Not how the world is but that it is the mystical [. . .] whereof we cannot speak [. . .] thereof we must be silent” ’(p. 88). Murdoch weaves these thoughts into her depiction of Bruno’s death, as will be seen. As memorable as is the portrayal of Nigel, Lisa, and especially Diana, share with him the novel’s moral focus. Taken together they represent a dialectic of worldly concerns and selflessness. Lisa and Nigel have spent their lives in service to others, including Bruno, while Diana has been largely occupied with domesticity. At the end of the novel, they change places, with Diana assuming care for the dying Bruno, Nigel leaving for India to serve with the Save the Children Fund, while Lisa, abandoning that same destination, is determined to live in the social world that Danby has to offer. Diana is unwilling to hurt her husband Miles by consummating her affair with Danby, she then forgives Miles and her





sister Lisa for loving one another, and further, condones Lisa’s acceptance of Danby’s love, and her relatively carefree life with him at the end of the book. Diana’s forgiveness is expressed in the very words with which Nigel had supplied her in their earlier encounter: ‘her resentment against Miles, against Lisa, against Danby had utterly gone away. They will flourish and you will watch them kindly as if you were watching children’ (p. 310, echoing p. 238). Noteworthy too is the conversation Lisa and Diana share as they take a short-cut through Brompton Cemetery where their father is buried. Their dialogue about death seems to corroborate Wittgenstein’s thinking, cited above, as Lisa disagrees with philosophers who ‘say we own our deaths’. Rather, she continues, ‘death contradicts ownership and self’. And then concluding, she asserts: ‘if only one knew that all along’ (p. 305), reflecting the sentiment of both Bruno and Murdoch in ‘The Sovereignty of Good’. Perhaps most significant about this conversation is the question of the role of love in dying and death, for the same question arises when Bruno dies. Lisa, who was with her father, holding his hand, just as Diana will hold Bruno’s, contends that their father did not care to know whether he was loved. ‘ “Here” ’, Lisa continues, ‘ “one felt that even love was – nothing”. ’ She backs down under Diana’s protests, and concludes that ‘ “love would have to be – like a huge vault suddenly opening out overhead – ” ’ (p. 138). Significantly, Murdoch will present love from the survivor’s perspective at the end of the novel. Bruno’s death scene reflects Murdoch’s concern about the difficulty of literary representations of the end of life. Part of her conviction, no doubt, has to do with the philosophical discussion overheard by Nigel, which included the observation that ‘death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through’ (p. 88). Murdoch’s ideas about death in literature, given in ‘Sovereignty of Good’, seem to reflect those notions. She writes: ‘it is not easy to portray death, real death, not fake prettified death. Even Tolstoy did not really manage it in Ivan Ilych, although he did elsewhere’ (SG, p. 85). What Murdoch is addressing is the impossibility of transmitting the sui generis experience of dying itself. This explains the movement from Bruno’s consciousness to Diana’s at the end of Bruno’s Dream, whereas Tolstoy attempted to relate Ivan’s death-experience from the protagonist’s perspective. Murdoch’s chosen models for literary death, Patroclus, Cordelia and Petya Rostov (War and Peace), ‘show us with an exemplary clarity the way in which art invigorates us by a juxtaposition, almost an identification, of pointlessness and value’ (SG, p. 85). It is noteworthy that these are all deaths announced, and not, as in the case of Ivan Ilych, a death described: Murdoch’s epitomes of



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mortality in literature are characters known for their virtue who were cut down quickly. It is precisely the juxtaposition of pointlessness and value that we find in Murdoch’s portrayal of Bruno’s death, although he is by no means a man of great virtue. Like Ivan Ilych, Bruno hopes for redemption at the end. If only, he speculates, echoing ‘Sovereignty of Good’, one could live backwards, as it were, using the lessons of dying in life (p. 305). Tolstoy seems to believe that this recognition is part of grace itself, and promotes God’s forgiveness. For Murdoch, this is not so: That life could be redeemed. But it couldn’t be, and that was what was so terrible [. . .] was it only in the presence of death that one could see so clearly what love ought to be like? If only the knowledge which he had now, this absolute nothing-else matters, could somehow go backwards and purify [. . .] but it could not. (p. 305) And yet, the knowledge Bruno attains in dying seems to be transmitted, just as the experience of dying itself seems to be shared (p. 309). For Diana is ‘nothinged’ by Bruno’s death: She tried to think about herself but there seemed to be nothing there. Things can’t matter very much, she thought, because one isn’t anything. Yet one loves people, this matters [. . .] one isn’t anything, and yet one loves people [. . .] she lived the reality of death and felt herself made nothing by it and denuded of desire. Yet still love existed and it was the only thing that existed. (p. 311) At precisely this point in Diana’s thinking, Bruno’s hand, which had been clutching hers, relaxes in death. The message has been transmitted. Comparing the ending of Bruno’s Dream with that of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych makes an important if familiar point: Murdoch’s world is spiritual, but not necessarily Christian. Ivan and Bruno have reached similar conclusions about selfless love, but Ivan dies content, in the belief that God understands and forgives, while Bruno, for whom death is god, is not shown to have that Christian consolation. But Murdoch’s reader does find succour, for Nigel – failed saint though he is – is abroad, doing good work, and the world has a new convert to selfless love in Diana. Murdoch’s novel wonderfully embodies and thereby scrutinizes the ideas of her inspiring essay. In both fiction and essay, we find reason




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to hope for the triumph of the Good, though of course, no guarantee of its victory.

1. Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream (New York: Viking Press, 1969); SG, pp. 75–101. 2. Nor did Murdoch’s thinking change significantly from this time forward. On the consistency of Murdoch’s philosophical thought and style, see for example, Heather Widdows, The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), especially pp. 6–13. 3. Published in England as Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998). Hereafter, Iris. 4. Peter J. Conradi, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 501. This is the American edition of Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Life (New York and London: W.W.Norton, 2001). 5. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953; New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), p. 138. The continuation of Murdoch’s argument here is also relevant. She notes that the ‘moral maturity’ (F.R. Leavis’s term) of an author will determine if a novel is literature, ‘but our judgment of him as a novelist will also depend on how he incarnates his viewpoint in his literary medium . . .’ 6. Plato, The Death of Socrates (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 121. 7. Iris, pp. 357–8. 8. One can sympathize with David J. Gordon’s assertion that ‘Nigel is a particular problem because he is cast in so many incongruous roles’. But, he should surely not be rejected as trivial, as Gordon seems to suggest: ‘Aided by Baldanza’s report of revisions in the MS, I suspect that Murdoch, needing someone who could eavesdrop and tattle, tried to make him into something more, then mocked the result’. Gordon, Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995), p. 141. 9. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 168. 10. Gabriele Griffin, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (San Francisco: Mellon Research University Press, 1993), p. 207. Chapter Five is entitled: ‘Fictionalizing Attention’. In ‘The Idea of Perfection’ (1962), also in The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch briefly defines Weil’s notion of attention as ‘a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’ (SG, p. 33). 11. Griffin, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil, pp. 225–6. 12. William C. Chittick, The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2005), p. 92. 13. Ibid., p. 79. 14. Dipple, Iris Murdoch, pp. 179—80; Gordon, Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing. 15. See Colin Wilson, The Outsider (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), pp. 93–105. 16. Nigel’s relationship to Will is complicated and turbid. It is true, as Griffin, in The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil, notes, that there are repeated suggestions that the two are really one and the same personality (p. 224), with a family-name, Boase, strikingly similar to the German word for ‘bad’



Notes

or ‘evil’, namely ‘boese’. As Nigel constrains his brother, he briefly reflects on their relationship in strongly sadomasochistic terms: ‘you need me as the brute needs the angel, as the tender back needs the whip and the suppliant neck the axe’. Typical of the sadomasochist, these pairings are seen by Nigel as an example of the ‘juxtaposition of brutish material and spirit [which] involves suffering’ (p. 211).




Jackson’s Dilemma and ‘The Responsible Life of the Imagination’1 Frances White

In the Iris Murdoch Archive in the Special Collections of the Library of Kingston University is the typescript of the ‘weighty study’2 of Heidegger (working title Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being) on which Murdoch was working during the latter years of her life.3 Reading it is a poignant and informative experience which sheds light not only on her thinking about Heidegger’s philosophy, but also on her twenty-sixth and last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, published in 1995. This chapter draws out the links between these two last works of Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction, seeking to discover why Heidegger became so important to her intellectual and imaginative life, and how her conception of her task as a writer was shaped by the evil times through which both he and she lived. There is confusion concerning the beginning of Murdoch’s long preoccupation with Heidegger. Three times in Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being she reiterates that she had not read his work before she wrote her own book on Sartre’s philosophy,4 claiming to have first read Sein und Zeit in 1965. But a note on page seven of the Bernard Quaritch Ltd Catalogue in the Conradi Archive 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 Gilbert Tyle [sic – presumably Ryle?] (who had reviewed the book in 1929) lent her Sein und Zeit in March 1949.5 Whatever the exact case may be, Murdoch spent a minimum of thirty years cogitating on Heidegger’s work. 126



9

Benet, a central character in Jackson’s Dilemma, is, like his creator, trying to write a book about Heidegger. At several points in the novel he 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.’6 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 is perhaps expressing her own position when he finds it hard ‘to decide what he really, in his heart, thought of his huge ambiguous subject’ (p. 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’ (p. 14), and witness ‘his ferocious concentration upon Heidegger’ (p. 70) which helps to distract him briefly from his troubles just as Murdoch’s own work may have helped her to fend off the encroaching anxiety that Alzheimer’s caused her – an ‘endless omnipresent anxiety’7 which dominates the strange tone of Jackson’s Dilemma. The dark presence of this troubling philosopher broods over the novel. Reading Murdoch’s Heidegger manuscript offers insight both into her positive appreciation of his work and into her criticism – and ultimate rejection – of his philosophy. This manuscript is what might be described as a ‘public work in embryo’, by which I mean that publication was Murdoch’s original intention. Mirroring her own work on Heidegger, Benet’s reflections in Jackson’s Dilemma offer a parallel insight into a more ambivalent and troubled set of thoughts triggered by musing on the life and work of Heidegger. Benet’s equally embryonic study of Heidegger is still at the stage of a ‘private work’ in which the musings and questionings are present in their rough form in the text and have not as yet been smoothed out for publication. There are points in Murdoch’s typescript where it is possible to see her decide on a passage as belonging to the ‘private’ mind of the writer, and reject it as part of the ‘public’ work she is willing to share with her readers. The thoughts and writings that she gives to her character Benet would seem to indicate the gap between the two, and suggest that Murdoch is not altogether comfortable with this gap. Thus Murdoch begins her study with the categorical statement: ‘The two philosophers in the twentieth century who have most deeply disturbed philosophical thinking are Wittgenstein and Heidegger’ (HPB, p. 2). Benet in Jackson’s Dilemma is less certain, still at the questioning stage: ‘And now – well, Heidegger, the greatest philosopher



Jackson’s Dilemma and ‘The Responsible Life of the Imagination’ 127


of the century?’ (p. 14). The gap between Benet’s queries and Murdoch’s statements is at its widest with regard to the appropriateness of including issues raised by Heidegger’s life in a study of his work, and it is this gap which is identified and explored in this chapter. A brief summary of the account of Heidegger given in Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being shows the tenor of Murdoch’s mature judgement on his work and indicates both why she thought him worth so much time and effort to decipher and also why she ultimately finds his thought morally unacceptable, even dangerous. On the one hand, the value Murdoch accords to metaphysics is at the root of her continuing if perturbed interest in Heidegger over almost half a century; in Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being she quotes Derrida’s description of Heidegger as ‘the last metaphysician’ (p. 112). On the other hand, the basis of Murdoch’s elemental mistrust of his philosophy is her unshakeable and passionate adherence to the absolute value of morality, and indeed to the concept of value itself, an adherence which causes Murdoch to quarrel not only with Heidegger, but also with Nietzsche, Sartre and Derrida, writers whose relativistic and/or deterministic stance she abhors. Murdoch differentiates clearly between early and late Heidegger in all her writing about him. Late Heidegger she categorically rejects, both in her unpublished manuscript and in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: ‘As for Nietzsche and (late) Heidegger, roughly, I regard those great writers as essentially demonic’ (p. 456). She is clear that late Heideggerian thought is determinism, a pernicious concept which has always been inclined to undermine philosophical thinking. It is early Heidegger who attracts her intellect and haunts her imagination. Early Heidegger, in Murdoch’s view, courageously grapples with the deepest and darkest foundations of human being and experience, and she admires Heidegger’s solitary intellectual journey and his passionate respectful love for philosophy. Murdoch frequently expresses her perception of the necessity of metaphysics, which is that the human race needs, and naturally at intervals creates, vast systematic statements about what it is to be human, and that metaphysics is beneficial to the human race and should not be abandoned. She is aware that a significant part of Heidegger’s appeal and charm for her is that he seems to satisfy this perennial yearning for metaphysical system. There is however a caveat in the equivocal word ‘seems’, but before focusing on that, the core material of Murdoch’s criticism of Heidegger needs to be explicated. Central to this are the lacunae with regard to morality, which Murdoch thinks essentially absent for Heidegger, and value, which is magicked away. These Murdoch regards as fatal flaws in Heidegger’s



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thought, and much of her study of his work concerns her efforts to pin them down, and to discover how it is that Heidegger magicks these, to her, central philosophical concepts, out of existence. There are many points where the shift in her apprehension of him from appreciation to disagreement is clearly marked. Thus, following on immediately from the admission of Heidegger’s charm as a metaphysical systematizer comes the reservation that too much is left out. Heidegger’s Being, with which he replaces the omnipresent God understood through love, comes more and more to seem a whimsical and potentially dangerous paranormal force. Thus Murdoch moves rapidly from experiencing charm to sensing danger, and this pattern of ‘Yes . . . but . . .’ prevails in Murdoch’s extensive thinking about Heidegger. His metaphysical genius appears to her to be woefully misused: she laments that although he has a rare gift of being able to pose metaphysical questions, in answering them, he purposely obliterates major aspects of what it is to be fundamentally human. There is even a moment of empathy with those entirely antipathetic to this idiosyncratic philosopher when Murdoch expresses fleeting sympathy with a logical positivist who looked at Heidegger’s work and saw it to be nonsense. This causes her to concede potential danger in reading metaphysics in that it is possible to be uncritically enchanted by a writer’s thinking. Querying whether Heidegger supplies help for the human need for liberated theological thinking, Murdoch’s impression is that what he offers with one hand he destroys with the other. Crucial to the tension between the helpfulness of Heidegger’s questions and the unhelpfulness, indeed, harmfulness, of his answers, are his concepts of Being and Dasein, concepts that change in emphasis, if not indeed in ontological essence from early Heidegger to late Heidegger. Murdoch constantly muses on what exactly Heidegger means by ‘Being’: she finds early Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit concept of Dasein (as fundamentally a being-in-the-world – not a subject trying to reach it from elsewhere) a helpful and fruitful philosophical idea, but she thinks that he subsequently loses any sense of the particularity of the individual in the unique situation, rendering any helpfulness or fruitfulness null and void. Herein lies the nub of Murdoch’s unease with Heidegger. For a moral philosopher like her with a ‘nostalgia for the particular’,8 and for whom attention to the individual was the locus of goodness, the lofty disregard for particulars and individuals evinced by Heidegger is anathema. She finds the status of the individual is blurred in his thinking, and she faults him for ‘a kind of contempt for human existence’ (HPB, p. 10). These ‘fatal flaws’ recur throughout her study of his work, gaining





in force. Although Heidegger writes of salvation by little things, he is unconcerned for little human things, and she finds the particular daily struggles of human life, to which previous great philosophers paid attention, absent from Heidegger’s work.9 Commonplace everyday life is inextricably linked for Murdoch with the centrality of morality as the beating heart of philosophy. Her own credo is clearly articulated in Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being, throughout which she reiterates the vital question, which is whether morality as revealed in ordinary human life and language, the most obvious and ubiquitous concern of human being, is in the metaphysical picture or not. Although she admits that this may seem question-begging question, if it is weakened into a lesser inquiry then a fundamental way of understanding the human situation is lost. It is vitally clear to Murdoch that whilst not all philosophy is moral philosophy, without moral philosophy, all philosophy becomes meaningless. Murdoch becomes increasingly focused on this target throughout her study of Heidegger. Early on she remarks that Heidegger omits the conception of goodness, which Murdoch considers an essential item, fundamental to any metaphysical account of human existence. She develops this later, saying that Heidegger deliberately cuts out any serious consideration of morality from the beginning, a damning indictment which casts his entire worth in doubt, when she goes on to say that it seems to her that the kind of philosophy attempted by Heidegger cannot succeed in its professed enterprise without the element of morality and that without it his enterprise is fatally impaired because it is based on a fundamental error. This is a strong and categorical rejection. Murdoch has further criticisms to make of Heidegger’s eclectic aestheticism; the selective and narrow choice of art-works which he puts forcibly into the service of his theories; also what she regards as his misuse of the pre-Socratic Greeks. But it remains his cavalier dismissal of the ordinary and the good, indeed the good in the ordinariness of life, which condemns him in her eyes: she complains that 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 complexity of human moral activity. It is this ‘ethical muddle’ and complex ‘moral activity’ which her own philosophical writings have (unfashionably but increasingly influentially) championed,10 and which her novels display comically and tragically at work in individual human lives. Small wonder that she should find herself in such profound disharmony with a philosopher like Heidegger. Why, then, despite all her objections, did Heidegger fascinate her so



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deeply and durably? To answer this question we must turn to Heidegger’s life, rather than his work, and to Jackson’s Dilemma. This novel, finished in the last months of Murdoch’s intellectuallyable life has a stripped skeletal quality about it.11 The bare bones of her deepest concerns and obsessions are exposed by the brevity of the story and the lyrical quality of the writing. It is a Shakespearean romance in prose,12 with multiple weddings and feasting forming its closure, but the novel has a darkness woven throughout. This sense of fearful foreboding emanates dually from the progression of Murdoch’s disease, and from her continued attention to the disturbing history of the twentieth century. Heidegger, Hitler and the unresolved relationship between the two preoccupied her to the end. Benet, speculating on Heidegger’s post-war state of mind and on the Holocaust, groans aloud to himself, ‘The darkness, oh the darkness’ (p. 14), and later 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 he goes on to say, ‘but for me it is my darkness, it is my neighbour and my heavy chain’ (p. 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 guilt and evil expresses that of Murdoch herself during her own long wrestling match with this philosopher’s turbulent history. The questions Benet poses are those she is asking in her own study of Heidegger, but put in emotional instead of scholarly tones: ‘And did dear good Célan, they say, visit him in his mountain hut, – and Hannah Arendt forgive him – and he dare to take over great Hölderlin as well as the Greeks?’ (p. 47). There is a notable passage in Murdoch’s manuscript where, having referred to Hannah Arendt’s justification of Heidegger13 and Victor Farias’s condemnation of him,14 Murdoch puts aside historical researches and speculations, and excises a remark concerning the mysterious relationship of Heidegger’s philosophical statements (which are open to judgement) to the condition of his soul (which is not). The excision implies that she considered this material inappropriate for inclusion in a scholarly work on Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus is the ‘private work’ carefully censored and adjusted to become what was initially intended to be a ‘public work’. Yet the mystery continued to haunt her imagination, and it seems plausible that Jackson’s Dilemma became the repository for the painful questions that Heidegger’s life and work posed for her. In her novel she is freed to ask them in the tones of urgency which she felt she had to relinquish in her philosophical writing. This




