Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment Edited by
Anne Rowe
Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
Also by Anne Rowe THE VISUAL ARTS AND THE NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH
Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment Edited by
Anne Rowe Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Kingston University
Editorial matter, Selection, Introduction and Chapter 12 in Part 4. © Anne Rowe 2007 And remaining chapters © respective authors 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph 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, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised 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 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-00344-6 hardback ISBN-10: 0-230-00344-3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Iris Murdoch–A Reassessment / edited by Anne Rowe. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-00344-3 (cloth) 1. Murdoch, Iris–Criticism and Interpretation. I. Rowe, Anne, 1952PR6063.U7Z6295 2006 823’.914–dc22 2006044845 10 16
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
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Contents Acknowledgements
ix
Notes on Contributors
x
Notes on References and Abbreviations
xiii
Preface
xiv
Introduction: ‘A Large Hall of Reflection’ Anne Rowe
Part I Reinstating Theology
1
13
1 Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy and Theology Maria Antonaccio
15
2 ‘All the World Must be “Religious”’: Iris Murdoch’s Ontological Arguments Stephen Mulhall
23
3 Iris Murdoch’s Deconstructive Theology Suguna Ramanathan
35
Part II Reconsidering Moral Philosophy
45
4 Murdoch on the Impossibility of Moral Scepticism Edith Brugmans
47
5 The Ethics of Self-Concern Samantha Vice
60
6 Attention, Self and The Sovereignty of Good Christopher Mole
72
Part III Revisiting The Saint and the Artist
85
7 The Ascetic Impulse in Iris Murdoch’s Thought Maria Antonaccio
87
8 The Curse of The Bell: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Narrative Bran Nicol
100
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viii Contents
Part IV Rereading Literature
113
9 Saint Iris? Murdoch’s Place in the Modern Canon Nick Turner
115
10 Houses of Fiction: Iris Murdoch and Henry James Priscilla Martin
124
11 A Literary Foremother: Iris Murdoch and Carol Shields Alex Ramon
136
12 ‘Policemen in a Search Team’: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Ian McEwan’s Atonement Anne Rowe
148
Part V Renegotiating Gender, Sexuality and Feminism
161
13 Plato, Foucault and Beyond: Ethics, Beauty and Bisexuality in The Good Apprentice Tammy Grimshaw
163
14 Reassessing Iris Murdoch in the Light of Feminist Philosophy: Michèle Le Doeuff and the Philosophical Imaginary Marije Altorf
175
Part VI Reinvestigating Negative Capability
Index
187
15 Oedipus, Peter Pan and Negative Capability: On Writing Iris Murdoch’s Life Peter J. Conradi
189
16 Alzheimer’s Amyloid Analogy: Disease Depicted through A Word Child Rivka Isaacson
204 214
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Frances White and Daphne Turner for their help with editing and proof-reading. Maria Antonaccio gave generously of her time for consultation and advice, and Peter Conradi also provided the most valuable practical advice. I should also like to acknowledge the help of my colleagues at Kingston University, Avril Horner, Meg Jensen and David Rogers for reading material and commenting. Martin Corner, John Ibbett, Stephen White and Stephen Mulhall have also kindly helped with specific queries. Extracts from Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals by Iris Murdoch, published by Chatto & 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. Extracts from The Sovereignty of Good are reproduced by permission of Taylor Francis Books UK. Professor John Bayley kindly provided the cover photograph of Iris Murdoch, and although every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge the copyright-holder, I have been unable to do so. I would be grateful for information which would enable me to rectify the omission in future editions.
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Notes on Contributors Marije Altorf is Lecturer in Philosophy at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill. She has published on Murdoch, imagination and feminist philosophy, and she co-translated Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good into Dutch (Over God en het Goede, Amsterdam: Boom, 2003). Maria Antonaccio is Associate Professor of Religion at Bucknell University. She is author of Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (2000), and co-author, with William Schweiker, of Iris Murdoch and The Search for Human Goodness (1996). She has also published several articles on Murdoch’s moral thought and has written for the Iris Murdoch Society News Letter. Edith Brugmans (1956) is Professor of Philosophy at Leiden University and Associate Professor of Philosophy of Law at Radboud University in the Netherlands. In 1989 she published a monograph on the moral philosophy of Adam Smith. Recently she published articles on the philosophy of Iris Murdoch and a book on moral scepticism (in Dutch). 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) which was published in its third edition in 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 advisor to the Iris Murdoch Society News Letter to which he contributes articles and reviews. He has also written books on John Fowles, Angus Wilson and Dostoevsky. Tammy Grimshaw is the author of Sexuality, Gender and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005). She recently completed Ph.D. studies at the University of Leeds, where she wrote her thesis on gender and sexuality in Iris Murdoch’s writing. She was the recipient of the Overseas Research Scholarship and the University of Leeds Tetley and Luton Scholarship. She is currently x
Notes on Contributors xi
conducting research on the performativity of gender in British fiction of the 1990s and twenty-first century. Rivka Isaacson obtained her Ph.D. in biophysics from Cambridge University in 2000 under the supervision of Professor Sir Alan Fersht. As recipient of a Wellcome Trust Prize Travelling Fellowship, she performed research at Harvard Medical School for two years before returning to the UK to continue her post-doctoral investigations of intracellular protein recycling at Imperial College, London. She is involved in several interdisciplinary projects to promote public engagement with science. Priscilla Martin teaches English and Classics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has also taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, London, California Colorado, Hawaii and Washington, Seattle. Her publications include Piers Plowman: The Field and the Tower, and Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives and Amazons. She regularly reviews for the Iris Murdoch News Letter and contributed the article on Iris Murdoch for the Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English. Christopher Mole is a post-doctoral Fellow in the Philosophy/ Neuroscience/Psychology Programme at Washington University in St Louis and has worked on a number of topics in the philosophy of cognitive science. His current research is focussed on attention, both as a topic in cognitive psychology and as a topic in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy. Stephen Mulhall is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford. His research presently centres around Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. He has published a number of articles on the relation of the work of Iris Murdoch to questions about ethics, religion and the nature of philosophy. Bran Nicol is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He has published extensively on Iris Murdoch and contemporary fiction and is author of Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction which was published in its second edition by Palgrave in 2004. Suguna Ramanathan retired as Head, English Department and Dean of the Arts Faculty, St Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad, India in 2002. Her publications include Iris Murdoch Figures of Good (1990) and The Novels of C.P. Snow: A Critical Introduction (1978), both of which were published
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in the UK by the Macmillan Press. She is one of the editors of The Silken Swing: The Cultural Universe of Dalit Women (2000) and one of the authors of Journeys to Freedom: Dalit Narratives (2004) and has translated in collaboration, Modern Gujarati Poetry: A Selection (1998). Her first novel The Evening Game was published by Penguin in New Delhi in 2001. She has published articles of theological interest in journals in the UK, such as The Heythrop Journal and The Way. Alex Ramon is a part-time lecturer at the University of Reading where he is undertaking Ph.D. work on the fiction of Carol Shields under the supervision of Professor Coral Ann Howells. He is also planning to edit a collection of Shield’s non-fiction. Anne Rowe is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Director of The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University. She is a Director of the Iris Murdoch Society and European editor of the Iris Murdoch Society News Letter where she contributes articles and reviews. She is author of The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch published in 2002. Currently she is working with Cheryl Bove on Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London, a book of essays, walks and drawings that celebrates Murdoch’s love for London and explores the variety of ways in which the City inhabits her novels. Nick Turner is Teaching Fellow at the University of Manchester. He read Modern Languages at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and is undertaking a Ph.D. which is ‘An Investigation of Canonicity in the Work of Post-War British Women Novelists’: the subjects are Iris Murdoch, Anita Brookner, Emma Tennant, Ruth Rendell and Penelope Fitzgerald. He has published articles on Jane Austen and A.S. Byatt, and reviews of books on Popular Fiction and on A.S. Byatt. Samantha Vice is Lecturer in Philosophy at Rhodes University in South Africa. She is co-author, with Ward E. Jones, of Ethics in Film, forthcoming for Oxford University Press, and has written articles on the self, goodness, immortality and autonomy. Her work is much influenced by the thought of Iris Murdoch. In ‘Literature and the Narrative Self’ (Philosophy, 78, 2003) she uses Murdoch to critique the currently popular notion of the narrative self; and in ‘On the Tedium of the Good’ (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 8, 4, 2005), Murdoch is the inspiration for her argument that we need more adequate and attractive representations of goodness.
Notes on References and Abbreviations References to the following texts refer to the editions indicated and are abbreviated as follows: Peter J. Conradi, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997): EM. Peter J. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, 3rd Edition (London: HarperCollins, 2001): SA. Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 2001): IMAL. Gillian Dooley, From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003): Dooley. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992): MGM. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970): SG. Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction 2nd Edition (London: Palgrave, 2004): IM:TRF. The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University is abbreviated as CIMS. Unless otherwise stated, references to the novels of Iris Murdoch are to the Penguin editions (Harmonsdworth, UK). The date of the edition is provided in the first reference within each essay; subsequent references give page numbers only. All publications by Chatto & Windus (London) are abbreviated to ‘Chatto’.
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Preface Mid-way through his great 1939 essay on Dickens, Orwell remarks: ‘By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read as far as this , will probably be angry with me’.1 Orwell has just spent many pages detailing Dickens’s frailties and limitations: Dickens had a narrow social range, and wrote confidently only of the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on. He had no contact with industry, agriculture or the governing classes. He wrote little or nothing about work. Work always happens off-stage. Not merely does he have no ideal of work, but he idealizes leisure instead. He has no profound criticism to make of domestic service, and his ideal master–servant relation is feudal. Moreover, Orwell tells us, Dickens’s absurd and melodramatic plots are the last thing anyone can recall, or even wish to. Sexual love is outside his scope. His critique of society is exclusively moral: he wants to change the individual human heart, not a corrupt social system as such. He has radical views about education in childhood, yet sent his sons to Eton. His radicalism, like Iris Murdoch’s, softened in some respects as he aged. His characters constantly verge towards caricature and are twodimensional, in the grip of their author’s private need for them. Many of these criticisms, mutatis mutandis, can be levelled against Iris Murdoch: the narrow social range; the absence of much discussion of work; the obsession with the moral and the under-playing of the political; the privileging of education as a panacea for society’s ills; the forgettable plots (unless you are a critic, and obliged to learn them); the sense that the characters are automata or slaves of their author’s plot and puppeteering; the stock types and, sometimes, stock situations. Her last novels, moreover, are too long, and remote from ordinary life. Dickens, too, is remote from certain aspects of his epoch. He lived through an age in which almost every aspect of working life was revolutionized, and left no record of, for example, the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, or wood-pulp paper. Orwell omits to mention Dickens’s palpable fascination with the novelty of the railway, which after all does feature importantly in his fiction, and untidies Orwell’s case. Murdoch, like Dickens, lived through an age of extraordinarily rapid changes. In her case, curiously, new technologies are not entirely neglected. Yet the way that they are included amounts to their being put into quotation marks, and found exceptional. xiv
Preface xv
True, she hated and feared computers, and there is no instance where one occurs in her novels. But the invention of the fax machine makes possible Joan Blackett’s marriage in The Green Knight; jet travel enables Peter’s sudden appearances in different parts of the world in The Unicorn; her unpublished and failed 1959 novel, Jerusalem, oddly invents and predicts the answer phone; the telephone, which her parents’ family home did not possess until after the first twenty-seven years of married life together – ‘the devil’s instrument’ as Murdoch once called it to her St Anne’s colleague Barbara Mitchell – features importantly and spookily in An Unofficial Rose, and a tape-recorder plays an uncanny role in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, as does the waste-disposal unit that swallows Kate’s glove in The Nice and the Good. These are surreal machines to Murdoch, and their presence startles us exactly because her world is a world of romance, not of scientific realism. We remember the telephone kiosk in A Severed Head because she poetically and aptly compares it to a wayfarer’s shrine. Orwell’s wonderful essay, near the end, contains the remark, already cited, ‘By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read as far as this, will probably be angry with me’. He goes on in the essay’s final moments to suggest why Dickens, for all his limitations, is also great: once Dickens describes something, you see it for ever; no other writer combines such purposelessness with such vitality; what he created is less a series of novels, more an entire world; although his imagination overwhelmed everything, like a kind of weed, his genius is to create ‘the unnecessary detail’ that you do not forget; Dickens has the face of a man who is ‘generously angry’.2 For just these reasons, many of us longed for the newest Murdoch novel and sat up half the night unable to put it down. We might be said to recall those crowds on 42nd Street in New York City awaiting the packet boats bringing the latest instalment of Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield. We have been bereft for ten years of such moral treats. And Orwell’s view of Dickens helps us understand our loss and hunger alike. Dickens and Murdoch were both serious yet popular; both had phenomenal energy; both were poets. Each of their first novels was picaresque: Dickens’s picaresque in Pickwick Papers came out of Smollett; Murdoch’s in Under the Net out of Raymond Queneau. Both, too, are utterly unlike their contemporaries; they are sui generis, one of a kind, with, in a sense, no real contemporaries. They were ‘free spirits’. Dickens stood above what Orwell terms the ‘smelly little orthodoxies which are contending for our souls’,3 by which, since he champions Dickens’s liberalism and radicalism, he probably meant political
xvi Preface
orthodoxies: the lies of Stalinism absorbed by the Popular Front; the lies of Fascism absorbed by sections of the Establishment. Murdoch, too, was a spirit free from fashionable credos. In Charles Taylor’s words, she ‘jumped the box’ of Oxford analytic philosophy.4 She showed others the way out. She bore considerable opprobrium for doing so, and was marginalized.5 She showed the inadequacies of popexistentialism, and never bought into the loonier wings of feminism or structuralism. She too, in our time, showed us how to go beyond the ‘smelly little orthodoxies that are contending for our souls’. Murdoch, like Dickens, created a whole world that recalls our own and yet is different, like yet unlike. Her novelistic world has real power and magic in it. Although you later forgot the plot, it is weird and fascinating to remember that exactly the same story gripped you as you read, and you needed to know how things would turn out. She told compelling tales: Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle, The Bell, A Severed Head: five different debuts, an astonishing Goethean facility. Then in the 1960s came the experiments with Neoplatonism, followed by the great Shakespearean romances of the1970s which are her best work. Even when she is at her most romance-like, she nonetheless conveys something of what it has been like to inhabit the post-war English world in general, and London in particular. William Golding recorded his envy of The Black Prince, a novel that, for him, evoked its place and time in a way he felt was hard for him to achieve in his own work.6 Her details stay with you even when the plots are forgotten. Her novels are funny, moving and wise; her moral philosophy accessible. As with Dickens, the details you recall are often details of London city life. London is the setting or part setting for twenty-four novels – all but the Irish pair (The Unicorn and The Red and the Green). After her plots fade, the London setting often remains: from Under the Net we remember Earl’s Court, the City pub-crawl, the Hammersmith theatre, the Mayfair hairdressers, Sadie’s Marylebone flat; from The Flight from the Enchanter Mischa’s South Kensington Palazzo and Rosa’s Camden Hill connections; from The Time of the Angels the fog-bound Rectory in the East End that is shaken by underground trains; Fulham and Battersea in Bruno’s Dream; South Kensington and Julius’s Brook Street flat in A Fairly Honourable Defeat; James’s Pimlico flat in The Sea, the Sea; the Brook Green ‘aviary’ in The Green Knight. Her London resembles Dostoevsky’s fantastical, and essentially religious, imagining of St Petersburg, as much as it does Dickens’s love-hate for London. One of the charming and startling moments in Orwell’s essay comes when he suggests that the whole of literary criticism is a huge network
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of humbug, entirely corrupted as it is by non-aesthetic motives. For many of us, of course, non-aesthetic motives enter into our admiration of Murdoch. As to the question of precisely what these non-aesthetic motives are, we may of course each have our own, different answers. For me, it might be the way she sees and describes our spiritual condition today as resembling the act of – as she expressed it in an unpublished radio interview in the 1970s – ‘staring into dark space’. Or it might have to do with how her own ‘anger with the way things are’ which also contains much generosity. The question of this generosity – or this love – is touched upon in many places. For example, in The Nice and the Good, when Ducane asks Willy: ‘Is your edition of Propertius going to be a great work of scholarship?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is it necessary to the human race?’ ‘No.’ ‘[. . .] Why do you do it?’ Willy reflected for a moment. He said, ‘It expresses my love for Propertius and my love for Latin. Love needs to be expressed, it needs to do work [. . .]’7 The note recurs. She had the courage not to shirk the question of the place of love in the moral life. It was there in her first published book, when she criticized Sartre for being unable to conceive of human love except as the ‘battle of two hypnotists in a closed room’.8 She wished always to learn, and to know and to understand, how love can go beyond power. She wanted to see how the alternation of voluntarism and determinism might be transcended. Canetti’s dismissal of such ideas carries, for me, little weight:9 those pages within Canetti’s book Crowds and Power concerned with national stereotypes would look at home in The Reader’s Digest. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, much feared doyen of German literary reviewers and broadcasters, writes of Canetti in his autobiography The Author of Himself in a chapter entitled ‘Canetti, Adorno, Bernhard and Others’.10 Reich-Ranicki argues that it was never enough for Canetti to be a notable writer. It was Canetti’s ambition to be the only writer in the world. All other writers were his enemies. Against Canetti one might posit John Updike, who wrote in an unpublished letter, ‘To me she was a marvelously creative spirit, a comfort and a stimulant, both [. . .] And such a vote, really, for the human race’.11 The question of love touches on what is magical in her work. It is to me extraordinary that Murdoch wrote (in 1963) that ‘the pattern of
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English life [. . .] can be something rather dull [. . .] [making] little appeal to the imagination’.12 A surprising dictum. What is startling about the pronouncement is how strangely it sits with her fiction, which shows English life to be anything but dull, which indeed always involves some transfiguration of the imagination, some redemption of particulars, some change. It is as if she transmits to us her own astonishment at ordinariness. If we ask ourselves which phenomena have this power, when closely enquired into by Murdoch, to effect such poetic changes of perspective, then it seems to me that we could each come up with a list. This list might include power, morality and the spiritual quest; but, above all, the transfigurations caused by love and by falling-in-love alike. She has the lover’s gift of feeling, and then the writer’s gift of conveying, the sheer poetry of objects, cars, dogs, changes in the weather, parts of London. At the end of Bruno’s Dream, Diana, holding the hand of the dying Bruno, reflects that love still exists, and is the only thing that exists. The war between love and power links Murdoch’s fiction, her moral philosophy and her life. She loved her characters and was omnipresent within her work. And if she bullies her characters a little, her best characters fight back. ‘Let them tell you what to do’, she would advise would-be novelist-friends. Such a struggle between writer and character touches on the question of negative capability, which recurs in my own essay later in this collection.13 I argue, following Coleridge, that she is paradoxically both absent and also omnipresent within her fiction, like Shakespeare. It is exactly this omnipresence whose loss we mourn: the sense that, whether we knew her or not, we lost, in 1999, someone who understood us. This is what Dickens’s readership and friends felt in 1870 also. The critical absorption and digestion of Dickens’s work has taken more than a century. That of Murdoch’s work has only just begun. An anthology such as this, which brings together the work of scholars, philosophers, post-graduates and literary critics from many countries, is in itself a celebration of the love that Iris Murdoch’s life and work exemplified. Love needs to be expressed; it needs to do work. The essays that comprise this volume are both expressions of work, and expressions of love. Peter J. Conradi
Notes 1. Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, (1939) collected in Inside the Whale (London: Gollancz, 1940). Online http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/Orwell-F.htm, p. 18
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Preface xix 2. Ibid., pp. 24–5. 3. Ibid., p. 25. 4. See IMAL, p. 303. The email correspondence is in the Conradi Archive at CIMS. 5. On the freedom of the artist she wrote interestingly in her Encounter articlereview of Stuart Hampshire’s Freedom of the Individual, ‘The Darkness of Practical Reason’, Encounter (27 July 1966), 46–50. 6. See: John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 119: ‘I’m slightly envious of people who are so firmly rooted in the twentieth century that they can write about it in great detail [. . .] I’m thinking of Iris Murdoch: The Black Prince is a very fine piece of work’. 7. The Nice and the Good, p. 126. 8. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto, 1987). 9. See Elias Canetti, Party in the Blitz (London: Hutchinson, 2005). 10. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 312–26. 11. Letter to the author, 2002. In the Conradi Archive CIMS. 12. See Y. Muroya and P. Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch (Okayama: University Education Press, 1998), p. 29. 13. See ‘Oedipus, Peter Pan and Negative Capability: On Writing Iris Murdoch’s Life’ in Part 6 of this volume.
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Introduction: ‘A Large Hall of Reflection’ Anne Rowe
‘A great work of art’, said Iris Murdoch, ‘gives one a sense of space as if one has been invited into a large hall of reflection’.1 This interdisciplinary anthology of writing is broadly divided into theology, philosophy and fiction, and invites readers into just such a ‘hall of reflection’ which reassesses Murdoch’s engagement with each of these disciplines. There are two other introductory essays: Maria Antonaccio’s ‘Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy and Theology’ follows this introduction and provides a framework for the philosophical and theological sections, while Nick Turner’s candid assessment of Murdoch’s position in the modern literary canon prefaces Part 4, which focusses on literature. My own introduction will provide a map of the various reassessments being made in this volume and suggest reasons why some seemingly unholy alliances are forged between Murdoch and poststructuralist and feminist theorists whose ideas her own work contested (Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Butler, Foucault, to name a few). It will also suggest a rationale for merging what Murdoch herself often described as separate ways of seeing the world and explore why, in practice, as many of these essays demonstrate, her work flouts the distinctions she advocated. Murdoch’s interdisciplinary practices facilitate the diversity of current research represented in the six parts that comprise this volume: Theology; Philosophy; The Saint and the Artist; Literature; Gender, Sexuality and Feminism; and Negative Capability. Contributions represent ongoing research in the UK, Europe, India, South Africa and the USA, and the essays are ordered in such a way that those at the beginning inform those that come later, and thus construct an internal dialogue. This structure, of course, embodies its own blurring of boundaries and defies the neat categorizations it pretends to, as theology and philosophy inform interpretation of the novels, and the novels illustrate, test and 1
2
Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
contest philosophical positions. The striking feature of this volume is the tensions it finds not only between Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction but also between her resistance to the theory-centred approach to textual analysis and the relative ease with which a number of essays in this volume find her novels or philosophy invite it. The theories of which she was most suspicious emerged in the 1960s via the work of philosophers and critics such as Barthes and Derrida and were at their most influential in the 1980s and 1990s. Her views alienated her from radically theorist academics and were partly responsible for a lessening of scholarly interest in her novels at that time. Indeed, one of the key features of this book is its reassessment of Murdoch’s ambivalent relationship with theory. Murdoch understood structuralism and deconstructionism to be an attack on traditional art forms and thought Derrida’s account of language represented a form of ‘technological determinism’ which weakens our faith in morality and our ability to discern truth (MGM, p. 194). She feared that these theories would foster a reductive approach to literary study because their ‘atmosphere and terminology [are] too constricting’ (EM, p. 23), and wanted texts to be evaluated by ‘the calm, open, judging mind of the intelligent experienced critic, unmisted as far as possible by theory’ (EM, p. 454). But, as early as 1992, Terry Eagleton famously suggested that Murdoch’s opposition to Derrida was ‘embarrassment at her own vision of things pushed to an embarrassingly radical extreme’,2 and poststructuralism, as he pointed out, values all the things that Murdoch herself values: contingency, muddle and incompleteness against all that would seek to systematize it. Murdoch criticism, therefore, progressed from the early direct equations between her philosophy and her novels in the 1960s and 1970s, to criticism influenced by Conradi’s view of her as moral psychologist in the 1970s and 1980s, to the most recent postmodern phase of criticism that sidelines Murdoch’s objections to theory: in 1999 Barbara Heusel considered how Murdoch related to Bakhtin’s poetics and in 2001 Bran Nicol expanded such discussion to include Murdoch’s relation to postmodernism, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis.3 Both Nicol and Eagleton point to the fact that Murdoch fails to see how far her own values, such as otherness and difference, are respectfully preserved in Derrida’s work, and such ambivalences are further explored in this volume (Suguna Ramanathan suggests, for example, that only some of Murdoch’s pronouncements unambiguously reject Derrida, while others ‘sound suspiciously like [him]’). Murdoch, it seems, was attempting to uphold divisions that could not be sustained in practice; she appeared to be emotionally denying
Anne Rowe 3
positions to which she was subscribing intellectually. She resisted them perhaps because they brought too close to home her own fear that morality ‘may turn out to be meaningless’ (EM, p. 71). She feared, too, that these theories might come to be understood as the only truths that art can tell, which would destroy any sense of its inherent value. Any kind of monocular vision or reductionism is anathema to Murdoch, and her denials are part of a quest to create precisely the multiplicity of perspectives that this volume offers. Yet critics here are careful to acknowledge the limitations of their approaches when it comes to ‘placing’ Murdoch. Ultimately, the hallmarks of her work – ambiguity, paradox and mystification – create ‘spaces [. . .] we can explore and enjoy’ (EM, p. 35). In fact, it is this ambiguity that allows for the diverse, often contradictory, interpretations that characterize this volume, and for the approaches to the novels that variously take structuralist, formalist, feminist and liberal humanist positions. Post-theory, the plurality of these critical approaches gives equal legitimacy to what has come to be seen as contesting ways of reading texts. Dovetailing Murdoch’s philosophical and literary practices requires justification because she herself insists that they make a dangerous mix, and perceives them as ‘totally different’ disciplines, ‘modes of thought’ and ‘ways of writing’ (Dooley, p. 36). While philosophy should ‘clarify and explain’, literature ‘is for fun’ and ‘leaves a space to play in’, but ‘the philosopher must not leave any space’; philosophy has ‘plainness and hardness’ while literature ‘is full of tricks and magic and deliberate mystification’ (EM, pp. 4–6). Murdoch’s reluctance to fuse the two may also reflect a desire to preserve the status of both her fiction and her philosophy: she was horrified at the thought that her novels might be read as didactic enactments of her philosophy, and thought that any attempt to draw direct equations between the two forms meant that the deeper meanings of her fiction would be obscured (‘art goes deeper than philosophy’ [EM, p. 21]). Conversely, she seemed equally concerned to preserve the separateness and integrity of her philosophy in the light of the ‘plainness and hardness’ of the English philosophical tradition. Yet much of the work in this volume is generated by links, tensions and equations between the philosophy and literature, which suggest ways in which they also blend. And ‘certain philosophical ideas [. . .] must somehow find expression in my novels’, Murdoch frequently conceded (Dooley, p. 36). She reiterates one crucial way in which she understands literature and philosophy to be identical: ‘[they] are both truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities’ (EM, p. 11). And if, as she suggests, good art expresses truth by manifesting ‘deep conceptual
4 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
connections’ because ‘any serious pursuit and expression of truth moves toward fundamental questions’ (MGM, p. 351), then such ‘fundamental questions’ must unite the philosophy and the fiction. These questions deal with freedom, love, truth, goodness and how, in a godless society, morality can be preserved. In this sense, 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, as such, takes over the role of philosophy and religion.4 She also says that a moral philosophy must be inhabited, and the novels are its practical illustration, so that their ideas are philosophical even though the language in which she debates them does not embody the ‘hard’ sparsity of philosophical discourse, but the magical, metaphorical discourse of literature. Her fiction mystifies rather than provides solutions to philosophical problems, and the merging of the two is more likely, as this volume illustrates, to produce questions than provide answers.5 But these tensions, as Maria Antonaccio acknowledges, are precisely what energise discussion of Murdoch’s work. If philosophy and literature, then, are never quite distinct, Murdoch’s ‘Godless theology’ is also ubiquitous. Her desire is that literature will provide the moral forum once supplied by religion: ‘Everything I have ever written is concerned with holiness’, she has said.6 The ‘mysterious interconnectedness’ between fundamental branches of knowledge that she attempts is therefore both deliberate – to do with the way she perceives the novel as functioning within society – and intuitive: ‘there is artistry’, she says, in ‘the sorting, separating and connecting movement of the mind’ (MGM, p. 351). This volume sorts, separates and connects in equal measure, and, despite Murdoch’s cautionary remarks, in endorsing and celebrating such connections she pre-empts the dismantling of boundaries between what were once perceived as distinct ways of seeing the world that is now an acknowledged development of poststructuralism. This volume does not so much demonstrate the transgression of boundaries as illustrate that, in practice, they do not exist. Peter Conradi’s Preface has set a celebratory tone with its meditation on how Orwell’s famous description of Dickens as a free spirit who refuses to subscribe to ‘the smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time could equally be applied to Murdoch. The volume itself begins by bringing the discussion of theology to the fore after its disappearance from the intellectual preoccupations of postmodernism and, in so doing, legitimizes and explores what Stephen Mulhall identifies as an ‘intermediate zone between philosophy, secular morality and religious belief’ that ‘many philosophers [. . .] [find] hard to take seriously’. Maria Antonaccio’s
Anne Rowe 5
introduction to the theology and philosophy sections is followed by two contentious discussions of Murdoch’s ‘Godless theology’, in particular her attempts to demythologize Christianity. Mulhall’s essay on Murdoch’s ontological arguments offers an analysis from within the Western tradition, while Suguna Ramanathan’s assessment of ‘Iris Murdoch’s Deconstructive Theology’ offers a reading from within the Eastern tradition. Mulhall believes that Murdoch’s objection to the conception of God as a powerful consoling fantasy is not a position that she needs to step out of the Christian tradition to make, while Ramanathan finds that Murdoch borrows much from Hinduism and Buddhism, both of which admit contradictory ideas. In common with many of her generation, Murdoch’s understanding of Christianity did not provide her with the resources to support her critique of the self, and Ramanathan reflects this in her essay, while Mulhall draws on a broader understanding of the Christian tradition which allows him to find within it that which Murdoch had not. Part 2 reconsiders Murdoch’s moral philosophy and begins with Edith Brugmans’s essay on the impossibility of moral scepticism, a concept that also derives from Murdoch’s engagement with the ontological proof. Brugmans treats the characters and situations of Murdoch’s 1971 novel, An Accidental Man, as answers to a philosophical question and raises an important question: if Murdoch makes claims for the ‘ubiquity of value’ by suggesting that all perception is moral perception, can she entertain the possibility of moral scepticism? Brugmans suggests that An Accidental Man offers a variety of arguments for moral scepticism but refutes them, and suggests that Murdoch’s denial that we can ‘think away’ morality may betray her worst fear that it might turn out, after all, to be meaningless. Samantha Vice’s ‘The Ethics of Self-Concern’ is the first of three essays that focus specifically on the idea of ‘unselfing’. All three find difficulty in reconciling Murdoch’s contention that to live ethically we must turn away from the demands of the inner self (which she considers falsifying – the ‘enemy of the moral life’), with her insistence that we must attempt to become morally better (which seems necessarily to require some kind of self-scrutiny). Vice suggests that the prohibition on attention to the inner life is neither plausible nor warranted by Murdoch’s position and argues that The Sovereignty of Good allows a place for it. Christopher Mole also finds Murdoch’s position to be incompatible with some kind of self-directed attention, but his approach is to suggest that we can keep the strong prohibition on attention to the inner but must reject the idea that morally important states of mind are inner states and think of them instead as being ‘world involving’.
6 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
Next, what has become a standard Murdochian interpretative trope, the struggle between the Saint and the Artist, is applied afresh to Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction to expand the boundaries of its application. Maria Antonaccio agrees that Murdoch does not unambiguously support the saintly idea of unselfing, and expands the paradigm of the struggle between the saint and the artist that Conradi identifies in the novels to find a similar ‘doubleness’ in Murdoch’s philosophy. In Antonaccio’s view, Murdoch never completely separated the aesthetic (hedonistic) from the ascetic (puritan), and she identifies metaphors of creativity and aesthetic perception that run as counter-currents in The Sovereignty of Good to work against the idea of unselfing. Antonaccio suggests that these inner contradictions, which all three of these essays identify, energize the philosophy as much as the novels. Like Antonaccio, Bran Nicol renegotiates the familiar territory of the saint and the artist, and these two essays together constitute Part 3. Nicol builds the concept into an argument about narrative and links the ‘artist’ figures in Murdoch’s fiction – the characters who create personal fables rather than recognize randomness and chance (as saints do) – to Murdoch’s own role as a story-teller with a similar desire to construct pattern and, by extension, to the reader, who interprets the clues that the writer provides. Nicol illustrates his theory by reference to The Bell, where the dichotomy between saint and artist suggests that resistance to the force of narrative and surrender to it work against each other. Applying the idea to narrative enables us to see how Murdoch’s fiction is, in fact, symptomatic of the changed attitude to narrative that marks the ‘postmodern’, as defined by Lyotard’s ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’. Nick Turner introduces Part 4 by considering Murdoch’s uncertain place in the English canon and suggests that A.S. Byatt’s recently less fulsome praise for Murdoch may represent a more general falling off in appreciation. Turner suggests that Murdoch once spanned both the ‘academic’ and ‘popular’ canon, particularly in the 1980s, but that The Book and the Brotherhood marked a distinct shift in reception. Other complications came with the ‘media hullabaloo’ that surrounded the publication of Conradi’s biography, John Bayley’s memoirs and the screening of Richard Eyre’s film Iris. Ultimately, Turner suggests, by her continual presence in contemporary critical discourse, Murdoch remains alive, and that if, as Bloom suggests, one of the things that makes a writer canonical is the ongoing influence (whether benign or otherwise) of their work on their literary descendents, then two following essays in this section argue for Murdoch’s growing canonical stature.
Anne Rowe 7
Each of the three essays that follow argues for a literary ‘duet’: Priscilla Martin suggests a link between Murdoch and Henry James, Alex Ramon between Murdoch and Carol Shields and my own essay connects Murdoch and Ian McEwan. An alliance between Murdoch and James is one that has not attracted any sustained critical attention despite obvious associations (both writers’ habitual use of the visual arts and similarities in character and themes), but Martin pursues such associations to illustrate flashes of Jamesian psychology in Murdoch (or even Murdochian psychology in James), similarities in motivations of character and shared moral concerns. They differ in that formal perfection for James is a major value while for Murdoch it is a temptation to falsity, but what most securely binds Murdoch and James, nevertheless, is a faith in the truth of art, which both affirm as something like religious faith – a ‘sacred office’. Yet Murdoch’s liberal humanist heritage cohabits with an ambivalent postmodernism making her an important link in a chain of association that stretches to the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Dominic Head has suggested that Murdoch’s ‘scrupulous thinking about the role of the novel and the novelist, in advance of an ethical world view, suggests a fruitful way in which the vision of many novelists can be appreciated in their struggle with form’,7 and Alex Ramon and I each reveal how both Murdoch’s ethics and aesthetics are perpetuated in the work of Carol Shields and Ian McEwan respectively: Ramon suggests that Shields’s own work reflects an appreciation of Murdoch, and that her novels rest on just such an admiration that Murdoch had for James. He identifies how Shields’s work echoes Murdochian ideas about the relationship between self and other; how her characters are confronted by an ‘unfinalizability’ that is central to Murdoch’s conception of the human personality. Shields’s experimentation with the novel form echoes Murdoch’s similar experiments, Ramon suggests, and he further explores the contradiction that both writers share between postmodern elements and a humanist focus on daily reality and the internal consciousness of their characters. The ‘median’ position between postmodernism and realism for which Shields searches, he argues, is precisely that middle ground incarnated in Murdoch. My own essay on Murdoch’s The Black Prince and McEwan’s Atonement suggests another middle ground where Murdoch is unable to divorce herself from postmodernism and where McEwan owes a conscious debt to liberal humanism. Both novels share a central paradox – they announce their fictionality and acknowledge that the novel form is compromised, at the same time as they construct possibilities for
8 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
secure meaning and authorial communication. McEwan is preoccupied with just such aesthetic and philosophical issues about the nature of truth, authorship and morality that Murdoch had considered thirty years earlier. This reassessment of Murdoch’s fiction testifies to her place in the tradition of literature as a ‘sacred office’ that links her back to liberal humanism, but also suggests that this ‘sacred office’ has evolved with the demands of the postmodern world. It sees Murdoch as a crucial link in the evolutionary chain of the English novel that stretches forward to the current century. A consideration of Murdoch’s uneasy relationship with gender, sexuality and feminism forms the focus of Part 5. Such issues have been sidelined in Murdoch studies largely as a result of her refusal to concern herself with feminism, but newer Murdoch scholars are not deterred by this reluctance on Murdoch’s part and thus both these essays break the mould of negative feminist attitudes to Murdoch’s work. Tammy Grimshaw argues that Murdoch demonstrates an enduring interest in gender issues, and links her to Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler and Michael Foucault. She suggests that the sexual identities Murdoch constructs present new possibilities that challenge traditional perceptions of gender; by using Foucault as a key to reading the ‘bisexual’ character of Stuart Cuno in The Good Apprentice Grimshaw finds that, like Foucault, Murdoch understands that the constraints of compulsory sexuality should be loosened so that bisexual and homosexual possibilities can emerge and artificial constructs be overthrown. Grimshaw is careful to acknowledge that such views do not automatically align Murdoch with feminism, and Marije Altorf picks up this point in the following essay that uses the feminist philosophy of Michèle Le Doeuff to cast a new light on Murdoch’s own philosophy. Altorf notes a similar reluctance to explore feminist implications in Murdoch’s philosophy as in her fiction, and illustrates ways in which Murdoch’s suspicion of feminism is shared with a generation of female philosophers, such as Anscombe, Foot and Warnock, who all believe that philosophy should be gender-neutral. But, Altorf distances Murdoch from her contemporaries by relating her to the work of Linda Alcoff and Le Doeuff, and suggests that her work has an unconscious sympathy with feminism by analysing some imagery in her philosophical writing.8 Murdoch’s suspicion of psychoanalytic criticism and her commitment to ‘negative capability’ has tended to deflect psychoanalytic approaches to the novels. The first of the two essays that comprise Part 6, however, rethinks this position as Peter Conradi explains the dangers of reductiveness faced by the biographer when ‘life-myths’ militate against the
Anne Rowe 9
individuality of the person one seeks to disclose. But he also reveals that they became evident when he was writing Murdoch’s biography, and suggests that they are manifest in the Oedipal conflict that informs the erotic symmetry of her plots, and in the theme of incest that ‘famously recurs’ in her fiction. Also, the fact that the ‘sinister boy’, Peter Pan, haunts her novels may suggest that, like Peter, she was self-sufficient yet lonely, and unable to commit herself fully or grow up. Conradi reveals that Murdoch’s disapproval of psychoanalysis stemmed partly from a fear that it might resolve an artist’s conflicts, without which she could not write. He suggests that her gift of negative capability might imply that the writer is not, as is commonly thought, religiously absent, but mysteriously omnipresent in her work. This important essay candidly illustrates the competing tasks of the biographer: to acknowledge justly the links between life and art; to honour the contingent, and, ultimately, to respect human mystery. The final interdisciplinary link is between literature and science, and the last essay is by Rivka Isaacson, a scientist from Imperial College, London. Isaacson illustrates the protein proliferation that characterizes Alzheimer’s disease by reference to Murdoch’s 1987 novel A Word Child, and after explaining the concepts of ‘entropy’ and ‘enthalpy’, she envisages the plot of this book as an analogy of the Alzheimer’s disease mechanism which enables readers to see how this degenerative condition ravages the brain. Isaacson offers scientists and literary scholars a new framework for understanding each other’s disciplines and her contention that the repetitive structure of A Word Child mirrors the progression of Alzheimer’s suggests ways in which Murdoch’s novels may continue to inform scientific research. If, as Isaacson tells us, the effects of Alzheimer’s may be present up to twenty years before symptoms appear, this kind of work is the logical extension of links being pursued by scientists at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College, London, who are currently analysing the syntax and lexical diversity of Murdoch’s early and late work to ascertain how early the onset of Alzheimer’s may manifest itself in language. The variety of approaches employed in this volume necessitates not only ‘tactful’ close readings that give autonomy to Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy, but also demands theoretically informed perspectives that allow them to be responsive to positions about which she voiced suspicion. Head notes that the critical attempt to establish schools or categories has been an imperfect, but necessary, process of explication,9 and Valentine Cunningham advocates ‘readerly tact’ that respects the integrity of literary texts but ‘listens to what theorists really say as
10
Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
well’.10 These positions sound remarkably close to Murdoch’s desire for the ‘relaxed polymath’ with the ‘calm, open, judging mind’ who ‘approaches the literary work in an open-minded manner and is interested in all sorts of ways [. . . which are] unmisted as far as possible by theory’ (EM, p. 25), though not, perhaps, uninformed by it.11 It is difficult, of course, perhaps impossible, to find the detached, objective critic able to withhold his or her own framework of understanding and privilege the text’s individual qualities.12 But this volume, with its multiple authors and variety of discourses, is perhaps the next best thing. The essays that follow reposition marginalized fields of knowledge and textual discourses; highlight the reassessments made possible by relaxed interdisciplinary cross-fertilization; allow internal contradictions to energize rather than close down debate; and take theory to texts and texts to theory, thereby blurring distinctions between conflicting ways of reading. It thus facilitates new approaches unhindered by what where once considered barriers to Murdoch’s work: ‘I know who are great writers in the past’, Murdoch said, ‘and I will not surrender them to theory but rather consider the theory in their light’ (EM, p. 25). Murdochian ethics – the study of human beings in the process of moral transformation – is the point where all these approaches necessarily converge. Dominic Head has noted that Murdoch fashions a moral philosophy that is in tune with the ethical project of Levinas, where ‘ethics’ combines the desire for convergence with a studied irresolution, which, he suggests, is ‘very much in the spirit of what Murdoch means by morals’.13 Murdoch’s desire for convergence draws her back to the ‘fundamental questions’ that preserve her links with the best of liberal humanism, while her ‘studied irresolution’ roots her firmly within postmodern ethics. Eagleton has suggested that the new millennium is indeed an awkward moment in history to find oneself without something to say about ‘fundamental questions’,14 and in his Preface to this volume Conradi suggests that Murdoch’s insistence on the place of love in the moral life and her courage not to shirk that question is what seals her greatness. Valentine Cunningham notes that it is astonishing that theory both refused to notice what Murdoch had to say about the ethical force of literature and blotted out the assumption that literature was about human behaviour.15 And if, as Eagleton also suggests, cultural theory has ‘been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love [. . .] religions [. . .] dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth and objectivity’,16 then Murdoch’s loving preservation of these aspects of human existence repositions her novels as valid objects of investigation in the age of the
Anne Rowe 11
ethical turn, and the new eclecticism that now characterizes literary criticism. Murdoch’s legacy, perhaps, is to facilitate new negotiations between contesting disciplines, between text and theory, between the past and the present and between art and life: ‘We have so many kinds of relation to a work of art’ she rightly said, and such energizing diversity is clearly evident in the ‘large hall of reflection’ that follows.17
Notes 1. EM, p. 28. 2. Review of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Guardian (20 October 1992), G2, p. 8. 3. See Barbara Stevens Heusel, Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s Novels of the 1970s and 1980s (Athens University of Georgia Press, 1995) and Iris Murdoch’s Paradoxical Novels: Thirty Years of Critical Reception (Suffolk: Camden House, 2001). Also Nicol, ‘Philosophy’s Dangerous Pupil’, Modern Fiction Studies (Iris Murdoch Special Issue), Fall 2001 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 580–601) and IMRF. 4. See Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction 1950– 2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 251–59. 5. Ibid., p. 255. 6. ‘Questioning Krishnamurti’, Iris Murdoch News Letter, 9 (1996). 7. Head, p. 258. 8. Other scholars are working along similar lines: Liz Tomazic has reinterpreted the image of the labyrinth and constructed a feminist rewriting of Plato’s myth of the cave. ‘Ariadne’s Thread: Women and Labyrinths in the Fiction of A.S. Byatt and Iris Murdoch’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia, 2005). 9. See Head, p. 256. 10. See Valentine Cunningham, Reading after Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 86. 11. My italics. 12. As noted by Head, p. 257. 13. Ibid., p. 257. 14. See Reading after Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 15. Cunningham, p. 149. 16. Ibid., p. 42. 17. EM, p. 24.
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Part I Reinstating Theology
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1 Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy and Theology Maria Antonaccio
It has often been said that Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy defies easy categorization, and one does not have to look far to see why. Trained in the analytic tradition at Oxford, she nevertheless challenged many of its central premises. A leading figure in the recovery of virtue ethics, she broke from her contemporaries by looking to Plato rather than Aristotle for inspiration. A self-declared atheist, she persisted in defending the importance of religion against the reductive views of her analytic colleagues and proposed that moral philosophy might become a kind of ‘Godless theology’.1 And despite her contention that art and ethics are allies more than rivals, she still insisted that philosophy and literature are importantly different human activities, and she exemplified that difference in her own writing. Given the highly original nature of Murdoch’s philosophical vision and the variety of the themes with which she was concerned, any attempt to assess her thought in the context of current philosophical trends will have to limit itself to the particular demands of the moment. My task in this essay, accordingly, is not to provide a comprehensive reading of Murdoch’s philosophical legacy, but to show how certain aspects of that legacy find expression in several of the essays in this volume.2 Although accounts of Murdoch’s influence differ, most commentators agree that she played a crucial role in shaping at least three important developments in moral philosophy in the past half-century: (1) the expansion of the domain of ethics beyond the confines of obligatory action; (2) the importance of the inner life and the role of vision and imagination in moral reasoning; and (3) the attempt to retain the idea of a moral absolute at the centre of human existence. These features of Murdoch’s thought have been noted by others, but in my view they add up to something greater than the sum of their 15
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Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
parts. They provide a model of what morality and moral agency are like that continues to provoke reflection and to generate new insights today, as I hope to show.
Broadening the domain of ethics One of most far-reaching of Murdoch’s contributions to contemporary ethics was her attempt to broaden the domain of ethics and the scope of moral deliberation beyond the concern with obligatory action that had dominated twentieth-century ethics. Long before thinkers like Bernard Williams directed critical attention to ‘the morality system’ as a ‘particular development of the ethical’ which emphasized certain concepts (for example, obligation, autonomy and duty) over others, Murdoch sought to extend the domain of the ethical beyond a constricted focus on ‘what it is right to do’, in order to encompass ideas of ‘what it is good to be’.3 If one considers the essays collected here, one could almost say that the entire volume exemplifies this first theme. In treating both the philosophical and the literary sides of Murdoch’s work, the essays show that some of the same themes that recur in her fiction find their way into her philosophy in conceptual form: the importance of states of mind for morality; the abiding significance of religion for ethics; the meaning of virtue and the role of self-regard (and its limits) in ethics; and other topics that would have been seen as irrelevant by many of her contemporaries. Such themes have become so entrenched in current ethics that it may be difficult to remember a time when questions of moral character and moral being were marginalized by the dominance of theories of right action. Yet as Charles Taylor notes, Murdoch ‘was criticizing the narrowness of moral philosophy well before the present counterwave’ of neo-Aristotelians and neo-Nietzscheans.4 In her justly famous essay ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’,5 for example, Murdoch offered an expanded definition of the phenomena that should be included in the study of ethics. Rather than restrict ethical inquiry to those operations of moral rationality related to choice and action, ethics should also consider what Murdoch called the ‘texture’ of a person’s being or the nature of their ‘personal vision’. These are displayed not only in people’s explicit choices and behaviour, but also ‘in their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessments of others, their conception of their own lives, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think funny: in short, the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversation’.6
Maria Antonaccio 17
It is not surprising, perhaps, that a philosopher who was also a novelist should have been the one to make this point so persuasively. As Martha Nussbaum notes, Murdoch was a distinctive presence on the philosophical scene for precisely this reason. As a novelist, she was able to help Anglo-American moral philosophy to achieve ‘a broader conception of its subject matter’ by attending to certain topics that had been rejected as a legitimate part of moral philosophy, such as ‘the virtues and the vices, the nature of imagination and attention, the vicissitudes of passion’. The explanatory brilliance of the famous example of M and D from ‘The Idea of Perfection’ made available a very different conception of virtue than the ‘muscular choice-is-all school of moral philosophy’ propounded at the time by thinkers as different as R.M. Hare and Jean-Paul Sartre. In this context, Murdoch’s assertion that ‘how we see and describe the world is morals too’ (EM, p. 73) must indeed have appeared revolutionary. A final aspect of Murdoch’s expansion of the domain of ethics, already hinted at above, is that her work was instrumental in encouraging the turn to literature and other forms of narrative as forms of moral pedagogy that may teach us more than philosophy can about the complexities of moral character and the often tragic nature of human choices.7 Although the so-called literary turn in ethics reached its high point in the 1990s, a more wide-ranging rapprochement between ethics and aesthetics has just begun. Recent work on the ethical dimensions of visual art, for example – a medium that Murdoch regarded as a paradigm case of the exercise of moral vision – suggests that there are further insights to be gleaned from her thought in this area.
The inner life and the recovery of consciousness in ethics Murdoch’s role in expanding the domain of ethics is closely related to a second aspect of her influence: her emphasis on moral psychology and the inner life. As Charles Mathewes has observed, Murdoch’s call for a ‘working philosophical psychology’ (EM, p. 337) was part of a larger ‘movement of return’ in post-World War II philosophical ethics, as thinkers like Elizabeth Anscombe sought to fashion a thicker, more concrete description of moral agency and practical reasoning through the recovery of Aristotle and ancient ethics generally.8 Although Murdoch did not turn to Aristotle but to Plato in her quest for a working philosophical psychology, The Sovereignty of Good had a transformative impact on the discipline of philosophy, encouraging younger scholars to consider the importance of mental states in ethics. As a result, moral
18
Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
psychology and also virtue ethics has become one of the significant areas of ethical inquiry, thanks to the efforts of Murdoch, Anscombe and others. An important effect of Murdoch’s emphasis on moral psychology was to encourage new philosophical attention to human capacities previously neglected in modern moral philosophy, such as vision and imagination, and to see these as integral components of what it means to choose and to reason ethically. Owing in part to the enormous impact of the M and D example in showing how much of our moral deliberation occurs before the moment of choice or apart from any overt action (that is, in our interpretive grasp of a situation, and in how we picture it or imagine it to ourselves), Murdoch has sometimes been accused of denying that action is important to ethics. This was never her intention, of course, but the fact that her work could be read in such a way indicates how radical (and perhaps unsettling) many readers still find Murdoch’s suggestion that we are responsible not only for our actions, but for the quality of our own thoughts and states of mind. Even everyday conversation ‘is not necessarily a morally neutral activity and certain ways of describing people can be corrupting and wrong’.9 Several essays in this volume bear out the importance of the M and D example for Murdoch’s views on the inner life. Christopher Mole, Samantha Vice and myself all use it in different ways to show that Murdoch’s famous ethic of ‘unselfing’, which is meant to counteract the pervasively distorting effects of egotism on moral vision and action, is actually far more complex than it first appears. A crucial question raised by all three is whether Murdoch’s critique of the self and its desires is at odds with her emphasis on the inner life and the role of self-reflection in morality. Edith Brugman’s essay, too, discusses the importance of the inner work of imagination as a moral activity as well as the techniques of unselfing that Murdoch developed to cultivate a vision of the Good. All of these essays suggest that, no matter how readily one may think Murdoch’s ethics can be captured in arresting phrases about ‘the fat relentless ego’, her depiction of the inner life and the process of unselfing contains tensions and perplexities that continue to merit serious reflection.
Religion and the absolute demand of morality Murdoch’s interest in religion is a corollary of her retrieval of the inner life and has always been a distinctive feature of her philosophy. Not only did it represent a direct challenge to her analytic colleagues, many
Maria Antonaccio 19
of whom regarded religion as simply another instance of bogus metaphysics; it also sets her apart from many modern critics of theism. Though Murdoch joined these critics in rejecting the concept of God, she did not believe that this necessarily entailed a rejection of the idea of a moral absolute. Through her re-reading of the ontological proof, she argued that although we may lose the symbol ‘God’, we cannot do without what the old God symbolized, namely, the idea of the Good as the source of an absolute moral claim on human life. For Murdoch, the ontological proof supports a conception of religion that is defined not as belief in a supernatural or personal God, but rather as ‘a mode of belief in the unique sovereign place of goodness or virtue in human life’ (MGM, p. 426). Precisely because Murdoch’s thought moves in ‘the intermediate zone between philosophy, secular morality and religious belief’ (as Stephen Mulhall notes in his essay), the legacy of her thought on religion may be more difficult to discern than her legacy in the two other areas I have noted. Some theological commentators have treated Murdoch’s aversion to theism as a kind of puzzling blind spot in an otherwise compelling ethical position, suggesting that her Godless theology cannot provide answers to the human dilemma that her moral theory so eloquently poses.10 Others, by contrast, have found Murdoch’s championing of an impersonal Good over a personal God, her suspicion of the ego-consolations and ‘cosy sentiments’ of traditional religion and the demythologizing impulse of her ‘Platonized Buddhism’ a welcome (if austere) tonic for the excesses of Christian orthodoxy and God-talk.11 Both of these kinds of critical reception, as well as other insights, find expression in this volume. Suguna Ramanathan’s essay examines the demythologizing and deconstructive potential of Murdoch’s moral imagination, focussing in particular on the highly overdetermined character of her treatment of religious themes in the novels and the notable appropriation of insights from non-theistic traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Ramanathan argues that even though Murdoch distanced herself from deconstruction in her philosophical writings, the novels come close to a ‘deconstructive position’ in that they often communicate a pervasive sense of uncertainty, doubt and undecidability. Nevertheless, in both of the genres in which Murdoch wrote, purification of consciousness lies at the heart of the religious disposition. Stephen Mulhall’s essay focuses on Murdoch’s revision of the ontological proof while also seeking to account for her ambivalence towards Christianity. While Mulhall appreciates Murdoch’s originality in finding moral and metaphysical insights in the proof that earlier interpreters
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Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
have missed, he nevertheless finds her rejection of a personal God (the object of the traditional proof) puzzling. Indeed, Mulhall sees no small irony in the fact that Murdoch felt she had to reject Christianity in order to make a point that is in fact endemic to Christian reflection: the prohibition against idolatry and literalism when it comes to symbolizing God. The strength of Murdoch’s worry about the dangers of false consolation prevented her, in Mulhall’s view, from further exploring the ways in which Christianity ‘might actually support the mode of moral perfectionism so central to Murdoch’s own thinking’. Whatever else one might say about Murdoch’s relation to Christianity, her moral philosophy continues to resonate with those who experience religion as something that cannot be fully captured in particular dogmas, institutions or traditions. By interpreting the idea of moral value as omnipresent, covering ‘the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations with the world’ (SG, p. 97), Murdoch implicitly rejected the idea that those who inhabit a community of faith can claim a unique or exclusive hold on moral insight. At the same time, however, her work challenges those who seek to flee the claims of morality by rejecting religion altogether. As Murdoch saw it, the claim of goodness on human life pervades even the farthest reaches of the disenchanted secular world: ‘[E]ven if all ‘religions’ were to blow away like mist, the necessity of virtue and the reality of the good would remain’ (MGM, p. 428). In concluding this essay, I want to build on this last point in order to suggest at least one area in which Murdoch’s philosophy continues to generate insights: the call for a renewal of humanism in contemporary thought.12 In doing so, the importance of the three features of her legacy outlined above will be apparent.
Conclusion: Murdoch and humanism Murdoch possessed an uncanny talent for identifying the underlying presuppositions of the reigning philosophical conceptions of her day. To the existential hero of Sartrean ethics, freely choosing his values in an inauthentic world, she contrasted the so-called mystical hero or saint, who relies not on will but on ‘genuine intuitions of an authoritative good’ (EM, p. 227). To the ‘Kantian man-God’, who uses his reason to survey the facts and then chooses, Murdoch contrasted the figure of the artist, whose perception of the world is not strictly ‘factual’, but mediated through the agent’s moral imagination. Murdoch’s use of such figures helped to expose the deficiencies in prevailing views and to capture features of moral experience that had been neglected or unnoticed.