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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 that 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 life 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? (JD, p. 14) Twenty-five years earlier in The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch had written: ‘Possibly Heidegger is Lucifer in person’ (EM, p. 358). Years of pondering the problem brought it no closer to resolution for her. Benet’s unhappy self-questioning concerning his sense of identification with Heidegger prompts further thoughts on Murdoch’s relationship with her difficult subject; her character’s sense of inadequacy and failure may reflect her own dissatisfaction with her uncompleted work. Benet accuses ‘himself of being fascinated by a certain dangerous aspect of Heidegger which was in fact so deeply buried in his own, Benet’s, soul that he could not scrutinize or even dislodge it’ (p. 13). His resumé of his responses to Heidegger’s writings puts in a nutshell the ambivalence and criticisms which are evident in Murdoch’s manuscript: Of course 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 PreSocratic 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. (p. 13)



passage expresses the crux of the matter for Benet, and, arguably, for Murdoch herself:

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 voices her frustration for her, bemoaning that he is ‘not a scholar’ (p. 209), ‘not a real philosopher’ (p. 93), just a ‘curious romantic pseudohistorian’ (p. 69), and that his work is ‘No good, just no bloody good!’ (p. 201). The self-doubts and anxieties find in him a channel for expression as Murdoch struggled with the last major intellectual effort of her life in tandem with writing this last poignant novel. Each reflects and illuminates the other. Yet Murdoch engaged in more than an intellectual involvement with the great philosophers. She loves Plato and selected others, with an emotional response beyond the merely cerebral. She minds what they think; philosophy matters to her; it is not just an academic game. So her ambivalent reaction towards certain writers is troublesome to her. Benet is able to speak of ‘his love-hate for Heidegger, and for Wittgenstein’ (JD, p. 209), the two philosophers Murdoch characterized as ‘deeply disturbing’ at the beginning of her study. 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?’ (p. 201): similarly, towards the end of her own manuscript on Heidegger Murdoch claims that he was certainly capable of despair. Despair, however, is not remorse, and it is the absolute lack of remorse evinced by Heidegger after the war for anything that he had done, or failed to do, during those years, which has created such a stumbling block for acceptance of his philosophy. As Benet wonders, ‘Remorse? – Was that the very concept which sounded the bell?’ (p. 14). Can a ‘bad’ man produce ‘good’ philosophy? Was Heidegger a ‘bad’ man? The essence of the question which has exercised Murdoch amongst many others has been concisely formulated by Mark Patrick 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?’15 Heidegger exemplifies the problem so fully articulated by George Steiner: the loss of confidence in liberal humanism, and in the very idea of European ‘civilization’, concomitant on the collusion of so many educated and ‘cultured’ people with 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.’16 Murdoch echoes his words when she speaks of ‘our, Hitler and after age’ and thinks of ‘quite ordinary people who worked as guards in concentration camps: evil as a job





to be carried on [. . .] evil as duty’ (MGM, p. 120). Like Steiner she sees ‘our confidence in reason shaken [. . .] by Hitler’ (MGM, p. 360). Neither art nor philosophy can hereafter be practised or apprehended with the same innocence. Both Steiner and Murdoch experience Heidegger as a figure who cannot be bypassed or ignored. Steiner ‘found Heidegger to be massively present and in the path of further thinking’,17 and Murdoch says similarly in her manuscript that having discovered Heidegger, she cannot leave him out of her own reflections. And for both Murdoch and Steiner the Holocaust is critical, a determinant factor in analysing the human capacity for evil, which undermines all intellectual and cultural endeavour. Their responses are based in personal experience. Neither suffered directly, but both feel inextricably linked to the suffering of others, Steiner through his own Jewishness, and Murdoch through her work in refugee camps with UNRRA, and through the loss of two close friends, Frank Thompson, who was tortured and killed during the war, and Franz Steiner, whose family died in concentration camps, and who died young himself, an indirect victim of Hitler as Murdoch saw it. Her novels are filled with Jews, refugees, survivors of camps, individual particular stories and details from the Holocaust. They are also filled with survivor-guilt. Murdoch’s fictional characters often exemplify her perception that, ‘[t]he spectacle of the terrible suffering of others may prompt not only sympathy but a sense of guilt which may be overwhelming. (This was felt by many people in relation to the Holocaust)’ (MGM, pp. 361–2). She says ‘the fate of the Jews under Hitler [. . .] has become a symbol of the capacity and strength of human wickedness’ (MGM, p. 94), and in her late novel The Message to the Planet, which is an extended meditation on the Holocaust, Marcus Vallar calls it ‘an icon of all human suffering’.18 Central to both Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction is how we are to deal with the endless and ubiquitous deliberate human suffering as manifested by the Holocaust. How can we think about it? How can it be forgiven, if indeed it can be forgiven? How can we learn to change ourselves so as to stand up to evil, and so as not to add to it? These are hard questions. Like Steiner, Murdoch knows that ‘We cannot pretend that Belsen is irrelevant to the responsible life of the imagination’, and she shares his conviction that, ‘what man has inflicted on man, in very recent time, has affected the writer’s primary material – the sum and potential of human behaviour – and it presses on the brain with a new darkness’.19 Murdoch’s ‘primary material’, in her philosophy and her fiction alike, concerns urgent questioning of human consciousness and



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The ordinary person does not, unless corrupted by philosophy, believe that he creates value by his choices. He thinks that some things really are better than others and that he is capable of getting it wrong. We are not usually in doubt about the direction in which Good lies. Equally we recognise the real existence of evil: cynicism, cruelty, indifference to suffering. (EM, p. 380) This conviction is voiced in her novels too: ‘Thinking evil is unreal is holding hands with evil under the table’ says Harvey in The Green Knight.20 Murdoch’s acknowledged fear is discovering that good and evil might prove not to be distinct. Her suspicion is that bad philosophy may corrupt, and that in this specific, morally orientated way Heidegger’s philosophy may be a malign influence. Failure to see evil clearly, to think about its nature and to work at averting it is a grave fault in Murdoch’s assessment. Even her beloved mentor Plato is not exempt from criticism in this connection: ‘The Republic, like many other great ethical treatises, is deficient in an account of positive evil’ (EM, p. 457). The essence of Murdoch’s judgement of Heidegger is distilled in her major work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, and it is here that clear indications are given of what precisely it is she mistrusts about his, and others’, philosophy. Primarily, she fears the effect of contempt for the ordinary individual, which she finds in Nietszche, Sartre and Derrida as well as Heidegger, and with which she links Nazism. Thus ‘the heroic aestheticism of Heidegger and Derrida quietly effaces any close view of moral lives as lived by ordinary individuals’ (p. 159) and furthermore, ‘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’ (p. 182). She further fears the determinism to which the eschewing of the concept of absolute value leads: Behind this new ‘revaluation of all values’ by Heidegger and by Derrida, lies the (metaphysical) concept of a vast superhuman area of



conscience. She focuses on the conception of good and evil, and on our ability, or refusal, to distinguish between them, and to make efforts to choose and follow the good. Murdoch is unequivocal about there being an absolute distinction between good and evil:


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’. (p. 190) Behind these various fears, Murdoch traces the philosophies and myths which help to create a relativistic mind-set which allows for 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’ (p. 136). Thinking and writing are not neutral activities, they are potentially dangerous. They can lead to permitting murder and genocide. Heidegger’s theories and myths are not innocent of such malevolent influence. And he showed remorse neither for his personal actions, nor for the effects of his words. For such ‘moral autism’, Murdoch both impugns and pities him. The work of ‘the responsible life of the imagination’ is difficult. Murdoch, like Steiner and many others, struggles with what it is the job of the writer to tell. Should the stories be never-endingly re-told, the terrible memories be kept alive? Should forgetfulness prevail, and maybe bring in its train, forgiveness? These questions recur in her novels, the public offerings of her own imagination. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 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’ (p. 95). Tuan, in Jackson’s Dilemma, experiences this problem: 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. (p. 172) The opposite viewpoint is put by the Rabbi, Daniel Most, in The Message to the Planet:



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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. (pp. 429–30) Whether the damage is just continued by the repetition of stories, or whether this reworking of them by novelists and philosophers as Midrash21 can be healing, it is impossible to say. Despite acknowledging the potential for damage, Murdoch, Steiner and others have been compelled to work at this dark knowledge – endlessly, but responsibly, imagining the individual human lives involved. Iris Murdoch’s Jackson’s Dilemma and her unfinished manuscript for Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being are the last but also two of her most significant contributions to this ongoing work of the human spirit.22

Notes 1. The quotation in the title is from George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 4. 2. Murdoch, EM, p. xxi. While this collection of Murdoch’s essays was being published it became known that Murdoch was suffering from Alzheimer’s and would produce no further writing. Conradi’s introduction speaks of the Heidegger manuscript as ‘her most recent work-in-progress, as yet unfinished’, 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’ (p. xiii). 3. Murdoch, Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being (unpublished manuscript), Conradi Archive, KUAS6, Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, Kingston University, London. Subsequent citations will be by page number in the text. The first 26 pages of Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being are to be published in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher edited by Justin Broackes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): references from this early portion of the manuscript are given in full, but my assessment of Murdoch’s thinking on Heidegger, accurately recorded from the rest of the manuscript, has had to be paraphrased because of copyright limitations on the unpublished portion. 4. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953; London: Penguin, 1989). 5. Conradi Archive, CIMS. 6. Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995) p. 13. 7. John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998), p. 35. 8. This phrase, which is the title of a 1952 essay by Murdoch (EM, pp. 43–58) encapsulates the emphasis in her philosophical position.





9. Murdoch’s list includes Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Locke, Hume, Marx and Mill. 10. See Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory, eds Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 11. See Frances White, Jackson’s Dilemma in the Literary Encyclopaedia Online, www.litencyc.com. 12. See Elizabeth Dipple, ‘Fragments of Iris Murdoch’s Vision: Jackson’s Dilemma as Interlude’, Iris Murdoch News Letter, 9 (Autumn 1995): 4–8. 13. Hannah Arendt, ‘Heidegger at Eighty’, in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 293–303. Murdoch’s copy of this essay in the archive at Kingston University is heavily underlined and annotated. One item of marginalia reads: ‘One hesitates to talk of Hei unless one has spent one’s life studying him!’ (IM965, Kingston University Archive, London). 14. Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987). 15. Mark Patrick Hederman, The Haunted Inkwell: Art and our Future (Dublin: The Columba Press, 2001), p. 25. 16. Steiner, Language and Silence, p. ix. 17. Ibid., p. 15. 18. Murdoch, The Message to the Planet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 416. 19. Steiner, Language and Silence, p. 4. 20. Murdoch, The Green Knight (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 304. 21. A Hebrew word meaning ‘interpretation’ or ‘hermeneutic’. 22. In the effort to gain enough of an appreciation of Heidegger’s philosophy to understand what Murdoch is thinking and writing about, I am indebted not only to George Steiner’s study of Heidegger, but also to the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and ‘Being and Time’, by Stephen Mulhall (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), which proved an invaluable introduction to Heidegger’s thought. Mark Patrick Hederman’s use of Heidegger’s thought, and his discussion of the problems posed by Heidegger’s life, in The Haunted Inkwell, were also most helpful.



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Morality without God: Iris Murdoch’s Secular Theology



Part III




‘The Dream that does not Cease to Haunt us’: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness Anne Rowe

If there is any kind of sense or unity in human life, and the dream of this does not cease to haunt us, it [. . .] must be sought within a human experience which has nothing outside it.1 So will the theologians invent new modes of speech, and will the churches fill with people who realise they do not need to believe in the supernatural?2

Iris Murdoch’s philosophy consistently denies the existence of a personal God, the divinity of Christ and life after death, and is suspicious of Christian dogma and iconography. She assumes ‘that human life has no external point’; ‘we are transient mortal creatures subject to necessity and chance’ and ‘our destiny can be examined but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here’ (EM, p. 365). Murdoch was born, however, into an Irish Protestant family: ‘I could pray as soon as I could speak and I knew that God was present [. . .] I had a feeling of communing with God’ (TCHF, p. 209). This tension between the denial of God and a desire for God underlies her theological expression throughout her life. Her Protestant faith was ‘removed by the image of Karl Marx’ in the 1930s, and she joined the Communist Party (TCHF, p. 210). She identified other complex causes for this loss of faith that were related to science, the breaking up of capitalism and ‘the loss of confidence [. . .] which came after Hitler’ (TCHF, p. 62). Her faith was replaced by a sense that the world could be changed for the better by ‘the application of certain techniques’ (TCHF, p. 210), but later she came to understand this position to be naive and began to work with the idea that 141



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the place of God should be filled by ‘a kind of moral philosophy or even neo-theology, which would explain fundamental things about the human soul and the human being’ (TCHF, p. 21). When Murdoch began to write in the 1950s theologians were aware that after two world wars and the Holocaust, Christian faith would have to be redefined or reinterpreted.3 Murdoch was engaging philosophically at this time with thinkers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein but understood that this specialized philosophical discourse had little resonance for society as a whole. So 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 then and now because she directed her moral philosophy to its end point – her readers. Her novels have much to offer to those who might be struggling to live a good life without the concept of God which denies them the communal support of traditional worship, the impact of Christian iconography and the emotiveness of religious liturgy, and without the moral focus for meditation on good and evil that the Christian faith provides. Two contemporary debates are relevant to this discussion of Murdoch’s neo-theology, one academic and one populist. The specialized philosophical debate relates to a ‘turn to theology’ which has recently emerged out of the ‘turn to ethics’ in literary theory (and which is discussed in the introduction to this volume). But these theoretical and philosophical trends have wider application, because many mainstream contemporary writers, critics and thinkers are also ‘turning to theology’ and seem to understand that the well-being of the world is inextricably tied up with spirituality and religion in ways that demand to be understood. Murdoch knew this all along; ‘Everything I have ever written has been concerned with holiness’, she said.4 A large body of contemporary mainstream theological debate centres on ways in which moral consciousness can be restored in an age without God, contesting science and faith as solutions to the problems of the age. This debate would be more familiar to the majority of Murdoch’s readers because it has generated ‘an explosion of proselytising atheism’5 in which novelists, journalists, philosophers, theologians and scientists are publicly participating.6 Yet no one within these debates offers solutions as detailed and practical as Murdoch. There is very little guidance coming out of the clash of contradictory and sometimes disrespectful polemics that dominate this populist theological debate as it would reach the majority of Murdoch’s readers today.



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In 1993, Murdoch’s heartfelt plea was that ‘the concept of the holy must not be lost [. . .] There is, just as there used (with the old God) to be, a place of wisdom and calm to which we can remove ourselves. We can make our own rites. We can preserve the concept of holiness’ (MGM, pp. 249–50). Her novels are, of course, offered as such places of wisdom, yet while Murdoch criticism has looked exhaustively at how we become ‘good’, there is relatively little about how we become ‘holy’; that is, how we satisfy the desire for God and transform a secular world into a religious one without believing in an existent deity. The desire to be good, which is the desire to act positively, not negatively, on the world, is rather different from the desire for God, which is the desire to find sense and unity in human life, to be forgiven for one’s sins and to find a spiritual home. These are the dreams that do not cease to haunt us, and they are central to Murdoch’s definition of what it means to be human. Her novels attempt to illustrate how such needs can be satisfied without providing a source of ‘magic’ or false consolation, and can constitute a moralizing force within society. The social and psychological contexts for Murdoch’s neo-theology can be discovered in her dark novel of 1966, The Time of the Angels, where the intensity of her meditation on a world without holiness acutely predicts the zeitgeist of the early twenty-first century.7 Politicians and theologians today discuss British society as a moral and spiritual vacuum blighted by self-indulgence in vocabulary that bears strong echoes of Murdoch’s own. The social, sexual and theological liberalism heralded by the 1960s is often cited as one of the causes of this spiritual vacuum because liberal theologians and church leaders all but capitulated to it. Murdoch was herself energized by the freedoms of the 1960s, but she also understood the pivotal nature of the time regarding respect for religious faith. The Time of the Angels was written at the height of that morally pivotal moment in British history and partly in response to its theological liberalism (represented by John Robinson’s Honest to God, published in 1963, which made available in the UK the thought of German liberal theologians). To analyse the moral psychology of its characters is to put contemporary society under the microscope. Two bands of angels are loose in the world: the first comprises the bristling forces of unregulated self-gratification embodied in the Nietzschean priest of no god, Carel Fisher, the rector with no church, no liturgy, and no belief, who removes himself from society and practises sexual exploitation, including incest. Carel is the ultimate product of the despair of the age, the Kantian mangod, who is ‘offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which



‘The Dream that does not Cease to Haunt us’


his discoveries reveal [. . .] the man whose proper name is Lucifer’ (EM, pp. 365–6). The second band of angels comprises the energy forces of sentimentalized attachments to old conceptions of God the Father who will comfort us, guide us and save our souls. A beautifully embellished gold and magenta Russian icon is the symbol of this desire and belongs to the émigré, Eugene Peshkov. It depicts the trinity as angels, their heads canopied with haloes, bent in contemplation. Eugene’s attachment to the icon induces in him a mesmeric solipsism that perpetuates the tendency to weave paralysing consolatory dreams; his son, the delinquent Leo, sees this sentimentality merely as a means of exploitation and there is no moral authority in this world strong enough to prevent him from taking advantage of it. The abused black maid, Pattie, representing the alienated victimized outsider sees solicitude on the faces of the angels, mirroring that which she desperately covets. But she is disempowered while waiting for something to provide it. Muriel, who sees the icon on Carel’s desk when she confronts her father after finding him in bed with his other daughter, is compelled to use the icon as protection against his evil: ‘with an instinctive movement she [. . .] hugged it to her breast’ (pp. 197–8).8 Even the most self-reliant covet the protection and consolation of faith. Collectively, these psychological forces form a dangerous metaphysical space; a real peril lies in the way that individual desires define moral parameters, the solipsism of the lapsed believer, the dangers of exploitative immoral youth, the desire for a redeemer, and most of all, the possibility that some new, more sinister kind of ‘magic’ could slouch in to fill this moral and spiritual vacuum. Neither the theological nor philosophical positions the book puts forward are powerful enough to combat these dangers. The Anglican bishop, who voices John Robinson’s liberal views, has no plan as to how the demythologization of faith that he advocates could function in society and is impotent as an antidote to Carel’s nihilism. He settles for afternoon tea and scraping stilton cheese from his ring with a delicate fingernail. The limitations of philosophy, and in particular the position Murdoch was then constructing, are laid bare as she contests Carel’s position and that of his brother Marcus’s Platonism. Marcus is engaged in writing a philosophical treatise which echoes The Sovereignty of Good and wants to ‘rescue the idea of an Absolute in morals by showing it to be implied in the unavoidable human activity of moral evaluation at its most unsophisticated level’ (pp. 77–8). Marcus’s position is given some credibility through the emotive picture of Muriel carrying her sister, Elizabeth, in her arms in an image which forms a secular pieta, suggesting that Muriel’s dedicating her life to her damaged sister comes out of just



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such instinctive goodness that Marcus suggests might save the world. Readers can take comfort from this vision, but Marcus’s philosophy is falsely optimistic in the face of Carel’s danger and the inability of the other characters to counter it. Murdoch understood the need for supporting devices and, despite her atheism, thought there were still possibilities for religious thought. She did not, like more radical theologians, want to construct so revolutionary a modern neo-theology that it could not accommodate Christianity (and aspects of other faiths) or one that the Church itself would not be able to house; Christianity and a secular neo-theology had to walk hand in hand. In interviews she suggests that Christianity could accommodate atheism and initiate ways in which a religious dimension to life could be sustained without subscribing to beliefs that many find impossible. She envisioned non-believers participating in religious ceremony and herself visited churches (as do many of her characters), attending services without taking communion. Christian liturgy, she suggests, could work literally for those who believe, and metaphorically for those who do not: ‘A sophisticated believer knows that these images represent something real in his life and that they are a refuge from evil’ (TCHF, p. 215). Such a practice enables her to marry her Platonism with Christianity because ‘these words’ (and here she is talking about Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer) ‘are about [. . .] the way in which we pass beyond egoism toward a more open recognition of the reality of other people’. She thinks that non-belief need not touch the ‘sacredness and numinousness and the truth-bearing properties of Christian mythology’ (TCHF, p. 215). There is, of course, something troublingly paradoxical in that she wants others to believe in God without believing herself. But the position she advocates is not one of superiority but humility; one that attempts to enable religious practices, which are often mutually exclusive, to coexist in mutual respect. The final chapters of A Word Child (1975) might illustrate such ‘religious osmosis’ in practice. The (atheistic) damaged and morally culpable narrator, Hilary Burde, who has been responsible for the death of two women and has now learnt of the suicide of his friend, Clifford Larr, is drawn (as he has been often before for different reasons) to St Stephen’s Church near Gloucester Road where he begins to understand his culpability in these deaths (‘I saw where I had behaved badly, the selfishness, the destructiveness, the rapacity’).9 Another church features the following day to bless the wedding of Hilary’s beloved sister, Crystal, whom he finally releases from the emotional blackmail with which he has been imprisoning her, and the novel closes with Hilary opening himself to





the healing love of his long-suffering girlfriend, Tommy Uhlmeister. They stand together on the corner of Kensington Church Street with Christmas snow falling and ‘the bells of St Mary Abbots [. . .] ringing Christmas in with wild cascades of joy [and] other churches nearby [taking] up the chime’ (p. 391). Even the most culpable soul, this imagery suggests, can be morally improved and achieve a greater degree of freedom by closeness to God; even without belief and without any effort of choice or of will on their part. Blessing can be bestowed subliminally, by accidental osmosis, as it were, and this involuntarily moral aspect of her neo-theology is, in this sense, allied to her quarrel with existentialism. We can decide not to participate in religion, but still receive its moral blessing. Murdoch’s neo-theology evolved to encompass Buddhism, and she began to term herself a ‘Christian Buddhist’, identifying Christ as the Buddha of the West, an image of spirituality, a teacher and centre of spiritual power. What it lends to her neo-theology is its lack of dogmatism; its demand for the destruction of the ego, and the fact that it is not an ‘other-worldly’ religion (TCHF, p. 49). Murdoch particularly likes Buddhism’s focus on change of consciousness and its moral impact on the community.10 From Christianity she took as a model the figure of Christ, and her band of secular Christ figures are a source of meditation on what a Christ of our time would be like in terms of goodness rather than divinity.11 A number of critics have explored the psychology of these characters and their attempts at selflessness, humility, powerlessness and non-intervention. But I would argue that Murdoch is as ambivalent about these secular Christ figures as she is about Christ himself and intends her readers to be ambivalent as well; selflessness can turn into masochism; self-denial can breed dangerous repressions; renunciation can be just another way of wielding power. Consequently, there are many images of Christ as soldier to meditate on in terms of moral goodness; soldier saints abound in the novels too – usually in paintings, sculptures, or stained-glass windows as in Jackson’s Dilemma. These images offer a model of goodness that is more assertive and decisive than either conventional images of Christ or what has become to be perceived as the Murdochian ‘Good Man’. The image of a soldier or a warrior saint (in the Laxlinden Tapestry in Henry and Cato, Rembrandt’s Polish Rider in The Green Knight, for example) is linked to specific characters to reveal a band of secular warriors (who are, interestingly, mostly ‘down to earth’ women, such as Norah Shadox-Brown in The Time of The Angels, Mildred Finch in An Unofficial Rose and Sefton Anderson, ‘the soldier’ in The Green Knight); they march through her novels, instinctively interfering



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more in the lives of others and less self-consciously attempting goodness than her more famous male moral pilgrims. These secular soldiers suggest some ambivalence about the negation of self and stoic endurance that Murdoch champions in her moral philosophy, and not only equivocate how the good man is perceived, but also how we can think of Christ himself – as more soldier and less saint. Either way, none of the secular Christs or the soldier saints are unequivocally good; it is the process of meditation on goodness itself, for which art becomes the vehicle, which is perhaps the most important part of Murdoch’s neo-theology. Through such comparative processes, including that between Christ figures and her demonic enchanters, readers come close to John Ducane’s moral perception in The Nice and the Good that ‘nothing matters except loving what is good [. . .] in the light of the good the evil can be seen in its place, not owned, just existing in its place’.12 Such understanding leads to a very Christian non-judgmental tolerance and understanding: ‘I will be no man’s judge [. . . .] nothing is worth doing except to love [. . . .] to love and to reconcile and forgive only this matters’ (p. 336). Murdoch’s moral psychology, which demands a working towards ‘unselfing’ – the learning to focus with deep meditative attention on the other that counteracts the voracious falsifying ego, needs no more elaboration here other than to emphasize its lack of liturgy, of any communal centre and ritual – which leaves the moral pilgrim physically isolated. Her novels are sacred in that they are places for such meditation on good and evil, but this purely psychological space lacks the ambience of holy buildings to which human beings are instinctively drawn; the loss of Christianity meant the loss of places of meditation. Her novels invite readers to consider alternative spaces that can perform the function of lost Christian rites for her characters. She suggests that ‘on the road between illusion and reality [. . .] there are many [. . .] wayside shrines and sacraments, and places of meditation and refreshment. The pilgrim just has to look about him with a lively eye’ (MGM, p. 496). Many of her nonbelieving characters use museums and art galleries as Murdoch herself did, as sources of spiritual nourishment. Murdoch proposes alternative secular icons that can act on human consciousness very differently to traditional Christian iconography, which, with its meditation on suffering as a route to salvation, she thinks invites sadomasochism. Paintings in accessible London galleries – by Titian, Gainsborough, Tintoretto, Giorgione and Rembrandt – provide revelatory experiences for her characters. The most effective is that of Dora Greenfield in The Bell, who sees Gainsborough’s portrait of his two small daughters, The Painter’s





Daughters Chasing a Butterfly at the National Gallery in London.13 Dora’s emotional encounter with the painting is a secular equivalent to the kind of religious revelation that many experience in church and gives Dora moral direction. Her deeply emotional response to the shining innocent faces of two little girls holding hands in the midst of a dark wood, induces a surge of love for something other than herself. She becomes free, experiencing a ‘sudden desire to go down on her knees before [the painting] embracing it, shedding tears’, and understands that ‘since somewhere, something good existed, it might be that her problems would be solved after all’ (p. 191). Murdoch invites her readers to find their own personal icons in their day-to-day lives. ‘I believe in salvation by art’, Murdoch said.14 The great painter or writer, focusing on the image being created is emptied of self, sees truth and reveals it in art. The reader or observer momentarily shares in this clarity of perception and receives truth by proxy. These symbols work on readers because Murdoch’s picture of human consciousness is one where ‘at the borderlines of thought and language we can often “see” what we cannot say’ (MGM, p. 283), and good art exhibits ‘the mystery of the synthesis of [these] different levels of cognition and how completely integrated they are’ (MGM, p. 321). Such a drawing in of the world outside the text is ideological in that it is crucial to Murdoch’s realism and to her contesting of Derrida’s removal of the referential qualities from language. But it has practical application too. Her novels alert readers to ways in which the physical world itself can be a lever from which we can move to contemplation of the transcendent and to experiencing spirituality. If her novels work on her readers’ consciousness as she would wish, they induce a moment of recognition when they ‘infinitely extend [their] capacity to imagine the being of others’ (EM, p. 216), and this conflict of dissimilar beings is in itself in a moment of ‘tragic sublime’ which is a moral and religious force (and a literary echo of what happens to Dora in front of the Gainsborough painting). The surface of the novels too – their language itself – participates in creating a moment of sublime generated by art. The uplifting, lyrical rhythmic meditations that punctuate her novels at moments of emotional intensity are Murdoch’s attempts at inducing empathy by giving language biblical resonance, so that the novel satisfies the need for ritual while inducing love, and thus morality. In The Nice and the Good, Willy Kost delivers some sound moral advice to the jealously suffering Jessica Bird, advising her to let her love for Ducane go: ‘you will win from the world of the spirit a grace which you cannot now even dream of. There are principalities and powers, there is unknown good which flies



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magnetically to the good we know’ (p. 192). These ‘principalities and powers’, are found in the fabric of literature, and directly combat the ‘principalities and powers’ which Carel identifies as the dark angels of no God. Too narrowly a philosophical analysis of Murdoch’s work fails to account for its emotive appeal to readers unaware of its philosophical content, and who are drawn by its aesthetic appeal. Readers arrive at meaning not only through intellectual engagement but through an invasion of the senses. Murdoch’s is a neo-theology of feeling, reflecting her understanding that all human experience originates in the body: ‘we think with our body, with its yearnings and its shrinkings and its ghostly walkings’, says the narrative voice in The Nice and The Good (p. 334). Physical experience is the first stage in a continuum that leads to spiritual experience. As much as Murdoch’s philosophy is grounded in atheism, her novels acknowledge the spiritual aspect of human consciousness and the mystery of our being. At the heart of her secular iconography is Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas which replaces the image of Christ on the cross as a meditation on the presence of the divine in the human condition. Murdoch explains how the image of the flaying of Marsyas had significance in the Renaissance as an image of the death of the self – ‘the God flays you, that you lose your egoism in this sort of agony, which is also ecstasy [. . .] It is to do with the entry of the spiritual into the human situation and the closeness of the gods’.15 The joy on the face of Marsyas, then, is an image of the transcendent Good, that moment of sublime unselfing which can come from the cracking of the ego generated by extreme suffering, intense love, the confronting of one’s own mortality, or the experience of great art. Murdoch experienced such a ‘revelation’ herself when she first physically encountered Titian’s painting: ‘I was completely stunned [. . .] it’s the greatest experience of that kind I’ve ever had.’16 Titian’s painting thus becomes a central ‘religious icon’ in her work. The painting is linked imagistically to Bradley Pearson, the protagonist of Murdoch’s most consciously self-revelatory novel, The Black Prince (1973).17 Bradley undergoes his own visitation by the gods after several cataclysmic experiences which induce the death of the ego that Murdoch identifies on the face of Marsyas. Murdoch delicately evokes links between Bradley’s experience and Marsyas’s flaying: ‘I was condemned to death by pure sound’, he says, when profoundly moved by Der Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden: ‘I was to be killed by the whistling of birds and buried in a pit of velvet. I was to be gilded and then flayed’ (p. 258). He has fallen in love with his twenty-year-old god-daughter





and has experienced, probably for the first time, intense sexual gratification which, when it ‘is also love, connects us with the whole world and becomes a new mode of experience [revealing] itself as the great connective principle whereby we overcome duality’ (p. 211). Subsequently, he grieves appallingly when she deserts him, but attempts to hold his pain within himself: ‘I passed my time so far as I could in pure, burning pain’ (p. 351). Finally, in prison for a murder he did not commit, he confronts his own mortality when diagnosed with terminal cancer. The spiritual enters the human situation and Bradley, like Marsyas, glimpses the transcendent as it briefly touches human life: ‘A divine power held me in its talons’, he says (p. 390). However, Bradley says that he ‘knew the black Eros which had felled me was consubstantial with another and more secret god’ (pp. 235–6), and Murdoch constructs this, the most intensely religious experience in her novels, as not only mysterious but also hugely ambiguous (a number of critics perceive Bradley as merely deluded, perhaps insane); all we know is that Bradley saw himself ‘a new man altered out of recognition [and] saw beyond and beyond’ (p. 389). Whatever truth Bradley, and by implication Murdoch, seeks to tell here, she understands it cannot be fully known or articulated. But as writers, both author and character understand the responsibility of art to point the reader toward this wordless, mystical realm. ‘Art is a vain and hollow show; a toy of gross illusion, unless it moves ever whither it points’ (p. 379), Bradley says, and Murdoch holds faith here with the real existence of transcendence to which language can only vaguely allude. With Wittgenstein’s suggestion that ‘what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ she would only partly agree.18 When questioned by Peter Conradi about what happens to Bradley, Murdoch says that ‘[he] is to be seen as a minor artist whom the god rewards and comforts for his patient zeal and longing’.19 But who is the god that rewards? He appears in the text as Loxias, or Apollo, who edits and publishes Bradley’s novel. Murdoch has identified Apollo as the Black Prince of the title, so we inevitably seek his symbolic significance. Most obviously he is a symbol of the transcendent Good, but there are other possibilities. ‘Surely in many cases something good can be retained or learnt from the experience of emptiness and non-being? Should it not be taken as a spiritual icon, a subject of meditation?’ she suggests (MGM, p. 501). Bradley’s violent sexual consummation with Julian and the two deaths for which it is partly responsible suggests that the artist must confront her own capacity



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for evil before she can produce great art; so Apollo, who is a rapist and murderer, also symbolizes this necessary self-knowledge. The Black Prince is thus the Devil himself.20 But Murdoch’s paradoxical vision demands that any symbol necessarily stands too for its opposite; her moral requirement is that one fully inhabits the contrary position to one’s own because any monocular vision generates fanaticism. So the Black Prince is also the point where we fully confront the possibility of God, which generates goodness, love and divine inspiration.21 (As Rob Hardy suggests in this volume, she allows subscription to myths with which she strongly disagrees if they are the myths that heal us.22 ) In this sense, fully confronting and allowing a theological position with which she disagrees becomes a philosophical necessity without compromising her atheism. Or else God is the dream that does not cease to haunt her too? Don Cupitt recently conjectured as to whether understanding the human world as all there is was enough for Murdoch, and suspects it was not. ‘Was she then trying to have it both ways? Yes I think so.’23 Either way, only then can we pass beyond to the point where images of God dissolve and we confront the transcendent. Coming close to the truth in Murdoch’s novels involves an inner journey whose destination is the change in consciousness brought about through the meditation on various possibilities that must be inhabited before they are denied. And at this moment of paradox and mystification the text itself induces a comparable moment of tragic sublime in readers as they participate in Bradley’s experience by proxy and struggle to grasp that which cannot be known.24 Bradley’s experience is Murdoch’s attempt to express spirituality in her art by going beyond the image of a personal God. In interviews she often suggests that one could pass beyond this image, and that this is something which Christian mysticism has always been hinting at, ‘the notion that you go beyond the image of God towards Godhead or divinity, and is expressed in mystics like Eckhart, where the notion of the personal God dissolves at a certain point’ (TCHF, p. 212). When Murdoch was writing the term ‘God’ was still predominantly associated with theism, but in The Black Prince she seems to envisage a time when it might not be, and it is in this sense that when she speaks of God, she intends us to understand the conception. She says, ‘we must stop thinking of God as the name of a super-person, and indeed as a name at all. 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 western concept of a personal God’ (MGM, pp. 431–2). In Nuns and Soldiers (1980) the dying Guy Openshaw tells the former nun, Anne Cavidge, ‘maybe you should have hung on, Christian theology is changing so fast these days. The relieving troops would have arrived’; and perhaps they are, from a different direction.25 Nicholas Lash – among other theologians – echoes Murdoch’s thinking in his resistance to the imposition of an individual agenda on the world and speaks of an open and listening attentiveness to the other as an openness to God.26 In this sense the word God is becoming understood less in terms of theism and more in terms of what Lash calls ‘the holy mystery that we may mention but never fix within the categories of our understanding, the mystery of all things’.27 Thus echoes of Murdoch’s neo-theology are at the heart of contemporary theological debate as thinkers such as Lash bring to the fore the ways in which the term ‘God’ should not be used and employ it more widely, speaking of Christianity and other religious traditions as schools of spirituality, as did Murdoch herself. Thus religious inclusiveness and tolerance are crucial to Murdoch’s neo-theology, and although she only explores cross-fertilization between secularism, Christianity and Buddhism, a natural extension would be to include other faiths. This may appear an idealized, perhaps naive, position, but it demonstrates a sharp premonition of how religious divisiveness would deepen. The issue of conversion, in fact, is currently being discussed by the General Synod of the Church of England where there are divisions between those who think that in a changing demography the church should convert members of other faiths to Christianity. Discussions seem to be in terms of a conflict – about what resources are available for an ideological battle against Islam. Such talk would be anathema to Murdoch because it destroys the possibility of the subliminal moral interaction and the spiritual communion between faiths that she envisages. However, for there to be any discussion at all on this issue is a mark of how in the last fifty years the issues have changed for some contemporary theologians, though perhaps not for others who are still locked in the absolute assurance that Christianity is the one truth. Murdoch was afraid that the failure to find new vocabularies in which to discuss God and faith, and through which theological debate could be broadened, would mean the annihilation of thinking about God altogether, or an increasing antagonism towards conventional belief. She would be disturbed indeed by a recent poll (in 2008) by the Rowntree Foundation which reveals that religion has not



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only continued to decline but is now perceived by some as the greatest social evil of the new century, or even as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development.28 Such a demonization of faith would terrify Murdoch. All Murdoch’s thoughts on theology are accompanied by humility and expressed with caution. In Nuns and Soldiers, Anne Cavidge has a dream that changes into a veridical vision and finds Christ in her kitchen. To her question as to whether there is salvation he replies, ‘Oh, yes’ but ‘you must do it all yourself you know. I am not a magician, I never was. You know what to do. Do right, refrain from wrong’ (pp. 69–70). Like Anne’s mythical Christ, Murdoch is deeply uncomfortable about offering herself as any kind of sage. The paradox of religion that is never resolved in her life or her art is that any religion (including her own neo-theology) is partly magical, but that magic is the enemy of religion. Her penultimate novel, The Green Knight (1994) is much concerned with the nature and function of role models and is one of her most religious in the sense that it is a meditation on how human beings should justly respond to evil, bringing in Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism. Here, it appears that she has lost any attempt at a governing vision, there is no incontestable argument for the sovereignty of any position and her compassion assuages any sense of evil. Some critics have hinted that her Alzheimer’s was already in evidence, but I think not, or at least not so significantly as to eradicate rational control of her material. Such 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. The Green Knight is an exercise in iconoclasm and here Murdoch provides a moving, self-deprecating deconstructing of herself, her moral philosophy and her neo-theology, as any ideal model. For her, idols are too easily drawn into subjective perceptions of truth, too easily manipulated to serve individual fantasies: ‘men will love a monster if he has bella figura’ observes Lucas Graffe, the evil enchanter of the novel who is compulsively adored by almost every other character (p. 273). The Catholic priest, Father Damien, warns the spiritual seeker, Bellamy James, that, indeed, he should not seek God outside his own soul, ‘not in any manmade, man-like idol’ and the sheer complexity of Murdoch’s novels resists any attempts at deifying her position. She often cloaks the greatest truth she has to tell in irony. The will, or complete self-reliance, is both parodied and meant to be taken very seriously in The Green Knight when Father Damien directs Bellamy, and indeed Murdoch’s readers, to the Purgatorio, where Virgil bids farewell to Dante by saying, ‘Do not