Maria Antonaccio 21
In that same spirit, I want to suggest that Murdoch’s thought challenges yet another image that is pervasive in ethics today. Its moral outlook is dominant in secular democratic societies such as our own: a form of secular humanism whose central feature is its adherence to a norm of human flourishing that is resolutely secular and this-worldly in temper. Its highest goal is to affirm the value of ordinary life and to diminish human suffering, as well as to encourage intrahuman goods such as justice and tolerance. From the perspective of this outlook, any view that endorses the notion of a good that ‘cannot be entirely or exhaustively explained in terms of its contributing to a fuller, better, richer, more satisfying human life’ (IM, p. 5) is seen as incredible and perhaps morally dangerous as well. By developing a form of thinking that is neither exclusively secular nor traditionally religious, Murdoch occupies a distinctive position in contemporary ethics. Although she shared the secular humanist’s insistence on the unequivocal good of human life and the need to relieve human suffering wherever it may occur, her philosophy also offers something more: a further extension of the domain of ethics to encompass a more expansive conception of the good (IM, p. 5). Beyond the exclusive concern with obligatory action that I noted earlier, and beyond even the shift to the emphasis on virtue and the inner life that her work did so much to promote, Murdoch’s philosophy also leads us to consider the possibility of a good that drives the idea of human flourishing to a new level of aspiration, indeed towards an ideal of perfection. In an age of resurgent religious absolutism and terrorism, the embrace of an ideal of perfection cannot help but give any humanist pause, given the murderous ends to which such ideals may be and have been put. Yet the wholesale rejection of transcendent ideals poses its own problems as well. Restricting the range of human aspiration solely to the achievement of ‘a fuller, better, richer, more satisfying human life’ may hamper our ability to recognize those goods that only come into view through the renunciation or purification of self. Such renunciations may bring about the fulfillment of a higher good than one had been seeking, a good that enhances the value of human life precisely by going beyond conventional notions of fulfillment. Murdoch’s work has kept the vision of such a good constantly before our minds. On the one hand, she offered a built-in corrective to the potential hubris of every spiritual path in her relentless exposure of the ego’s tendency to use even its own renunciations to fuel the fires of consolation and self-gratification. In this sense, demythologization was for
22 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
her both a spiritual discipline and a moral imperative. At the same time, Murdoch argued that religion has a role to play in defining the proper scope of human aspiration by challenging the narrowness of our moral vision and the mediocrity of our ideals. In thus providing an alternative both to religious fanaticism and to the secular rejection of a transcendent good, her work remains poised between the ideals of the saint and the artist, and thus provides a fitting image for the struggle to define a humanism for our time.13
Notes 1. See MGM and also my essay, ‘Imagining the Good: Iris Murdoch’s Godless Theology’, Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, 16 (1996), 233–42. 2. For a more extended account of Murdoch’s legacy, see my essay ‘The Virtues of Metaphysics: A Review of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 29, 2 (Summer 2001), 309–35 and forthcoming in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (ed.) Justin Braockes (Oxford University Press (UK), 2006). 3. See Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). 4. See Taylor, ‘Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy’ in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, (ed.) Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 5 – hereafter IM. 5. See: EM, pp. 76–98. 6. EM, pp. 80–1. 7. See Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). 8. See Mathewes, ‘Agency, Nature, Transcendence, and Moralism: A Review of Recent Work in Moral Psychology’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 28.2 (Summer 2000), p. 298. 9. The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 32–3 – hereafter SG. 10. For several theological assessments of Murdoch’s thought, see Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, (ed.) Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) – hereafter SHG. 11. See David Tracy, ‘The Many Faces of Platonism’ in SHG, pp. 54–75. 12. See, for example, the essays collected in the special issue of Literature and Theology, 19, 3 (September 2004). 13. For a recent statement on humanism, see William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004), esp. Chapter 10.
2 ‘All the World Must Be “Religious”’: Iris Murdoch’s Ontological Arguments Stephen Mulhall
Perhaps because it appears at a relatively late stage in the progress of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, the long chapter that Murdoch devotes to the ontological argument for the existence of God seems to me to draw together many of its central themes, and hence of Murdoch’s work as a whole, as it explores the intermediate zone between philosophy, secular morality and religious belief. Of course, to many philosophers, the idea that there is such a zone – let alone the idea that the ontological argument might serve to delineate its boundaries and structure – would be hard to take seriously. For myself, the inability to take such ideas seriously is rather a criterion for having lost touch with the kinds of interests and motives that bring us to philosophy in the first place, and that first made a place of honour for philosophy in human culture. Such differences between conceptions of the subject may ultimately be beyond the reach of argument; but they are surely not beyond evaluation. And anyway, as Murdoch herself puts it, ‘in philosophy we go where the honey is. Some thinkers are, for us, live and life-giving, others are dead [. . .] Anyone in the philosophical trade seeks in other philosophers for ideas which they can profitably understand, whether or not they also make them their own’.1 Murdoch’s approach to the ontological argument immediately distinguishes itself from that of the mainstream of analytical philosophers by putting in question the received view that Kant’s hugely famous critique of that argument is wholly successful. The ontological argument is originally presented by Anselm as a response to the Fool of the fourteenth Psalm, who says in his heart that there is no God. Anselm points out that the very idea of God that the Fool’s atheistic assertion purports to deploy, the idea of God that is central to the Christian tradition, is that of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Since, however, we 23
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Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
could conceive of a being greater than one which existed (as the Fool thinks God exists) solely in the human understanding – namely one which also existed outside it – then the Fool’s denial is not so much wrong as misdirected; for he misconceives the nature of the being whose existence is asserted by the believer. To think of God as a being whose nonexistence is even a possibility, let alone a fact, is precisely to fail to think of the God of Christianity; it is to miss the purported target of one’s atheistic thought. The Christian God is the embodiment of all perfections, and the only mode or kind of existence that might intelligibly be thought of as belonging to a perfect being – the kind of existence than which nothing greater could be conceived – is necessary existence. Hence, to understand what unbelievers and believers alike are really talking about when they contend over God’s existence is to understand that His non-existence is inconceivable. Entirely unsurprisingly, most philosophers have been deeply suspicious of Anselm’s claim. For it seems to license a conclusion about the real existence of a certain kind of entity simply by inspecting our concept or idea of that entity; and this sounds like a particularly egregious instance of supposing that thinking can make something so. Kant expresses the worry in the following way: ‘Being’ is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, as existing in themselves [. . .] If, now, we take the subject (God) with all its predicates [. . .] and say ‘God is’ or ‘There is a God’, we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all its predicates, and indeed, posit it as being an object that stands in relation to my concept [. . .] Whatever, therefore, and however much, our concept of an object may contain, we must go outside it, if we are to ascribe existence to the object.2 ‘Is omnipotent’, ‘is omniscient’ and ‘has a long white beard’ are real predicates, according to this way of thinking; they serve to determine our concept of God, specifying properties or features that anything answering to that concept must have. But when we assert that God exists, we are not recalling or specifying another such property or feature, and thereby introducing a new articulation into our concept of God; we are rather claiming that there is something in the world which answers to that concept (with all its defining predicates). Judgements about existence apply our concepts to reality, and thereby add to or
Stephen Mulhall 25
otherwise modify our list of the furniture of the universe. Hence, they can only be justified by exploring that reality to see whether it contains anything that answers to the relevant concept, not by simply exploring the content of that concept. Kant’s point may seem hard to gainsay; but in fact, as Murdoch (following Malcolm and Hartshorne) demonstrates, his argument simply repeats the original error of the Fool, as Anselm understands it. For Kant plainly presupposes that the kind of existence that is in question with respect to God is that possessed by physical objects. About such existence-claims, everything Kant asserts is true. But such existenceclaims, if true, are contingently true; every physical object that does exist might not have existed, and it is precisely because of this that we must go outside our concept of such objects to determine whether or not anything in reality corresponds to them. That is just what it means to treat the truth or falsity of the relevant claim as contingent. But the nerve of the ontological argument is found in its reminder that the Christian conception of God is of a being whose existence is necessary; to think that God might conceivably not have existed is to fail to understand the kind of being God is, and hence to fail to understand what belief in God amounts to. To this the Kantian might respond by offering this summary of the believer’s claim: if God exists, then he exists necessarily. But this formulation takes away with its antecedent clause what it appears to give in its consequent clause. One might say: if God’s existence is necessary, then there is and can be no ‘if’ about it. The antecedent clause treats God’s existence as a possibility rather than a necessity, which is the very thing its consequent clause denies. What should follow immediately from the reminder that God’s existence is necessary is the recognition that belief in God is not and could not be belief in the existence of a spatio-temporal entity. What the ontological argument therefore makes manifest is that God is not an object or being at all – in Kantian terms, he is not a possible object of experience. However, even if we can be sure that Kant’s critique of the ontological argument misses its target, what are we then in a position to say about the status of the argument itself? What exactly, on this reading of their significance, do Anselm’s reflections establish? On the face of it, the appropriate conclusion is now purely negative; the ontological argument tells us that God is not an entity – that nothing whatever that might be encountered in the field of possible experience, no thing, could conceivably be God. To say that God’s existence is necessary is not to say that God’s existence can be established as a matter of logic; it is
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Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
rather to say what kind of existence God’s existence necessarily is not. Courting paradox, then, we might say: the argument shows that God is nothing, that God is non-existent. As proofs of God’s existence go, this one not only does not seem to go far enough; it seems, if anything, to go as far as possible in the wrong direction. In fact, a multitude of paths open out from this ontological insight. One would take us in the direction of a negative theology – that tradition of religious understanding which claims that not just this, but rather every, aspect of our concept of God must be understood as specifying what God is not. To say that God’s existence is necessary is simply to say that God is no thing; likewise, to say that God is the Prime Mover, the self-causing cause, is not to assert that God stands in a peculiar or unique causal relationship to himself, but rather to deny that God can be understood as the effect of any cause. The forms of words we employ in characterizing God are ways of warding off mischaracterizations, ways of holding open a space that can only be negatively defined, not ways of filling in that space. Cora Diamond, for example, exploring a track that branches off from this path, thinks of Anselm’s talk of ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ as akin to a phrase in a riddle, rather like the phrase ‘come neither clothed nor naked’ in the fairy tale; we know what we will not be prepared to count as fitting such characterizations, without necessarily having any idea what will.3 And whereas the point of the fairy tale is to provide a solution to the riddle (when the princess comes dressed in a fishing net), and thereby to praise the human drive and ingenuity involved, Anselm’s phrase rather wards off false solutions, and further suggests that what is of the essence here is not human ingenuity but a certain kind of resistance to it. For what is needed is not a solution to the riddle, but a willingness to acknowledge its reality – to regard this mysterious articulation as the articulation of something really and essentially mysterious, and not as a puzzle or a problem or a confusion, to which solutions or resolutions or dissolutions might be an apt, or even a possible, response. Another path, of more explicitly Wittgensteinian bent, is followed by Norman Malcolm, who suggests that two conclusions follow from a proper grasp of Anselm’s purpose.4 First, if God’s existence could not conceivably be a contingent matter of fact, then either God exists necessarily, or he necessarily does not exist; since God’s existence cannot be an open question, the only way to deny it is to demonstrate that God could not possibly exist. In other words, the sole substantial way of establishing the general truth of atheism on rational grounds would be
Stephen Mulhall 27
to show that God’s existence is impossible – which means showing that the very concept of God is incoherent. This is a familiar project in analytic philosophy of religion, which has often tended to assume that the major intellectual threat to belief in God is the difficulty of rendering mutually coherent His traditional attributes of omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence. Against the thrust of this enterprise, Malcolm simply asserts, without arguing the matter in any detail, that such criticisms fail. Since the concept of God has a place (or a variety of related places) in human life, then it has a coherent and systematic pattern of use, and so is patently meaningful. If we conclude otherwise, this is most likely because we have attempted to pin down what it must mean in abstraction from its role in a form of life, when precisely that abstractive act deprives us of the context within which its true significance is evident, and without which it has none. Pressing further along this path, Malcolm then asks: what kinds of consideration might lead us to adopt a form of living in which the concept of God has its place? Certainly not an intellectual proof, which anyway only articulates an aspect of the concept the point or value of whose employment is precisely at issue. Malcolm rather invokes Wittgenstein’s suggestion that life can force the concept of God on us; and he exemplifies this process by invoking an overwhelming feeling of guilt, a guilt greater than which cannot be conceived, for which is required an equally measureless power to forgive. As Murdoch puts it: ‘I am forced, in a situation which strips me of consolation and compels deep thought, to think in this way and the fact that I am thinking in this way proves that that which I am thinking points to a reality’ (MGM, p. 417).5 One might say: what connects the logical grammar, the meaning, of the concept of ‘God’ to our lives is a certain kind of experience. Murdoch is dissatisfied with this approach. To begin with, she thinks that any attempt to understand religious concepts in general, and the ontological proof in particular, by invoking ‘Lebensformen, or “languagegame”, contextual argument, is [. . .] a wrong turning. It ushers in the “soft” idea, already at large in both theology and ethics, that there is something called “religious language” which is “expressive” not “descriptive”. This path favours structuralism, existentialism, and a renewed life for emotive theories of ethics. Religion is thereby put in a corner, as one possible mode of proceeding’ (p. 413). For Murdoch, the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical method either positively requires, or at least strongly encourages, a commitment to the distinction between fact and value, and to the consequent relegation of religious and ethical speech and thought from the realm of genuine discourse, in which
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Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
contact might be made with the real, to that of simply letting off emotional steam. Malcolm’s invocation of feelings of overwhelming guilt as one possible root of religious concept-use appears to confirm this suspicion; and it further raises the spectre of the following challenges. ‘[This] existentialist line of thought [. . .] implies that people who lead quiet orderly lives are less spiritual than those who are errant and tormented. And may it not be said that per contra great guilt arouses a great desire for forgiveness and with it the illusion that it must be available’ (p. 417). Murdoch sees in both Malcolm and Wittgenstein a view of salvation by extremes; and she takes such a view to risk not only denigrating the very everyday or ordinary realm for which such philosophers claim to speak, but also to overlook the very real spiritual danger of mistaking a consoling illusion for a glimpse of moral reality. I would argue that these criticisms at best identify risks attendant upon certain versions of Wittgensteinian thinking rather than necessary features of any such approach. One can acknowledge that the kinds of uses to which words are put in religious discourse are distinctive without regarding religious belief as a (set of ) self-sufficient and self-founding language-games; and the suggestion that any attempt to grasp the meanings of words by situating them in the context of human forms of life with language will open the way to purely expressive treatments of religious discourse, and hence to emotivism, seems unduly impoverished in its assumptions about how various non-literal uses of language can be. Be that as it may, however, Murdoch’s preferred path from her favoured reading of Anselm’s proof can be very accurately deduced from these critical remarks, simply by imagining how one might avoid the specific risks they highlight. ‘If there is any sort of proof from experience via meaning, should not the relevant phenomena be, not esoteric, but of great generality? What sort of experience can provide a strong enough meaning? If the meaning of “God” can be learnt from experience might we not expect the lesson to be everywhere visible? In an obvious sense there are religious “worlds”, groups or communities with shared words and feelings; but in another sense all the world must be “religious”’ (p. 417). Murdoch takes her bearings for this third path from Anselm himself – more specifically from her citation of his response to the monk Gaunilo, his earliest critic, when he challenges Anselm’s assumption that he, or anyone, can frame an idea of God. ‘I do not know that reality itself which God is, nor can I frame a conjecture of that reality from some other reality. For you yourself assert that there can be nothing else like it’. Here Gaunilo leaps upon the apparent absoluteness with which the
Stephen Mulhall 29
ontological proof, on Murdoch’s reading of it, excludes God from the range of possible human experience, and thereby uproots the idea of perfection in general, and so moral perfection in particular, from the human grasp. But Anselm’s reply suggests a way of supplementing the proof which overcomes what one might call the threat of purely negative theology. ‘Everything that is less good, in so far as it is good, is like the greater good. It is therefore evident to any rational mind that by ascending from the less good to the greater we can form a considerable notion of a being than which a greater is inconceivable’. Murdoch calls this a metaphysical argument which is also an appeal to experience; and she notes that her assumption that this supplementation is vital to Anselm’s sense of how the ontological proof is supposed to work is supported by the fact that, in the Meditations, Descartes combines his own version of the ontological argument with another proof of God’s existence which turns upon the thought that our sense of ourselves as imperfect necessarily engenders in us a concept of perfection. However that may be, Murdoch summarizes her own version of this necessary supplement as follows: God is something necessary not contingent, he is not an empirical object in the world. How do we know about him, then, and whence do we derive the unique idea of good which can be extended into a concept of perfection? [. . .] God, who is invisible and not an object in the world, can be seen and clearly seen everywhere in the visible things of the world, which are his creatures and shadows [. . . ] We ‘see’ God through the morally good things of the world, through our (moral) perception of what is beautiful and holy, through our ability to distinguish good and evil, and through our just God-fearing understanding of what is not good [. . .] the definition of God as noncontingent is given body by our most general perceptions and experience of the fundamental and omnipresent (uniquely necessary) nature of moral value, thought of in a Christian context as God. This is essentially an argument from morality not from design [. . .] [It] claims [. . .] some uniquely necessary status for moral value as something (uniquely) impossible to be thought away from human experience, and as in a special sense, if conceived of, known as real (pp. 395–6). Three central themes in Murdoch’s thinking, which I can only mention in the present context, are here brought to bear.6 For her, our everyday experience of reality reveals moral value to be ubiquitous, ineliminable
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Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
and hierarchical; and it is these inter-related truths about the Good of which the Ontological Proof of God is such a valuable symbol. Anselm’s sense of God’s existence as necessary reflects Murdoch’s sense of value as less dispensable even than our idea of a material object, and of moral perfection as necessarily lying outside our experience, although implicitly indicated by our experience of degrees or levels of goodness, and as endlessly drawing us up through those levels, attracting us to the next unattained level which always comes into view as each new level is attained. One might say: to fail to see that and how the ontological proof proper is and must be supported by this metaphysical argument from experience is to forget that the necessity of God’s existence is inseparable from his absolute goodness. It is to forget that all His perfections hang together. It should, then, be clear that Murdoch’s way with the ontological argument detects and aims to recover far more of metaphysical and moral value from it than most philosophers. Nevertheless, there is a vital point at which she withdraws her assent from its implications – or perhaps more accurately, from traditional theological ways of understanding those implications. As she puts it in this chapter, ‘I have been talking as a neo-Christian or Buddhist Christian or Christian fellowtraveller’ (p. 419); and the key issue over which she parts ways with the tradition of religious thought within which Anselm and Descartes stand is over Christianity’s commitment to the idea of a personal God, and thus to the idea that it is of such a God that the ontological proof is a proof. Murdoch plainly and forcefully rejects both aspects of that commitment as it finds expression in Christianity – with respect to God the Father and with respect to God the Son. ‘God’ is the name of a supernatural person [. . .] the really existing elsewhere, father figure. It makes a difference whether we believe in such a person, as it makes a difference whether Christ rose from the dead [. . .] Perhaps (I believe) 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 can console and save, but who is to be found as a living force within each human soul and not in some supernatural elsewhere [. . .] [T]he attractive figure of Christ [. . .] appears in Christianity as a mediator, but might in some sense be regarded as an idol or barrier (pp. 419–21).
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Murdoch’s Platonic substitution of the Good for God is here presented as part of an attempt to depersonalize or demythologize traditional Christianity. One might say: the problem with God the Father is that, since He is divine, He is too much like a person, whereas the problem with God the Son is that, since He is a person, He is too much like a divinity. With respect to Christianity’s personal conception of God the Father, the danger Murdoch sees is certainly a real one. For a religious believer to think of God as just like a human parent, only incomparably more powerful, knowledgeable and loving, certainly would amount to the projection of a consoling human fantasy; with respect to such a projection, Freud’s caustic scepticism would be entirely justified, and the threat of moral infantilization – so antithetical to Murdoch’s conception of the human moral pilgrimage towards perfection – all-but-unavoidable. But she concludes that the only way of avoiding the threat is to dispense altogether with this aspect of the traditional Christian language for characterizing God. And yet, she draws this conclusion in the midst of an attempt to emphasize that the key moral of the ontological argument for God’s existence is its warning that God is not in any way to be grasped in the terms appropriate to entities within the world of our experience. In other words, any Christian who takes that argument to heart will herself regard attempts to regard God’s fatherhood as an infinitely magnified version of human parenthood as essentially idolatrous, a variation on the golden calf. This suggests two conclusions. First, Murdoch’s critique of the traditional conception of God the Father is not in fact one which she must step outside that tradition in order to make; on the contrary, it is one which any believer must acknowledge as specifying an essentially blasphemous possibility that she must avoid. And second, it suggests that there may be another way of understanding the use of such language about God, from within the tradition, one that avoids this possibility. Suppose, for example, that the concept of God’s fatherhood is meant to bring into play the idea of our being God’s children, and hence of our existence as being akin to a gift, hence an expression of love, itself understood as a kind of kenosis or self-emptying – God’s making way for us, His coming to find the point of His own existence as lying outside Him; then Christianity would be asking us to view our very nature as calling us to express such loving self-abnegation in our own mode of life, and thus might actually support the mode of moral perfectionism so central to Murdoch’s own thinking. One might say: here perhaps Murdoch’s own imagination – her capacity to see how the imagery of
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Christianity might invoke a distinctive moral vision while avoiding certain encouragements to regression, her capacity to imagine the life of these words otherwise – failed her. What of her hesitations about the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, with its decisive claim that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine? Once again, her sense of the risk inherent in any such conception is entirely accurate. If one’s sense of Christ’s fully divine humanity finds expression in the conviction that moral perfection has already been fully attained, and hence one imagines that maintaining a relation to Christ guarantees one’s participation in such achieved perfection, then the danger of human complacency fed by a fantasy of effortless moral achievement is very real, and the essentially transcendent dimension of absolute goodness has been eclipsed. But is this what the figure of Christ necessarily represents in Christianity? One might, of course, argue that the doctrine of the Incarnation actually makes it clear (however inadvertently) that the achievement of human perfection is only possible for a fully divine being, and hence underlines an essential human distance from the good that Murdoch fears is under threat. But this is rather too external an interpretation of the doctrine; it does not articulate its point for those who endorse it. And from that perspective, what matters primarily about the Incarnation is what it tells us about God. For the idea that God might become fully human without any loss to His divinity is, before anything else, a way of articulating the conviction that not only human reality but reality as such is not essentially distant from that of God; it says not only that God loves His creation but that His creation – flesh and blood, time and history, birth and death – is essentially consonant with, even expressive of, His own nature. And by denying that material creation is separated from the absolutely good by any abyss of essence, the Incarnation amounts to an endorsement of the realm of reality, a conviction of its essential value or goodness, that seems more thoroughgoing and wholehearted than would be possible if Christianity maintained – as its heretical familiars such as Manicheanism and certain forms of Platonism certainly do – that the fulfilment of humanity lay necessarily beyond the realm of experience. One might even wonder, therefore, whether Christianity is rather more consistent or thoroughgoing in its praise of particularity and the material, in its willingness to say ‘Yes’ to every aspect of the real as it is in itself, than Murdoch herself. One could put the question the following way: does the assertion that goodness is ubiquitous and necessary to any human experience of reality truly manage to compensate for the
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equally fervent assertion that perfection essentially transcends our experience? For where Murdoch talks of the idea of perfection as haunting our activities, quite as if it hovers like a ghost over the machine of contingency, Christianity talks of perfection as having become fully real, and imagines the Spirit as a dove hovering over its human embodiment. From this perspective, a Christian might say that Murdoch’s Platonism is insufficiently incarnational – that the goodness with which she claims that reality is pervaded is insufficiently substantial. But from another point of view, one might say that her sense of the ubiquity of goodness is insufficiently earned – or more exactly, that her sense of the true reach of goodness within reality is rather more limited than it might appear. This is a danger of which Murdoch is aware; for in the architecture of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she deliberately raises this challenge to her own perspective at the end of her long investigations, in the chapter, ‘The Void’. Once again drawing upon Weil, Murdoch here draws attention to experiences of absolute affliction, of pain and evil which occasion desolation: ‘black misery, bereavement, remorse, frustrated talent, loneliness, humiliation, depression, secret woe’ (pp. 498–9). And she asks, ‘can we go on talking about a spiritual source and an absolute good if a majority of human kind is debarred from it?’ (p. 499). The challenge is clear: if human beings can be placed in situations which strip or shatter the personality, which denude them of all energy and motivation, and render the world utterly charmless and without attraction, then it seems that it simply cannot be true that Good is always and everywhere magnetic, that loving attention to the world will attract us to a clearer image of reality, that our transformative energies are never entirely in abeyance. Murdoch is naturally hesitant in her treatment of this fundamental counter-example to her moral vision. She reminds us that such episodes pass: but the key question here is not their permanence or frequency, but what they reveal about the nature of the real. She also points out that, according to Weil herself, the void can give spiritual succour, insofar as it teaches us that we are absolutely nothing, that we can lose everything that we have and are; but she does not emphasize that Weil’s ability to draw succour from such a teaching depends entirely upon her ability to locate the void within an essentially Christian framework of understanding. For she sees Christ’s ultimate cry of despair on the Cross – ‘My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?’ – as at once an expression of affliction and a moment in the internal dialogue of God with God. In other words, the essentially Trinitarian spiritual economy of
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Christianity allows for God incarnate to suffer God-forsakenness; it incorporates the ultimate human experience of reality’s resistance to meaning and value within the life of God, and thereby recuperates even this most extreme crucifixion of the human self for the work of spiritual pilgrimage. Of course, to suggest that a moral vision has limits is not to suggest that it lacks value or depth. It suggests at most that it may require modification and refinement. And with respect to the limits I have been discussing, those refinements might be thought of as invitations to push further along a path of thinking on which Murdoch herself was exceptionally far advanced – that of testing the extent to which our ability to keep faith with any essentially perfectionist conception of the human self and the reality it inhabits is itself dependent upon our capacity to find contemporary edification in the teachings of Christianity, which ultimately means in the person of Christ. As Murdoch herself put it, at a very late stage in her philosophical pilgrimage: ‘Christ the man, as we know and love him, is the enlivening image of perfect goodness [. . .] we can relate to him, as Buddhists do to the historic Buddha; only differently, because he is, if we belong to Christianity, ours, our nearest, our dearest’ (H, p. 51).
Notes 1. Murdoch, Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being (unpublished manuscript in the Conradi Archive in CIMS, hereafter H), pp. 127–37. 2. Emanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans.), N. Kemp-Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A599-601/B627-9. 3. Cora Diamond, ‘Riddles and Anselm’s Riddles’ in The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991). 4. Norman Malcolm, ‘Anselm’s Ontological Arguments’, Philosophical Review, 69 (January 1960), 41–62. 5. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations by Murdoch are from MGM. 6. The following account of these themes is drawn from my ‘Constructing a Hall of Reflection: Perfectionist Edification in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’, Philosophy, 72, 280 (April 1997).