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Notes 1. EM, p. 294. 2. MGM, p. 487. 3. Don Cupitt suggests that ‘the work of creating a fully modern theology [had been] left undone’. The Long Legged Fly (London, SCM Press, 1987), p. 3. John Robinson was drawing on the thinking coming out of post-war Germany at this time, but his Honest to God (Canterbury: SCM Press) was not published until 1963. 4. Murdoch in conversation with Conradi, quoted in Peter J. Conradi, ‘Questioning Krishnamurti’, Iris Murdoch News Letter, 10 (1996), p. 12. 5. John Gray ‘The Atheist Delusion’, Guardian Review, 15 March 2008: 4. 6. Two rival armies have formed: the atheists headed by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins and A.C. Grayling, and the believers with Alistair McGrath, Charles Taylor and John Gray as foot soldiers, to name only a few. 7. Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (1966; Chatto and Windus, 1979). 8. For a much more detailed discussion of the function of paintings in Murdoch’s novels see Anne Rowe, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: The Mellen Press, 2002). 9. Murdoch, A Word Child (1975; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 381. 10. Tammy Grimshaw explores Murdoch’s Buddhism in Chapter 12 below. 11. See Suguna Ramanathan, Figures of Good (London: Macmillan, 1990). Pamela Osborn, in Chapter 11 below, discusses precisely this subject. 12. Murdoch, The Nice and The Good (1968; London: Triad Panther, 1977), p. 346. 13. Murdoch, The Bell (1958; Harmondsworth Penguin, 1986). 14. Murdoch, in William C. Carter, ‘Murdoch Appears in Proust Film’, Iris Murdoch News Letter, 7 (1993), p. 2. 15. Murdoch, interview with Eric Robson. Revelations, Border Television, broadcast on Channel 4, 22 April 1984. 16. Ibid. 17. Murdoch, The Black Prince (1973; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). 18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7, http://www.voidspace. org.uk/ (accessed 15 September 2009). 19. Murdoch in conversation with Peter Conradi, SA, p. 188. 20. See also Conradi, SA, p. 208. 21. William Schweiker rejects this possibility in his essay, ‘The Moral Fate of Fictive Persons: Iris Murdoch’s Humanism’ which concludes this volume. 22. See Rob Hardy’s essay ‘Stories, Rituals and Healers in Iris Murdoch’s Novels’, Chapter 3 above. 23. Comment made by Cupitt at his plenary lecture, ‘Iris Murdoch: A Case of Star-Friendship’, at the fourth International Conference on Iris Murdoch at Kingston University (12–13 September 2008). 24. At this point literary criticism must hand over to philosophy, and William Schweiker’s closing essay in this volume further explores the relationship



expect any word or sign from me. Your will is free, upright and sound, it would be wrong not to be ruled by its good sense, and so, master of yourself, I crown you and I mitre you’ (p. 269).

25. 26.

27.

28.

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between fictional characters and the tragic sublime to suggest that it ‘opens new fundamental religious questions in ways that theological reflection can engage’. Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. x. I would emphasize that this only refers to some contemporary Christian theology. The Christian tradition comprises not only many different traditions of belief but also radically different conceptions of belief. I am greatly indebted to John Ibbett for his general comments and his more specific help with this section of my chapter. Nicholas Lash, ‘Observation, Revelation and the Posterity of Noah’, in The Beginning of the End of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 53. It may be of interest to note that Nicholas Lash succeeded Donald McKinnon in the Norris-Hulse Chair of Theology at Cambridge. See ‘The Social Evils Debate’ at www.socialevils.org.uk/2008/04/09/decineof-values (accessed 14 September 2009).




‘A Story about a Man’: The Demythologized Christ in the Novels of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White Pamela Osborn

Iris Murdoch met the Nobel prize-winning Australian novelist and playwright, Patrick White, briefly at his home in Sydney in 1967. The reason for the arranged meeting is unknown but the two novelists were contemporaries: White had written his first novel in 1939 but was in his prime, like Murdoch, from the 1950s onwards, and their novels span the same decades, with White ceasing to write in 1987 and Murdoch in 1995. White records their meeting in a letter to a friend, referring to his pleasure at the short time they had spent together and his regret that ‘[Murdoch and husband John Bayley] are on this mad tear through Australia so that we can’t see more of them.’ He concluded that he liked Murdoch and that he felt they were ‘on the same wavelength’.1 Murdoch seems to have kept no record of this meeting but shows an awareness of White as a contemporary in her essay, ‘Existentialists and Mystics’, published three years later. In this essay she refers to White as one of a number of ‘mystical’ authors (amongst them, we may assume, herself) who, she writes, ‘attempt to express a religious consciousness without the trappings of religion’ (EM, p. 225). The ‘religious’ consciousnesses displayed by Murdoch and White are similarly concerned with retaining a focus on morality and a common moral framework in the context of a Western world increasingly unable to take moral guidance from religion. Murdoch saw morality as ‘fundamental to human life’ (TCHF, p. 133), and often confessed that she was most afraid of finding out that ‘the attempt to be good may turn out to be meaningless, or at best something vague and not very important’ (SG, p. 75). Murdoch’s final work of philosophy, Metaphysics as a 156



11

Guide to Morals, insists that ‘a theology [. . .] without God’ (MGM, p. 60) is possible, indeed vital, if morality and moral thinking are to continue. Likewise, White thought that the loss of a common moral framework provided by religion was ‘the prime disaster which has overtaken most of the world in the latter part of the twentieth century’.2 Often scathing about the lack of moral values inherent in the United Kingdom, the United States and his home country of Australia, White spoke publicly of the duty of the author ‘as the world becomes more pagan [. . .] to lead people in the same direction in a different way’ (PWS, p. 19). As an antidote to immorality, White extols the virtues of distancing oneself from the ‘great monster self’,3 and achieving a condition he describes as ‘wholeness’ and which, upon examination is actually very close to Murdoch’s concept of goodness in that it involves achieving a ‘state of simplicity and humility’ (PWS, p. 16). Many of their peers, particularly those of an existentialist persuasion, could not, and did not want to visualize moral behaviour or good people in their novels, but the novels of Murdoch and White rely upon representations of good people functioning within the world as examples of virtue. In a further divergence from those who rejected Christianity entirely, Christ appears to be the model for many, if not all, of these characters. Christ, who is alluded to, represented and discussed in a variety of ways in all of Murdoch and White’s novels, is indispensable as the epitome of ‘the good man’ despite his fundamental association with a religion they both opposed in theory. Where Christ holds value for Murdoch and White is through his status as an ordinary human being attempting to behave morally, and he can only be useful in this way if he is stripped of his divinity and made entirely human. Murdoch and White both often struggle to separate the human Christ from the mythical one; Murdoch perhaps is too close to the religion of her childhood to effectively separate the two, and White is arguably over-dependent on Christian imagery of Christ in his later work. This struggle conveys the difficulty of the task they individually set themselves, but the attempt to emancipate Christ from Christianity is continuous, with, in each case, allusions to Christ increasing in their later novels. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation states that Christ was human and ‘worked with human hands [. . .] thought with a human mind [. . .] acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved’.4 The same doctrine also confusingly suggests that Christ ‘became truly man while remaining truly God’,5 and it is this contradiction that Murdoch opposes when she states that ‘the story of Christ’s life is perhaps partly true. It is a story about a man’ (TCHF, p. 217). White makes a



The Demythologized Christ in Iris Murdoch and Patrick White 157


strikingly similar statement in his novel Riders in the Chariot (1961), when he asserts that the character, Alf Dubbo, is unable to consider Christ ‘except as an ambitious abstraction, or realistically, as a man’.6 In order to retain relevance as an image of human virtue, Christ, for Murdoch, cannot also be God, and for White, Christ cannot be pictured as God. In her unpublished study of Heidegger (which is located in Kingston University’s Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies), Murdoch comments ‘Christ the man, as we know and love him, is the enlivening image of perfect goodness.’7 This fervent assertion of Christ’s continuing relevance as an example of goodness refers only to the demythologized Christ that Murdoch believes to be emerging from the ‘changing scene’ (MGM, p. 11) of religious belief. Certainly, Christ is central to Murdoch’s attempts to emancipate elements of traditional religion from what she often refers to as the ‘superstition’ or magic that envelops much of Christianity and is its ‘greatest enemy’ (TCHF, p. 100). Murdoch found she had retained a belief in a demythologized Christ long after she had rejected the religion of her upbringing. In an interview with Jean-Louis Chevalier she outlines her changing belief, emphasizing the influence she believes that Buddhism can have upon transforming the image of Christ: I don’t feel that religion departed from my life when God the Father departed. When God the Father went it was the end of religion for me, but I have learnt better. I feel now that I don’t have to have this image or to believe in a personal God in order to have religion – after all Buddhists don’t believe in a personal figure like this. Buddha is the image of spirituality, a teacher, and a centre of spiritual power, and I would want to regard Christ in this sort of light, the Buddha of the West. (TCHF, p. 76) Murdoch’s insistence upon a godless theology could be said to rest entirely upon our ability to apply what she referred to as the ‘demythologising’ (IMAL, p. 525) ideology of Buddhism to Christianity, which would involve ‘retaining the mystical figure of Christ occupying a place analogous to that of Buddha: a Christ who can console and save, but who is to be found as a living force within each human soul and not in some supernatural elsewhere’ (MGM, p. 419). It is worthy of note that White’s last recorded public speech, ‘Credo’, written shortly before his death and expressing an increasing



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appreciation of Buddhist ideals, also mutually embraces Christ and Buddha as ‘comprehensible manifestations’ (PWS, p. 197) of goodness. For most of his career, White had claimed to have a ‘religious faith’ and to believe in a version of God, but he also maintained, ‘I belong to no church’ (PWS, p. 19). At the end of his life he concluded that he no longer believed in ‘God’ (PWS, p. 197) in the same way, but retained faith in Christ and Buddha as representatives of human morality. Like Murdoch, White embraced Buddhism later in his life and found that many of the ideas he had wanted to express in his novels were encapsulated in Buddhism. Buddhist teaching focuses exclusively on the immediate world, with no concept of divinity, and Murdoch and White’s Christ occupies the same ground. Both authors focus on what Christ can offer humanity in terms of everyday morality, with no regard for a higher plane or eternal life. As the most recognizable images of Christ are concerned with his status as a divine being, Murdoch and White both endeavour to overcome the imagery of Christ suffering upon the cross and his miraculous return from the dead. Murdoch allows Christ himself, in the novel in which he appears as a character, to explain that his suffering is not the point, ‘though it has proved so interesting to you all!’8 Images of Christ on the cross prove dangerous objects of contemplation for her characters, and those who are more enlightened, such as Father Bernard Jacoby in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), prefer depictions of Christ as a soldier or teacher, ‘a mystical figure [. . .] not the tormented crucified one’.9 White also criticizes the tendency to focus on Christ’s crucifixion by staging absurd yet violent recreations of it, such as Himmelfarb’s ‘crucifixion’ in Riders in the Chariot. The simultaneously farcical and horrific nature of what starts as anti-Semitic bullying, finally allows Alf Dubbo to see ‘colour’ flow ‘through the veins of the cold, childhood Christ’ (p. 412), that had always been too ‘pale’ (p. 343) and removed from his reality for him to envisage as having any personal relevance. That Himmelfarb’s death as a direct result of the ‘crucifixion’ leaves the perpetrators of this torture so shaken also reveals how far removed their image of Christ’s crucifixion is from the reality of the act. For Murdoch and White the crucifixion is useful only as an image of death, a reminder of mortality; it is not an offer of hope for a continuation of life. A mortal Christ is far more effective as a picture of morality since he behaves morally with no hope of reward. As non-Christian novelists writing in secular times Murdoch and White both needed to find a way of presenting their mystical notions of Christ in ordinary and domestic settings. To this end, they both





employ ‘Christ-figures’, characters who embody an element of Christ, allowing the idea of Christ-like goodness to infiltrate the novel free of the ‘trappings’ of Christianity. The priest, Brendan Craddock, in Murdoch’s novel Henry and Cato (1976), advises Cato that ‘anyone can stand in for Christ’,10 and Murdoch’s Christ-figures are all ordinary people who combine a Christ-like humility and goodness with elements of the almost Buddhist Christ that she envisioned. They are almost always marginal characters and are often unnoticed by other characters and easily overlooked by the reader so that attention is required in order to identify them through allusions to Christ. Anthea Barlow, ‘a sort of Buddhist’,11 is a fringe character in The Time of the Angels (1966), and one who is strongly associated with Christ. As Carel Fisher, the sinister, damaged and nihilistic priest around whom the other characters assemble, descends into insanity, the mysterious yet ordinary Anthea repeatedly tries to gain access to him. The motif of Anthea knocking at the rectory door, and being turned away is an image which is evocative of Christ’s voice in Revelation 3:20: ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door I will come in to him and eat with him and he with me.’ Anthea is ironically referred to by Carel’s daughter Muriel in semi-religious terms as ‘a daily visitation’ (p. 38), and by his servant and lover Pattie as ‘an enemy’ (p. 3), but Anthea has the potential to become a spiritual catalyst if attended to. Always seen in the natural light of the real world as opposed to the strong artificial light and contrasting darkness within the rectory, Anthea is very much an outsider. She provides comic relief within the novel, for both the reader and other characters, in that she is continually turned away from the centre of the action and this dismissal becomes a humorous motif. That she is a comic character, and is somewhat derided, certainly disregarded, does not undermine her status as a Christ-figure, but rather enhances it. Brendan Craddock, who provides one of Murdoch’s most detailed definitions of what the demythologized Christ can offer, points out that ‘Christ was mocked, nothing can be more important than that. We are absurdities, comic characters in the dream of life, and this is true even if we die in a concentration camp, even if we die on the cross’ (p. 144). Anthea, like Brendan’s picture of Christ, holds no power, and is never recognized by any other character as anything other than an unwanted distraction or a source of amusement, yet she subtly and quietly causes reality to infiltrate the rectory. It is Anthea’s gift of snowdrops, an intentional reminder of the outside world, that elicits a moment of clear vision for Pattie. Pattie believes that ‘the web of her being’ is ‘so interwoven with Carel no alien thing could



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A clear line of the purest palest green was drawn around the scalloped rim of each drooping white cup. The flowers had a sudden presence, an authority. Pattie looked at them with surprise. She saw them as flowers. They made, in the continuum of dark days, a pause, a gap as it were, through which she saw so much more than the springtime. (p. 84) This ‘gap’, created by attention to the flowers, is a chance for Pattie to see reality amidst the complications and solipsism of her controlled and illusory life with Carel. Snowdrops are evocative of spring, and therefore represent for Pattie the persistence of ordinary life outside the rectory. Perception of the snowdrops changes Pattie’s quality of consciousness, causing her attention immediately to shift from herself (and by association Carel, since she defines herself by him) to the outside world she begins to notice through the window. It is this withdrawal from Carel that prompts Pattie’s realization that her indulgent presence is harming him, and which ultimately influences her decision to leave the rectory. She concludes, rightly, that ‘she could not make [Carel’s] miracle of redemption’ (p. 212). Pattie is last heard of working in an African refugee camp, which indicates that she has regained her sense of ordinary morality due, at least in part, to the clarity of vision she experienced whilst simply gazing at the snowdrops. Anthea’s presence has a similar effect upon Carel’s brother, Marcus, who notices that ‘with [Anthea] the ordinary world seemed to resume its power, the world where human beings make simple claims on one another and where things are small and odd and touching and funny’ (p. 231). The world that Anthea recalls for Marcus is one in which goodness exists and that Carel’s decline has obscured from him. The novel ends with Anthea sobbing in the now empty rectory, presumably for Carel, who is revealed to be her ex-lover and whom she was unable to save. There is a sense that, had Anthea been attended to, Carel’s suicide could have been prevented, which highlights the importance of recognizing not only those we might save, but also those who might save us in a world in which God is no longer responsible for doing either. White’s Christ figures often quietly prompt moral thinking in a similar way to Murdoch’s, but more often than not they do so simply by existing rather than through any conscious attempt to be useful, as in



penetrate’ (p. 151), and yet this is exactly what happens when Pattie truly pays attention to the flowers meant as a gift for Carel. As Pattie examines the snowdrops, she sees them as if for the first time:


the case of Anthea Barlow. The literary critic Peter Beatson notes that ‘in all of White’s novels, characters find their God in human form [. . .] God is too vast to be embraced directly, and a local habitation must be found for him’.12 White’s concept of Christ sees him as a reflection of what he called God, though without divine power, but this idea of Christ is often obscured, for his characters, by the traditional picture of the crucified Christ. Beatson’s ‘local habitation[s]’ are the human Christ-figures who embody White’s ideas about Christ as an ordinary, comprehensible manifestation of God. God is often experienced emotionally by White’s characters, as by the Aborigine artist Alf Dubbo in Riders in the Chariot, who ‘could accept God because of the spirit that would work within him at times’, but who, as previously discussed, cannot envisage or draw on the concept of Christ. Alf’s attempt to paint Christ is regarded by others as a failure because it does not encompass Christ’s divinity, and yet, as Michael Giffin suggests in his book on White, Arthur’s Dream, the picture is ‘a portrait which, the reader suspects, contains a phallus, and this would certainly confront the image of Christ as divine but not human’.13 In actuality, Alf has embraced Christ in the only way he is able to: as a human being. Once Alf has realized that only a human Christ can have any relevance for him, he finds his own Christ-figure in Himmelfarb, a persecuted Jewish man to whom White deliberately refers as ‘The Jew’14 in order to align him with Christ, who becomes ‘[Alf’s] Lord Jesus’ (p. 433). Alf’s recognition of Himmelfarb’s Christ-like qualities allows him to achieve his potential as an artist and to become a Christ-figure in his own right. Christ-figures populate White’s later novels to the extent that it is clear that the demythologized Christ has become central to his vision. Peter Beatson noted that ‘some readers seem confused in later novels, particularly in Voss (1957), about the Christian symbolism; being unable to resolve the question: “who is the Christ figure?” they accuse White himself of confusion. In fact nobody is precisely a Christ-figure, whilst everyone contains a little bit of the divine archetype.’15 Often those characters who embrace the traditional image of Christ eventually find it too far removed from their reality and unable to stand the test of any real trauma. White therefore attempts, as Murdoch so clearly does, to return Christ to the world in order to make him relevant as a focus of moral and spiritual attention. Mrs Poulter in The Solid Mandala (1966), typically struggles to retain Christ as the focus for a religious belief that White writes ‘was in her own breath, her own body’.16 The problem for her, like Alf Dubbo, is that she cannot connect what she terms ‘the face they spoke about’ (p. 300), that of Christ, with her own innate world-based



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spirituality and natural sense of morality. When Mrs Poulter finds her neighbour, Waldo Brown, dead, her vague image of Christ on the cross is immediately obliterated because it bears no resemblance to this real experience of death. White writes that this traditional Christ ‘released His hands from the nails and fell down, in a thwack of canvas, in a cloud of dust’ (p. 303). Language, such as ‘canvas’ and ‘dust’ – the repetition of ‘puppet’ (as in Riders in the Chariot, p. 409), which is often used in White’s novels in association with traditional images of Christ – emphasizes the irrelevance of such imagery to the real world of ordinary experience. As Carolyn Bliss suggests, this Christ is ‘a mere stage prop, a lifeless image too flimsy to withstand the pressure of real experience’.17 In The Solid Mandala it is Mrs Poulter’s belief in the goodness of Arthur Brown that allows her to adapt to a demythologized form of religious belief which centres upon human reality. She asserts that ‘nowadays [. . .] we’ve only men to believe in. I believe in this man’ (p. 314). Through her love of and belief in Arthur’s natural goodness, which transforms him into a Christ-figure, Mrs Poulter is able to attain a level of fulfilment previously unknown to her, which manifests as a love of ordinary objects, people and domestic life. The appearance of Christ as a character in Nuns and Soldiers (1980)18 also draws attention to the importance of the association of morality with the ordinary and domestic in Murdoch’s novels. It is a striking materialization because Murdoch has it occur within a kitchen, a marked contrast to the exalted appearance of the ‘golden’ angels in Anne’s dream in the same scene. Christ’s appearance in a ‘very undreamlike reality’ (p. 293) affirms the importance of accepting Christ within a real context. When questioned as to whether Anne had really seen Christ Murdoch replied, ‘one does not know. Perhaps’ (TCHF, p. 206). Anne herself concludes that ‘somehow it was a true showing’ (p. 362), and the similarity between the ordinariness of Murdoch’s Christ and that of her Christ-figures implies that it is, at the very least, a truthful manifestation of a Christ that Murdoch believed continued to have relevance in a secular society. In keeping with his ordinary manifestation, the most important message Christ has for Anne is that he is not able to give her the ‘wonderful answer’ (p. 298) she seeks. Instead, he draws Anne’s attention, almost imperceptibly, to the ordinary reality of her life which she has tried so hard to reject. That her first sighting of Christ is of him ‘standing beside the table, with one hand resting upon it’ (p. 297), a stance he maintains and Anne mimics throughout their exchange, suggests the importance of remaining in contact with the ordinary world in





spite of the temptation either to abandon it, as Anne did when she became a nun and is planning to do again, or to look for what Murdoch would describe as ‘magic’, as Anne does by focusing on Christ’s wounds. Christ’s gift to Anne of ‘an ordinary grey stone’ (p. 300), is a physical manifestation of what Murdoch’s Christ sees as the necessity of staying in touch with the ordinary world. The pebble is also reminiscent of the Buddhist Dharma, which can be described as ‘one’s righteous duty, or any virtuous path in the common sense of the term’19 and which ‘each pebble, each leaf, each flower is preaching’.20 White also refers to Dharma, which he interprets as ‘the Buddhist truth’, represented by ‘atoms’, which are ‘small ordinary things’ (PWS, p. 189) that also represent the world. In Nuns and Soldiers the ordinariness and imperfection of Anne’s slightly chipped pebble horrifies her, but Christ confirms that it represents ‘everything that is’ (p. 298). It is not the ‘miracle’ Anne admits she desires, and it certainly does not provide a comprehensive answer to her questions (Murdoch does not have one), but it begins to have relevance to Anne as she reflects upon her experience. After the apparent visitation, Anne finds herself unable to meditate upon the ‘traditional public Christ’ (p. 362), whom she was previously unable to separate from her notion of the crucifixion and the resurrection. That she is left with the image of ‘only a man hanging up in bleeding anguish, of which for the first time she was able to grasp the details’ (p. 362) is the result of the demythologizing of her Christian belief so that ‘the last remnants of faith’ (p. 362) (by which Murdoch refers to dogmatic religious belief) are removed from her. This returns the ordinary world to Anne, leaving her ‘feeling lightened of her burdens’ (p. 514), and able to see where she is able to do good in the ‘small’ world of ordinary reality. Anne’s eventual acceptance of an ordinary human Christ demands that she confronts and recognizes his inevitable failure and, by association, her own. Anne’s thought processes, as outlined by Murdoch’s narrator, pursue the idea that: Christ was a failure, a pathetic, deluded disappointed man who had come to an exceptionally sticky end [. . .] could she knowing what she knew of him, of all his failure, all of it, tread that way after Him? Could she relive his journey and his passion while knowing that he was after all not God? (p. 510) This question recalls Murdoch’s central philosophical problem, stated in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: ‘Can we go on talking about a



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spiritual source of Good if the majority of human kind is debarred from it?’ (MGM, p. 499). She questions whether, knowing that failure is the inevitable outcome, we can now continue with the attempt to be good. Murdoch acknowledges that ‘however good a life is it includes moral failure’ (MGM, p. 509) and that a secular concept of Christ must embrace the knowledge that moral and spiritual perfection is impossible for most people. Yet, by continuing with the attempt, as Anne Cavidge discovers, spiritual progress can be made. Murdoch’s characters inevitably fail in their attempts to be good, and yet, ironically, it is the doomed attempt, and the acceptance of subsequent failure, that is central to achieving any level of success. Nuns and Soldiers is a study of the merits of failure in that spiritual progress is shown to depend, at least partially, upon an acceptance of the inevitability of failure. Christ and his chipped pebble represent to Anne the inevitable existence of imperfection in ‘everything that is’ but emphasize the overriding importance of the attempt to be good, above the achievement of that aim. White’s vision of Christ as a good man also rests upon the concept of failure. Indeed, his entire oeuvre is often described (sometimes disparagingly) as a study of failure, and yet his attitude is not entirely that of the pessimist. It is at the point of failure that White’s Christ-figures realize their potential as spiritual signposts. White’s explorer character, Voss, in the eponymous novel, derides what he calls ‘the Christ-picture’ (p. 197), criticizing his fellow explorers’ need to celebrate Christmas as a ‘miserable fetish [. . .] of Jesus Christ’ (p. 197). Voss is unable to comprehend Christ because he is ‘possessed by his own divinity’ (p. 144). It is Palfreyman, a fellow explorer, who evokes, for Voss, Christ’s humility and eventually unlocks his ability to transform into a Christ-figure in his own right. Palfreyman’s death also allows another member of the party, the poet Frank Le Mesurier, to reflect that ‘the mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming’ (p. 271), a conclusion with which Voss will eventually concur. When Voss finally accepts that his attempt to defeat the geography of Australia has ‘failed evidently’ (p. 346) he begins to resemble the Christ-figure he has believed himself to be all along, revealing with humility that ‘he himself [. . .] had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail God upon a rickety throne’ (p. 390). Bliss recognizes this denouement as ‘one of White’s familiar ironic reversals’,21 in that Voss’s failure to live up to his self-imposed divinity reveals him as most Christ-like. White’s sacrificial attitude to spiritual enlightenment, considering his attempt to return Christ to ordinary life through his Christ-figures, is problematic and has been denounced by critics. It is a literal





representation of Murdoch’s ‘death of the ego’, the ultimate aim in any attempt at goodness. Characters in White – Stan Parker in The Tree of Man (1955), Voss, three of the ‘riders’ in Riders in the Chariot, amongst others – find enlightenment at the point of death, a facet of his style that one critic described as ‘the result of [White’s] wanting to locate wholeness beyond the world we live in [. . .] an overt devaluing of human life’.22 This criticism disregards White’s attitude to failure. Those characters in White’s novels who receive enlightenment at the point of death do so because it is at this point that they accept their own mortality, which defines them as human and locates them firmly within this world. The Tree of Man ends with the main character and Christ-figure Stan Parker’s enlightenment and subsequent death, but White does not devalue Stan’s life in granting him such an experience only as he dies. That Stan is ‘illuminated’23 just as his life ends is a result of acceptance of ‘his inadequacy’, which White writes, ‘can also be, in a sense, a prize’ (p. 416). Stan is not united with God on another plane, as the criticism of White would suggest, but with White’s vision of God in the world, manifesting in a very human image of ‘a gob of spittle’ (p. 476). As Stan realizes he is dying he begins to locate meaning, not in the promise of elevation to a higher plane or eternal life, but in ‘the incredible objects of the earth’ such as ‘cracks in the path. On which ants were massing’ (p. 477). ‘Death’, White’s narrator announces, ‘is faintly credible because it still smells of life’ (p. 480). The novel ends with the image of Stan’s grandson, the living continuation of the enlightened Stan, attempting to express his love of the world as a poem ‘of life, of all life [. . .] the smell of bread [. . .] red apples, and a little wisp of white cloud that will swell into a horse’ (p. 480). Similarly, once Voss accepts his own fallibility he can appreciate ‘objects of wonder [. . .] the wounds in the side of a brigalow palm [. . .] stones that sweated wild honey’ (p. 393). The abiding image of Voss’s death is the very earth-bound description of his blood running ‘out upon the dry earth, which drank it up immediately’ (p. 394). Stan and Voss, like Murdoch’s Anne Cavidge, are released by acceptance of their fallible humanity, but they are not released to a higher plane, rather to a vision of the world unencumbered by their own egos and finally into the world itself. It is at this point that they begin to resemble Christ in the entirely human way White intended. An exploration of Murdoch and White’s attitudes to Christ reveals a shared emphasis on the importance of retaining a picture of Christ as an ordinary human picture of virtue at the centre of secular morality. The prominence in their novels of the demythologized Christ, usually represented by Christ-figures, indicates a belief that Christ can continue



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to have relevance in a secular society if he is stripped of his divinity, emancipated from myth and set within the ordinary world. Writing at a time when many writers were questioning the future of morality in a secular society, Murdoch and White both place Christ prominently within novels that emphasize the value and importance of a collective moral vision.

Notes 1. David Marr (ed.), Patrick White’s Letters (London: Cape, 1994), p. 311. 2. Paul Brennan and Christine Flynn (eds), Patrick White Speaks (London: Cape, 1989), p. 154. Hereafter, PWS. 3. Patrick White, The Aunt’s Story (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 134. 4. Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Chapman, 1994), p. 106. 5. Ibid., pp. 103–4. 6. Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 371. 7. Murdoch, Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being (unpublished MS). Held in the Conradi archive in the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, Kingston University. 8. Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 296. 9. Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 156. 10. Murdoch, Henry and Cato (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 336. 11. Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (London, Vintage, 2002), p. 229. 12. Peter Beatson, The Eye in the Mandala: Patrick White, a Vision of Man and God (London: Elek, 1976), p. 45. 13. Michael Giffin, Arthur’s Dream: The Religious Imagination in the Fiction of Patrick White (Paddington, NSW: Spaniel Books, 1991), p. 71. 14. White professed that ‘I refer to Himmelfarb constantly as “The Jew” on account of what was being prepared for him. I wanted to establish in the reader’s unconscious a connexion between him and the other “Jew” ’ (Marr, Patrick White’s Letters, p. 195). 15. Beatson, The Eye in the Mandala, p. 92. 16. Patrick White, The Solid Mandala (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 300. 17. Carolyn Bliss, Patrick White’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 111. 18. The servant character Jackson, in Jackson’s Dilemma, may also be a direct representation of Christ and is always seen working in a domestic setting, usually the kitchen. 19. Murthy K. Krishna, ‘Dharma, its Etymology’, Tibet Journal, XXI(1) (Spring 1966): 84. 20. Nhat Hanh, and Thich Hanh, Being Peace (London: Parallax Press, 2005), p. 26. 21. Bliss, Patrick White’s Fiction, p. 87. 22. Laurence Steven, Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction (Ontario: Laurier Press, 1989), p. 1. 23. Patrick White, The Tree of Man (London, Penguin, 1972), p. 476.




Do not Seek God outside your own Soul: Buddhism in The Green Knight Tammy Grimshaw

The interviews that Iris Murdoch granted throughout her lifetime chart her changing religious beliefs. In 1972, she stated, ‘I am an exChristian.’1 More than a decade later, in 1983, she demonstrated her affinity with Buddhism by describing herself as a ‘Christian Buddhist’, but she was quick to add, ‘I can’t get away from Christ, who travels with me.’2 In 1990, after having worked on Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals for nearly a decade, it seemed that she had moved away from the idea of a personal Christ or a personal saviour. She stated, ‘I think that if we have religion, we shall have to have religion without God [. . .] It’s a difficult question actually to know what believing in a personal God is. I know that I don’t believe in one.’3 An examination of Murdoch’s Oxford library, now held in the Special Collections at the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University in London, reveals that Murdoch did not make these comments on religion and Buddhism lightly, but after a great deal of reading and contemplation. The Murdoch Archives contain several books on Buddhism, which Murdoch acquired over a thirty-year period, with her first book on the subject, entitled Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki, published in 1956, and her latest acquisition, Journey without the Goal: The Tantric Wisdom of the Buddha, published in 1985.4 Moreover, Murdoch did not merely read these books on Buddhism, she studied them assiduously. There is extensive underlining throughout the volumes, as well as notes written in the margins and on the end papers of the books, in which she queries the teachings and attempts to work out her own engagement with them. With an indefatigable fascination for matters of religion and spirituality and an increasing interest in Buddhism, it is not surprising that Murdoch also explored her ever-evolving religious and moral beliefs in 168



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her fiction. In The Time of the Angels, published in 1966, several characters discuss whether God is or is not a divine person.5 And whereas The Time of the Angels focuses primarily on the manner in which God and Christ can be demythologized, The Nice and the Good, published two years later in 1968, contains a direct reference to Buddhism in relation to Theo Gray, who has lived in India and taken vows there in a Buddhist monastery.6 Murdoch also represents Buddhist teachings in The Sea, The Sea (1978), in which, at the end of the narrative, James Arrowby, whose primary avocation is tantric Buddhism, travels to Tibet to pursue personal enlightenment.7 In Nuns and Soldiers (1980), the Christ who appears to the former nun Anne Cavidge is offering a Buddhist teaching when he tells her that she must do all the work in order to redeem herself.8 Echoing the comment that Murdoch gave in her 1983 interview with John Haffenden, Father Bernard Jacoby in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) describes himself as a Christian Buddhist.9 And Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planet (1989) practises Zen Buddhism with a Japanese master.10 Of course, Murdoch was neither the first nor the last novelist to illustrate Buddhist themes in her fiction. During the 1950s, writers of the Beat Generation, particularly Jack Kerouac, found great creative inspiration in the teachings of the Buddha.11 Buddhist thought has also been identified in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, a novel with supernatural themes, but which is realistically set in Buddhist Sri Lanka.12 Buddhist themes are also found in other genres, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings and Thomas Pynchon’s postmodernist The Crying of Lot 49. Critics have noted that postmodernism and fantasy genres are in fact highly amenable to the representation of Buddhist principles.13 The affinity that writers of the post-war generation had with Buddhism, and the representation of Buddhist themes in their novels seems to be aligned with societal attitudes during the post-war period. A decline in organized religion and a rise in secularism were hallmarks of this epoch. Patricia Waugh points out that the decreasing respect and deference towards authority after the war was accompanied by an increase in intellectual relativism and the privatization of values. For these reasons, many people began to believe that organized religion was ‘no longer viable as a source of absolute value and spiritual sustenance’.14 Murdoch explains this phenomenon in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals by pointing out that many great thinkers saw organized religion as ‘an enemy of morality, an enemy of freedom and free thought’ and accordingly for some the entire institution



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of organized religion was ‘rationally considered to be discredited or outmoded’ (MGM, p. 487). Yet, perhaps paradoxically, the decline in the observance of traditional forms of religion existed alongside a search to attain spiritual grounding during the post-war era.15 From this search for new spiritual avenues emerged individual belief systems that had a shared emphasis on the plurality of religious faith. Murdoch shares this tendency, endorsing a belief system rooted in plurality, drawing on the teachings of Christ, the Buddha and Plato, as well as Islam and Judaism: ‘We look at Christ (or Buddha or the Form of the Good) and are magnetically attracted [. . .] to the moral life’ (MGM, p. 24). She adds: ‘We look through [. . .] Christ into the mystery of the good. And so also with the figures and images of other religions including [. . .] Judaism and Islam’ (MGM, p. 429). Nevertheless, the plurality within society and the concomitant rise in individual belief systems sometimes resulted in personal chaos and confusion. Brian McHale states that this situation resulted in what could be described as ‘an anarchic landscape of [the] world in the plural’.16 Murdoch realized that living in a pluralistic society could bring about feelings of loss and alienation, especially for the writer. She explains that many writers were ‘explicitly hostile to religion’ and that metaphysical problems were sometimes experienced as ‘a sense of loss, of being returned to a confused pluralistic world in which something “deep” has been removed’ (MGM, p. 7). In spite of these feelings of loss and alienation, individual belief systems continued to proliferate since the emphasis on individuality inherent in them was seen to offer increased opportunities for selfrealization. That is to say, ‘a more profound realization of the self’ was promoted ‘as an antidote to the fear of cosmic groundlessness’.17 Importantly, self-realization is based on moral improvement of the ‘self’, which in turn is contingent upon the relationship of the ‘self’ with other ‘selves’, since the ‘self’ is arguably forged through interactions in personal relationships and within one’s community. Social interactions are integral to an individual’s moral development since ‘involvement with others [. . .] is almost certainly a fundamental component of [. . .] the discovery of “moral meaning” ’.18 Personal relationships thus became of paramount importance as a source of moral value in the post-war era. As Waugh points out, spiritual and moral significance were deemed ‘discoverable [not] only in the profound depths of the self [but also] in its relations with other selves’.19 An analysis of Murdoch’s views on personal and social relationships reveals that her thoughts on the interaction of the individual with



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the community informed both her moral philosophy and her fiction. Speaking at length about this interaction in her highly-regarded essay, ‘Against Dryness’, she explains that human beings are ‘free and separate [yet] related to a rich and complicated world’ (EM, p. 290). Murdoch was concerned about the inner moral life of the individual and argued that the task of the individual within society was to become more moral by viewing others with justice and love. For Murdoch, Buddhism was aligned with the philosophical views that she discussed in her non-fiction, as well as with the philosophical themes on moral development that she illustrates in her fiction. It is in The Green Knight, published in 1993, that Murdoch enters on one of her most transparent and extended narrative engagements with Buddhist teachings. Further, The Green Knight reflects the aspects of Buddhist thought that Murdoch explored in her concurrent volume of non-fiction, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, published in 1992. Reflecting the doubts about the presence of God in religion that she expressed in her 1990 interview with Jeffrey Meyers, Murdoch extols eastern religions that do not have the doctrine of a personal saviour. She praises Buddhism for its ‘imageless austerity’, which she sees as ‘impressive and attractive’ (MGM, p. 247). Reminiscent of her 1983 classification of herself as a ‘Christian Buddhist’, she suggests later in Metaphysics that Christianity could be augmented by borrowing teachings from Buddhism. She writes: Christianity can continue without a personal God or a risen Christ, without beliefs in supernatural places and happenings, such as heaven and life after death, but retaining the mystical figure of Christ occupying a place analogous to that of Buddha: a Christ [. . .] who is found as a living force within each human soul and not in some supernatural elsewhere. (MGM, p. 419) Thus, while Murdoch was interested in eastern philosophy and religion in general, this excerpt reveals that it was the absence of a personal saviour, as well as the lack of emphasis on the supernatural, that drew her to Buddhism. Again, this attitude shows Murdoch’s affinity with other novelists during this epoch. Waugh comments that while few ‘writers explicitly proclaimed to be Christian, many [. . .] voiced a need to address the forms that spirit could take in a society which had largely abandoned the idea of a transcendent supernatural authority’.20