3 Iris Murdoch’s Deconstructive Theology Suguna Ramanathan
Placing Murdoch Deconstruction’s refusal of a centre, leading inevitably to postmodernist heterogeneity, is roundly trounced in Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She says disapprovingly that the concept of language as a deep metaphysical system removes truth altogether and substitutes ‘play’1 (and argues for a fundamental starting point by quoting Kierkegaard: ‘philosophy is like sewing, you must knot the thread’, p. 186). This position is a clear rejection of Derrida’s arguments against some central logos to which Western thought has been in thrall.2 And yet she admits, ‘Everything is relative, incomplete, not yet fully real, not yet fully true, dialectic is a continual reformulation’ (p. 488). This, it seems to me, sounds suspiciously like Derrida’s ‘differance’; difference and endless deferral cannot take a centre seriously. And in the theology of the later novels undecidability finds a more complete expression. I suggest in this essay that Iris Murdoch’s philosophy says one thing and her fiction another; while her philosophy denounces deconstruction, the later novels deliberately offer, in the process of exploring and dismantling Christian theology, an ambivalence antithetical to a centre. To a moral philosopher like Murdoch, an interest in theology with its authoritative elaboration of the nature of the Good came naturally. The possibility that there may be nothing good at the bottom of things, that a heap of decaying bones and feathers is all there may be in the cupboard, is one that she intellectually refuses, but the later fiction suggests that nothing certain can be said about transcendental principles. In these works, non-transcendence is not just accounted for and set aside as in, for instance, Acastos, but given equal weight. These novels speak with certainty of only one thing – a change of consciousness, 35
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Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
a purification of mind and desire, which of course guarantees nothing outside itself. Such an approach, which is comfortable with not knowing, which declares the impossibility and the possibility of knowing at one and the same moment, has a Far Eastern colouring. It is also a deconstructive position in as much as it recognizes having to leave the foundation in the domain of the unthinkable. This essay, then, attempts to show how close Murdoch comes to a deconstructive position as she explores Christianity, and to indicate that her understanding of religion borrowed something from Far Eastern religions, specifically Hinduism and Buddhism. Hinduism has no theology, only metaphysics and myth; it admits that contradictory things may be predicated of the same thing at the same time, and that the beauty of religious worship is merely an aid to a prized, freeing state of consciousness. To such a metaphysics, deconstruction offers nothing new and Derrida did not set the cat among the pigeons there as he seems to have done in this country, at least when he first became known. Murdoch took theology seriously at a time when few intellectuals and artists did, not by affirming the power of faith in the manner of Roman Catholic writers like Graham Greene, but by examining it. Unlike Greene and Evelyn Waugh, she was no convert, but religion interested her, and its theology, by virtue of its apparent reasoning processes and claims to speak about morality with authority, even more. Once the grandest of all meta-narratives, it disappeared altogether in the postmodernist heyday from the intellectual preoccupations of the West, except for a handful of people in divinity schools. But by dismantling its ancient claims and taking it apart with respect and interest, Murdoch gave it a new lease of life.3 The fifties and sixties were a time of demythologizing when the stands taken by theologians like Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich were influential; Gadamer spoke of the non-definitiveness of the horizon. But Murdoch went farther than these. She demythologizes, certainly, but she also de-deifies. Not only is Christ not God, God may not be there at all. Believers (even some academic theologians) would find this untenable. They might agree to the defeat of good, even to a ‘powerless’ God (powerlessness being an essential ingredient if the whole package is not to turn into magic), but they would stop short of the final giving up of God. Murdoch, unwilling as she is to abandon her philosophic core, lets the theological core drift directionless. One may begin by noting that the trajectory from origin to telos so self-evident to the Western world comes from both its Greek as well as its Judaeo-Christian inheritance. The naturalistic and materialistic explanation of reality propounded by the pre-Socratics was marginalized by
Suguna Ramanathan 37
Parmenides’s concept of a permanent absolute. Greek philosophy thereafter settled for a grounding principle of this kind. Plato and Aristotle set the seal on such a vision with their notions of, respectively, unchanging forms and the primum mobile. To this was added, with the Christianizing of Europe, the potent mix of the Old and New Testaments, with their story of origin and end – Eden and the New Jerusalem; a linear movement from a point of origin became the overwhelmingly dominant picture; the concepts of Alpha and Omega run deep. It is a commonplace that, despite his dismissal of religion, Marx’s scientific explanation of society’s evolution is messianic. Murdoch is within that tradition inasmuch as she does not let go of a magnetic sovereign principle that she calls ‘Good’. Her replacement of God with the concept of the Good does not go all the way either, but it transforms a theological reality into a philosophical one, and with that, theology loses its central ground – the divinity and redemptive role of Christ. The imagery surrounding Christ is seen for what it is, a shadowing of the love of the Good.4 For her the background is goodness, our connection to something other than the material is our connection with the Good, and the end to which we travel is out of the cave towards the light of the Good. The link between theology and this philosophical concept is natural, given that theology offers a rich canopy under which the Good may be discovered, and one sees why she uses theology and religion to elaborate that magnetic ground. But here one is up against an obstacle. Theology in some sense works against itself; its freezing, fixing tendency changes that of which it speaks,5 and Murdoch is compelled to examine whether the central ground it stands on is indeed her central ground. The result in the fiction is a dismantling unacceptable to traditional Christian theology. And something happens in the fiction that does not happen in the philosophical writing: while the critiques she directs at her own position in her philosophical writing are taken account of by her, so that they may be laid aside, they turn in the fiction into positions with equal weight. Art, by offering multiple positions, undercuts a central stand and openly declares the rhetorical status of any and all of its linguistic units. She cannot argue her case here, and philosophical honesty puts into the mouths of her characters opposing stands that dismantle her avowed position, leaving all possibilities wide open. This is not to say that the fiction carries an unintended effect, but simply to say that fiction is not philosophy. In Murdoch’s novels the Good lingers only as a haunting and beautiful possibility, largely through the symbolic evocation of a religious figure such as Christ, who is brought in as an aid. In presenting
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Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
Christ in the novels she discards important Christian doctrine and retains the evocative power of Christian imagery. Her intellect requires a clarification of the Good, but her imagination cannot let go of the beauty shadowing it. The imagination then leads her to theology so as to release the core which is her preoccupation. But how does one speak of a core and of deconstruction in the same breath? Here is where she takes the help of Eastern religions. For Murdoch, religious claims were unacceptable; religion’s examples were irresistible: she could neither live with religion nor without it, and she had had to fashion her own version of its truth. The example, Christ, comes from her own Christian background; the interpretation of his significance from her interest in Far Eastern religions. I do not believe that Christian theology would accept the Buddhist light that Murdoch casts on Christ, for Buddhism is comfortable with atheism; no strict belief is required; on all questions regarding the transcendent, the Buddha maintained ‘a noble silence’. After all, Buddhism, though it began as a reaction to brahminical power, is rooted in a Hindu ethos, and Hinduism requires no actual belief in a transcendent personal God, no fixed centre or unmoved mover; at the same time it proffers God, a multitude of gods, to those in need. To allow that in a theological system, as Murdoch did, is to engage in a deconstructive theology. She starts with a demythologizing of religious beliefs, stripping the core of encrustations. This is a halfway house to deconstruction, which involves a critical dismantling of texts and symbols to pinpoint their rhetorical nature, refuses a master theory and is alert to the element of undecidability in all systems of communication. Her dilemma is one of engaging in the dismantling process but retaining a pure component necessary to her sense of a centre. Traditional theology, in its anxiety to sustain belief, does not let go sufficiently. Murdoch is anxious, not to sustain religious belief, but to preserve a desire for a moral universe. While the usual Christian consolation of redemption through a Saviour is not acceptable, Christ is the most effective way available to her in her novels of communicating the change of consciousness that she regards as significant. The dilemma is resolved by keeping Christ by her side in novel after novel, retaining and discarding simultaneously, making theology rise from its own ashes, a process derived ultimately from Eastern religions. This idea of connection with Good, a purification of consciousness, is borrowed from the non-Semitic religion she knew best, Buddhism. Buddhism, without revelation, without a Saviour, invites the pilgrim to try out the way, even suggests its own rejection, but offers a path. Positing no personal God, it does posit the
Suguna Ramanathan 39
transcendent experience, available once the Buddha nature is awakened. Its emphasis on three dispositions of the mind – ‘first that of the will, to be gentle and peaceful; second, that of prayer and meditation; and finally, that of universal good will, maitri’ – comes very close to Murdoch’s stand.6 Murdoch was more familiar with Buddhism than with Hinduism but in one of her last novels she borrows, as I hope to show, a Hindu perspective. What Western theology finds most puzzling is that neither Hinduism nor Buddhism requires belief in God, or in a god, any god. Hinduism, as I observed earlier, has no organized church, no theology, no central book. It has, however, metaphysics of a sophisticated kind. The ultimate reality (not quite God in the usual sense of the term) is called Brahman, and the goal of the seeker is to be united with this reality. There is no real difference between the Brahman and the individual atman (or soul). The seeker may say that he is indeed that Brahman; the difference between divine and human is minimal (cidananada rupa shivoham shivoham). There are various theories to explain that the soul is in bondage, but equally that it is, with a focused inwardness, entirely capable of growing and attaining Brahman. If the seeker needs help on the way, a multiplicity of gods is available. The figures and the myths that enchant the imagination may at some point be discarded (but not necessarily) as the consciousness approaches the ultimate state. The idea of the human moving up towards godhead, so heretical in a Christian context, is a very familiar one in Hinduism and Buddhism. An avatar, or incarnation, is both divinity descended to human form and the human absorbed into the divine, the latter being the ultimate and legitimate end in Hindu philosophical and religious thought. The Buddha, for instance, is one such avatar, and has his place in the Hindu list of the ten avataras. The Buddha, who was bred in this tradition, reacted against the social arrangements (caste) of this culture, recognized the suffering in human life and the transience of all human attachment which causes suffering and showed a way out – the eightfold path – towards nirvana (a desired state because it is nothingness, whereas birth and existence are full of suffering). That eightfold path through discipline and meditation calls for the extinction of the ego, an enlightenment of the kind the Buddha himself experienced. This very simplistic account will serve to indicate that faith is not a requirement: salvation must be worked out by oneself; there is no Saviour. The following section attempts to illustrate the light these traditions shed upon the Christ figure in Murdoch’s later novels, a Christ figure
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who is not the Christ of Christian theology. I shall first sketch the demythologizing of Christ in Henry and Cato, Nuns and Soldiers, The Good Apprentice, The Book and the Brotherhood and The Message to the Planet, and then indicate that this Christ (utterly Christian in terms of his ethics) is a Christ who is neither redeemer nor Saviour.
Demythologizing Christ That the demythologizing process leads to radical uncertainty can be seen not only through characters assuming opposing stands, but also through textual disruptions that allow doubt in at every point. These techniques take away all possibility of what she would call false consolation (‘We are what we seem to be, transient mortal creatures subject to necessity and chance’).7 She remarks in the dialogue on religion in Acastos, that it is as if truth has been cast into a particular form, but that the truth itself requires criticism of that form, the seeing of it as only provisional and only one of many ways.8 Hence Christ is stripped of mythopoetic wrappings, passing from the Jesus of Henry and Cato through Anne’s understanding that he is not her Saviour in Nuns and Soldiers, and the near invisibility of William Eastcote in The Philosopher’s Pupil whose ‘blood washes away sins’, through Stuart Cuno in The Good Apprentice who goes about doing good as commanded by the Gospel, to the marginalized figure of Jenkin Riderhood in The Book and the Brotherhood, completely secularized, living quite without doctrine and dying entirely by accident, of whom many of the characters say or think, ‘He died for me’. But while the rhetorical linguistic units supporting the meaning of unselfish goodness coincide with, for example, Jenkin Riderhood, the text itself releases a disruptive ‘ludic’ denial of them through the picture of his unplanned existence and accidental death. This deliberate transgression is Murdoch’s pre-emptive way of questioning the moral base of her assumption that the Good exists, its genuineness, its possible falseness, its inevitable inefficacy in the world and its exhaustion. With Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planet, the picture changes yet again. What sort of a Christ figure is this? The hints are obvious enough. Jewish by birth, he has a multitude of believers wanting to see him and a disciple who wants to write the gospel of his life; he raises a dying man to life; women come and gaze in silence and make offerings of stones if not ointment from an alabaster box and he dies with his head near a gas stove, meditating on the Holocaust that exterminated
Suguna Ramanathan 41
six million of his co-religionists. But his daughter is acid about his needs (breakfast in time, adoration from multitudes, recognition of his godlike qualities, the desire to ‘enact the spiritual or something destiny of the human soul’).9 Is he the Son of God or the son of man? It is as if he is the son of man who desperately wants to be the Son of God instead of the other way around. Ordinary recognizable morality, he tells Ludens, is not enough; being driven into the godhead is the final end. In this astonishing novel, Murdoch examines the relationship of the charismatic holy person to power and his movement towards godhead (entirely Hindu or Buddhist), and suggests that the only answer is willed death through identification with those who suffer (entirely Christian). I submit that Murdoch understood that the language-using ego makes ‘Christ be’, and that all is a tissue of illusion, even the opposition between the divine and human, ideas in the making long before the creation of Marcus Vallar. Buddhism was more accessible to Murdoch, as indeed to the West in general, than Hinduism with its formless multiplicity. James Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea may be the single Buddhist figure in the Murdoch canon, but already with Brendan in Henry and Cato the interpretation of Christ bears a distinct Eastern religious colouring. Brendan has no clear answer to Cato’s question whether he believes in God or not and, when asked what happens to his Christology in that case, answers, ‘I let Christ look after my Christology’.10 Here God is not an anthropomorphic Almighty out there, but neither is he only an event in the soul; he is both nameless and named; contradictory attributes may be predicated of him. His articulation of Christ as the principle of self-transforming change, as the death of the ego (‘there is no one there’) is not that of traditional Christianity where the person is very much there, the subject (or object?) of salvation.11 The Christ of this silence and dying comes from Eastern religions which assert that what seems real is an illusion to which the self must die. This is both Hindu and Buddhist. The Upanishads describe the reality that Brendan points to as ‘neti, neti’ (not this, not this), and affirm that this reality is without qualities (nirguna Brahman) and also with qualities (saguna Brahman). Brendan, in going to Calcutta, moves nearer that illumination he fears rather than away from it as he intends. James Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea incarnates this death to the self; the Indian doctor who certifies his death says, ‘Believe me, Sir, he was an enlightened one’ (p. 479), a description laden with resonances of the Buddha. Anyone can be a Buddha. When Christ tells Anne in Nuns and Soldiers, ‘The work of salvation is yours’ (p. 297), he is rejecting his usual
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role, but he is saying something close to the Buddha’s utterance to his closest disciple Ananda, in the Maha-Parinirvana Sutta: O Ananda, take the Self as a lamp, take the Self as a refuge. Betake to yourselves no external refuge. Look not for refuge to anyone beside yourselves. Work out your own salvation with salvation.12 In the novels that followed, Murdoch’s figuring of a de-mythologised Christ stayed within the traditional Christian picture and dominant ethic: pure heartedness as in William Eastcote; going about doing good as with Stuart Cuno and Jenkin Riderhood. But with Marcus Vallar, elements from Far Eastern religions are back. Here is a charismatic Jewish figure who has Christ-like powers and who meditates on the Holocaust, gives darshan (showing) to his followers in the manner of Hindu holy men and wants to be, act, thinks his way into the foundation of things. When Ludens asks this thinker–mathematician–philosopher where he has been all these years, what he has been thinking, what it is like, Marcus replies: I suppose it’s about what makes human consciousness possible, or rather what human consciousness is, which is to say what, and how, the world is, how anything is (p. 163). The exchanges throughout The Message to the Planet, full as they are of Christian allusions, emphasize the search for the unity underlying all plurality, the beginning before the beginning, the search of the Vedic seers. Raimundo Pannikar, commenting on the questions posed by the Vedic seers regarding the foundation of all things, mentions their expression of ‘a deep-rooted inextirpable uncertainty for which no reply is vouchsafed’.13 The Rg Veda verses have this to say: Who really knows? Who can presume to tell it? Whence was it born? Whence issued this creation? Even the Gods came after its emergence. Then who can tell from whence it came to be? That out of which creation has arisen Whether it held it firm or not, He who surveys it in the highest heaven He surely knows – or maybe, He does not know! (Nasadiya Sukta, RV X, 129)
Suguna Ramanathan 43
To return to Marcus and another concept derived from Hindu thought. He says to Ludens in the course of the conversation about seeking to know how anything is: ‘At a certain point, one is compelled to develop a conception of insight, or pure thinking, which is not recognizably moral, something which simulates, or is, the rising up of man into the divine, as if one were being driven into godhead’ (p. 164). This notion of moving towards godhead (aham brahmasmi: I am the Brahman) is a notion as acceptable in a Hindu context as it is heretical in a Christian one. Of Marcus, who had earlier said he could not love, Ludens says, ‘he was certainly able to love’ (p. 244). Marcus offers a blend of Buddhist, Hindu and Christian spirituality. To put it very simply, Marcus strains towards karuna, that is compassion, suffering with. This requires total emptying of the self so that it may be filled with the suffering of the other, an abnegation that is complete; this is Buddhist. By exerting karuna to the fullest extent, he dies; this is Christian. But the message does not yield a single reading. Meaning slips and shifts continuously through the critiques of Marcus given by the other characters in a chapter of letters. Even Ludens and Gildas, impressed as they have been, do not set the seal on the mystery of the powerful holy person. Who is he really? The final exchange, going to and fro between Gildas and Ludens debating whether it was all accidental, whether he died in despair, whether he was Christ-like, offers a decentring, a state of knowing and not-knowing that can exist simultaneously. Accepting contingency in a creator God is to say that there is no God. Yet the Vedic experience indicates that accepting contingency is not to deny; affirmation and denial are both possible at one and the same moment, for the position taken is outside the principle of non-contradiction. (‘At first was neither Being nor Nonbeing’, RV X, 129.) This uncertainty puts sources and origins into the category of the unthinkable. This two-way conversation between Christianity and Eastern religions in Murdoch’s later novels helped her to say the unsayable, to affirm and deny at one and the same moment. This paper has attempted to say that Murdoch’s later fiction casts lights upon Christ from non-Christian contexts that have no theology, in which God exists if you need him, and disappears if you do not, but which recognize that the human consciousness can transform itself through effort and seeing clearly. Finally, in making the Good peripheral and central simultaneously, in having it both ways, as the angles of a room sometimes seem to change even while remaining exactly the same, Iris Murdoch, saying yea and nay at one and the same moment, engages in a dissolving of boundaries that Derrida would understand.14
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Notes 1. MGM, p. 193. 2. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, (trans.) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (First published Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; first Indian edition, Delhi: Motilal Banarasi Das, 1994). 3. The Christian views I refer to are not necessarily those of the professional theologian but ideas which are common currency among the majority of the ‘faithful’. 4. She asks, ‘Should we let (the word God) dwindle and go?’ See ‘Ethics and the Imagination’, The Irish Theological Quarterly, 52 (1986), 81–95. 5. For an elaboration of this see F. Franco and Suguna Ramanathan, ‘The Recovery of Religious Meaning’, Textual Practice, 5 (1991), 183–93. 6. D. Dubarle, ‘Buddhist Spirituality and the Christian Understanding of God’, Concilium,116 (1979), 68. 7. The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 79. 8. See ‘Ethics and the Imagination’ The Irish Theological Quarterly, 52 (1986), 81–95. 9. The Message to the Planet (Chatto, 1989), p. 212. All subsequent references to this edition. 10. Henry and Cato (Chatto, 1976), p. 372. 11. It has been brought to my notice by Martin Corner that St. Paul speaks of dying to Christ (‘I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me’, Galatians 2:19–20); but Christian belief cherishes the soul in whom Christ lives, the soul that is cherished by Christ himself. This is very different from the death of the self in Hindu–Buddhist tradition. 12. Cited in Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 93. A comparison may be drawn with Paul who also encourages Christians to work out their own salvation (Philippians 2:12), but the accompanying element of faith in Christ as redeemer distinguishes it from the command of the Buddha where works can by themselves bring salvation; faith is not a requirement. By contrast, the faith–works debate within the church does not dispense with faith in this manner, however much the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches may disagree about the stress to be laid on the one or the other. 13. Raimundo Pannikar, Mantramanjari: The Vedic Experience: Mantramanjari (Pondicherry: All India Books, 1983), p. 57. 14. Additional references: Christopher Humphreys, Buddhism (Penguin, 1951). Murdoch, ‘A Discussion: Dialogue with J. Krishnamurti’, Bulletin: Krishnamurti Foundation (March 1988), 2–20. Raimundo Pannikar, The Vedic Experience: Mantramanjari. (Pondicherry: All India Books, 1977). Suguna Ramanathan, Iris Murdoch: Figures of Good (London: Macmillan, 1990). D.S. Sarma, The Upanishads: An Anthology (Bombay: Bharativa Vidya Bhavan, 1961). The Teaching of Buddha. no editor named. (Tokyo: Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai: Buddhist Promoting Foundation, 1978).
Part II Reconsidering Moral Philosophy
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4 Murdoch on the Impossibility of Moral Scepticism Edith Brugmans
Murdoch argued that moral philosophy should reflect on the sovereignty of Good and developed a Platonic position in her philosophy and her novels. Once, this position set her apart from mainstream academic philosophy, yet today, to a younger generation of philosophers, it makes her work all the more interesting, and her arguments inspire important contributions to contemporary discussions of virtue ethics.1 Moreover, her novels, in particular her 1971 novel An Accidental Man, provide rich material for understanding how Platonism could be an ‘inhabited’ philosophy in our (post)modern times.2 The impossibility of moral scepticism is crucial to Murdoch’s Platonism, and her essay ‘The Ontological Proof’ may serve as a suitable starting point to describe this position. In this essay, Murdoch gives an account of Norman Malcolm’s comparison of the concepts of God and of material objects. For Murdoch, Malcolm’s comparison is insufficient: ‘[t]he material object example does not help much. We can imagine human life without objects [. . .] A more relevant question might be: what about human life without values, without morals, without good and evil?’ (MGM, p. 414). Murdoch’s response to this question is robust: ‘[m]orality is unavoidable’ for we ‘can “think away” material objects from human existence, but not the concepts of good, true, and real’.3 Thus here, as elsewhere in her writing, Murdoch claims that human life without morality is absolutely impossible. She substantiates this claim in many different ways, but three theses are fundamental in her philosophy. These concern the role of the imagination and the ubiquity of value; the unavoidability of the idea of the Good; and moral realism.
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Imagination and the ubiquity of value Contrary to the behaviourist account of morality that prevailed in the 1960s, Murdoch argues that leading a moral life is a progressive process of imagining the being of the other. It is a process that finds its ideal limit in truthful and loving respect for the other.4 Not reason, nor sense perception, but the imagination is singled out as the faculty by which we acquire and develop moral knowledge. For Murdoch, the imagination combines some of the activities of reason and the senses, but it differs from these faculties because it is essentially a moral consciousness, and is oriented towards concrete things and persons. Murdoch puts it quite clearly: imagination is consciousness as the ‘fundamental mode or form’ of moral being.5 Murdoch claims that this imagistic conception of morality is true to life. This becomes clear once we realize that we see things as this or that, that we talk about things always in an evaluative sense, that we represent objects, people, times and places in a moral light. The metaphors, images and pictures we use when we think or talk about something or someone signify this imagistic moral perspective (MGM, pp. 305–6). Because our perception is always a mode of evaluation, our consciousness of something is a moral activity where the imagination operates. Thus, we see value everywhere (MGM, pp. 39, 56). According to Murdoch then, it is not possible for us to see things in a neutral, amoral or non-moral way. Of course, this is not to say that we automatically see things justly. On the contrary, in her view, we naturally are selfish beings or ‘fantasy-ridden animals’.6 Against this background Murdoch poses this moral task: how can we overcome our selfish fantasies, how can we progress towards a just vision of the other as real? This progress or process that Murdoch terms ‘making ourselves morally better’7 is an endless task in which we as conscious imaginative beings are involved inescapably: there is, in Murdoch’s view, no time off from being moral and no place where one could be free from morality (MGM, pp. 404–5). The inevitability of morality is central to Murdoch’s philosophy and is further developed by her arguments on the nature of the Good.
The unavoidability of the idea of the good Murdoch’s imagistic conception of morality is all-encompassing: if consciousness is always moral consciousness, and if anything and everyone are perceived morally, then there can be no limit to morality. A brief
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look at Murdoch’s interpretation of common human activities will demonstrate what she implies by this position. She suggests that the question of how we can make ourselves morally better, for example, is not difficult to answer. She reminds us of the techniques Plato mentions: craftsmanship, scientific work, thinking, painting, and refers to religious techniques such as prayer, worship and meditation. Practising these techniques, she suggests, triggers complex moral experiences. First, while praying or painting or studying, the notions of ‘better and worse’ arise and with these notions the idea or ideal of perfection presents itself. Actually, this ideal finds its limit in the concrete work which results from our actions. Second, while practising these techniques we tend to forget ourselves, we concentrate on the work at hand and thus our self-centredness vanishes. Does this loss of egotism make us morally good? Murdoch admits that the question itself is embarrassing. As she argues, being a good painter and being, for instance, a good and helpful friend is not the same thing: the goodness of Gauguin and of Christ differ in crucial ways. Nevertheless, though Murdoch notes these differences, she prefers to emphasize the similarities of the cases. The painter, in her view, loses his selfishness while concentrating on the object of the painting; so does the benefactor lose his selfishness in attending to the needs of others. What matters for her is the inner experience of developing a moral imagination. And this experience, she claims, is common to all activities, to all kinds of work. Indeed, for Murdoch, even the process of thinking about the necessity of Good is part of this experience. She suggests just this notion in her interpretation of the ontological argument in which she equates Anselm’s argument regarding the degrees of goodness with ‘Plato’s examples from work, politics, intellectual studies, human relations’ (MGM, pp. 404–5). As she compares these different activities, Murdoch finds among these differences a common moral element: the idea of the Good. As Murdoch implies, since the idea of perfection comes to us in everything we do, the idea of the Good is unavoidable.
Moral realism The idea of the Good is thus the main pillar of Murdoch’s house of morals, and the third thesis fundamental to her philosophy concerns the existence of the Good. Murdoch’s equation of artistic work, crafts, religious practices, scientific and philosophical thinking, even politics, indicates that ‘good’ is a general concept, or in logical terms, a universal.
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Like other universals, ‘good’ is defined more precisely only when related to particular cases. This relation may be expressed in logical terms of abstraction and concretization or, in terms reminiscent of Christian metaphysics, as transcendence and incarnation. I think that this implies that the universal ‘good’ is, in itself, indefinite. In other words, ‘good’ in itself is a non-discriminating universal. A discriminating or distinctive meaning of ‘good’ arises only when the concept of ‘good’ is connected with particulars. In addition to emphasizing the universality of the Good, Murdoch suggests that it should be interpreted in a realist sense as well. For Murdoch, that is, the Good has to be understood ontologically as the defining principle of reality so that our world is a moral world: the Good defines our lives so that our lives are works of the moral imagination. The status of this principle can be clarified, I think, by referring to the suggestion that logically speaking the universal ‘good’ in itself is nondiscriminating. At the ontological level this must mean that the Good does not function as the criterion by which the moral world can be distinguished from a possibly amoral or morally neutral world. In Murdoch’s philosophy, then, since ‘good’ in itself is not a discriminating criterion, and since the Good is the principal value of our moral world, the Good is the very principle by which our world exists necessarily as a moral world. As Murdoch would be quick to note, this is not to say that our world is a good world in which everything is right and each and everyone is virtuous. Instead, her philosophy accounts for her view that our world absolutely cannot be an amoral world. For Murdoch, moreover, epistemologically speaking, the Good is the transcendental of moral knowledge and moral experience. This, I think, is what Murdoch refers to in ‘The Ontological Proof’ when she suggests that ‘we cannot think away the concepts of good, true, and real’. There, she concludes her long discussion of Anselm’s argument as follows: The human scene is one of moral failure combined with the remarkable continued return to an idea of goodness as unique and absolute. What can be compared with this? If space visitors tell us that there is no value on their planet, this is not like saying there are no material objects. We would ceaselessly look for value in their society, wondering if they were lying, had different values, had misunderstood. At the level of ‘no pattern’, ‘no experience’, ‘no consciousness’
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things really break down, but then we cannot set up the example either (MGM, p. 427). It is not too extreme to suspect that Murdoch’s categorical denial of the conceivability of a non-moral world betrays perhaps her fear that our own world might be just such a place: a world without values.8
The question of moral scepticism Murdoch presents the Platonic position on the sovereignty of the Good as a convincing model, indeed, as the only position possible in morality and moral philosophy. But is it true that we cannot live without good and evil, that ‘beyond good and evil’ (Nietzsche’s Jenseits) really is beyond our being? It seems, however, impossible to address this question: if Murdoch is right in claiming that we cannot set up the example of a non-moral world, then we will never reach a point from where we can judge that it is better to be moral than amoral. Several contemporary philosophers have also raised this issue: Stanley Cavell discusses it in The Claim of Reason, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams address it in their work, as does, from a different angle, Peter Strawson in Freedom and Resentment. In that work Strawson discusses the question of whether belief in metaphysical determinism undermines our moral reactions and feelings and argues that the natural human commitment to ordinary moral practices defies the notion that morality is rationally justified only if metaphysical determinism is proven to be false.9 Cavell, on the other hand, opts for an analogy with epistemology. He applies the arguments for ‘scepticism with respect to material objects’ to ‘scepticism with regard to other minds’, and shows that the latter is a lived scepticism whereas the former is merely speculative. For Cavell, the lived form of scepticism is a mode of being moral, since being sceptical with regard to others turns out to be ‘between avoidance and acknowledgement’ of the other.10 But a decade before Cavell wrote his intriguing book and some years after Strawson published his milestone essay, Murdoch found a different way to play with the thought that morality might turn out to be meaningless. She wrote An Accidental Man.11 As the title suggests, the novel explores the moral implications of accident, luck and contingency, thus representing Murdoch’s objections to the idea that moral responsibility depends on free will, choice and intention.12 At a deeper level, An
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Accidental Man highlights her views on moral scepticism by illustrating her certainty that the human world cannot be an amoral world.
A test case: An Accidental Man An Accidental Man is the story of Austin Gibson Grey, the accidental man of the title. Austin blames Matthew, his older brother, for an original evil deed (his hand is stiff since he fell down a quarry – a fall caused by Matthew, so Austin believes) and for all the negative things that have befallen him since: his first wife was drowned; he loses his job; he accidentally kills a girl while driving Matthew’s car; he hits the father of that little girl so badly that the man is brain-damaged and his second wife accidentally electrocutes herself in a bathtub after she witnessed him making love to another woman. The absurdity of the plot here is a typical Murdochian device for drawing attention to the underlying serious question concerning the limits of morality. An Accidental Man is a complex and not altogether successful novel in its overplotting and surfeit of characters who become less interesting as the plot develops. Nevertheless it is most illuminating on the question of whether human life without morality is conceivable. The plot and characters, the dialogues, the style and form, all work together to disclose the necessity of morality, and offer a wealth of opportunities for discussing Murdoch’s views on moral scepticism as, in this text, Murdoch engages with differing accounts of the problems besetting a moral universe: freedom and determinism; accidents and fatalism; convention and solipsism; and finally, mortality.
Freedom and determinism The first perspective from which the question of moral scepticism is approached is more or less straightforwardly philosophical and concerns the argument from determinism. In its simplest form, this argument states that the belief that moral responsibility is justified presupposes a belief in free will, which in turn, implies the belief that determinism is false. Formulated conversely, the argument states that if determinism is true, then belief in moral responsibility is not justified. Ludwig, who is a conscientious young man and rather high-minded about moral responsibility, particularly his own, is deeply worried by this argument. He busies himself with thinking and talking about determinism and free will, and is preoccupied by the moral choice he believes he has to make. This self-absorption makes him blind to the
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real needs of others: he ignores Dorina, who is in extremis. Ludwig’s selfconsciousness is therefore demonstrated by Murdoch to be a form of fantasy that prevents him from responding morally in the real world. A more sophisticated form of the argument from determinism proposes a compatibility between determinism and moral responsibility. The compatibility argument is based on a sharp distinction between theory and practice: seen theoretically or scientifically, everything is causally determined so that freedom and its concomitant, moral responsibility, have no place in the objective world. But when it comes to understanding human actions, it is rational to assume that free will exists. Therefore, morality is rationally justified from a practical point of view. This argument is defended by Kant in his critical philosophy. Kantian dualism definitely offers a way out of moral scepticism. According to Murdoch, however, the Kantian solution is merely a partial way out of it, since the compatibility of determinism and morality rests upon the dichotomy of theory and practice. In that respect, the Kantian position differs widely from the Socratic view that virtue and knowledge are intimately connected. Moreover, Murdoch disagrees with Kant’s notion of commanded practical love and states that ‘pathological love can be commanded too’, even must be commanded ‘if love is a purification of the imagination’ (EM, pp. 219–20). In An Accidental Man, Garth is representative of the Kantian position. When he gives up studying philosophy and enjoins himself to practical love, to dutiful beneficence, he is not yet a virtuous man. He thinks that ‘virtue is just a necessary illusion’ (p. 113) and sets out to do good. Some of the good he does, however, is the result of luck rather than intention, and this makes him doubt the truth of Kantian moral philosophy. Gradually, he overcomes the Kantian dualism that has characterized his life and starts to feel love, by which time he is ready for literature and marriage. The characters of Ludwig and Garth thus suggest that metaphysical arguments about determinism and free will are irrelevant to true morality; therefore the argument from determinism cannot serve as an argument for moral scepticism. As Murdoch puts it elsewhere, morality is a matter of vision, not of choice.13
Accident and fatalism A second perspective from which the question of moral scepticism is approached in the text is suggested by the religious elements that colour the rivalry between the brothers, Matthew and Austin. Murdoch uses
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Buddhist and Christian doctrines to draw attention to an ‘argument from accident’ as an argument for moral scepticism. Put crudely, the argument from accident would be that moral judgements are meaningless if human actions are not the outcome of moral intentions and motives, but are instead the products of chance and contingency. If we believe, as we usually do, that we can never be absolutely certain that chance played no role in our actions, then we have to admit that our moral judgements of actions can never be absolutely justified. Moral scepticism, or at least a suspension of moral judgements, seems to be justified by the view that human actions are (partly) accidental. Matthew interprets some of the Buddhist teachings he picked up during his years in the East, along the lines of this ‘argument from accident’. True Buddhism consists of learning to accept calmly and lovingly whatever happens and whatever people do, whether intentional or accidental. Buddhist enlightenment, in this sense, amounts to a wise fatalism. But Matthew never succeeds in attaining Buddhist enlightenment. He ‘could only have played at the contemplative life’ (p. 127), partly because he never stopped blaming Austin for what he (himself) did to his brother. Indeed, on the surface, it looks as if Matthew constantly excuses Austin from moral blame and legal punishment by referring to the accidental nature of Austin’s acts. Deep down, however, Matthew resents Austin, and this resentment constitutes the true moral problem Matthew has to face: is he capable of forgiving his brother and of loving him? Apart from the implication that Buddhism is about perfect love, Murdoch suggests here that the crucial question is not whether the acts were accidents, which would mean that the actor may be excused from moral responsibility. The crucial question is whether one understands the moral meaning of the act. Acts should be judged by what they reveal about one’s love for the other and not by their intentionality or accidentalness. For Murdoch, the argument of accident, then, simply misses the moral point. This conclusion sheds some light on the moral identity of Austin, who causes accidents to happen, refuses to take moral and legal responsibility for his actions, behaves badly – and gets away with it. In the eyes of some, he plays at being the victim, as he constantly attempts to justify his immoral behaviour by arguing that he is not to blame for his actions since they were accidental. Yet, at some point, Austin confesses that he does not see himself as an accidental man at all, but thinks of his accidents as the punishments he deserves for his original sin (pp. 386–7). He knowingly and willingly hurt and mocked Matthew,
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and by that original evil deed he predisposed himself to further evil, or so he believes. Murdoch seems to suggest here that the Christian dogma of original sin may lead to a degenerate form of practical fatalism, a form of moral scepticism even. This pseudo-Christian belief is opposed in the novel to true Christian morality, represented by Mavis, who cannot ‘stop being saintly’ (p. 428). She cures Austin’s hand and takes care of him lovingly. Perhaps Murdoch also uses Mavis’s love to illustrate that Austin will continue to selfishly take advantage of others. The complexity of the characters and the plot make it impossible to arrive at a clear understanding of Austin’s moral identity and, although such inability to account for Austin might well be part of Murdoch’s intentions, I wonder if just too much is left in the dark. Either way, there is no doubt about Murdoch’s objection to the argument from accident as an argument for moral scepticism. Murdoch makes it quite clear that the moral meaning of an act does not depend on its accidental or non-accidental nature. What matters morally is whether or not we respect the other involved, whether we see justly and lovingly while we do what we do.
Convention and solipsism Stylistic elements of An Accidental Man offer clues that are easier to interpret than its view of fatalism. The novel moves between chapters comprising party talk and chapters composed of letters. Both formats reveal the difficulties of addressing the real other, of understanding the other and of making ourselves understood. The chapters containing party talk suggest the idea that morality is meaningless since everything is determined by convention. This structure highlights the possibility that moral scepticism is justified by the fact that convention determines good and evil, right and wrong. Evidently Murdoch does not find this argument convincing, since such parties consist of persons who can bring in their personal views and thereby change conventions. Murdoch’s construction thus makes clear that the argument that we are determined by conventions is false, because we are also creative individuals. Just as Gracie and Garth arrange the cushions on the floor instead of on the sofa at their first party, so too are all of us able to effect changes in the world. The use of letters is another stylistic device used in the novel, and indeed in most of Murdoch’s novels. This epistolary framework allows direct conversation and confrontation to be avoided. In this sense, the writing of letters is relevant to moral scepticism, as it indicates the
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solipsistic argument. After all, when one corresponds, one addresses one’s mental image of the other. The other is present as the image of the self only; he or she is not really present. But, so the sceptic argues, this is always the case. The self can never see beyond its image of the other; even when the other is really present, the self accesses only an impression or an image of the other. Murdoch’s use of the epistolary structure here and elsewhere in her novels often seems to present the sceptical view that it is impossible to arrive at true knowledge of the other. Murdoch’s reply to this scepticism clearly reveals her moral view. She insists that we should not overstretch the truth of phenomenalism and turn it into the solipsistic argument for scepticism. Logically speaking, the argument is inconsistent because it implicitly presupposes objective knowledge of the other as a point of reference or term of comparison, while it explicitly argues that this knowledge is not attainable. But this logical inconsistency is not what interests Murdoch most. Nor does she care much for a Wittgensteinian epistemological analysis of the matter. For the truly interesting question concerning the solipsistic claim that it is impossible for the self to see beyond its image of the other, is a moral one. Once more Murdoch ‘changes gear’ and argues that the right question to ask is whether one’s images are selfish fantasies or just perception of the other. This is a moral distinction and it requires imagination as a moral discipline to make it. Murdoch exemplifies this in Ludwig’s farewell letter to Gracie: this letter expresses, in a high-flown style, his examination of his conscience and concludes by urging Gracie not to come and see him. Here, Murdoch represents how Ludwig lacks the imagination to realize that his apparently conscientious letter is, in fact, proof of his selfishness.
Mortality The most radical argument regarding moral scepticism challenges the thesis that it is easy to make ourselves morally better. We have seen that, according to Murdoch, all kinds of activities are opportunities for letting go of the self and progressing towards virtue. But what if one gives up, what if one stops working, praying, looking, eating? What if someone wants to stop living altogether and faces his own death? Such a person would have sunk into moral scepticism. Murdoch explores this situation in An Accidental Man when she describes Charlotte’s misery. Charlotte feels unloved and unwanted by
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those she expects to love her and wonders whether she would prefer to be dead: She lay on the wretched lumpy bed in the twilight, behind the filthy gauze curtains, lying awkwardly, without even the will to make herself comfortable, and she thought about death and whether it made sense to desire it. No, it made no sense. She was far beyond the truth and its sharp dividings of the world. Whether or not she would kill herself, whether it would seriously matter to anyone or anything if she did, was a question which had no answer, which could not even be properly framed (p. 310). Here, Murdoch implies that the strongest argument for moral scepticism fails. This argument states that the thought of one’s own death is the most radical reason for being morally sceptical: why care about one’s morality, about good and evil, when one is to die? The prospect of one’s death annihilates one’s morality. But the argument is invalid, ‘not properly framed’, since it contains a contradiction. The thought of the self as dead is contradicted by the activity of thinking, since this activity necessitates that the self is very much alive. We cannot, therefore, set up the example of the situation in which moral scepticism would be ultimately justified without contradicting ourselves. The point is not that there is no hereafter; the point is that one cannot use one’s non-being as a reason for moral scepticism since one’s thinking self is undeniably present while thinking about oneself as gone forever. Here, Murdoch uses the Cartesian proof to argue that the most radical argument for moral scepticism fails. But again she explains that the real difficulty has nothing to do with logic but with moral experience. She does so by demonstrating in her later description of Charlotte how the logical rebuttal of the argument is of no avail. Charlotte knows perfectly well that the question of whether it would matter if she were dead is self-defeating. Yet she takes the fifty sleeping tablets and wishes ‘to go to sleep forever’. Logic does not help, because she suffers not from a lack of logical insight but from a lack of moral faith. What she needs is something or someone who revives her hope, someone who helps her to become morally better.14 In this way Murdoch illustrates how moral scepticism differs from despair. In her sensitive picture of Charlotte’s terrible unhappiness, she clarifies the argument that while moral scepticism is impossible, it is not impossible to experience the void. Nevertheless, as Charlotte’s misery
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exemplifies, to be thus afflicted is still to be in a moral state, in which something may occur to achieve a re-orientation towards the Good.
Conclusion In this analysis of An Accidental Man I have argued that the novel suggests a number of different arguments for moral scepticism and, most importantly, refutes them. Taken together, they make a strong case against the possibility of moral scepticism. What appears to be an argument for moral scepticism is in fact a sign of selfishness or despair. For Murdoch, moral experiences belong to the world where human beings experience failure and success in their endless task of becoming morally better. The apparently sceptical standpoint turns out to be a moral one after all, thereby proving Murdoch’s belief that moral scepticism is an impossibility. Halfway through the novel, Murdoch paraphrases Kant’s famous dictum about the good will (Kant is not mentioned explicitly, of course) and ends on a very Murdochian note: ‘There is nothing either in the world or out of it which is good without qualification, except a good will. Bosh, thought Garth, eating baked beans on toast in a Lyons tea shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Nothing was good without qualification’ (p. 165). Here Murdoch, as throughout her works, in arguing that nothing is good without qualification, implies that everything is good in some degree. Murdoch, typically, brings Kant’s lofty idea of the good will back to the human scene. The human world may not be perfect, but it certainly is a moral world where Good is sovereign. This world, as Murdoch would argue, has no place for moral scepticism.15
Notes 1. See Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 2. See Conradi, SA. 3. MGM, pp. 418, 425. Strawson argues against the claim that we can think away material objects from human existence. See P.F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 1959). 4. For a discussion of the self-concern that is involved in the progress towards respect for the other, see the contributions of Samantha Vice and Christopher Mole in this volume. 5. EM, p. 316. Cf. MGM, pp. 171, 215, 265, 271, 278–81. 6. In her essay ‘Imagination’ and elsewhere, Murdoch distinguishes between selfish fantasy and imagination as a moral discipline of the mind. See MGM, pp. 321–23.
Edith Brugmans 59 7. MGM, p. 342; EM, p. 215. 8. Conradi refers to this fear: ‘The Sovereignty of Good attempted to exorcise her fear that ‘morality might turn out to be meaningless’. See IMAL, p. 547. 9. P.F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 1–25. 10. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). See also: Stephen Mulhall, ‘Misplacing Freedom, Displacing the Imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the Fact/Value Distinction’, Philosophy. The Good, the True and the Beautiful, Philosophy, Supplement 47 (2000), 255–77. 11. An Accidental Man (London: Penguin, 1973). See also Conradi’s helpful discussion of the novel in SA, pp. 78–84. 12. Cf. EM, pp. 299–306 where Murdoch criticizes Stuart Hampshire’s rationalistic conception of morality. 13. See in particular ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, EM, pp. 76–98. 14. Cf. MGM, p. 503. 15. I would like to thank Maria Antonaccio and Marije Altorf for their comments on an earlier version of this article.
5 The Ethics of Self-Concern1 Samantha Vice
Murdoch’s contribution towards rehabilitating the value of the inner life is well documented. However, her suspicion of the self is equally well known, and central to her moral vision is the claim that ethics requires self-forgetfulness rather than self-concern. It is this apparent tension that I wish to explore for, after all, self-directed activities like self-reflection and the attempt to reach self-knowledge seem a crucial dimension of the inner life – and I label them ‘activities’ intentionally, to align them with one of Murdoch’s central aims in The Sovereignty of Good, that of arguing that interior ‘work’ is a moral activity. Because the essays in The Sovereignty of Good were influential precisely as a defence of the inner life against the behaviourist tendencies of modern moral philosophy, and given that one of their aims is expressly this kind of rehabilitation of the inner world, the tension I am interested in is all the more apparent and troubling in these essays, and I therefore concentrate on them. I hope to show that Murdoch’s own commitment to the importance of quality of consciousness and the task of self-perfection requires and indeed presupposes some degree of self-concern.2
The enemy of the moral life For ease of reference I will use the term ‘self-concern’ to capture, firstly, our conception and experience of self and, secondly, self-reflection, self-knowledge and their intended fruits in practical conversion. By ‘self-reflection’ is meant an intentional activity directed towards the ends of self-knowledge and self-improvement; neither aimless activities, nor those directed towards ends other than these are relevant here. The notion of self-concern is already normative, as it relates to one’s 60
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self-conception, both actual and ideal, and is essentially concerned with moral and personal progression. There are, of course, well-documented dangers to incorporating even a normative notion of self-concern into ethics, the most obvious being that of self-absorption: what prevents self-concern from becoming mere ‘fingerings of the self’, to use Montaigne’s nice phrase?3 Even if our reflections aim at self-knowledge, there is no guarantee that we can retain the necessary self-detachment to achieve it. While Murdoch sets herself apart from much modern philosophy, with much of this, at least, she agrees. She writes, ‘The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself’, so self-knowledge, ‘except at a fairly simple level, [is] usually a delusion’ (pp. 93, 67).4 Coming from Murdoch this conclusion has particular force because she has persuasively argued that ignoring the reality of inner activity is tantamount to ignoring morality. The moral life, she argues, is ‘something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices’ (p. 37). Murdoch’s worry, then, is that, by paying attention to the needy self, vision and knowledge of reality are obstructed. Because the attempt to see accurately is the moral quest, morality demands ‘unselfing’ rather than self-concern. Underlying Murdoch’s view are a number of related claims: the first is that the self is to a significant extent selfish and deluded; the second is that virtuous consciousness is only achieved through self-forgetfulness. A third, rather more elusive claim – that self-knowledge should be understood as a ‘scrutiny of [a] mechanism’ (p. 67) – will become important later, but I will begin by looking at the first two claims. Murdoch’s distrust of self-concern, we can already see, depends on a particular view of the self that is both agent and object of such attention. Murdoch requires from moral philosophy a starting-point in a realistic picture of human psychology. The crucial question for moral philosophy, ‘how can we make ourselves better?’ must be answered against such a framework, and much of her argument is directed against the prevalent behaviourist-inclined picture. As an alternative starting-point to behaviourism and in lieu of religion, Murdoch accepts Freud’s secularized picture of our fallen nature: the ‘fat relentless ego’ is the ‘enemy of the moral life’ (p. 52). At times Murdoch seems to think that this ego exhausts what we would call the self, a view to which I will return later, but for now we can work with her frequent characterizations of the self as ‘ego’ or ‘fantasy mechanism’. The self is a site of illusion, often divided against itself when it attempts to act morally, adept at constructing
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a falsifying and consoling veil over the world. The greatest obstacle in the path of moral excellence is personal fantasy, ‘the tissue of selfaggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one’ (p. 59). This view of the self has both epistemological and moral consequences, because Murdoch’s view is that reality is inescapably normative. If we do not see the world through virtuous consciousness, we will not know the world as it really is.5 It is beyond the scope of this paper to assess Murdoch’s metaphysics. For my purposes, what is relevant is the following argument: the moral quest requires correct vision, but the fallen, fantasy-ridden self obscures our vision by interposing itself between the consciousness that sees the world and the world itself. The best way to see correctly is therefore to ‘unself’, to turn our attention away from its exigent demands and to concentrate on seeing justly what is not the self. In short, because the self is inherently false and falsifying, we must disregard it in order to see and act correctly. The call to disregard the self then has the consequence that self-concern, while not impossible, becomes unimportant in the quest to be good. It is not, she writes, a ‘scrutiny of the mechanism itself, that liberates’ (p. 67). The self is as difficult to see justly as anything else, and what is revealed may be merely ambivalent and tawdry motive, something less worthy, ‘smaller’, than other objects. Any self-knowledge we achieve is therefore not worth much. There is also a more positive danger to self-scrutiny: ‘self is such a dazzling object that if one looks there one may see nothing else’ (p. 31). One becomes fascinated by one’s own unworthiness, a particularly refined form of self-indulgence. What is clear so far is that Murdoch’s self is not identical to consciousness, and that it is the quality of consciousness that matters for morality. The self is indirectly important insofar as it affects consciousness, but concern for the latter requires that we disregard the self, rather than attempt to purify it directly. Despite the fact that the self affects quality of consciousness, only self-forgetfulness can refine them both. Murdoch’s self is thus not directly redeemable, it seems, by the kind of just and loving attention that she recommends we turn on the world. The result is that the inner moral activity that she wishes to return to ethics does not include self-concern as an essential or even helpful component. However, Murdoch’s exploration of inner activity implicitly undermines this picture of the self. It shows that, contrary to the first claim, self cannot be only or significantly ego. There is far more to our experience of being a self than self-interest or neurosis. And regarding the second claim, we should remember that consciousness is the subjectivity
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and quality of the self – as her work itself presupposes. The self is, in Murdoch’s words, the place where we live,6 but like travellers we carry our homes with us and what we see of the world is through the windows of ourselves. If this is true, then, to use another metaphor (familiar to the ancient philosophers),7 if the quality of the self infects our consciousness of the world, it is not clear how turning away from the source of the infection will cure consciousness. A purge of the infecting material is required, and one way to do this is through self-reflection. I am thus proposing that, like prayer, art and study, self-concern be taken as one of the ‘techniques for purification’ that Murdoch argues can help us to become better. In fact, if we now examine Murdoch’s own exploration of moral activity we see this view working implicitly.