At the risk of falling prey to the intentional fallacy, one must note that there are many parallels between Murdoch’s own personal religious beliefs and her portrayal of those of Bellamy James, the homosexual protagonist in The Green Knight.21 Near the beginning of the novel, the reader learns that Bellamy, like Murdoch, has had a long-standing ‘“flirtation” with the doctrines of the East’ (p. 43). It soon becomes clear that by mentioning ‘the doctrines of the east’, Murdoch is referring to Buddhism in particular. Reflecting Murdoch’s own increasing doubts about Christianity, as well as her burgeoning affinity with Buddhism, Bellamy expresses his religious views in heartfelt letters to Father Damien, his spiritual mentor. For example, in one of his first letters, Bellamy tells Father Damien, ‘I do sometimes feel that, for me, there is this blank in the middle of [Christianity] [. . .] The Buddhists [. . .] have a mystical Buddha – if we have a mystical Christ can that be the real Christ?’ (p. 41). Murdoch’s attraction to Buddhist principles is largely the result of Buddhism’s disregard for the supernatural, but it also stems from the Buddhist emphasis on the interior work of the individual. In his book on Buddhism, Bradley Hawkins explains that Buddhism’s rejection of the supernatural underlies its wide-reaching appeal: Buddhism does not advocate a split between ‘this world and some unseen, totally other, reality [. . .] Buddhism sees religious activity to consist of personal actions. [For the Buddhist] it is the interior work of the individual that matters.’22 This statement bears a striking resemblance to the emphasis on the inner moral life of the individual in Murdoch’s moral philosophy. Peter Conradi has briefly noted the influence of Buddhism on Murdoch in his seminal work, The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, in which he states that Buddhism appealed to her because ‘it is based on a realistic assessment of the limited capacity of the ego to decentre itself, and because it is nonetheless designed to alter perception and behaviour’ (SA, p. 16). Murdoch comments on these limitations of the ego in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, stating that ‘there is the selfish ego surrounded by dark menacing chaos, and the more enlightened soul perceiving the diversity of creation in the light of truth’ (MGM, p. 165). The interior work of the individual is described in Buddhism as deriving from three good ‘roots’ and three bad ‘roots’. ‘Actions motivated by greed, hatred, and delusion are bad.’23 Like the Buddhist teaching of the three bad roots, Murdoch’s moral philosophy speaks to the dangers of greed, hatred and delusions, concepts which, for her, had their bases in Platonism. While Murdoch classified greed, hatred and delusion



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generally as the workings of the Platonic construct of Low Eros, delusion, which she referred to as illusion or fantasy, had a central place in her moral philosophy. As Conradi points out, Buddhism confirmed Murdoch’s belief in the ‘mind as a factory of illusion in general’ (IMAL, p. 544). In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch expounds on how to overcome illusion: ‘Platonists and eastern religious thinkers [. . .] would hold ordinary awareness to be a state of illusion, but would allow and advocate a gradual change of consciousness whereby the veil of appearance was penetrated by moral-intellectual cognition’ (MGM, p. 222). Significantly, Murdoch later draws a direct connection between Buddhism and the Platonic concept of illusion, stating that the Buddhist teaching of ‘what it is like to be stripped of the ego, and how difficult this is’, is like ‘Plato’s distance from the sun’ (MGM, p. 247). In these two excerpts, Murdoch is referring to the parable of Plato’s cave, in which prisoners in a cave look at shadows cast on the cave wall by a fire, unaware not only that the shadows are illusions, but also unaware of their distance from the sun, which represents reality. Because of her use of Plato’s cave allegory, ‘what awaits the moral pilgrim for Murdoch is not some attenuated elsewhere, but “here” differently and freshly perceived’ (SA, p. 108). In The Green Knight, Bellamy suffers from illusions that distance him from reality. At the beginning of the novel, the reader learns that ‘Bellamy had given up his job at the further education college, and thereafter sold his large flat in Camden Town and moved into the one-room flatlet in Whitechapel. He had sold or given away almost all of his belongings’ (p. 45). At first blush, it might appear that Bellamy’s actions are honourable, especially from a Buddhist perspective. As Hawkins points out, ‘the Western gospel of consumerism is entirely at odds with Buddhist values which preach simplicity, tranquillity, and turning away from the relentless acquisition of goods’. That is because, for the Buddhist, the universe ‘is a vast system of processes, not things’.24 Yet, a closer reading of the novel reveals that Bellamy’s desire to rid himself of the world completely and join a remote religious order, while ostensibly an honourable attempt to rid himself of materialistic ‘things’, stems from his illusions and therefore creates a pernicious influence in his life. Father Damien warns Bellamy that his asceticism is actually based on greed and delusion. Father Damien writes to Bellamy: ‘The solitude which you seem to be imposing on yourself is not wise. Long periods of self-imposed solitude [. . .] tend to degenerate into self-indulgent fantasy’ (p. 113). When Bellamy fails to effect positive





changes in his life, Father Damien drives this point home in a later letter to his protégé, entreating Bellamy: ‘Distance yourself from the self-gratification which you mistake for adoration of God. The greedy cunning self has many ways of deceiving’ (p. 221). By referring to ‘selfindulgent fantasy’ and ‘the greedy cunning self’ in these two excerpts, Murdoch draws parallels to greed and delusion, two of Buddhism’s three bad roots. On the other hand, non-attachment, benevolence and understanding are the three good roots in Buddhism; and actions stemming from these three roots are good.25 Murdoch’s views on the individual’s interactions with others bear resemblance to the Buddhist teachings of the three good roots, particularly those of benevolence and understanding. Murdoch calls the process by which individuals become more benevolent towards and understanding of others ‘attention’, a term which she borrows from Simone Weil, who, like Murdoch, had a ‘natural affinity’ with Buddhism and Platonism (MGM, p. 247). Murdoch defines ‘attention’ as the individual’s inner moral effort involved in directing his or her view ‘outward, away from the self’. Murdoch explains that the improvement of personal relationships through the process of ‘attention’ helps one to achieve moral goodness: ‘it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with [this] knowledge [. . .] with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case [. . .] of what confronts one’ (SG, p. 38). Suguna Ramanathan has commented that the experience of selflessness and loving-kindness in Buddhism can be directly compared to ‘Murdoch’s stress on the importance of proper seeing’.26 In keeping with Murdoch’s moral philosophy, Father Damien encourages Bellamy to direct his attention outward, away from the self. Father Damien first encourages Bellamy: ‘You should certainly find some regular work in the service of others’ (p. 95). This focus of thought and action away from the self is similar to the Buddhist teachings of benevolence and understanding from the three good roots. When Bellamy fails to follow his earlier advice, Father Damien then writes: ‘I suggest once more that you go out and serve your neighbours. You have had experience of such service in the past and are well placed to help out those in need’ (p. 113). Therefore, while Bellamy wishes to embrace an ascetic lifestyle in order to become more moral and spiritual, the solipsism that could result from such a lifestyle would paradoxically restrict his ability to love, and hence impede his moral development, since true moral vision is cultivated in interaction with others. A further teaching of Buddhism is that extremes of any kind are unproductive. Just as ascetic penances are spiritually unsatisfying, so



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too is self-indulgence. The Buddha came to see that the most productive course was a ‘middle way’ between extremes of this kind. ‘The most appropriate lifestyle, accordingly, is one of moderation in which the appetites are neither denied nor indulged to excess’.27 In other words, Buddhism is said to be the middle way, meaning the middle point between self-indulgence and extreme asceticism.28 For the Buddhist, the middle way is ‘a path of self-transformation: an intellectual, emotional, and moral restructuring in which a person is reoriented from selfish, limited objectives towards a horizon of possibilities and opportunities for fulfilment’.29 Conradi has found that Murdoch’s moral philosophy can be compared to the Buddhist philosophy of the middle way since it mediates moral extremes, such as egocentrism and self-denial (SA, pp. 85–6). But while Murdoch’s moral philosophy initially resembles the middle way because of its emphasis on moral mediation and balance, it further reflects this element of Buddhist teaching because Murdoch insisted on intellectual transformation as a means of spiritual mediation and growth. And because of her affinity with Platonism, physical passion plays a role in the individual’s intellectual and spiritual transformation. In this way, Platonism has a direct counterpart in Tibetan Buddhism. As Keown explains, while sexual desire was formerly regarded in other religions as an obstacle to religious progress, in Tibetan Buddhism, it ‘came to be seen as a potent force which, if properly harnessed, could accelerate spiritual development’.30 Murdoch bases her philosophical stance on a Platonic notion that is similar to Tibetan Buddhism: that physical passion can be virtuously transformed in the pursuit of truth and knowledge, thereby enabling one’s spiritual growth. She emphasizes that through intellectual discipline and moral vision, an individual can metamorphose the temporal impulses of sex and selfish desire (or Low Eros) into spiritual energy and selflessness (or High Eros). Like Plato, Murdoch insists that the ‘approach to [. . .] the Form of the Good [. . .] comes through a difficult disciplined purification of intellect and passion, wherein passion (Eros) becomes a spiritual force’ (MGM, p. 11). She reiterates this view throughout her philosophical writings, explaining that the pursuit of High Eros is a lifelong process, achieved through ‘the continuous operation of spiritual energy, desire, intellect [. . .] as it moves among and responds to particular objects’ (MGM, p. 496). Murdoch’s belief in the physical as a path to the spiritual is evident in many of her works of fiction. In The Green Knight, Bellamy exemplifies this Platonic concept as he decides to try to become more moral by





transforming his sexual energies. In portraying the Platonic relationship between spirituality and sexuality, Murdoch shows how Bellamy’s dream of a moral life causes him to shun sexual activity and to adopt a selfimposed vow of chastity in order to purify and transfigure his sexual impulses. Murdoch writes: ‘Bellamy had decided, after certain messy and inconclusive experiences, that it was all right to love one’s own sex, but in his case this must be done chastely’ (pp. 44–5). Yet, Bellamy’s abstinence cuts him off from others, and he is not able to transform his spiritual energy because he does not allow himself the opportunity to move among and respond to others. This is perhaps most evident when Murdoch portrays Bellamy fleeing from his close-knit community to spend time alone in his dismal Whitechapel flatlet. Bellamy’s spiritual path reaches crisis point when Father Damien, his mentor and role model, decides to leave the priesthood. In his final letter to Bellamy, Father Damien echoes Murdoch’s own religious views. He writes: ‘I can no longer believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or indeed any personal God or supernatural [. . .] divinity, or in the divinity of Christ or in eternal life’ (p. 265). Illustrating Murdoch’s views on the displacement of a personal God, Father Damien concludes his letter to Bellamy with this imperative: ‘Remember Eckhart’s advice [. . .]: do not seek for God outside your own soul’ (p. 266). Insistence on the redemption of one’s self through spiritual growth is evident in the interactions that Bellamy has with Peter Mir, the ‘Green Knight’ of the title. Bellamy feels an instant affinity with Peter Mir, who is maliciously injured by Lucas Graffe, Bellamy’s long-time friend. When Peter reminds Bellamy that he is Jewish, Bellamy replies, ‘Peter, what on earth does that matter! All salvation is in some way the same’ (p. 222). Peter ultimately finds it in his heart to forgive Lucas and becomes a spiritual inspiration to Bellamy. However, Bellamy struggles with the idea that he himself is responsible for his own spiritual change as he continues to seek God ‘in some supernatural elsewhere’. The similarity of Murdoch’s views to those of certain of her fictional characters is again obvious when Peter later tells Bellamy that he is a Buddhist. Bellamy replies, ‘But Buddhists don’t believe in God.’ Peter responds, ‘In a personal God, no. I used the word as a brief way of indicating a spiritual path.’ Bellamy then interjects, ‘But you are Jewish.’ Peter replies, ‘What is that “but” doing? I am a Jewish Buddhist. Judaism too seeks God in the soul’ (p. 298). After spending much of the narrative vacillating between selfindulgent neurosis and extreme self-denial, Bellamy is finally



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It seems to me that there are two questions. Do you want to be chaste? Do you want to live alone? It seems that you want to be chaste, all right. But that need not prevent you from living with another person. [. . .] Why not simply stay here? I need you, I think you have discovered that you need me. (p. 426) Emil’s proposal can be classified as a middle way because it encourages Bellamy to think of abandoning his ascetic impulses, while respecting his desire not to indulge his sexual appetites. Living with Emil would also mean that Bellamy would have a life in interaction with others, providing an avenue through which his spiritual growth could be accelerated. Bellamy rereads Father Damien’s final letter as he considers Emil’s proposal. It reads: ‘Go out and help your neighbour, be happy yourself and make others happy, that is your path, not that of the cloister [. . .] and do not look for God outside your own soul’ (p. 464). For Murdoch, as in Buddhism, ‘seeking God inside one’s own soul’ means that individuals create themselves through the moral choices that they make. Keown explains that ‘moral actions are unlike other actions in that they have both transitive and intransitive effects. The transitive effect is seen in the direct impact moral actions have on others [. . .] The intransitive effect is seen in the way moral actions affect the agent’.31 In the same way, Bellamy considers the effect that his moral choices will have on others, as well as on himself. Making the decision to live with Emil, he muses: ‘I’ll ask him [Emil] about my will [. . .] And as he thought this Bellamy felt a sudden surge, as of a warm wind, a breath of warm air. He thought, yes it is true, I love Emil, and Emil loves me, I shall get that job helping people, and we shall live together and stay together’ (p. 465). Bellamy’s interest in drawing up a will shows that he has finally given up his quest for asceticism, of which he deemed a lack of concern for worldly possessions such an integral part. Bellamy’s rejection of asceticism then brings about his desire to become more involved in a community; he intends to fulfil his desire to help people by becoming involved in community service. Given a Buddhist reading of the final scene of this novel, Bellamy’s decision to get a ‘job helping people’ has positive transitive effects since it will bring benefits to others in the



encouraged by his partner Emil to consider what might be called a ‘middle way’ between asceticism and self-indulgence:


community. In addition, his choices will also have positive intransitive effects since they will bring about improvement of himself as a moral agent. Murdoch concludes the narrative on an appropriate note as Bellamy looks forward to the future, ‘Would Emil and I be happy in India [. . .] I suppose I might become a Buddhist there’ (p. 472). Hence, Bellamy’s change of lifestyle has helped to reshape his character, and by reshaping his character, he will reshape his future. As the Buddhist proverb states: ‘Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.’32

Notes 1. Hugh Herbert, ‘The Iris Problem’, Guardian, 24 October 1972: l0. 2. John Haffenden, ‘John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch’, in Novelists in Interview, ed. John Haffenden (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 206. 3. Jeffrey Meyers, ‘The Art of Fiction: CXVII – Iris Murdoch’, Paris Review, 32(115) (1990): 220. 4. William Barrett (ed.), Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki (New York: Doubleday, 1965); Chogyam Trungpa and Tulku Trungpa, Journey without the Goal: The Tantric Wisdom of the Buddha (Boston: Shambhala, 1985). 5. Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), pp. 92–4. 6. Murdoch, The Nice and the Good (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), p. 314. 7. Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978), p. 470. 8. Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980). See also Suguna Ramanathan, Iris Murdoch: Figures of Good (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 31. 9. Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983). 10. Murdoch, The Message to the Planet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), p. 19. 11. Anne Waldman and Barbara Read, ‘Buddhism, Dharma and the Beat Generation Writers’, in Maria Anita Stefanelli (ed.), City Lights: Pocket Poets and Pocket Books (Rome: Italo-Latino-Americana Palma, 2004), pp. 13–28. 12. Marlene Goldman, ‘Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost’, in Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (ed.), Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje’s Writing (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), pp. 27–37. 13. Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Caski, ‘Talking Trees and Walking Mountains: Buddhist and Taoist Themes in The Lord of the Rings’, in Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson (eds), The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2003), pp. 179–91; Robert E Kohn, ‘Seven Buddhist Themes in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49’, Religion and Literature, 35(1) 2003: 73–96. 14. Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background 1960 to 1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 61.



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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p. 63. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 37. Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p. 62. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 2, 41. Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, pp. 62 and 65. Ibid., p. 61. Murdoch, The Green Knight (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993). Bradley K. Hawkins, Buddhism (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 111–12. Damien Keown, Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 39. Hawkins, Buddhism, pp. 108, 111. Keown, Buddhism, p. 39. Ramanathan, Iris Murdoch, p. 32. Keown, Buddhism, p. 22. Paul Williams, Buddhist Thought: A Complete Introduction to the Indian Tradition (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 29. Keown, Buddhism, p. 56. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid.




The Moral Fate of Fictive Persons: On Iris Murdoch’s Humanism William Schweiker

In this chapter I want to show that the connection in Iris Murdoch’s thought between morality and art discloses her understanding of what it means to be a human being. She intimates that we are straddled between kinds of fate: the necessity of virtue and the necessity of death. I want to probe these necessities on three levels of reflection in order to sustain my contention about Murdoch’s work. I start with art and morals. The second level of inquiry indicates how Murdoch anticipated concerns found in current humanism even though she once called humanism a flimsy creed. Things turn on definition, of course. I will strive to indicate rightly her kind of humanistic outlook. The final level of reflection examines morality and death in order to clarify her deepest claims about human existence. This reflection on what is ultimately important is the inner aim and purpose of the chapter. ‘To do philosophy’, Murdoch once wrote, ‘is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth’ (SG, p. 46). Think of my inquiry as a stab at that way of thinking and on different levels of reflection.