The progressing self: Moral activity and self-concern It will be helpful to recall the example of inner moral activity that Murdoch spends some time on – the well-known case in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ of the mother-in-law, M. Her discussion here reveals a richer conception of self and its relation to virtuous consciousness than the one she explicitly makes, and it shows the centrality of self-reflection for moral improvement. It becomes clear that M’s ‘endless task’ (p. 28) of seeing her daughter-in-law, D, justly requires that she, M, comes to knowledge of herself. In fact, the very impulse to ‘look again’ (p. 17) at D presupposes that M has already achieved a measure of self-knowledge that she has come to think there is reason to distrust her previous appraisal. Knowing that she is prone to snobbishness or jealousy, she knows too that these traits will invariably influence her vision. At the same time, she must recognize in this struggle for accurate self-perception an impetus to self-improvement. Murdoch is clear that M is active – this indeed is the immediate point of the example.8 M’s activity is also ‘peculiarly her own’, she writes (p. 23), so understanding M’s activity, from both her own and an observer’s perspective, requires knowledge of that personality. Furthermore, self-knowedge is presupposed by the ideas of perfection and improvement that are so central to Murdoch’s ethics, because we improve from a certain position and from the recognition that we are not perfect. We must recognize our shortcomings, or at least suspect which parts of ourselves require moral work, before we can consciously undertake the journey.9 Of course Murdoch sees M as focussed not on herself but on another, and as aiming to see this other person in all her particularity: ‘M looks at D, she attends to D, she focuses her attention’ (p. 22). While this is
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certainly the telos of M’s activity, the self-knowledge presupposed by M’s inner activity is only possible if M reflects upon the kind of person she is, how she wants to improve and what standard she measures herself against. In cases like these, reflection on, and knowledge of, the self is required for any just or loving vision of another individual precisely because of the self’s propensity towards falsification. While it is certainly morally pernicious to become enthralled by one’s self, idly enraptured by the self’s imperfections or virtues, nevertheless the journey towards clear vision of the external world must go within first. The ancient philosophers saw the ethical journey in this way, as one that carried the enquirer within and achieved knowledge of external reality only through self-knowledge. While admittedly more developed in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals than in The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch’s reliance on a version of the ontological argument to establish the necessity of the concept of Good, requires a similar turn within to reflection upon one’s own, subjective experience.10 The point is simply that there is a rich tradition that takes self-concern to be, certainly not the telos of moral inquiry, but a necessary constituent of a journey towards ethical self-improvement.11 And as I have argued, Murdoch’s own example of M recognizes and requires a similar inward turn to self-concern. Murdoch of course insists that ‘the unexamined life can be virtuous’ (p. 1), that uneducated or unreflective people can be good and this certainly must be admitted as a possibility. But it seems to me that such naturally pure vision and thought is rare, that it is, in her terms, an instance of grace. The ordinary cases are rather those of obscured perception and, if we are lucky, tentative gropings towards a just vision of the world, and given this starting-point self-concern will generally be required. In any case, self-knowledge need not be conscious or articulated in highly educated terms; it may be revealed in one’s steadiness of thought and action and effort, but again, for most of us, even this integrity requires some conscious work. The moral life is, as Murdoch herself insists, a ‘discipline’, a ‘task’ (pp. 38, 91). Given this discussion so far, we can conclude that attending to the self is a means towards self-improvement and purified consciousness, contrary to the second claim. While not strictly necessary, for most of us this technique of self-purification will be required before we are able to progress, especially if the self is as active in its delusion and selfishness as Murdoch suggests: ‘Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world’ (p. 84). Whatever the explanation for this perversely
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self-defeating and world-obscuring activity, a reasonable antidote is to oppose it with a potentially clarifying activity like self-reflection. Furthermore, selfish and contorted as the self undoubtedly is, it is still there as a phenomenon of the world, and one responsible for our vision of the world.12 Attending with a loving gaze upon reality without ever turning to the self is both to ignore a part of the world that we strive to know and to disregard the very instrument, as it were, with which we gain knowledge. In fact, once we see that the self is part of the ‘data’ of ethics, part of ethical reality, focussing on it moves beyond the inner/outer dichotomy that characterizes so much ancient and modern thought in this area. Our direction of focus should be on seeing what is there and seeing it as it is, whether within or without. In ‘On “God” and “Good”’, Murdoch notes in parentheses that it is ‘always a significant question to ask about any philosopher: what is he afraid of?’ (p. 72). Part of Murdoch’s fear, I suspect, is that morality and the glimmers of redemption we can sometimes detect in ourselves will prove powerless before the allure of ego. What Murdoch fears is that morality will not stand up to the challenge posed by the darker needs of the self, and this leads her to envision as a normative ideal of perfection, a self that is pure vision. The danger, though, is that she will substitute for the empty notion of the untrammelled will, which she consistently argues is a psychologically inadequate account of the person, an equally empty notion of the perfected self as pure vision. Neither ideal is attractive because, as will become clearer below, a far more complex notion of the self is required for capturing the very phenomenology of moral experience that so concerns her. While her ideal of the self may be problematic, in returning us to a realistic picture of our actual, fallen state, Murdoch reminds us that we do indeed need to take seriously the threat posed by the self. There is no doubt that much of the evil in the world is the result of the illusions and grasping absorption of self. However, Murdoch’s own work shows that this cannot be all there is to say on the matter. Contrary to the first claim I noted above, the self, on her own terms, cannot be understood purely or even largely in terms of ego, and, if this is the case, the fear of the self’s malign power is exaggerated. The important point to note is that, if the self were only a ‘fantasy mechanism’, moral exploration and the very attempt to be better could never get off the ground. A self that can recognize its own shortcomings and doubt its vision, and that can be attracted by perfection, cannot be without any redeeming resources. The opening for self-improvement, in turn, allows in a more generous conception of selfhood. The moral life, then, becomes not so
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much a matter of ignoring the self, but of educating it: of teaching it to love and desire worthy objects and, by coming to know itself, to realize the very shortcomings that obscure its vision. To use the metaphor so central to Plato, the soul must be turned around so it can gaze at reality, but for this metanoia a direct purification and education of the soul itself is required.13 Now this more generous notion of the self is implicit in Murdoch’s discussions and becomes more apparent when she switches to using the term ‘soul’. She says, for example, that ‘the liberation of the soul from fantasy’ consists in ‘the capacity to love, that is to see’ (p. 66). And later she writes that we need a conception of the soul ‘as a substantial and continually developing mechanism of attachments, the purification and reorientation of which must be the task of morals’ (p. 71). Ignoring for the moment the troubling notion of a ‘mechanism’, this suggests that the entire person, for want of a better word, is more than a product of fantasy. So perhaps ‘self’ captures that aspect of the complete person entangled in fantasy, while ‘soul’ refers to the aspect receptive to conversion and grace. This may very well be the case, but I think there is more at issue than mere stipulation of terms, given that the fate of self-concern depends on how ‘self’ is understood. Because Murdoch considers the self to be so deeply fantasy-ridden, she assumes that self-concern cannot be part of the moral quest. And even if ‘self’ is only a part of the complete personality, the necessity of self-concern would still be clear, against her explicit views. Furthermore, although I cannot adequately argue for this here, if any concept is central to secular morality, and indeed required in order to account for moral experience, it is the concept of the self. ‘Soul’ is too laden with the affectionately rejected religion; ‘personality’ too empirical a notion to capture the perfection-seeking, progressive elements of our being; ‘individual’ too empty a notion, unless given normative content better suited to ‘self’. I would argue that ‘self’ is best taken to capture two aspects of being: firstly, the complex, contentless subjectivity or background ‘hum’ of existence – what Murdoch, I think, calls ‘consciousness’; and secondly, the particular identity or substantive content that individuates persons – our identity, not in the formal sense common to discussions of personal identity over time, but in the sense, relevant to ethics, of who we take ourselves most fundamentally to be. Knowing ourselves in this way requires knowing what is important to us, knowing what moves us and what we stand for.14 Both these aspects are central to Murdoch’s vision of moral progress, and her project cannot do without a richer conception of self. None of this,
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however, disagrees with Murdoch’s pessimism regarding our actual state – a casual glance at self and world is all the evidence required. Another explanation for Murdoch’s reluctance to give full weight to self-concern may lie in her conception of self-knowledge, and here I explore the third claim mentioned earlier. Murdoch writes, in terms reminiscent of Stuart Hampshire,15 of self-knowledge as ‘a minute understanding of one’s own machinery’, a ‘scrutiny of the fantasy mechanism’ (p. 67). By ‘machinery’ and ‘mechanism’ she presumably means the beliefs, desires and commitments that make up one’s character and that partly constitute the substantive self. ‘Understanding the machinery’, then, seems to mean understanding the causes of one’s mental states, their relations to other states, and their effect on one’s behaviour and outlook as a whole. But it is only because she presupposes the problematic view of the self as fantasy that she can conclude that it is ‘attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism, and not a scrutiny of the mechanism itself, that liberates’ (p. 67). The mechanical metaphor is, however, inappropriate, both for the self and for self-knowledge. What motivates people in the moral domain cannot be only some sub-intentional, non-personal system of self-centred energy. Ordinary self-reflection and attempts to improve would make no sense and, more importantly here, neither would the ongoing effort to progress in the light of the Good. Murdoch correctly reminds us that what moves us may not always be explicit or articulable, but this must be distinct from an impersonal mechanism if it is to be responsive to the techniques of purification that Murdoch advocates. The progressive, vision-refining knowledge of self and others that we see in the example of M would otherwise be rendered incoherent. In the light of the alternative view of the self for which I have argued, a more adequate conception of the self-knowledge relevant to ethics becomes available. The self-knowledge required for living morally includes a deepening understanding of the significance of one’s commitments, desires and beliefs for one’s normative vision of self and world. Without this understanding, improving oneself in relation to an ideal of perfection would, without immense moral luck, be very difficult indeed. It is difficult to progress without knowing what it is one wishes to achieve and without understanding how and why one’s selfconception is implicated in the achievement. If my earlier suggestion is correct, one’s substantive identity is constituted largely by what one cares about and values. This conception of self-knowledge is central to the ancient philosophers, for whom the imperative ‘gnothi seauton’ – ‘know thyself’ – is the first principle in the quest to live a better life. In this
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sense, the reason-responsive, intentional objects of self-understanding, as well as the process of understanding them, are not compatible with viewing the self as a mechanism. This argument can be strengthened further by noting that a better account of the reflective process towards achieving self-knowledge will tell equally against the mechanistic metaphor. On the one hand, selfreflection is concerned with revealing previously unknown or only obscurely grasped elements of the self – the aspect I shall call ‘selfdiscovery’. On the other hand, the results and phenomenology of selfreflection often reveal a creative ‘constituting’ activity, as if our very reflections form their objects. In fact, Murdoch’s representative antagonist in The Sovereignty of Good, Hampshire, discusses this perceptively, arguing that intentional states ‘are not independent objects, which remain unchanged by the subject’s changing views of their nature’, and that reflection is a typical way of ‘forming, or bringing into existence, the state of mind’.16 While someone can be wrong about his state of mind, this error is part of the phenomenon to be explained. If we apply this view to the issue relevant here, the complex intentional states that shape moral identity will be at least partly constituted by our reflections upon them. And in that case, reflection will be a necessary part of discriminating and understanding the inchoate background ‘fabric of being’ that so concerns Murdoch. That they take on their character through a process of reflection makes these states responsive to the considerations, desires and character one brings to the reflective process. They are not, in short, non-responsive neutral existents obeying a subintentional logic. We can in fact broaden the point beyond Hampshire’s claim about the logic of intentional states and in doing so further bring out the inadequacy of the mechanistic conception of the self. The deeper aspects of self-knowledge in the ancient tradition just mentioned – understanding what is important to one, how one wishes to live and be guided in the effort – even more certainly arise through, and are constituted by, the very activity of self-reflection. It is implausible to think that such aspects of the self are already there, awaiting patient excavation. One learns about these aspects through the process of reflecting upon one’s character and needs, and on the values that one adopts to form and guide them. One does not create values and significance, but that certain things take on a personally charged significance for us and become part of our substantive identity – become part of who we, most essentially, are – is settled at least partly through reflection on just these issues.17 In order to be a mode of self-knowledge, however, self-concern
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cannot be independent of facts about oneself and what is really of value. That one can go wrong in both these respects, and that living ethically requires that we strive to be right, shows that the creative process is at the least truth-responsive and open to normative and epistemic assessment. Self-creation is thus still under an obligation to truth, even if this obligation is not necessarily always steady. Here Murdoch is correct: it is precisely when self-concern strays into fantasy that knowledge becomes unattainable.18 In short, the best accounts of self-knowledge, the objects of selfknowledge and the reflective process towards achieving it, are not comfortably accommodated within a mechanistic picture of the self. The creative aspect of self-knowledge does carry with it the danger of choosing comforting fiction over fact, but it also importantly reminds us of the progressive, seeking nature of the self, and its active role in self-knowledge. Mechanisms are not reason-responsive and actively self-constituting, and they do not undertake journeys to perfection. Once we realize that a complex self is part of the world we must learn to see justly and with love; once we have a better understanding of self-reflection and self-knowledge, then we shall see that self-concern cannot be ignored in the ethical quest. And in fact, if we ally this alternative picture to Murdoch’s own pessimism about our failings and her worries regarding the allure of false unity, its role as a clarifying, redemptive activity becomes even more clearly important. Briefly considering the notion of unity will help to draw together the threads of the discussion. Throughout her work, Murdoch worries that our desire for consolation and order will falsify experience and hamper progression to the real unity of the Good. The very experiences that can assist can also mislead. Bad art offers false consolation and patterns; the experience of progression in the moral sphere can lead us to metaphysical systems that posit a false order and foundation.19 Part of Murdoch’s worries regarding selfconcern can also be understood in this light. The self’s desire to be in the right while also fulfilling its cherished desires can lead to judgements that rationalize and unify all experiences and needs around the self-perpetuating fantasy of the ego. We have the tendency to create a picture of the self that satisfies our desires and already existing selfconception. In terms of the discussion so far, the creative aspect of selfreflection becomes corrupt, with little response to truth. Ironically enough, Murdoch’s comment elsewhere that ‘[m]an is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture’ takes on a more ominous ring in this light.20
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These are indeed real dangers. But Murdoch’s tendency to reduce the self to ego is another instance of a false, if hardly consoling unity and, as I suggested, the self is far more complex than this view allows. With a more adequate account of self-concern and the self in place, we can see that the need for self-concern is easily accommodated within her ethical project. Without spending some time reflecting upon self, it will undoubtedly remain tangled in fantasy, and vision and action will remain clouded. ‘And if quality of consciousness matters’, as Murdoch writes, ‘then anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue’ (p. 84).
Notes 1. Work on this paper was partly undertaken while the author an Andrew Mellon Fellow at Rhodes University. Thanks to Christopher Mole and members of my 2004 graduate class for helpful discussions. 2. For an alternative, though on the whole compatible account of this issue, see Christopher Mole’s contribution to this collection, also in Part 2 of this volume. 3. Montaigne, ‘On Practice’, in The Complete Essays (trans. and ed.), M.A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), II.6, p. 426. 4. All page references, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Sovereignty of Good. 5. See, for example, SG, pp. 37–8, 42, 59, 65. 6. SG, p. 93; cf. Murdoch, MGM, p. 260. 7. On the medical analogy and the nature of ancient philosophy, see Martha Nussbaum’s fine study, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 8. The larger aim of the example is to demonstrate the inadequacy of ‘genetic analyses’ of moral concepts, which have the result of rendering inner activity either non-existent or meaningless. 9. The qualification ‘consciously’ is meant to allow for those who are naturally virtuous, without having ever consciously attempted to perfect themselves. I return to this below. 10. For example, see MGM, pp. 391–430. Also see Antonaccio on Murdoch’s ‘reflexive realism’, in Picturing the Human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 61–84. 11. On the history of this ‘turn within’, see Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 12. I mean to be ontologically neutral on the status of the self. All that is required for my point is that we have an experience of being a self. 13. For example, Plato, The Republic, 518c-e. 14. See Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Charles Taylor, ‘The Concept of a Person’, in Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Samantha Vice 71 15. For example, see Stuart Hampshire’s ‘Freedom of Mind’, in Freedom of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 16. Stuart Hampshire, ‘Sincerity and Single-Mindedness’, in Freedom of Mind, pp. 236, 244. Also see Charles Taylor, ‘The Concept of a Person’, and Richard Moran, for example, in Authority and Estrangement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 17. I do not mean that what makes something a value is a matter of our choice. Some values, from an array which we recognize as having an independent normative force, have a more personal resonance for us and become the ones which guide our lives. 18. I have explored these dangers in relation to the notion of the narrative self in ‘Literature and the Narrative Self’, Philosophy, 78 (2003), 93–108. 19. The tension between the need for unity and the chancy incompleteness of the world is discussed by Antonaccio: ‘Form and Contingency in Iris Murdoch’s Ethics’, in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, (ed.) Antonaccio and Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 20. EM, p. 75.
6 Attention, Self and The Sovereignty of Good Christopher Mole
In 1958, Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’1 forcefully launched the idea that character traits and states of mind are morally important in ways that could not be seen from the point of view of the contemporary moral psychology. ‘[M]oral philosophy’, she wrote, ‘should be laid aside [. . .] until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking’ (p. 1). This idea influenced many ethicists in Iris Murdoch’s Oxford, and provides one of the motives for Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, and in particular, for Murdoch’s attempt to establish that states of mind (construed broadly, so as to include character traits) are morally important for their own sake: that their moral importance is not exhausted by the importance they derive from the actions they might lead one to perform or the states of affairs that they might help to bring about.2 Murdoch’s ideas about the moral importance of states of mind are closely related to her views about how one ought to think of oneself. Attention to oneself, she thinks, is a widespread source of moral failure: ‘Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself’;3 ‘In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego’ (p. 51). These two aspects of Murdoch’s thought seem to be incompatible. It is natural to think that the states of mind whose moral importance Murdoch establishes are inner occurrences taking place on the private stage of consciousness. But this leads to the following problem. Trying to become good involves giving attention to things of moral importance, and so, if we understand the morally important states of mind to be private inner occurrences, it involves giving attention to private inner states. But this is a form of self-directed intellectual activity, and self-directed intellectual activity is the very thing that Murdoch wants to characterize as a source of moral failure. 72
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There are at least two strategies for avoiding this problem. The first strategy avoids the problem by taking Murdoch’s view of the self to entail something less than a complete prohibition on attention to the self. Perhaps self-directed attention comes in different forms, only some of which are prohibited, or perhaps the prohibition on self-directed attention only applies in certain circumstances. Samantha Vice employs this strategy in her contribution to this volume. The present paper pursues a different strategy. It avoids the problem by understanding the morally important states of mind as something other than inner occurrences taking place on the private stage of consciousness. Vice’s view is that the strong prohibition on attention to the inner life is neither plausible, nor warranted by Murdoch’s position. My view is that we can keep the strong prohibition on attention to the inner, but must reject the idea that the morally important states of mind and character are inner states, and think of them instead as being world involving.
The moral importance of the mind The claim that the moral importance of states of mind is not exhausted by the importance of their effects can be interpreted in two ways: one strong and one weak. The strong position is that (independently of their effects) states of mind and character often have a crucial role in determining whether a person is doing well or badly, morally speaking. The weak position is that states of mind and character carry some weight, but vastly less than is carried by the moral importance of acts and states of affairs. Murdoch endorses the strong position. The parable of the mother-in-law, which is prominent in her discussion of this point, establishes only the weak position. Murdoch asks us to imagine a mother-in-law who, by a process of reflection, comes to a positive view of the daughter-in-law whom previously she had regarded as vulgar and noisy (pp. 16–23). It is specified that the mother-in-law’s new opinion is not accompanied by any change in outward behaviour (the daughter-in-law is dead or abroad). Murdoch thinks, and expects us to think, that there is something morally good about this change in the mother-in-law. Since, ex hypothesi, the only changes that take place are changes in states of mind, it must be these states of mind that make the moral difference, and so it must be that moral importance attaches to states of mind in a way that does not depend on their effects. This argument for the moral importance of states of mind depends on the fact that the case of the mother-in-law is one in which action is out of the question. But, for that very reason, the example cannot establish
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that states of mind are morally important when the possibility of action is in question. The parable of the mother-in-law shows, in the very special case of entirely mental conduct, that the question of whether the conduct is good or bad must be answered by reference to states of mind or character. It does not show that states of mind are morally important in general, only that moral importance attaches to inner states when nothing else is at stake. There is another argument, however, that does support the strong position, according to which states of mind often have a crucial role in determining the morality of a person’s conduct. Murdoch does not develop this argument in any detail, but we can reconstruct it in terms borrowed from the virtue-based approach to ethics that her work helped to revive. The virtue ethicist takes the proper starting point for ethical theory to be the fact that we should do what the virtuous agent would do were he in our circumstances. We act as we should only if we act as the virtuous agent would. The virtue-ethicist then claims that there is not usually any description of an act given in purely behavioural terms that allows us to settle the question of whether that act is one that the virtuous agent would do. The virtuous agent might lie if the circumstances called for it, but he would not lie callously. He might hurt others, but he would not hurt others brutally. ‘It is all very well to say that “to copy a right action is to act rightly”’, says Murdoch, quoting Stuart Hampshire’s ‘Logic and Appreciation’,4 ‘but what is the form I am supposed to copy?’ (p. 29). It cannot be the form of behaviour, considered independently of its motivation. In order to determine whether or not an action is one that the virtuous agent would perform, we need a description of the action that tells us more than is implied by a purely behavioural description. We need a description that tells us about the states of mind and character that the behaviour expresses. These states are important for determining the morality or immorality of a course of action, not because, as in the case of the mother-in-law, we can take away the possibility of action and retain a morally significant inner state – but because the descriptions of action under which we consider actions morally are already laden with commitments to the agent’s being in a certain state of mind, or having certain character traits. Actions lose a crucial part of their moral character if we attempt to divorce them from these commitments.
Attention to the self The argument we have just explored does, as the parable of the motherin-law cannot, provide Murdoch with a reason to believe that states of
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mind have an important role to play in our moral thinking. It shows that it is not merely when nothing else is at stake that these states are morally important. But the argument also seems to show that Murdoch is committed to the very un-Murdochian view that the attempt to become good essentially involves attention to oneself. The problem arises in the following way. In order to know whether we are acting as the virtuous agent would we need to know which aspects of our character we are exercising. It is not enough to know that we are hurting others, or that we are benefiting them. We need also to know whether we are being callous or manipulative. To know these things we must, it seems, pay close attention to ourselves. And that is precisely what Murdoch has told us we must not do.
The prima facie innocence of self-directed attention What we have just seen is that Murdoch’s best argument for the moral importance of states of mind entails a commitment to self-directed attention. This does not pose a problem by itself. The problem arises when this commitment is combined with Murdoch’s view that selfdirected attention is a source of moral failure. No problem would arise if we were to reject that view of self-directed attention, and it is tempting simply to do so. Self-directed attention does not seem to be a moral failing. The forms of self-directed attention that we find ourselves committed to by the arguments of the previous section seem particularly innocuous when we consider their role in the moral reasoning at work in the following example: a man is wondering whether he should tell his wife about a minor indiscretion in his past. He recognizes that keeping the secret is a way of being untrustworthy and so he resolves to tell the truth. What moves him is the realization that he does not want to be the kind of person who would continue to lie. The distinctive feature of this form of moral reasoning is that the terms of evaluation it employs indict the agent rather than the act. Self-indicting formulations often sound more natural than the alternatives from which all reference to the self has been removed, and they are not merely verbal variants on them. The belief that my wife ought to be told the truth rationally motivates me to tell her the truth if I have the desire that things be as they ought. To be motivated to act by the belief that ‘I ought to tell her’, I need only desire that I do what I ought. The self-directed attention required for this form of moral reasoning does not seem to be objectionable. It may be clear that the agent who employs this sort of reasoning is not among the best of moral reasoners.
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In our best moral thinking our reasons for acting are not provided by concerns about our own goodness. But this does not lead us to think that there is anything wrong with deliberately undertaking the task of acting well, or with being motivated by judgements about whether one is succeeding in that task: the self-directed attention that is required in the making of those judgements does not, on the face of it, rule them out of the attempt to become good, especially when, as in the example above, the judgements are negative ones. Our argument for the moral importance of states of mind and character carries an apparent commitment to self-directed attention only to the degree that self-directed attention figures in the rather benign sort of reasoning sketched above. Murdoch herself seems to realize that selfdirected attention can have a role in the attempt to become good. Her own telling of the parable of the mother-in-law, in fact, seems to involve self-directed attention: The M of the example [the mother-in-law] is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: “I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again” (p. 17, emphasis Murdoch’s). The mother-in-law’s praiseworthy change of opinion is clearly precipitated by self-directed attention of the sort that we met above. It is by attending to herself that M is in a position to know that she is oldfashioned, conventional and so on. In this passage Murdoch seems to recognize, even to endorse, the mother-in-law’s self-directed attention as having a role in her moral progress. Why, then, does Murdoch also seem to think that self-directed attention is a source of moral failing? We have not yet seen any reason to think of self-directed attention in this way. It is neither selfish nor self-aggrandizing, and, moreover, it seems to figure in our everyday attempts to act well.
The rejection of self-directed attention The self-directed attention involved in the sorts of reasoning discussed above is prima facie innocent. It even seems to figure in Murdoch’s account of the mother-in-law’s praiseworthy change of opinion. It is tempting, therefore, to say that self-directed attention is not always
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a source of moral failure, and that it is morally permitted in the service of an attempt to become good. This temptation should be resisted. For Murdoch the struggle to be good is a struggle to keep attention away from the self: ‘Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself’ (p. 91). It is important to be clear that Murdoch does not merely think that self-directed attention has no role in the fully good life. There would be no problem with thinking that the fully virtuous agent does not think of himself, while thinking that we should think of ourselves in order to become good. (Just as there is no contradiction in thinking that a good tennis player gives no attention to his ball-toss when serving, but that we need to attend to our ball-toss rather carefully in order to become good tennis players.) Murdoch’s claim is that self-directed attention is absent from the pursuit of goodness, and not merely from the life in which goodness has been achieved. We see this most clearly in the concluding pages of ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’ in the claim that ‘although [the humble man] is not by definition the good man perhaps he is the kind of man most likely of all to become good (p. 101). The thoroughgoing rejection of self-directed attention is also prominent elsewhere: ‘In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego’ (p. 51). Murdoch’s thoroughgoing opposition to self-directed attention is clear throughout The Sovereignty of Good, but why does she oppose it so? The following two passages provide some clues: The difficulty is to keep attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair (p. 89). We are anxiety ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world. Our states of consciousness differ in quality, our fantasies and reveries are not trivial and unimportant, they are profoundly connected with our energies and our ability to choose and act. And if quality of consciousness matters then anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue (p. 82). The prohibition on self-directed attention, then, is connected to the moral importance of accurately perceiving things as they really are. The
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accurate perception of things is central to Murdoch’s conception of the good life, and of the movement towards it, both because it is good in itself, and because it enables us to make the right decisions about how to act: ‘The love that brings the right answer [. . .] is an exercise of justice and realism, and really looking’ (p. 89). We shall see, in the next section, that the connection between this imperative to accurate perception and the prohibition on self-directed attention is not an entirely straightforward one. But notice, for now, that attempts to perceive the self are prohibited, and that this is, in part, because they are attempts at a sort of perception that is particularly unlikely to be accurate, and that is likely to impair accuracy when it comes to perceiving things other than the self. The situation we are in is this: we have seen that a role for selfdirected attention in the attempt to become good seems to be entailed by Murdoch’s emphasis on the moral importance of states of mind, and that the existence of such a role is incompatible with a strong prohibition on self-directed attention. We have also seen that, although it may be tempting to reject the strong prohibition, Murdoch does not reject it. The problem that we face is one that Murdoch is vividly aware of. It is a source of much of the moral drama that animates The Nice and the Good, published in 1968 (two years before the appearance of The Sovereignty of Good, but two years after the delivery of the lectures that the book of that title collects). The Nice and the Good gives an explicit statement of our problem as a ‘great paradox of morality’ experienced by the book’s protagonist, John Ducane: What Ducane was experiencing, in this form peculiar to him of imagining himself as a judge, was, though this was not entirely clear in his mind, one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely, that in order to become good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet such imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible, either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness is thought about in the wrong way. To become good it may be necessary to think about virtue, although unreflective simple people may achieve a thoughtless excellence. Ducane was in any case highly reflective and had from childhood quite explicitly set before himself the aim of becoming a good man.5 The problem that the authorial voice expresses here is the very problem that we have found in Murdoch’s philosophical work. If being good is thought of as involving virtue, then a deliberate attempt to become
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good (like Ducane’s ‘explicitly set[ting] before himself the aim of becoming a good man’) seems to involve self-directed attention, which ‘renders improvement impossible’. One way to deal with this problem is not to try to eradicate it, but simply to embrace the conclusion that it is not possible to become good by trying. Ducane is sometimes tempted by that view, but Murdoch has no sympathy with it and thinks that we must account for deliberate intellectual attempts to pursue goodness and account for the simple achievement of goodness. ‘[I]t must be possible to do justice to both Socrates and the virtuous peasant. In such “musts” as these lie the deepest springs and motives of philosophy’ (p. 2).
A bad argument against self-directed attention The escape from our problem is seen by looking more carefully at the way in which the emphasis on ‘realism and really looking’ provides the foundations for the prohibition on self-directed attention. It is the imperative to ‘realism and really looking’ that leads Murdoch to prohibit self-directed attention, but it is not that Murdoch prohibits self-directed attention simply because the self is particularly difficult to really, realistically, look at. We should not interpret Murdoch in this way because if we were to do so we would have to credit her with the following patently invalid argument: 1. Accurate perception of the self is difficult. 2. We are morally required to perceive things accurately. Conclusion: We are morally required not to attempt accurate perception of the self. This argument is clearly not valid. If the first premise only cites the difficulty of accurate self-perception then all that follows is the entirely unremarkable conclusion that, when it comes to the perception of the self, the moral requirement of accurate perception is a difficult requirement to meet. That does nothing to justify the vilification of selfdirected attention. The struggle to become good is, after all, a difficult struggle. There is a temptation to strengthen the argument by beefing up the first premise. Murdoch sometimes seems to use an argument that is a version of the one above, but one that is less obviously invalid because the first premise has been strengthened so as to say that accurate
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self-perception is not merely difficult but impossible, and that the self prevents the accurate perception of other things: That human beings are naturally selfish seems true on the evidence, whenever and wherever we look at them, in spite of a very small number of exceptions. About the quality of this selfishness modern psychology has had something to tell us. The psyche is a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. [. . .] One of its main pastimes is daydreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it sees the world but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature (p. 76). The ‘modern psychology’ that Murdoch understands as revealing this picture of the self is Freudian psychology, and one who thinks that Freudian psychology is wrong-headed will be unmoved by Murdoch’s argument here. But even if we were to grant this picture of the self as a source of fictions, we would still not have a premise capable of patching the hole in the argument sketched above. Even if we believe that the self is a source of fictions we still lack a reason for not trying to perceive it rightly. (A Freudian would say that we should try to perceive it rightly.) The premise that is needed to establish an absolute prohibition on selfdirected attention is not just that the self is a deceiver and that accurate self-perception is impossible. The needed premise is that the self is a deceiver, and that its deceptions are made worse by the attempt to perceive it correctly. This is a much harder premise to establish. It is not a premise that can be established on the basis of introspection, for to believe it on the basis of introspection is to undermine one’s own basis for believing it. Nor is it a claim that is made obvious on the basis of our observations of others. When we observe others we do, perhaps, find them to be somewhat deceived about the way things are, but the matter of whether they would be any less deceived had they not tried to perceive themselves is not a matter that our normal encounters with people, however carefully conducted, enable us to decide. This claim is too strong to feature as an unsupported premise in the argument against self-directed attention. There are no plausible strengthenings of the first premise that make the argument given above into a compelling one and so we should not understand Murdoch’s prohibition on self-directed attention to be
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motivated by this argument, or by a version of it in which the first premise is strengthened. We get a more satisfactory interpretation of Murdoch’s reasons for prohibiting self-directed attention by getting a better understanding of the strength of the second premise – the premise concerning the imperative to perceive the world correctly.
Realism and really looking To understand the importance of really looking we must turn once again to the parable of the mother-in-law. The mother-in-law’s morally praiseworthy change of opinion involved her seeing that her daughterin-law is ‘not vulgar, but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful’ (p. 17). Such changes are said to result from ‘realism and really looking’ or, as Murdoch says elsewhere, from a ‘just and loving gaze directed on an individual reality’ (p. 33). Murdoch specifies that the case is one in which the mother-in-law is not deluding herself. The mother-in-law’s vision is more accurate once she has revised her opinion upwards. But it must be a contingent fact that in this particular case the higher opinion is the more accurate one. Some daughters-in-law really are undignified, noisy and tiresomely juvenile, and the result of realistically looking at them would, presumably, be to see them as undignified, noisy and tiresomely juvenile. Murdoch herself has given us the verdict from her realism and really looking: ‘That human beings are naturally selfish seems true whenever and wherever we look at them’ (p. 77). If ‘really looking’ is valuable for itself then it is valuable whether or not it shows us things in a good light. In being told to really look we are not being invited to optimistically misperceive the world; we are being asked to perceive it as it really is. ‘Really looking’ with ‘a just and loving attention’ is valuable whatever it is that one is doing justice to. It may be a daughter-in-law that one had underestimated, or the extent of human altruism that one had overestimated. The emphasis on resisting fantasy shows us that it is respect for the real which is the achtung impelling Murdoch to act well: ‘The authority of morals is the authority of truth, that is of reality’ (p. 88). This is not an emotional reaction to the world as known, but the recognition of the world as something one must come to know (and thereby come to understand and respect): The value concepts are here [in the case of imaginative art and the practice of a skilled craft] patently tied onto the world, they are
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stretched as it were between the truth seeking mind and the world, they are not moving about on their own as adjuncts to the personal will [. . .]. [W]e see it as natural to the particular kind of creatures we are that love should be inseparable from justice and clear vision from respect for the real (p. 88f).