1 In ‘The Sublime and the Good’ Murdoch wrote this: 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 realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. What stuns us into a realization of our supersensible destiny is not, as Kant argued, the formlessness of nature, but rather its unutterable 180



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Murdoch’s claim is that love – as a perception and discovery of the reality of individuals distinct from the self – is the defining feature of art and morality. The enemies of art and goodness are convention and neurosis which block right perception of other people. She worried about the ‘fate’, the destiny, of persons in ‘fiction’ but also the way in which the ego conceals the reality of others, makes them ‘fictions’ in its selfpicture. ‘The tragic freedom implied in love’, she wrote, ‘is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others’ (EM, p. 216). Imagination and love collide: what we love can be concealed by what we imagine; the imagination creates fictive objects of love. To worry about the moral fate of ‘fictive’ persons is to worry about the tragic freedom of love in both art and morals. The challenge in exploring the tragic freedom of love centres on Murdoch’s insistence that what stuns us about ‘our supersensible destiny’ is particular other people. In order to get the gist of that idea, her reference to Immanuel Kant is important. Recall that Kant, in The Critique of Judgment, says that we experience nature as ‘dynamically sublime’ when we consider it as ‘a power that has no dominion over us’.2 As Murdoch notes, ‘on the one hand we experience distress at the failure of the imagination to compass what is before us, and on the other hand we feel exhilaration in our consciousness of the absolute nature of reason’s requirement and the way in which it goes beyond what mere sensible imagination can achieve’ (EM, p. 208). Importantly, Kant drew a connection between this experience and respect for the moral law. While Murdoch thinks that Kant’s aesthetic theory is wrong, his grasp of the connection between the sublime and the demand of morality ‘must’, she says, ‘be pregnant with something marvellous’ (EM, p. 213). What is this marvellous insight? First, for Kant the sublime and respect for the moral law disclose that human beings are not reducible to the totality of the nature system. The moral law arises from a supersensible realm beyond nature. Morality evokes a sense of the holy, according to Kant. The holy is what we find inviolable in ourselves and in others, namely, the law giving power of reason with its demand for intelligibility and freedom. The moral law discloses humanity in me that exceeds my particular, odd, fault-ridden, broken, embodied and finite existence. As Murdoch comments, according to Kant ‘we feel pain at the thwarting of our sensuous nature by a moral requirement, and elation in the consciousness of our rational



particularity; and most particular and individual of all natural things is the mind of man.1


nature; that is, our freedom to conform to the absolute requirement of reason’ (EM, p. 208). An analogous dynamic is found in the experience of the sublime. ‘The freedom of sublimity’, Murdoch explains, ‘does not symbolize, but is moral freedom, only moral freedom not practically active but only, as it were, intuiting itself in an exultant manner’ (EM, p. 209). Aesthetic and moral experience discloses the transcendent reach of existence while also exposing the conflict at the heart of human life. Murdoch departs from Kant in terms of how supersensible destiny and moral conflict are rightly to be conceived. That is the second thing to note about his ‘marvellous’ insight. On Murdoch’s reading, Kant’s aesthetics and ethics fail because the demand of reason extracts one from the messiness of actual life. She complained that ‘we are supposed to live by exceedingly simple and general rules: suppression of history, suspicion of eccentricity’ (EM, p. 215). On reaching that conclusion, Murdoch then states her own position in the words quoted above. To summarize: love as the essence of art and morals is the perception and discovery of the reality of the other person. In this discovery we are stunned with the realization of a ‘supersensible destiny’, specifically, the particularity of the mind of man. That supersensible destiny is not like Kant in rational freedom, or humanity incarnate in individuals, but in eccentric forms of personal consciousness. For Kant our supersensible nature is the power of reason to legislate maxims of action which command obedience. In the core of our being, Murdoch insists, is found the tragic freedom implied in love, that is, the perception of others in collision with the dynamics of self-picturing. What discloses our supersensible destiny is the work and peril of the imagination marked by love and its tragic freedom. Freedom thereby poses the challenge of the moral fate of ‘fictive’ persons: how to write novels that attend to the eccentric forms of consciousness embodied in characters, and how in our lives to perceive the reality of others who exceed the ways we picture ourselves and them. It is this problem, I suggest, that is probed in novels like The Black Prince and others. Other persons always exceed our ability to picture them and yet there is a drive to picture ourselves and our world. This is the struggle of the moral life. What about the difference between art and morality? For Murdoch this turns on the idea of form and also the possibility of genuine tragedy. ‘What makes tragic art so disturbing’, she claims, ‘is that self-contained form is combined with something, the individual being and destiny of human persons, which defies form. A great tragedy leaves us in eternal doubt. It is the form of art where the exercise of love is most like its exercise in morals’ (EM, p. 219). Art, in so far as it is pleasing and



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entertaining, is a crafted object. Great art is about that reality that defies form: the human being. Great art enacts in form the struggle of the moral life. Persons defy form in at least two ways. First, a human being cannot be reduced to artistic form, social totality, or a political agenda because humans have a supersensible destiny that exceeds sensible form. This is why art is not life. The ‘pointlessness of art’, Murdoch says, ‘is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe’ (SG, p. 86). The fact that human beings defy form is the reason the moral life cannot be represented in Kantian-like duties and laws that we are to obey, but, rather, must be a sustained labour of attention and love under the idea of perfect Good. Not surprisingly, characters in Murdoch’s novels shatter each other’s perceptions; not surprisingly, her account of the moral life is messy and yet austere in its demands. Human beings defy form in a second way. We fail to see that consciousness is always making pictures of ourselves and others. We defy the real for the imaginary. We are all artists, and that is the problem. In one famous passage Murdoch declared, ‘Man is a creature who makes a picture of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture. This is the process which moral philosophy must attempt to describe and analyze.’3 This is the reason she worried about the demand on the artist and the moral distortions and false consolations of human consciousness. That human beings defy form not only demarcates art from morals, it also articulates the struggle of the tragic freedom of love. One other point needs to be made. I will return to it later. For Kant and Murdoch the moral demand is endless and unconditioned because human life is sensible and free (for Kant), and enmeshed in the tragic freedom of love (for Murdoch). This mixed character of our being (sensible/supersensible) is disclosed in the experience of the sublime and respect, for Kant, or the workings of love in consciousness, for Murdoch. We are creatures ‘in-between’, as it were. Not just the dignity and moral vocation of human beings arise from this fact of our mixed being; evil and despair also transpire here. Kant defined moral evil as the subversion of maxims of action when an immoral maxim rooted in sensibility triumphs over reason’s demands. In order to succeed at the moral task and so to make oneself virtuous and worthy of happiness, Kant thought he had to postulate the ideas of a perfect judge, God, and also immortality – an endless time of moral striving. Reason puts a certain necessity on human beings to fulfil the demands of morality and





thus to be happy. This necessity rationally warrants the postulates of God and immortality. Murdoch too believed that the moral life centred on change, that is, the transformation of consciousness. While she grasped the unconditional nature of morality as well as the evil and despair that haunt human life, morals have to proceed without God or immortality. A different temperament is at work. We dwell within the ‘self-contained aimlessness of the universe’ that reaches beyond our knowledge and imagination. Ideas about God and immortality are too easily false consolations because they claim to grasp the whole of reality. I return to God and death in the third level of my reflections. For now it remains ‘pregnant with something marvellous’.

2 I have explored love and its tragic freedom as the essence of art and morals. Murdoch’s celebrated demand of unselfing through attention to others means that one task, maybe the central task, of the moral life is to escape forces, internal and external, that intertwine the self in itself. One needs to shatter form, break the images, for a vision of what is real on its own terms. Tragedy as a form of art is one that enacts this shattering while also rendering lived reality in form. The author and the moralist must protect the reality of persons against forces within art and existence that too readily efface persons through the triumph of form. The novels and the philosophy are then different but conjoint strategies that aim to show the moral plight of persons, fictive and real. Murdoch’s argument about the tragic freedom of love entails a stunning insight into ‘supersensible destiny’. Put differently, the tragic freedom of love that connects art and morals is also a key, a clue, to what it means to be a human being and the moral demand at the core of our being. If that is so, then Murdoch’s art and her philosophy are profoundly humanistic in orientation and intent. That possibility brings us to the second level of reflection. Currently there is new interest in humanism among philosophers, social commentators and religious thinkers. The concern is to counter dehumanizing forces of intolerance, fanaticism and ignorance wellknown on the global scene. Neohumanism, as it is called, makes a shift from the priority of the self found in classical humanism to an ethical concern for the other. Tzvetan Todorov notes that freedom of the self, the moral claim of others, and an inclusive moral community are basic humanistic values which ‘impose themselves [. . .] with the



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force of self-evidence and seem [. . .] more suitable to the human species than others’.4 Neohumanists also believe, in Edward Said’s words, that ‘human history as made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities’.5 The purpose of thought and action is human flourishing achieved by means of the distinctive power to act and so to create history, whatever other non-human powers might obtain. Two other attributes of neohumanism are crucial to note. One is a claim about the human capacity to overcome given conditions towards what is better, more just, more perfect. Most neohumanists talk about ‘lateral transcendence’ as opposed to some kind of other worldly religious transcendence which they worry will efface concern for human beings. Human freedom and love find their aim in human beings alone and not some supersensible reality. This means that there is no telos to human existence beyond the realm of historical, social existence. On these points, Murdoch seems to agree. The point of the moral life is to escape the tenacious grasp of the ego. We are simply here, she says. ‘And if there is any kind of sense or unity in human life, and the dream of this does not cease to haunt us, it is of some other kind and must be sought within a human experience which has nothing outside it’ (SG, p. 79). Along with ‘lateral transcendence’, a final aspect of neohumanism is then notable. The source of value, of Good, is not its metaphysical status so much as how it appears or imposes itself with a kind of self-evidence. In Murdoch’s terms, what stuns us into an awareness of our supersensible destiny and also the reality of the Good is the discovery of other persons. Their being imposes itself upon our attention with the force of reality; it stuns us. This is why ‘value’ or the ‘Good’ is not a product of will.6 Of course, the tragic dynamics of freedom means that the omnivorous ego seeks to reduce others into fictions of its own imagination. Murdoch concludes that ‘nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous’ (SG, p. 87). The Good must have its human evidence. I take it, then, that Murdoch agrees with the main features of neohumanism. This is why George Steiner is basically right when he says that Murdoch’s novels enact the ‘contradictory ideal of immanent transcendence, of down-to-earth “rapture” or illumination’, and, further, that this ideal is found in her ‘morality of love, of individualized reciprocity, whose foundations can, ought to be, those of rational humanism’.7 If that is the case, does Murdoch contribute anything distinctive to neohumanism, or, put otherwise, what is the nature of her ‘humanism’?





If we are to get Murdoch’s humanism right, then we need to probe further our supersensible destiny and the tragic freedom of love. What many neohumanists apparently do not grasp, but Murdoch does, is the danger inherent in saying that the value of others merely asserts itself with self-evidence. That is not enough. Right perception might be missing and if that is so, if one does not feel the weight of another person’s moral dignity, what then? Does their value somehow vanish because it is not perceived? A stronger argument about the reality of value is needed in order to make sense of the necessity of virtue. Murdoch’s position on this metaphysical point is why her work is criticized by neohumanists like Martha Nussbaum in ways that parallel criticisms of Kant, Plato and Christian ethics by others, including Todorov. The criticism goes like this. The Christian command to love thy neighbour, Kant’s insistence that we respect ‘humanity’ in persons, Plato’s claim, in the Phaedrus, to love the divine good in a person, and Murdoch’s austere statements about the Good and unselfing, mean that concrete individuals are loved or respected not for what they actually are, but as instances of a more general idea. Christians, supposedly, see human beings as interchangeable ‘neighbours’ loved without discrimination or attachment. Plato apparently is awkward with particularity and entranced with the idea of the Good. Kant cannot love himself but must reverence ‘humanity’ in him. In each case, individuals become images, symbols, or forms of the Good that have to be seen through, decoded, broken open in order to grasp the real Good. The failing shows up, the criticism goes, in the denial of the body and sexual love. Of course, Murdoch’s critics admit that her novels focus on sexual love and eccentric selves. Nussbaum concludes, ‘Murdoch’s art can depict more about the human particular than her characters can see, insofar as they are Platonic lovers.’8 Murdoch’s art supposedly redeems her philosophy. Stated otherwise, neohumanists are suspicious of the account of transcendence found among Christians, Platonists, Kantians and, at least in her philosophy, Murdoch as well. The critics are not surprised that in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she wanted a godless theology – but still a theology – and that she found something truly marvellous in Kant’s connection of the experiences of the sublime and the moral law (MGM, pp. 511–12). I do not think the critics are right about Murdoch, never mind their interpretations of Christian love, Plato or Kant. In order to get things clearer we need to return to that passage above from ‘The Sublime and the Good’ and introduce another clarification. Love is a perception of individuals; it is the discovery of reality. What stuns is the ‘unutterable particularity’ of ‘the mind of man’. Murdoch’s



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argument seems to be that the abstract, the real, the Good, is only experienced in the breaking down of the power of consciousness by what defies form: the real individual. That event of fracture is the appearance of the Good. While metaphysically real and basic, the Good is only rendered, expressed or seen in particular persons who break open, fracture, the form-making power of the ego. Yet the Good is also not limited to any particular individual. We can, in acts of love, ‘see’ the Good in anyone. Whatever one wants to say about Plato or Kant and their care for actual persons, Murdoch is not saying that the Good is real or manifest anywhere else than in loving attention to particular persons. That is the only place it is known even if the reality of the Good is not equivalent to discrete individuals. Because of this metaphysical claim, the neohumanist criticism of Murdoch is wide of the mark. A different temperament is at work. Murdoch’s critics are obviously not captivated by what she found marvellous in Kant, namely, that art and morals have unique modes of appearance, the demand of reason arising within its own failure, as Kant had it, or the discovery of the other persons, as Murdoch says, entangled in the tragic freedom of love that limits art and invigorates morals. The necessity of virtue remains, despite our failure of perception; the reality of the Good or the moral law exert force within consciousness and often against consciousness. Where Murdoch and Kant differ is in terms of how best to describe that mode of appearance: a demand of reason or that of love and vision. They share the conviction that ‘transcendence’ is what the mind cannot capture in its own terms, namely, the unconditional claim of morality that has its analogy in aesthetic experience. Human beings are mixed creatures in whom the supersensible appears within the struggle of the sensible. Only this insight, Murdoch intimates, enables a clear grasp of what art and morality are about. If one does not see what kind of creatures we are revealed in the sublime and in morality, then art, love and morality do not make sense. They lack rational grounds; they vaporize into the fog of feeling or a burst of will. If one does grasp this point, then there is a return to matters of ultimate concern and to our sense of what is holy, but within a humanism of the tragic freedom of love. Murdoch, we can say, is a chastened neohumanist. Other people are indeed the term or aim of transcendence, but this means the death of the self and awareness of the Good as the source of the necessity of virtue.




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I have explored the way in which Murdoch connects art and morals, and the account is probably uncontroversial. I have also shown how her thought on this topic commits her to a chastened form of neohumanism. I suppose that is my most controversial claim. It just rings true, I submit, that within aesthetic and moral experience something about the depth of our being and the existence of others is disclosed in ways not reducible to bodiliness. Even in our day it still makes sense to speak of a supersensible destiny. More profoundly, Kant’s and Murdoch’s arguments show that freedom and consciousness are so constituted that a reality other than ourselves appears within our world: the magnetism of the Good and the claim of the moral law. Our inner life is open to self-transcendence in and through encounters, perceptions and relations with others. This fact imposes a kind of necessity on us from within freedom: the necessity of virtue. There is an otherness in human beings and this makes us uniquely precious creatures even if we are vulnerable to fault and evil. Self-consciousness is riddled with the struggle between the necessity of virtue and the freedom to abide by or deny morality. Moral goodness is victory in this battle of our lives, lasting or fleeting. Moral goodness is a self-transcendence into our supersensible destiny. The texture of moral experience is the pathway to the holy, the sense of the sacred. This is why Murdoch’s humanism of love’s tragic freedom is open to the religious in a way that many neohumanists are not. Murdoch is a chastened religious neohumanist. If Murdoch is right, then we are creatures who in moral and aesthetic experiences confront the unconditioned. That is, we are the kinds of creatures who experience the sovereign claim of the Good, and what is beautiful and sublime, on our lives despite whatever other forces regularly condition and thus shape our existence. And that is just to say that the ‘unconditioned’ defies form, as we have seen. The question then becomes: how has the sacred, the unconditioned, which ultimately defies form been conceptualized? In fact, I have been exploring two different temperaments. Kant conceived the unconditioned, its necessity and evidence, through the idea of categorical duty. Murdoch does so in terms of the magnetism of the Good, love and attention, and consciousness. Is there any way to decide which of these conceptions is most adequate for articulating the claim of the unconditioned on human existence? What standard could possibly apply? The last element in the title of this chapter comes to the fore: fate, that is, the inescapability of



3

death. Experiences of the unconditioned and the holy are deeply bound to time and mortality. Does our experience of the unconditioned in art and morals disclose anything about the temporal reach and complexity of human existence and reality? What is the metaphysical and religious significance of the unconditioned? Kant thought we need the ideas of immortality and God in order to stave off despair and to bolster moral effort. Somehow happiness and virtue have to go together. Each imposes a necessity upon us. As an embodied, mortal creature, I cannot escape the desire for happiness; as a free, rational being, my freedom is bound to the necessary universal moral law. My existence is straddled between these necessities. The union of virtue and happiness is what Kant called the ‘highest good’, and it is an idea without which human beings cannot make moral sense of existence. If we thought that evil would always triumph, the wicked always flourish, and the good or innocent always suffer, then, Kant held, we could not render our lives morally intelligible. The unconditional moral law and the inescapable desire for happiness must be reconciled, or, he believed, morality would appear a sham. Ought implies can: because reason requires intelligibility we are permitted to think beyond empirical conditions. In order to reconcile virtue and happiness – the two necessities – we need some notion of infinite time to make ourselves virtuous and so worthy of happiness. Under reason’s demand, we are thereby allowed rationally to postulate the idea of immortality and also the idea of God as the judge of virtue who bestows happiness. This is the sublime reality of religious ideas. For Murdoch things are different. The moral life is pointless. The universe is aimless. Virtue ‘is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful’ (SG, p. 93). If we ask how the world really is, we are often told, in her philosophy and in some novels, that it is suffering and death. Late in The Black Prince, Francis tells Bradley that Priscilla is dead. Bradley responds: ‘Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it’s all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain.’9 Of course, a character is not the mouthpiece for Murdoch’s thought. Yet something true of Murdoch’s thought is reflected in Bradley’s temperament. According to her, moral goodness is incompletely realized in a human life, and, further, it shatters the turmoil of egoism and suffering. Goodness also reveals something. Does it reveal the rational permission to hold an idea of God and of immortality? No. Rather, love is the sign that we





are spiritual creatures, she says in The Sovereignty of Good. What else? ‘Goodness’, she writes, ‘is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance [. . .] can we understand the full extent of what virtue is like’ (SG, p. 103). Virtue is bound up with acceptance of the necessity of real death. The acceptance of mortality, not its overcoming, is the deepest truth against which virtue makes sense. This stark claim is deeply humanistic: human, made from dust and born to die. Humility, awareness that one just is dust, marks a good person. Virtue is the death of self-preoccupation and so true objectivity. Philosophy, as Plato famously taught, is learning to die. Murdoch insisted that tragedy is the highest art. The fate of the moral life, she claimed, is an unsuccessful one but, importantly, there are moments when the reality of the Good pierces the world from within the world. There is immanent and lateral but also religious transcendence in the acceptance of death as the background of virtue. Human beings are not creatures thrown into a meaningless void who have to create value through acts of will. Murdoch rejected secular existentialism. Yet we must ask: is the logical conclusion of her thought the idea that mortals exist in an aimless universe and that the inner meaning of the good life is the acceptance of the necessity of virtue against the backdrop of the necessity of death? I cannot hope to answer that question in this chapter. Yet Kant and, further behind him, the Christian tradition have different, if no less realistic, temperaments. The metaphysical ground of morality for Kant is moral freedom. Respect for rational freedom over the holy, is the background of virtue and not death. The most basic reality for Christians is divine life and not death, and, further, new life in redemption. Awareness that we are creatures combats pride and evokes gratitude for being.10 A life enjoined to divine life is marked by humility, knows suffering, will die. Yet perfect love (love of God and neighbour) discloses that through the brokenness of life, pride of self and sorrow of death, something nevertheless shines: the living power of goodness called, in theological terms, the being of God. The meaning of our supersensible destiny has changed. Not learning to die, but learning to live: that is the motto of a humanistic ethics drawn from the biblical traditions. In other words, while Murdoch likes Simone Weil’s claim that selfishness dies when the soul is exposed to God, there is another strand of Christian thought. The true self is found in the living God, the life of one’s life,



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as Augustine put it. The enemies of goodness are pride and ingratitude; the background of virtue is resolute gratitude for life, a kind of real joy.11 My point is not to launch into a defence of Christian moral thought. It is also not to suggest that in a single lecture, book or lifetime one could give a definitive proof of a Murdochian, Kantian or Christian outlook. We are probing temperaments but also seeking the truth. Murdoch’s kind of humanism, I judge, exceeds neohumanism in her insistence on our supersensible destiny and the transcendence of the Good. Yet it is a humanism which in temperament is a step away, before, aside or behind one drawn from biblical sources. Why? Because, for those sources and the temperaments they express, the background of virtue is not the acceptance of death but a conviction about the gift of life. Some will be pleased with Murdoch’s stand. Others will chide Murdoch for being too ‘spiritual’ or for not being religious or Christian enough. My conclusion is neither pleasure nor chiding. It is, rather, to isolate those points where her work helps fight forces of the inhuman. Murdoch’s thought on art and morals is an important bulwark against illusion, fanaticism and fantasy. What is more, her account of the tragic freedom of love opens anew fundamental religious questions in ways that theological reflection can engage. A theological humanism, if I can coin a term, would do so by intimating that a sense of the holy is somehow bound up with the gift and dignity of life despite the realities of suffering and the sting of death.12 The moral fate of persons is not just suffering, illusion and the reality of the Good, along with the unsuccessful struggle for virtue whose background is acceptance of death. Through real pain and moral struggle something else hits with the force of self-evidence. Finite life reaches out to deeper life and it is against the background of resolute gratitude that love of others and self gain power and sense. Murdoch might find this false consolation. One can only respond: look again.

4 In concluding, it is proper to ask: what does my argument, and even the way I have presented it, mean for the connection between art and morality? Murdoch thought that Western philosophy could be seen as a debate between Plato and Kant, and this chapter has engaged that debate. Yet if one asks about art and morality something else comes to the fore. Western civilization is driven most basically, if not exclusively, by the creative interaction and conflict between its Greek, Roman and





biblical sources.13 Within strands of these traditions there are points of agreement, especially about the unconditioned claim on human beings as mixed creatures. That is why Kant, Murdoch and Christian thought reach similar marvellous insights. There are also points of profound disagreement which I have unfolded not just in terms of the difference between will and love in defining freedom, but, more profoundly, in terms of the metaphysical significance of life and death. At a deep level, Western thought is the tracking of different assessments of what is disclosed in human mortality and the gift of life. Ethics and aesthetics in this civilization are a long and ongoing dialogue about the relation of death and life in disclosing the meaning and value of reality. Is the good real but reality aimless? Can the depth and reach of life be disclosed in the folly, travail and suffering of fictive and real human beings? Why love life? Answers to these questions matter for how we can and ought to live. Among the most basic facts of our time are the endangerment to human and non-human life on this planet, fanatic religious hatred of finite life and moral reasonableness, and the endless profaning of existence in late-modern cultures. Against these horrible realities we need a humanism open to a sense of the holy and the unconditioned and yet which also endorses the transcendent reach and dignity of finite life. In these reflections I have tried to explore the subtlety, brilliance and significance of Iris Murdoch’s contribution to that type of humanism.

Notes 1. Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (1997; London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 215. 2. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 28. 3. Murdoch, ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’, in Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (eds), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 252. Also see Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 42. 5. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 10. 6. This is a point in which Murdoch’s debt to G.E. Moore is most obvious. The good is a real but non-natural property that supervenes on natural realities. 7. George Steiner, ‘Foreword’ in EM, pp. xiv–xvi.



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8. Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual’, in Antonaccio and Schweiker, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, p. 48. Of course, the question of how to understand Christian love is massive. 9. Murdoch, The Black Prince (with an introduction by Martha C. Nussbaum) (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 359. 10. See, for example, Martin Luther, ‘Sermons on the Catechism’, in Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, ed. J. Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), pp. 207–40. 11. See the end of ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’; Augustine’s statement of his position is in the Confessions. On ‘real joy’ see William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 12. See David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). 13. There is another strand of thought that seeks to avoid these sources. Schopenhauer, with whom Murdoch engages, finds remnants of Eastern thought in the Perennial Philosophy of some Western thinkers. He sees this as Asiatic and even Aryan and so the real legacy of the West. I cannot engage this option here. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality, 2nd edn, trans. A.B. Bullock (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005).




Aeschylus, 33 Alter, Robert, 26 Alzheimer’s, 137n, 153 animism, 58 Antonaccio, Maria, 6, 100n Arendt, Hannah, 81, 121 Aristotle, 87–8, 138n art, 1–4, 10–11, 21, 24, 33, 67, 96, 148–50, 180–4, 187, 190 attention, 4, 8, 40, 89, 96, 116, 174 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 33, 62 Augustine, 33, 92, 190 Austen, Jane, 76 Ayer, Alfred Jules, 90 Babbitt, Irving, 87 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 133 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 56–7, 68n Ballard, James Graham, 18–19, 22, 28 Barber, C.L., 57, 62, 65 Barth, John, 21–2, 25–6 Bayley, John, 58, 67, 156 Beatson, Peter, 162 Beckett, Samuel, 19, 21 Berger, John, 19 Bergman, Ingmar, 61 Bergmann, Gustav, 87 Bible, The, 48, 77 Biles, Jack, 111 Blake, William, 93 Bliss, Carolyn, 163 Borges, Jorge Luis, 21 Boulton, Marjorie, 38 Brönte, Charlotte, 72, 76 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 19 Brophy, Brigid, 19 Brugmans, Edith, 100n Buddha, 158–9, 169–72, 175 Buddhism, 11, 41, 57, 146, 152–3, 158–60, 163, 168–9, 171–8 Burgess, Anthony, 19

Burns, Alan, 19 Byatt, Antonia Susan, 56 Byron, Lord, 93 Canetti, Elias, 60 Carter, Angela, 19 Célan, Paul, 131 Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, 119, 126, 137n, 158, 168 Chevalier, Jean-Louis, 158 Christ, 9–11, 13, 39, 41, 48, 77, 141, 146, 147, 149, 153, 156–60, 163–72 Christ figures, 10, 146, 160–3, 165–6 Christianity, 10, 37, 80, 102, 142–7, 151–2, 157–8, 160, 168, 171–2, 189–91 Christology, 9 cinema, 28 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 72, 89, 93 comedy, 56–63, 65, 103 communism, 141 Iris Murdoch Conference at Kingston University, 2008, 154n Conradi, Peter J., 3, 12, 38, 43, 44, 78, 81, 100n, 107–8, 113, 116–17, 126, 150, 154n, 172–3, 175 Coover, Robert, 25–7 Cowper-Powys, John, 59 Cupitt, Don, 80, 151 Currie, Mark, 26 Dante, 37, 153 De Beauvoir, Simone, 111 demonic characters, 59 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 9, 14n, 128, 135, 136, 148 Descartes, René, 87 Dharma, 164 Diamond, Cora, 88 Dickens, Charles, 31 194



Index

Dipple, Elizabeth, 46, 56, 116, 119 dogs, 66–7 Doherty, Gerald, 43 Dooley, Gillian, 110 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 57, 60, 61, 63, 111 Du Maurier, Daphne, 76 Durrell, Lawrence, 19 Eagleton, Terry, 9 Eckhart, 151, 176 Eco, Umberto, 21, 22, 25, 29 Eliot, George, 20, 34, 35, 60 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 91 ethics, 6, 88, 192 ‘ethical turn’, 1, 5–7, 9, 13n, 14n, 87–9, 91, 142 evil, 1, 2, 7, 8, 32, 71–4, 77–82, 135, 153, 188 existentialism, 89–90, 103, 190 experimentalism, 20–1, 23, 27 fabulation, 25, 27–8 Farias, Victor, 131 feminism, 3 Figes, Eva, 19 Foot, Philippa, 59 Forster, Edward Morgan, 31 Foucault, Michel, 88 Fowles, John, 19, 22, 25, 26, 27 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 43–4, 49, 51, 62, 91 Gainsborough, Thomas, 147–8 Gasiorek, Andrzej, 21 Giffin, Michael, 162 Giorgione, 147–8 God, 1, 7, 10–11, 48, 52, 54, 80–2, 90, 92, 95, 96, 98, 105, 120, 129, 141–6, 149,151–3, 157–9, 161–2, 164, 166, 168–71, 176, 184, 189–90 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 92, 133 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich, 62 Good, 8–10, 71, 88, 96, 98, 102, 104, 115, 135, 149, 150, 165, 175, 183, 185–8, 190–1 Gordon, David. J, 56, 119, 124n

195

Gordon, Giles, 19 Gothic, 7–8, 28, 70–82 Greenblatt, Stephen, 88 Griffin, Gabriele, 116–17, 124n Grimshaw, Tammy, 11, 13, 154n Guevara, Che, 93 Haffenden, John, 47, 111, 169 Haines, Simon, 6 Halberstam, Judith, 81 Hampshire, Stuart, 88, 90, 103 Hardy, Rob, 8–9 Hare, Richard Mervyn, 103 Harris, Wilson, 19 Hawkins, Bradley, 172–3 Hawkins, Peter, 48 Hederman, Mark Patrick, 133 Hegel, Georg, 91, 138n Heidegger, Martin, 2, 7, 126–37, 158 Heppenstall, Rayner, 19 Hitler, Adolf, 131–5, 141 Hobson, Harold, 110 Hölderlin, 131–2 Holocaust, 2, 3, 7, 79, 134, 142 Homer, 33, 95 Horner, Avril, 7–8, 100n humanism, 11, 87, 180, 188, 191–2 Hume, David, 138n Hutcheon, Linda, 25 Ibbett, John, 155n Islam, 170 Jameson, Fredric, 29 Johnson, Bryan Stanley, 19–22, 25–6, 28 Johnson, Samuel, 61 Joyce, James, 18, 23 Judaism, 153, 170 Julian of Norwich, 33 Jung, Carl Gustav, 8, 43, 44, 47–54 Kafka, Franz, 23, 61 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 31, 75, 87–8, 90–8, 100n, 103, 138n, 143, 180–3,186–91 Keown, Damien, 175, 177 Kerouac, Jack, 169 Kristeva, Julia, 75



Index

Index

language, 1, 3–4, 87, 89, 90–1,136, 148 Lash, Nicholas, 152 Laverty, Megan, 5 Lawrence, David Herbert, 43, 47, 59 Leavis, Frank Raymond, 124n Le Fanu, Sheridan, 77 Lessing, Doris, 19 Lewis, Matthew, 72, 79 liberal humanism, 2, 3, 133 Locke, John, 138n Lodge, David, 27 London, 24, 72, 147–8 love, 57, 104, 107, 113, 120, 180, 181, 186 Luckhurst, Roger, 30n Luprecht, Mark, 10 Luther, Martin, 193n Lyotard, Jean-François, 18 MacKinnon, Donald, 155n Magee, Brian, 81, 108, 111 magic, 9–10 Mallarmé, Stephane, 89, 93 Malory, Thomas, 35–7 Malraux, André, 19 Marlowe, Christopher, 92 Martin, Priscilla, 12–13 Marx, Karl, 91, 138n, 141 Marxist theory, 3 Mauriac, François, 81 McEwan, Ian, 9, 11 McHale, Brian, 170 Metafiction, 25–7 Meyers, Jeffrey, 171 Mill, John Stuart, 138n Milton, John, 6, 91–7 Mishima, Yukio, 59 Mitchell, Juliet, 44 modernism, 17–18 Mole, Christopher, 100n Molière, 33 Moore, G.E, 192n Moore, Scott, 8, 12 Mulhall, Stephen, 10, 13n, 100n Murdoch, Iris Acastos, 13 Accidental Man, An, 38, 66–7, 99n ‘Against Dryness’, 20–2, 71, 171

Bell, The, 8, 37, 40, 58, 70, 72–8, 80, 82, 110, 147–8 Black Prince, The, 22–3, 27, 44, 60, 63, 67, 104, 129–30, 151, 182, 189 Book and the Brotherhood, The, 9, 12, 25, 37–9, 41, 43, 45, 48–50 Bruno’s Dream, 10, 37, 58, 64–5, 113–23 ‘Existentialists and Mystics’, 5, 20, 22, 114, 156 Fairly Honourable Defeat, A, 8, 32–3, 38, 58–9, 63, 102, 106–8, 110–11 Flight from the Enchanter, The, 70 Good Apprentice, The, 11, 25, 43, 45, 49–53, 59 Green Knight, The, 11, 13, 25, 37, 43, 45, 53–4, 58, 67, 135, 146, 153, 168, 171–8 Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being, 2, 126, 128, 130, 137 Henry and Cato, 25, 34, 41, 46, 146, 160 ‘Idea of Perfection, The’, 99n, 103 Italian Girl, The, 24, 70, 81 Jackson’s Dilemma, 2, 7, 126–8, 131–3, 136–7, 146 Message to the Planet, The, 12, 37, 41, 134, 136–7, 169 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 27, 38, 44, 47, 49, 57, 61–2, 96, 104, 128, 135–6, 156–7, 164, 168–9, 171–2, 186 ‘Miss Beatrice May Baker, Headmistress of Badminton School, Bristol, from 1911 to 1946’, 37 Nice and the Good, The, 58, 64, 147–9, 169 Nuns and Soldiers, 13, 25, 37, 39, 47, 60, 152–3, 163–5, 169 ‘On “God” and “Good”’, 95, 103, 115 Philosopher’s Pupil, The, 5, 23–5, 28, 58, 159, 169 Platonic Dialogues, 40 Red and the Green, The, 32



196

Sacred and Profane Love Machine, The, 20, 25, 27, 44, 47, 59 Sandcastle, The, 40 The Sea, The Sea, 25, 41, 58, 63–4, 104, 169 Severed Head, A, 44, 57, 63 Sovereignty of Good, The, 44–6, 51, 107, 132, 144, 189 ‘Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts, The’, 6, 10, 90, 103, 110, 113–15, 122–3 ‘Sublime and the Good, The’, 180, 186 Time of the Angels, The, 8–11, 24, 38–9, 70, 78–81, 102–6, 110–11, 143, 146, 149, 160–1, 169 Under the Net, 3, 35, 40, 58, 62–3 Unicorn, The, 28, 61, 70, 76–8, 82 Unofficial Rose, An, 32, 39, 58, 146 ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, 91 Word Child, A, 25, 38, 48, 51, 54, 61, 145–6 Nabokov, Vladimir, 21 neohumanism, 184–8 new historicism, 3 Nicol, Bran, 4–5, 8, 74 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 60, 90–1, 103, 128, 135, 142–3 nihilism, 9, 79, 144 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 119–20 Nouveau Roman, 18, 21, 23, 28–9 Nussbaum, Martha, 5, 48, 87, 88, 186 Nye, Robert, 19 Oates, Joyce Carol, 24–5 Ondaatje, Michael, 169 ontological proof, 98, 102 Osborn, Pamela, 10–11, 154n Parker, David, 6, 87 Plato, 13, 31, 33, 40, 43, 71, 98, 102, 108, 114, 133, 135, 138n, 144–5, 170, 172–6, 186–7, 190–1 Pliatzky, Leo, 63 Poe, Edgar Allan, 75, 89 post-colonialism, 3 postmodernism, 5–6, 9, 17, 21–2, 25–6, 27, 29, 169

197

post-structuralism, 3, 5, 9, 72 Proust, Marcel, 18, 23 psychoanalysis, 44 psychoanalytic theory, 3 Pullman, Phillip, 12 Pym, Barbara, 68n Pynchon, Thomas, 169 Queneau, Raymond, 62 Quin, Ann, 19 Racine, Jean, 33 Ramanathan, Suguna, 11, 174 Raphael, Frederic, 96 reader-response theory, 3 realism, 3–7, 17–18, 21–3, 25, 28, 96, 148 Rembrandt, 147 Rilke, Rainer, 133 Rimbaud, Arthur, 89, 93 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 17–18, 25, 28 Robinson, John, 80, 143 Rorty, Richard, 87–8 Rose, William Kent, 110 Rowe, Anne, 10, 13, 99–100n Royle, Nicholas, 26 Rumi, 10, 118–19 Ryle, Gilbert, 90 Sage, Lorna, 59 Said, Edward, 185 Sarraute, Nathalie, 18–20, 23 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 19, 27, 31, 47, 88, 89, 90, 97, 111, 113, 126, 128, 135 Satan, 91–5 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 4, 87 Scholes, Robert, 26–9 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 61 Schubert, Franz, 133 Schweiker, William, 11, 154n Shakespeare, William, 12, 33, 35, 56–7, 61–6, 77, 131 Shelley, Mary, 93, 95 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 89 Shiva, 10 Shuttle, Penelope, 19, Smith, Zadie, 11 Socrates, 13, 39–40, 114 Sontag, Susan, 60



Index

Index

Sophocles, 33 Spark, Muriel, 19 Steiner, Franz, 63, 134 Steiner, George, 3, 12, 38, 43–4, 78, 81, 107–8, 113, 116–17, 126, 137n, 150, 172–3, 175 Stevens, Anthony, 52–3 Stevens Heusel, Barbara, 13n structuralism, 3, 26 suffering, 7, 39, 41, 43–5, 48, 51–3, 77–8, 120, 134, 147, 149, 159, 189–92 Sukenick, Ronald, 22 surrealism, 89–90 Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitaro, 168 Taylor, Charles, 88 Themerson, Stefan, 19 theology, 9, 56, 142 Thompson, Frank, 63, 134 Tintoretto, 147 Titian, 147, 149 Todd, Richard, 30n Todorov, Tzvetan, 184, 186 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, 169 Tolstoy, Leo, 20, 59, 116, 121–3

Tracey, Honor, 68n tragedy, 33, 61–3, 65, 103, 182, 184 Turner, Jack, 54–5n United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 134 Vidal, Gore, 22 Villon, François, 33 Virgil, 37, 153 Waugh, Patricia, 6, 7, 26, 169, 170 Weil, Simone, 31–3, 33, 37, 60, 74, 81, 89, 115–16, 120, 174, 190 White, Frances, 2, 7, 14n, 55n White, Patrick, 10, 156–9, 162, 165–7 Williams, Bernard, 88 Wilson, Colin, 119 Wind, Edgar, 117 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 31, 87, 90, 98, 111, 122, 133, 142, 150 Wood, James, 62 Wordsworth, William, 93 Yeats, William Butler, 58



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