The world-involving nature of the morally important states of mind The emphasis on the moral importance of character and of states of mind should be understood as an emphasis on the importance of modes of attention. The value that we pursue in developing craftsmanship, and in our engagement with the arts, is ‘stretched between the truth seeking mind and the world’ (p. 88) because it is value that inheres in attention. (There is a play on etymology here. ‘Attention’ comes from the Old French ad tendere: being stretched out.) Being loving and just, and possessing the other virtuous character traits, is not a matter of being in a particular sort of private, inner state. It depends on our mode of engagement with the world. The facets of our character take on the status of virtues only insofar as they involve particular faculties of attention that bring us into a virtuous relationship with the world. Virtuous character traits involve particular propensities for varieties of valuable attention, while vices are tendencies towards inattention. Loving is (or at least, it essentially involves) an astute focus on the particularity of others. Kindness starts with an awareness of their needs. Pity pays heed to the origins of another’s misfortune. Courage is the trait required for attention to produce action unimpeded. The angry man, the lazy man and the disrespectful man are all, in their various ways, negligent, careless, thoughtless, impulsive, tactless or rash, as is shown by the frequency with which the harm and offence they cause is inadvertent (tendencies Murdoch explored in her 1971 novel, An Accidental Man). The impatient man is the first to look away. Possession of a character trait is not a kind of bias in the way that events are depicted in one’s internal monologue. There is no distinctive profile to the inner phenomenology of acting from some particular character trait. What is distinctive about acting from a particular character trait is one’s form of engagement with the world. It is the world that sets the standards. In trying to act well we must ask (as my argument in the first section demonstrated) questions about our character, but this does not commit us to problematically self-directed attention
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because these are not questions that can be answered by directing attention onto oneself. To know whether one’s character is virtuous is to know one’s mode of attentive engagement with the world, and this cannot be known by looking inwards. The question, ‘Is this act loving?’ is not a question about whether the behaviour is accompanied by a particular phenomenological twinge in the subject, but a question about (among other things) whether the act does its object any good and whether it is motivated by a proper recognition of what would do the object good. That is why ‘Love needs to be expressed, it needs to do work’.6 Really looking does not get its value by revealing purposefulness and pre-existing value out there in the world: ‘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’ (p. 77). Nor does it involve an illusory projection of value from the self. Looking at the world is itself a bearer of value. Knowledge of the nature of one’s character may be indispensable for the more or less reflective thinker’s deliberate progressing towards becoming good, but this knowledge of character is not attained through the worthless unstretched-out attention involved in introspection. Even when introspection succeeds in being honest and astute, the features of ourselves that we learn about through introspection are features that are morally salient only on account of their relationships to things outside the self. Introspective meditations do not bring us into a proper relationship with the world, and they do not tell us whether we are in a proper relationship with the world. It is careful understanding of the world that reveals our failures of virtue as failures. If one takes our moral character to be partially constituted by the ways in which we attentively interact with the world, then one can hold that character traits are primary bearers of intrinsic value without thereby making one’s own properties a focus of concern in one’s pursuit of goodness. Insofar as the struggle to become good requires knowledge of one’s own moral character it provides a further impetus for patient and careful attention to the world.
Notes 1. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ in Philosophy, XXXI (1958), 1–19. 2. Most of this work was completed while the author held the William Alexander Fleet fellowship at Princeton University. An enormous debt of gratitude is owed to Miss Julia Fleet, whose death, while the work was being prepared for publication, is an occasion of great sadness. Thanks for useful discussions are owing to David Sussman and Philip Pettit, to Jessica Boyd
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3. 4. 5. 6.
Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment and, especially, to Arudra Burra, who read several earlier drafts. Discussions with Samantha Vice and others at the Iris Murdoch Conference at Kingston University in 2004 have also been a great help. All page references are to The Sovereignty of Good. Stuart Hampshire, ‘Logic and Appreciation’, in Language and Aesthetics (ed.) W. Elton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954). The Nice and the Good (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 77. The phrase is given to Willy Kost (p. 132). Murdoch probably endorses the view, although only with the additional observation that ‘Love can’t always do work’ (p. 222).
Part III Revisiting The Saint and the Artist
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7 The Ascetic Impulse in Iris Murdoch’s Thought Maria Antonaccio
Introduction: The Saint and the Artist In his classic study of Murdoch’s fiction, The Saint and the Artist, Peter Conradi uses a recurring theme of Murdoch’s interviews and essays – ‘the peculiarly distressing struggle between the artist and the saint’ – to structure his reading of her novels (p. 88). On the one hand, the novels display an essentially religious or Platonic ideal of ‘unselfing’, represented by characters who aspire to a saintly or otherworldly mode of existence and, on the other, a more cheerful and ego-affirming worldliness represented by characters whose embrace of ordinary life and its pleasures mark them as aesthetes or hedonists. Although the contrast between the two ideals is not absolute, the tension ‘between a spiritual and a secular or worldly view of the moral agent’, Conradi writes, ‘animates [Murdoch’s] work from the beginning’ (p. xiv). Conradi is not alone in his perception of this pervasive ‘doubleness’ in Murdoch’s fiction. Other critics have also acknowledged that the implied morality of the novels can at times appear stringently moralistic, at other times more generously humane and aesthetic. Yet what is most unique and helpful about Conradi’s reading is that, although he acknowledges the deeply ascetic or puritanical impulse in Murdoch’s writings, he rightly insists that her moral passion ‘does not emerge in her fiction in a simple-minded way’ (SA, pp. 92–3). Conradi notes how consistently if painfully funny the novels are even at their darkest moments, how contrary to ‘a solemn and self-dramatising moral intensity’ (SA, p. 91). In fact, the characters who are most severely punished are precisely those would-be saints or false ascetics whose perfectionism usually leads them towards moral hubris and eventual self-destruction, rather than to a true askesis. This is why, as Conradi suggests, Murdoch 87
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cannot simply be characterized as a puritan moralist, but is rather an anti-puritan puritan, who warns against the dangers of moral or spiritual hubris inherent in the pursuit of high-minded ideals (SA, p. 90). The novels, in short, express ‘a dynamic and cheerful philosophy of the Middle Way’, which ‘mocks moral excess at the same time that it invites it’ (SA, pp. 90, 127). Although devotees of Murdoch’s novels will find Conradi’s work to be invaluable in identifying what makes them so unique (and, for many readers, so addictive), readers of Murdoch’s philosophical writings might be struck by the fact that the ‘doubleness’ that is so widely recognized as a central feature of the novels seems to be largely missing from her moral philosophy. For example, many readers and critics have discerned in the philosophical voice of The Sovereignty of Good chiefly the voice of the Platonic moralist urging us towards the saintly ideal of unselfing, rather than the voice of the worldly or pleasure-seeking artist. Such readings seem to share the assumption that, whatever the considerable pleasures and moral subtleties of the novels, Murdoch’s philosophical centre of gravity remains that of an ascetic moralist who advocates the defeat of egoism and adherence to an absolute standard of the Good. For this reason, her philosophy is often judged to be less subtle and internally complex than her novels, and more preoccupied with pursuing a unitary, mystical path to the Good. As an example of this view, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has suggested that Murdoch’s severity about moral ideals encourages an intolerance of human variety and difference that is not only at odds with her fiction, but perhaps even morally dangerous as well. Nussbaum argues that a ‘neglect of the worldly was part of [Murdoch’s] exacting idea of virtue’.1 She faults Murdoch as a philosopher for allowing her Platonism to lead her to embrace a unitary abstraction called ‘The Good’, while her artistic instincts tended in a more Aristotelian direction – towards an affirmation of what Nussbaum calls ‘the variegated world of surprising humanity’ (WG, p. 32). Nussbaum in effect recasts the struggle between the saint and the artist in Murdoch’s work as a wrestling match between Plato and Aristotle, which Plato (unfortunately, in Nussbaum’s judgement) wins. Nussbaum implies that Murdoch would have been a much better philosopher if she had followed the impulse towards ‘Aristotelian many-sidedness’ that marks her best novels, instead of the ‘Platonic mysticism’ that her moral philosophy misguidedly favours (WG, p. 32). Nussbaum’s work exemplifies a consistent worry that ‘otherworldly’ or ‘transcendent’ values may lead to a devaluation of our embodied
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humanity. As such, her criticism of Murdoch is emblematic of a concern that has become increasingly common in contemporary ethics: the concern that any morality that aspires to high or perfectionist ideals is suspect because it devalues persons in their particularity and imperfection and may encourage intolerance and even cruelty when adopted as social ideals. Insofar as Murdoch’s Platonism seems to lead in that direction, Nussbaum parts philosophical company with her. Against this background, my aim in this paper is to offer a corrective to overly monolithic readings of Murdoch’s moral philosophy vis-à-vis her fiction by challenging narrowly ascetic interpretations of her philosophical position. I hope, in doing so, to engage the more general problem of the status of ideals in human life. My contention is that Murdoch’s moral theory does not unambiguously support the saintly ideal of unselfing, as many have assumed; it also makes room for a conception of the moral agent as creative ‘artist’. In this respect, the characteristic ‘doubleness’ that pervades Murdoch’s fiction, typified in the contrast between saint and artist, is not missing from her philosophy. The philosophical stance of her ethics is neither purely the stance of the ascetic moralist, nor that of the anti-puritan aesthete, but the more dynamic, self-critical posture of the ‘anti-puritan puritan’.2 In order to show this, I first present the theoretical contours of the relation between art and ethics in The Sovereignty of Good as a way to explore the possible structural parallels with the saint–artist theme in the novels. In the second part, I show that Murdoch’s recognition of the limits or paradoxes of an ethic of unselfing find expression in her account of the reflexive structure of moral consciousness. This represents the theoretical corollary to the anti-puritan puritanism of the novels. In the conclusion of the paper, I briefly note the potential contribution of my reading of Murdoch’s ethics to the current debate over the status of moral ideals.
Art and ethics in Murdoch’s moral theory Art as spiritual exercise It is little wonder that Murdoch’s account of the problem of egoism and its cure in The Sovereignty of Good has been interpreted as the work of an ascetic moralist who judges human conduct by an otherworldly ideal of perfection. As is well known, the moral psychology presented in this text is intended to challenge what she regarded as the ‘unambitious optimism’3 of much modern ethics – its lack of aspiration and rigour
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in formulating moral ideals – and to articulate a rival psychology or ‘soul-picture’ which represents morality as a disciplined achievement of purified vision. To counteract the overly sanguine assumption of existentialists and others that ‘an authentic mode of existence [. . .][is] attainable by intelligence and force of will’, Murdoch appealed to ‘the vanishing images of Christian theology which represented goodness as almost impossibly difficult, and sin as almost insuperable and certainly as a universal condition’ (SG, pp. 50, 51). Yet Murdoch did not fully align herself with a Christian diagnosis of the human moral fault or its correction. The human problem is not (as in Augustinian Christianity) the result of the perversity of a will unable to will the good. Rather, as David Gordon has noted, ‘the fundamental evil for [Murdoch] is always human vanity, not human will’.4 If there is a notion of original sin in Murdoch, it is that ‘objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings’ (SG, p. 51). ‘Our minds are continually active fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world’ (SG, p. 84). Drawing on the work of both Plato and Freud, Murdoch described human beings as compelled by their desires and inclinations, tenacious in their attachments, and obsessed by consoling fantasies and illusions designed to protect the psyche from the pain of reality. Images and fantasies provide the focal point around which undifferentiated psychic energies are organized. The cure for egoism is therefore not simply a matter of redirecting one’s vision, but of reorienting one’s psychic energies and desires. In this light, we can see why Murdoch believed that art and morals are ‘aspects of a single struggle’ (SG, p. 41). Because of the connection between vision and desire, the quality of the images and objects to which we attend is ‘profoundly connected with our energies and our ability to choose and act’ (SG, p. 41). Accordingly, the cure for egoism involves cultivating forms of vision or attention that break the hold of ego-centred fantasy and reorient the energies of consciousness ‘in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism’ (SG, p. 41). Ordinary human experience furnishes multiple occasions for such a reorientation: the appreciation of beauty in art or nature, the discipline of concentrated intellectual study and, especially, serious attention to the existence of other people and their claims (SG, pp. 83–97). Such experiences refocus psychic energies on a moral source that lies outside of the illusions and desires of the ego. The famous example of M and D is often cited as the pre-eminent example of the kind of moral discipline that is required for unselfing. The example recounts the situation of a mother (M) struggling to come
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to terms with her son’s choice of a spouse, her daughter-in-law (D). In undertaking a sincere effort at self-criticism, M attempts to re-describe D’s more irritating qualities with a new set of evaluative terms. D is no longer seen as ‘vulgar’, but ‘refreshingly simple’; not ‘undignified’, but ‘spontaneous’; not ‘tiresomely juvenile’ but ‘delightfully youthful’, and so forth (SG, pp. 18–9). When understood in the light of the text’s preoccupation with unselfing, the story of M’s progressing knowledge of D can be read as Murdoch’s recasting of the Platonic allegory of the cave. Like the prisoners in the cave, M is engaged in a pilgrimage from shadowy perception towards truthful vision. Through a disciplined effort of moral attention, she progresses from a perception of D distorted by jealousy and egoism to a more just appreciation of D’s personality. Artistic activity is described as a similar sort of pilgrimage. It requires the same disciplined exercise of attention, the same decentring away from selfish preoccupation that was required of M in her reassessment of D. Murdoch considers art one of several techniques or practices for ‘the purification of states of mind’ (SG, p. 83). In fact, compared to human relations, where ‘selfishness operates in a much more devious and frenzied manner’, Murdoch holds that art ‘presents the most comprehensible example of the almost irresistible human tendency to seek consolation in fantasy and also of the effort to resist this and the vision of reality which comes with success’ (SG, p. 64). In this respect, art is exemplary for morality. It is ‘the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of morality can be seen’ (SG, pp. 87–8). Despite her deep affinities with Plato, then, Murdoch sees the deceptive potential of art – its tendency ‘to seek consolation in fantasy’ – as useful to morality rather than merely harmful. Art engages the human temptation to impose form on reality and to coerce reality to the ego’s purposes, but it also exercises our capacity to overcome or resist that temptation. As an exercise in unselfing, moreover, art provides an occasion for moral discipline both in its creation and in its consumption or enjoyment. It requires the artist to put aside ‘personal fantasy: the tissue of selfaggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one’ (SG, p. 59). The consumer of art has an analogous task: ‘to be disciplined enough to see as much reality in the work as the artist has succeeded in putting into it, and not to ‘use it as magic’ (SG, p. 64). In a famous passage, Murdoch characterizes truthful moral vision as follows: ‘Rilke said of Cézanne that he did not paint “I like it”, he painted “There it is”’ (SG, p. 63). The sharp distinction drawn here between the artist’s personal or subjective desire (‘I like it’)
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and the clear vision he struggles to achieve (‘There it is’), suggests that art, as a discipline of unselfing, requires a total withdrawal or renunciation of subjectivity: ‘the greatest art is “impersonal”’ (SG, p. 65). The same feature is apparent in the M and D example: M can only see D ‘as she really is’ if she ceases to focus on her own selfish reasons for disliking D. In another passage, Murdoch describes unselfing as a form of ‘detachment’, the distancing of the self from its own desires. ‘It is obvious here what is the role, for the artist or spectator, of exactness and good vision: unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention. It is also clear that in moral situations a similar exactness is called for’ (SG, pp. 65–66). As these passages demonstrate, Murdoch’s characterization of the similarity between art and morality alternates between the language of analogy and the (rather stronger) language of instance. That is, art is not only an excellent analogy of morals – ‘a place where the nature of morality can be truly seen’; it may even be a case (or instance) of morals’ (SG, p. 59). In one passage, for example, Murdoch notes that the appreciation of beauty (whether in art or in nature) is not only ‘the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just analogy of) the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real’ (SG, p. 65). In such passages, the distinction between art and ethics seems to collapse altogether. Good art is not simply like virtuous conduct; it is itself a form or end product of virtuous conduct. Similarly, mediocre or bad art is not simply like mediocre conduct; rather, bad art and bad conduct result from a failure of unselfing, and both display precisely the opposite features that good art or virtuous behaviour display: ‘the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world’ (SG, p. 59). Such passages suggest that art is itself an instance of moral conduct: ‘Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man’ (SG, p. 41). Although this view seems to veer uncomfortably close to a didactic view of art, where good art is good only insofar as it is ‘good for us’ (that is, insofar as it serves a moral purpose), Murdoch consistently rejected such a view in her writings and interviews. Accordingly, these passages should not be taken to mean that in promoting the ethical project of unselfing, art is serving a purpose outside itself. Rather, the claim is that, insofar as the aim of art is realistic (that is to ‘delineate nature with a clear eye’), the discipline of unselfing is integral to the practice of good art. Without this discipline, what the artist will produce is not a vision of reality, but her own fantasy. Given this virtual identification between art and ethics as forms of realistic or purified vision, it is not difficult to see why the tension between
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saint and artist seems to be missing from Murdoch’s moral theory. In The Sovereignty of Good, she portrays the artist not as a ‘worldly hedonist’ but as a moral pilgrim, treading the same path of self-abnegation as the saint on the way to a vision of the real. Art is itself a technique of unselfing and an instance of what Murdoch means by ‘goodness’ or ‘virtue’. If our discussion were to end here, those who interpret Murdoch primarily as an ascetic philosopher whose moral theory lacks the internal tension and dynamism of the novels would have a point. But this is not the end of the story: an aesthetic countercurrent runs through Murdoch’s account of unselfing in The Sovereignty of Good. As we will see, metaphors of creativity and aesthetic perception play a role in Murdoch’s ethics that work against the idea of a total unselfing. Morality as an exercise of imagination In order to grasp this point, I want to return briefly to the example of M and D. A closer reading reveals that truthful moral perception may not, in fact, involve a complete renunciation of self, but rather depends on the creative imagination and personality of the individual agent. These aesthetic elements put pressure on the ascetic ideal which otherwise dominates the text and open the possibility for a more nuanced reading of the dynamics of unselfing. There are at least three ways in which art (or activities associated with art) emerges in the M and D example to resist the ascetic or saintly ideal. The first is the role of imagination in the process of acquiring truthful vision. As Murdoch notes, M’s transformed perspective on D suggests that ‘clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort’ (SG, p. 37). It is not, therefore, simply a passive apprehension or contemplation of reality. In other writings, Murdoch describes the imagination as an active moral faculty, even a form of willing. ‘The world which we confront is not just a world of “facts” but a world upon which our imagination has, at any given moment, already worked; and although such working may often be “fantasy” and may constitute a barrier to our seeing “what is really there”, this is not necessarily so’.5 Murdoch describes the difference between the two activities in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals as follows: while fantasy ‘mechanically generat[es] narrowly banal false pictures (the ego as all-powerful)’, imagination ‘freely and creatively explor[es] the world, moving toward the expression and elucidation [. . .] of what is true and deep’.6 From this perspective, M’s effort to set aside her negative impressions of D is an effort to overcome her fantasies, while her creative re-description of D’s qualities in more generous terms represents the use of her imagination.
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Much more needs to be said about the distinction between fantasy and imagination in Murdoch’s work,7 but the important point for our purposes is that the process of unselfing does not simply banish all images from consciousness. Rather, it involves a deeply creative engagement with reality that generates images of its own. As Murdoch puts it, ‘we use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it’ (SG, pp. 90–1). The idea that the imagination plays an active role in moral perception suggests that the vision of reality that results from the practice of unselfing is not a vision that is uninflected by subjectivity, but a vision that has been actively constructed by a perceiving subject. The second important feature of the M and D example is closely related to the first. The process of unselfing does not involve a total extinction of M’s personality; quite the contrary. M’s re-description of D (as ‘refreshingly simple’ rather than ‘vulgar’, ‘spontaneous’ rather than ‘undignified’, etc.) (SG, pp. 18–9) is something she does with the resources of her own unique moral temperament. Yet these personal or ‘subjective’ aspects do not prevent her from achieving a clear vision of D; they are the necessary condition for it. M is able to see D apart from the distorting lens of her earlier jealousy and elitism not by negating or renouncing her own individuality; rather, the effort she makes in the struggle to perceive D more justly elicits her unique capacities. The final point I wish to make about the example of M and D concerns the nature of the moral vision that M achieves. The quality of M’s perception of D seems nothing like the seemingly neutral or impersonal detachment described in the passage about Rilke and Cezanne. Murdoch uses the term ‘attention’ ‘to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’ (SG, p. 34). Attention is a type of vision that does not merely seek neutral ‘accuracy’ or ‘photographic realism’ in relation to its object. Rather, ‘what M is ex hypothesi attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly’ (SG, p. 34). Good vision is not ‘neutral’, like the eye of a camera; it is human vision that has been purified of selfish desire. Taken together, the passages that I have just noted seem to warn against the idea that the self that has undergone the discipline of unselfing has been extinguished along with its desires. That is, they warn against precisely the idea of a radical askesis that is often taken to be Murdoch’s central moral imperative. Instead, what is suggested is that truthful moral vision may have its own drive or eros – not the narrowly self-serving drive of the fantasy-producing ego to judge reality by its own self-centred standards, but the creative drive towards a loving tolerance and acceptance of the reality of another being. The vision
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achieved by unselfing is not a vision utterly devoid of self, but a subjectivity purified of selfishness – a consciousness, that is, in which imagination has triumphed over fantasy. The alternation between these two perspectives in Murdoch’s philosophy – one suggesting the ‘putative identity’ (SA, p. 365) between art and ethics in the project of unselfing, and the other suggesting an aesthetic resistance to a total unselfing – supports my larger claim in this paper that Murdoch’s moral theory is marked by some of the same internal tensions as the novels, and is not as monolithically committed to a strenuously ascetic ideal as some have suggested. In the next part of the paper, I want to suggest that a similar tension is present within Murdoch’s account of consciousness. To this extent, the competing ideals of saint and artist become an internal structural feature of her account of moral consciousness.
Paradoxes of askesis and the reflexive structure of consciousness Murdoch was keenly aware of the compensatory mechanisms of human egoism – its capacity to generate new fantasies when the old ones have been exposed, thus allowing the ego to reassert itself at the first available opportunity. While this regenerative capacity can be life saving, it also represents the potential weakness in any ethic of unselfing. The danger is that the attempt to overcome one’s ego may itself be a form of egoism in another guise. Conradi has convincingly shown that this is precisely the danger that Murdoch often exposed in her fiction, usually with devastating wit and at the expense of her most pompous characters. The question for this paper, however, is whether these dangers are acknowledged, accounted for and guarded against in Murdoch’s philosophy. At first glance, the answer seems to be a resounding ‘No’. Given the scathing critique launched in The Sovereignty of Good against the mediocrity and unambitiousness of modern ethics, Murdoch seemed intent on defending high-minded ideals from degeneration, rather than poking fun at them as she does in the novels. Yet I believe that Murdoch did recognize the dangers of her own philosophy’s high-mindedness from the inside, as it were, and that this is evident in her account of consciousness. Although I cannot develop this point in adequate detail here, my contention is that what Murdoch’s philosophy calls for is not simply the renunciation of the ego, but a form of consciousness that guards against every false consolation – including the consolation of
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believing that one has overcome one’s ego (or that one has achieved a vision of the good). This reflexive posture allows Murdoch to retain both an aspiration towards high ideals and a suspicion of such ideals insofar as they often lead to self-deception, hubris or cruelty. In order to show that Murdoch was aware of the self-refuting paradoxes that attend ideals of renunciation, I want to return briefly to her account of human egoism. Earlier, we saw that moral change involves not only a redirection of vision, but a reorientation of psychic energy. What deserves further emphasis, however, is that the direction of our vision, the quality of our attention and desires, have already been so deeply habituated and conditioned by the ego’s tendency to protect itself that they are almost mechanistic in their tenacity. On the Freudian view that Murdoch explicitly endorses, the psyche is ‘an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or control. Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason’ (SG, p. 51). The relentlessly ‘machine-like’ nature of the psyche actually makes self-scrutiny dangerous because the psyche is ‘programmed’, so to speak, to look after itself. So relentless is this machinery that even a negative judgement of oneself may perpetuate a consoling self-absorption. The reflexive nature of self-scrutiny allows the psyche to double back on itself and produce ‘plausible imitations of what is good’ under the guise of sado-masochism. It is not surprising, therefore, that Murdoch sought a source of psychic transformation outside the naturally selfish consciousness. She recognized that the perverse reflexivity of human egoism infects consciousness in such a way that looking inward may only heighten the psyche’s tendency to console and deceive itself. This is why Murdoch often conceived the cure for human egoism in terms of a radical unselfing that seems to demand the death of the ego, the extinction of personality, the stripping of images and fantasies. But she also understood that even these radical strategies of circumvention remain flawed and vulnerable. There is no guarantee that even the most well-intentioned effort to escape selfish fantasy will not get drawn ineluctably back into the powerfully self-regarding machinery of the psyche. Even the most radical renunciations (perhaps especially the most radical renunciations) will be accompanied by new compensations that threaten to ensnare the ego all over again. Readers of the novels know how many would-be saints and moral pilgrims in the novels receive their comeuppance through precisely this
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mechanism. But I believe that Murdoch’s philosophy also responded to this potential of even the most radical unselfing to double back on itself. She tried, in effect, to inoculate her ethics against the ego’s constant tendency to reassert itself by admitting rather than denying the self-refuting nature of most of our attempts to be ‘selfless’ or ‘good’. For Murdoch, the successful askesis can never be simply renunciatory. Rather, the cure for egoism must be reflexive enough to use the very form of the problem in its solution. This is why unselfing requires a constant process of purification that enlists rather than simply negates the contents and dynamics of consciousness in their own self-correction. In this respect, Murdoch’s account of consciousness is structurally homologous to her understanding of art. Although art is deceptive and fantasy mongering, caught up in the ego’s search for self-protective consolation, it can also tell the truth about human life. Precisely because of its ‘doubleness’, art can teach us more about the difference between appearance and reality, and about the movement from one to the other, if we engage with it in its complexity than if we try to avoid it or banish it from the moral life. For the same reason, and despite the language of unselfing that she so frequently associated with truthful vision, Murdoch also acknowledged the role of the agent’s personality in moral perception, the way in which egoistic fantasy can be purified through a creative use of moral attention and imagination. Truthful vision and moral virtue are not impossible for human beings; but they are only achieved in and through the self-reflexive dynamics of consciousness. As an ‘anti-puritan puritan’, Murdoch embedded a critique of the dangers of unselfing and of the pitfalls of moral striving within her theory of consciousness and of art alike. In doing so, her philosophy, as Conradi noted of her fiction, ‘mocks moral excess at the same time that it invites it’.
Conclusion: Murdoch’s contribution to contemporary ethics In this paper, I have tried to suggest certain thematic continuities between the characteristic doubleness of Murdoch’s fiction and aspects of her moral philosophy. I have tried to show that there is a tension in The Sovereignty of Good between the saintly project of unselfing, which seems to demand ‘nothing less than the death of the ego’ (FU, p. 10), and an aesthetic countercurrent to this imperative, which celebrates the imagination and allows for the expression of personality in the grasp of the real. The question I would like to address in concluding is whether an ethic such as Murdoch’s, which affirms both the height of human
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moral aspiration and the depth of our moral failures, can be sustained in the face of positions like Nussbaum’s, which are suspicious of high ideals. In her Gifford Lectures, Upheavals of Thought, Nussbaum argues that there is a temptation in all ideals ‘to despise what is merely human and every day’.8 The danger of high ideals, such as Plato’s ascent to the Good, is that ‘by lifting us above ourselves, they risk the orgy of disgust when we discover our daily reality’ (UT, p. 712). To avoid this potential of ideals to evoke both ‘self hatred and the hatred of others’ (UT, p. 709), Nussbaum favours the anti-Platonism of James Joyce, the artist she considers the clearest anti-type to Murdoch. Joyce reverses the direction of the Platonic ascent in order to ‘say yes to humanity’, and to allow people to be themselves (UT, p. 704). The proper response to the danger of high ideals, on this view, is to plunge more deeply into the human world, since whatever transcendence is available to us can be found only there. By invoking Joyce, Nussbaum takes the part of an anti-puritan to what she regards as Murdoch’s puritanism and otherworldly asceticism. Yet if my argument in this paper is at all convincing, Murdoch’s position may have the resources to absorb Nussbaum’s critique. While Nussbaum feels compelled to abandon the Platonic quest for the Good for fear that it will turn us against our own flawed humanity in disgust, Murdoch insists that we need to preserve the tension between the highest and the destructive ways we fail to reach it, as an internal feature of our idealism. Instead of fleeing such ideals, Murdoch builds the consciousness of imperfection and failure into her account of egoism and the paradoxes of askesis. She combines an aspiration towards the highest with the risks and dangers of it. In this respect, her anti-puritan puritanism resists, but also celebrates, even the consolations afforded by that tolerant and humane worldliness that her own work does so much to promote.
Notes 1. See ‘When She Was Good’, a review of the Conradi biography, The New Republic (December 2003), p. 31 – hereafter WG. 2. For an earlier attempt to relate Murdoch’s fiction to her philosophy, see my ‘Form and Contingency in Iris Murdoch’s Ethics’ in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (eds.), Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 110–37. 3. The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 50 – hereafter SG. 4. David J. Gordon, Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), p. 68 – hereafter FU.
Maria Antonaccio 99 5. ‘The Darkness of Practical Reason’ in EM, p. 199. 6. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Viking/Penguin Press, 1993), p. 321. 7. See my Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) and also ‘Imagining the Good: Iris Murdoch’s Godless Theology’, Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, 16 (1996), 233–42. 8. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 713 – hereafter UT.
8 The Curse of The Bell: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Narrative Bran Nicol
‘The story is a natural unit which we all use every day. We are all story-tellers and in this sense we are all literary artists’. —‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’ (1978) 1
Literature and philosophy A common critical procedure in examining Murdoch’s writing has been to measure her novels against her philosophy, to consider (for example) whether the behaviour of her characters and the events depicted in her plots exemplify or compromise her ethical principles. This is understandable given the remarkable clarity and consistency of her moral philosophy over four decades, the similarity between the scenarios repeatedly presented in her novels and the issues dealt with in her nonfiction, and perhaps also because of an implicit hierarchy which prevails in contemporary critical practice whereby theoretical pronouncements are privileged over fictional practice. Yet I think there is a value in turning this relationship between Murdoch’s philosophy and literature around, and recognizing that certain of her key philosophical concerns might usefully be regarded as fundamentally literary problems. At the very least, we need to acknowledge that her philosophical concerns run along similar lines to the questions explored by literary theorists. This is the starting point for this essay, which will concentrate on the significance of one particular ‘literary’ question in Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy: narrative form. In her philosophical writing, from the outset, Murdoch explored the significance of narrative in our lives, specifically in relation to morality. 100
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‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ (1956) examines the role in determining our actions played by what she terms ‘personal fables’. The ‘personal fable’ is a ‘meditation upon the conception of [one’s] own life, with its selective and dramatic emphases and implications of direction’. A person regards his or her life ‘as having a certain meaning and a certain kind of movement’. It may cause someone to consider themselves ‘as set apart from others, by a superiority which brings special responsibilities, or by a curse, or some other unique destiny’.2 In a later essay, ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’ this theme has developed into a much more confident and universal assertion that: [w]e are all story-tellers and we tell stories about people, and we tell these stories not only to other people but also to ourselves. We have in our activity as story-tellers a way of judging, a way of evaluating the world that surrounds us, and this gives us in return a sense of our own identity, our separateness, our own self-being (AIN, p. 253). It is not an exaggeration to say that this statement summarizes Murdoch’s chief preoccupation throughout her writing career, which dominated both her moral philosophy and her fiction. Essays such as these are concerned with the process of moral reasoning (in relation to established universal rules of morality) or the value of art and literature to moral judgement. We might argue that because of the centrality of this theme to her philosophy, it is not surprising that her fiction should constantly portray characters who, in different ways and for different reasons – and with varying degrees of success – impose narratives on their lives. As numerous novels show (A Severed Head, The Black Prince, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, The Sea, the Sea) this is the distinctive strategy of the ‘artist-figure’ in Murdoch’s novels (the polar opposite to the figure of ‘the saint’), by which he interprets his own life and maintains power over others. But the ubiquity of this motif in Murdoch’s fiction is not the result of the author ‘trying out’ philosophical experiments in her writing. Murdoch’s discomfort with the label ‘philosophical novelist’, which implied that her fiction was simply another form for her philosophical inquiry (as in the case of Sartre), is well documented.3 Rather, it seems sensible to assume that Murdoch’s interest in narrative is due to her own fascination with the practice of writing fiction. Central to her theory of fiction was the need to check the desire to create a narrative pattern in order to facilitate the presentation of believable characters.
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Undoubtedly this is because her own ability to create narrative was considerable – perhaps her major strength as a novelist. In fact, this ability needs to be taken into account when assessing Murdoch’s achievement among novelists in the late twentieth century, even though it could be easily overlooked (given her reputation as a serious author, and the fact she tended to downplay the importance of narrative in her literary theory). Murdoch’s status as supreme story-teller is at the heart of responses to her novels. Those who dislike her fiction object to a kind of excess – of which narrative excess is one of the most central features. Those who enjoy it are gripped by precisely this glorying in the constant twists and turns of plot. The production of narrative, then, is not just something that Murdoch was interested in as philosophical or literary theme, but something she did continually throughout her life. This essay, rather than dwelling upon her ability to produce compelling narratives, or trying to reverse the implicit privileging of the ‘philosophical’ over the ‘literary’ in approaches to Murdoch, will consider one of the key effects of the fact that Murdoch did not just write about narrative, but was an exponent of it. Because narrative is both the subject of her fiction and the form through which this subject is treated, it means that one of the most striking features of Murdoch’s fiction is the way it implicates the reader in precisely the same dilemma as the characters: we ‘feel’ Murdoch’s philosophy, and this makes it all the more effective.
Chance and design To define narrative at any great length is probably unnecessary here. Suffice to say that the established structuralist definition of narrative holds true: it is divided into three parts: the story (a set of events), recounted in a discourse (a process of narration), where the events are selected and arranged in a particular order (the plot).4 But this formal definition only hints at what we might regard as the more philosophical or ethical definition of narrative, which is the one most relevant to Murdoch. What is the purpose or function or effect of narrative? The answer is that it is a way of imposing order on contingent events, a way of making sense of experience, present or past, that provides us with a coherent sense of self. In Murdoch’s own words, narrative is, ‘a way of judging, a way of evaluating the world that surrounds us, and this gives us in return a sense of our own identity, our separateness, our own selfbeing’ (VCM, p. 253).
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In literary narrative there are two specific dimensions to this process: the writer shapes events into a particular order, and so does the reader. The logic is most obviously illustrated in the detective story, where the writer tells ‘what really happened’ – though not in a straightforward way, but by using artifice to disguise or omit crucial details, conversations and events. The fundamental rule of the detective novel is that the truth must be concealed, but that it must also be present in disguised form, so the reader will not feel cheated.5 The author of the detective story must therefore engage in a number of techniques of concealment and distraction in order to put up a smokescreen. The reader’s job is to ‘recuperate’ the tantalizing fragments of the story, to piece it all together. This is why, in his essay, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, Tzvetan Todorov (drawing on an old article by the detective writer S.S. Van Dine) posits a homology that aligns the author with the criminal rather than the detective: ‘author:reader = criminal:detective’.6 But analysing how detective fiction works underlines the fact that reading all fiction is a process akin to detection. It reminds us that all narrative constantly involves artifice: telling a story is not an innocent act, involving a natural sequence of events which can simply be somehow ‘extracted’ and represented in prose or on screen. Rather narrative involves selection, organization, interpretation, on the part of the narrator. Similarly, reading is not a simple matter of receiving a narrative passively, but requires a certain degree of activity: for example, we respond to repetitive elements in the text, such as repeated events and symbols. And, as Murdoch herself says, the language of narrative is ‘evaluative’ – the story is fundamentally, ‘concerned with the communication of emotion’ (AIN, p. 252). The moral dilemmas which feature in Murdoch’s fiction revolve around the subjective, aesthetic nature of narrative. More precisely the complexity arises from the apparent ‘reversibility’ (if I may borrow a term from the enigmatic lexicon of Baudrillard) of ‘chance’ and ‘design’. Reversibility is when the possibility of distinguishing satisfactorily between separate entities, of marking the boundaries between things and concepts, becomes eroded. It would be hard to imagine a more different philosopher from Baudrillard than Murdoch, but central to her fiction is the human predisposition to regard chance and design as ‘reversible’. The moral imperative behind her thought is that chance events be accepted for what they are, as accidents. Recognizing this is a crucial step on the way to other, more profound, aspects of moral enlightenment such as recognizing the fundamentally godless nature of the universe and the absurd (that is pointless, accidental) nature of our
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existence in it. But, as her novels show, human beings are naturally predisposed to make connections between things, to put events in narrative sequence. And this means that we have a natural tendency to regard chance events as part of a pattern. Her fiction demonstrates how tempting it is – even for those not bent on falsifying or dramatizing reality – to build up a narrative around one’s life, to connect together disparate features into an explanatory whole. This natural tendency towards ‘narrativization’ means that we apply the logic of art to life. 7 As Murdoch says in ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’: ‘[w]e are all story-tellers and in this sense we are all literary artists’ (AIN, p. 252). In a work of art, no element is insignificant. This logic applies especially to narrative, as Roland Barthes makes clear in his famous 1966 essay, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’. There he insists that, ‘everything, down to the slightest detail, [has] a meaning [. . .]. Even were a detail to appear irretrievably insignificant, resistant to all functionality, it would nonetheless end up with precisely the meaning of absurdity or uselessness: everything has a meaning, or nothing has’. 8 Nor does the total ‘functionality’ of narrative apply simply to the details in a narrative, but also to the sequence of events. ‘The mainspring of narrative’, Barthes argues, is the confusion between ‘consecution and consequence’, where ‘what comes after’, in a temporal sense, is interpreted by the reader as being ‘what is caused by’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 94). This can be illustrated by the formula known as ‘Chekhov’s Gun’, the principle that (as the dramatist Chekhov said on several occasions) if a rifle is placed on the stage at the beginning of a drama, then sooner or later, it must go off. 9 The Murdochian version of this, we might say, is that if there is water, then someone will drown in it (think of Nick in The Bell or Titus in The Sea, the Sea). In adhering to their own ‘personal fable’, Murdoch’s artist-figures tend repeatedly to mistake chance for design. A person suddenly enters or re-enters their life (as in The Black Prince or The Sea, the Sea), a dreadful accident occurs (as in The Good Apprentice), an event is repeated (A Word Child). These are chance events, but on each occasion chance is mistaken for evidence of Destiny. The world of characters like Bradley Pearson, Charles Arrowby, Edward Baltram and Hilary Burde resembles the ‘significance world’ of primitive people Freud writes about in Totem and Taboo. Freud’s conviction is that art is one of the aspects of modern life where an ancient animistic sensibility prevails – in which there is no distinction between the real world and the world of the mind. This means that, in the mind of the artist, as in the neurotic’s, psychotic’s or
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child’s mind, accidental events can appear as part of a pattern. A symptom of this is what Freud calls ‘the omnipotence of thought’, where one regards as an external magical force something which in fact originates in one’s own mind.10 Murdoch was aware of this capacity of art, too, for all her appreciation of its value as conveyer of truth: she insists in ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’ that, ‘it would be impossible to over-estimate the magical nature of art’ (AIN, p. 251). As they are naturally inclined towards neurosis, Murdoch’s everyday artists exhibit this state of mind, but in doing so they remind us that a similar state of mind is demanded by the work of art. For the paradox is that the chance events they misinterpret as significant actually have a double status in relation to the question of narrative. While, on the one hand, they are to be seen – at the level of the story – as non-narrative elements falsely gathered up into a character’s ‘personal fable’, on the other hand, precisely because this is a meaning conveyed within the story, and as Barthes says, ‘what is noted is by definition notable’ in narrative (p. 89), they figure as functional elements in the prose narrative in which they appear (i.e., the Iris Murdoch novel). This doubleness implicitly reminds the reader of Murdoch’s fiction of the similarity between the interpretive endeavours of the characters they read about and their own task as decoders of her narratives.
The rational and the irrational: The Bell To illustrate how this works in practice, we can turn to Murdoch’s 1958 novel The Bell. Its hero, Michael Meade, is someone who exemplifies the dangers of living according to the logic of the ‘personal fable’. Like more obviously neurotic heroes who come later in her fiction, like Bradley Pearson or Hilary Burde, Michael’s way of responding to troublesome situations is to interpret them in terms of a narrative imposed as if by some external force – a ‘personal fable’ – and then to act in a way which conforms to its apparent logic. Michael is a religious man, and its function as generator of explanatory narratives explains the appeal of religion to him. As the narrator of The Bell says, ‘it was an aspect of Michael’s belief in God, and one which although he knew it to be dangerous he could never altogether reject, that he expected the emergence in his life of patterns and signs. He had always felt himself to be a man with a definite destiny, a man waiting for a call’ (p. 82).11 The tendency to impose a dramatic narrative on chance events is exhibited as he tries to make sense of troublesome events in his life. The scandal involving his relationship with Nick Fawley which destroyed
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his school-teaching career is rationalized by him as something ‘designed to humble him’ (p. 108). When Nick then unexpectedly shows up at Imber, the religious community Michael presides over, Michael feels that his appearance is ‘no accident’ (p. 114). Finally, when the initial scandal repeats itself after Michael cannot stop himself from kissing another schoolboy, Toby, and is swiftly followed by Nick’s death, Michael immediately assumes both occurrences are part of a plot by Nick to exact a fitting revenge. But because The Bell is a narrative itself, and not just about narrative, we do not simply ‘watch’ Michael’s narrativization of his life, but become aware that we are engaged in a similar activity. To understand how this works we need to consider in detail the complex dualistic structure of the novel, which is chiefly what guides the reader through his or her interpretation of the text. A dualistic structure is not unusual in a work by Murdoch, for she was a remarkably dualistic thinker and writer. But there is something remarkable about the way aspects of this novel run parallel to and dovetail with one another. The story and intellectual content of the novel is founded upon an overall opposition between the rational and the irrational. The life of the lay community at Imber, where the story is set, is a rationalistic one, sustained chiefly via the organizing vision and guidance of Michael and his co-leader James Tayper Pace. Against this, though, must be set the legend of the old bell which lies at the bottom of the lake and which is the source of many uncanny elements of the story. According to a legend uncovered by Paul Greenfield, the self-appointed historian of the Abbey, it lies there as a result of a curse issued by one of the medieval bishops following a scandalous affair between a nun and a man from outside. Paul tells Dora that ‘there is a story about the bell ringing sometimes in the bottom of the lake, and [. . .] if you hear it, it portends a death’ (p. 43). The opposition between the rational and the irrational universe in the novel is paralleled on a generic level. On the one hand, The Bell is the first successful example of Murdoch’s distinctive aim to re-imagine nineteenth-century classic realism for the late twentieth century: that is it contains a number of characters whom we can imagine living a life outside the work in which they are contained. Yet the novel’s realism is offset by features of the gothic romance. This is suggested most obviously by the novel’s ‘geography’ which plays on gothic conventions – isolated ancient buildings surrounding a deep lake. One of the features of the literary gothic is the way it favours settings which evoke a dark past out of which something emerges (such as a secret) that comes to
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haunt the characters.12 This is how the lake and the bell function in The Bell where the characters (Michael, Toby and especially Dora) often look out at the lake and experience an indistinct sense of foreboding. Both the rational and irrational, the realist and gothic, dimensions of The Bell are underscored by a structure of repetition. First, the realist dimension is serviced by the dialogue about goodness conducted throughout its pages, which turns on the two sermons given by James and then Michael. Each opens with the line, ‘The chief requirement of the good life’ (pp. 131, 200), each considers the question of innocence, and each uses the image of a bell to reinforce what they have to say. Both debate the kind of ideas about universal and personal rules of morality explored in ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, the essay Murdoch was writing while planning the novel. Second, a similar pattern of repetition functions in the gothic dimension of the book, and this serves to puncture the sense of dialogic rationality conveyed by the two sermons. Twice, in episodes that are described identically in their initial lines, Michael is awakened from his sleep, ‘by a strange hollow booming sound which seemed to come from the direction of the lake’ (pp. 78, 223). The first turns out to be another example of a recurring dream Michael has, where he watches some nuns drag a corpse out of the lake and wonders whose it might be. On the second occasion Michael is really awakened by the sounding of the old bell after Toby and Dora have pulled it out of the water. Just like the plot, then (which revolves around the disastrous repetition of Michael’s desire for a young man) the symbolic and philosophical texture of this novel works according to the logic of repetition too. The repeated sermon episodes signify the rhythms of a community sustained by a rational, traditional ideology. But these are counterpointed by the disorienting effect of Michael’s hearing the booming of a distant bell. The old bell is the marker of an original time of trauma. At the same time, it heralds, portentously, an event in the future. It is a reminder of a story of inappropriate love which leads to tragedy, and as such cannot be forgotten until a similar story is played out again. As the novel approaches its conclusion it seems that its logic – as we might expect from the resolutely rationalist character of Murdoch’s philosophy – is to insist that the rational approach to our lives should win out over the irrational. Michael is finally able to resist the temptation to account for chance events by wrapping them up in a selfaggrandizing narrative. He is able to acknowledge that, ‘[t]he pattern which he had seen in his life had existed only in his own romantic imagination. At the human level there was no pattern’ (p. 308). This
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suggests that his decision to return to school teaching may prove a healthier kind of repetition. Yet where Michael’s rational side appears to have triumphed over his earlier determination to see his predicament as the result of fate or destiny, in fact the relationship between the narrative which unfolds in the novel and the myth of the old bell itself means that a sense of irrationality is not so easily dispelled. And it is here that we must acknowledge the role of the reader in responding to Murdoch’s narrative. Just like Michael, the reader too has been engaging in a process of ‘narrativization’ throughout the novel. We have been decoding devices such as repetition and symbolism, making links between different aspects of the text and organizing elements of the plot into story. Because ‘what is noted is by definition notable’ (Barthes, p. 89) in narrative, it means that as soon as Paul has recounted the legend of the old bell, we are on the look out for parallels with Murdoch’s story as it unfolds. And sure enough we find plenty. Toby climbs the high wall of the Abbey, like the nun’s lover. Catherine, the faithless, lovesick nun, runs into the lake to drown herself. Knowing the sound of the old bell means death, where Michael hears booming sounds, the reader expects a death to occur. This anticipation increases once Dora and Toby have rescued the bell and accidentally caused it to ring – as a result of their own illicit flirtation. The question, of course, as so often in Murdoch (for example, The Book and the Brotherhood), is whose death will it be? And given the number of illicit or inappropriate affairs in the story, there is no shortage of potential candidates, such as Toby, Michael or Catherine (a postulant who has been secretly in love with Michael for years, and who eventually tries to drown herself in the lake). But of course the casualty is Nick, disillusioned and perhaps jealous at Michael’s passion for Toby. His suicide recasts Michael’s kiss as a smallerscale version of the illicit affair of the legend but with equally serious consequences. The point here is that Nick’s suicide effectively asks the reader to choose between the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’ positions in the text. Because the legend promises a death and a death occurs, the implication is that this means the old curse – as improbable as it seems – has come true. Or are we to see this a simply a coincidence? Are we to resist this particular narrative which is so strongly implied by the text? In this way we become actively implicated in The Bell’s logic ourselves rather than simply, passively, ‘watching’ the characters grappling with it. We are confronted in other words with the dilemma surrounding narrative which is at the heart of Murdoch’s writing, the apparent ‘reversibility’
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between chance and design: life is a random chaotic flux but we are predisposed to regard it as patterned. But deciding finally between superstition and rationalism is not the point. Instead, the very process of dealing with the ambiguity is really what the novel is ‘about’, for it mirrors the dilemma which the central characters face in relation to their own pasts. What can they learn from it? Are sequences of events to be regarded purely as coincidental and unrelated, or are they a kind of narrative from which the characters should learn?
The Saint and the artist The Bell is not simply about the hazards of imposing a narrative upon one’s life. It also powerfully suggests the benefits. Michael Levenson has argued that the novel can be read in terms of Murdoch’s conviction about the value of narrative in making sense of moral experience explored in ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’.13 Indeed, by the end, each of the main characters has chosen a personal fable which has sufficient objectivity to reinforce universal moral principles, such as understanding one’s self and assessing how one’s behaviour impacts upon other people. Michael comes to understand that ‘[t]he pattern which he had seen in his life had existed only in his own romantic imagination. At the human level there was no pattern’ (p. 308). Toby, in a letter to Michael, acknowledges that now, ‘[h]e was in a new and wonderful world, and already Imber had become a story’ (p. 305), while the last line of the novel – ‘Tonight she would be telling the whole story to Sally’ (p. 316) – indicates that Dora, too, has learned something from the past which enables her to have a happy future. The novel demonstrates the fact that reading is associated powerfully with morals in Murdoch’s work. Her narrative is not just about the aesthetics of narrative, but about the ethics of narrative. It is about reading carefully and correctly and choosing the correct personal fable. The central characters of The Bell eventually do this – but many of her novels (for example, A Severed Head or A Word Child) feature characters who are unable to. Narrativization is not something we can do without, but we must recognize how dangerously seductive it is. The significance of narrative in Murdoch gives us another way of conceptualizing the fundamental dichotomy in her writing between saint and artist. We might tentatively suggest – in the spirit of reassessing Murdoch’s work – that the saint and the artist theme, commonly regarded as the foundation of her fiction is, in fact, part of a more
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fundamental theme still which concerns the ethics and aesthetics of narrative. Peter Conradi has shown in his book Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist that the struggle between saint and artist is more than just a theme in Murdoch’s fiction, but informs its structure as well. Murdoch’s fiction shifts between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms.14 A further refinement of this theory might be to argue that the saint and the artist as they operate in Murdoch’s fiction embody two different attitudes towards narrative, which also work against each other in her own practice of composing fiction. The ‘saintly’ is a resistance to the force of narrative and its Barthesian logic that everything always signifies, while the ‘artistic’ is a surrender to it. What is worthwhile about this shift of emphasis in assessing Murdoch’s writing is that it enables us to see how she relates to wider currents of late twentieth-century fiction. A concern with the nature of ‘saint’ and ‘artist’ is unique to Murdoch’s work. Yet a concern with narrative is not, and is shared by many other late twentieth- and twenty-first century novelists. We might see her work in this respect as symptomatic of the changed attitude to narrative which marks ‘postmodern’ culture. This is suggested most notably by Jean-François Lyotard’s account of postmodernity as the result of a pervasive ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. Just like narratives in literature, metanarratives provide a form into which a series of unrelated elements can be ordered, thereby legitimizing scientific, religious, political and philosophical discourses, and maintaining power. But our faith in these, Lyotard contends, is on the wane.15 Murdoch’s fiction, we might argue, presents us with a world in which the Christian metanarrative is in serious decline. The breakdown might explain the wrong-headed approach to narrative adopted by Murdoch’s ‘artist-figures’, their immersion in an animistic ‘significance-world’. Her work, in this respect, might plausibly be regarded as providing another way of presenting the problem explored by postmodern novelists such as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo: that a condition or effect of the breakdown in the credulity in metanarratives is a paranoid or neurotic subjectivity. But a novel like The Bell also suggests a more rational response to the decline in Christianity, by focusing directly on a community which has set itself the task of exploring how to determine spiritual meaning in an increasingly postreligious world. Faced with a widespread disbelief in the Christian metanarrative, the inhabitants of Imber have constructed their own ‘small’ narrative (‘un petit récit’, in Lyotard’s terms, that which counters or replaces the metanarrative in the postmodern imagination) about their past. This is clear from the
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emphasis placed upon the central characters’ reflections on the lessons they have learned from the story they have been involved in at the end of the novel.
Notes 1. Murdoch, ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’, in EM, pp. 243–57 – hereafter AIN. 2. Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, in EM, pp. 76–89, 85–6 – hereafter VCM. 3. See, for example, her comment in the interview with Malcolm Bradbury that, ‘there’s just a sort of atmosphere and, as it were, tension and direction which is sometimes given by a philosophical interest, but not anything very explicit’. Murdoch, interview with Malcolm Bradbury in ‘Iris Murdoch in Conversation with Malcolm Bradbury’. British Council Literature Study Aids Recorded Interview RS2001 (London, 27 February 1976). 4. The exact terminology for these three aspects varies, but there is a general agreement as to their significance. See, for example, Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978); Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method (trans.) Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Shlomith RimmonKenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1983). 5. Pierre Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (London: Fourth Estate, 2000). 6. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ in The Poetics of Prose (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), p. 49. 7. We might see Murdoch’s distrust of this procedure as another dimension of what I have previously referred to as her ‘anti-modernism’ (See IM:TRF, pp. 4–5, 146–7). Where the modernist novel typically glorifies the epiphanic moment where mundane life seemingly opens up to reveal a powerful aesthetic pattern, Murdoch’s fiction cautions against this impulse. 8. Roland Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives: Image – Music – Text (trans.), Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 89. 9. See, for example, Chekhov’s letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, 1 November 1889: ‘One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it’, or the report in Gurlyand’s Reminiscences of A.P. Chekhov: ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there’, in Teatr i iskusstvo, 28 (July 1904), 521. 10. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 143–4. 11. The Bell (1958) (London: Vintage, 1999). All references are to this edition. 12. Jerrold Hogle, ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (ed.), Jerrold Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 3. 13. Michael Levenson, ‘Iris Murdoch: The Philosophic Fifties and The Bell’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47, 3 (2001), 576. 14. See Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist. 15. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
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Part IV Rereading Literature
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9 Saint Iris? Murdoch’s Place in the Modern Canon Nick Turner
For much of her career A.S. Byatt lauded Iris Murdoch, describing her as a ‘literary mother’; on Murdoch’s death, Byatt said, ‘something in my life, that was the most important thing in my literary life, has ended [. . .] I think she was the most important novelist writing in my time’.1 Yet Byatt appears to have withdrawn her enthusiasm. Speaking more recently, in 2003, she said: I get a sense at the moment that Murdoch is at that stage where the initial revelation/enthusiasm has worn off and people are wondering whether they overvalued her. I know a surprising number of real Murdoch-lovers who say they can no longer read her [. . .] No, I don’t think she is being read, and I think there is a hostile tone in the general references. A guess I have is that the ‘charm’ of her world has worn off and people are not always prepared to consider her tougher thinking. Of all the writers who are in my own canon in my head Murdoch has the shakiest position, I think because she was too close in time – she was a way out of Kingsley Amis and boring jokiness for me.2 Given Byatt’s original estimation of Murdoch, and her role in the making of Murdoch’s academic reputation, this sentiment is surprising. But it is not out of kilter with other things that have been, and are being, said about Murdoch at the moment. I would like to characterize the modern canon – within the realm of British literature – as post-war, taking us further back than the purely contemporary, and avoiding the possible alliance of ‘modern’ with ‘modernist’. Before we even begin to interrogate Murdoch’s work, however, we have the tricky and now dangerous concept of ‘canon’. What 115
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is a canon, precisely? What connections does it have with hegemony and oppression? Do we still need a literary canon in the twenty-first century? These questions have been thoroughly debated, chiefly by American critics.3 As Frank Kermode points out, a canon is a list that has always been open to change, just as biblical texts were, in the analogous Church’s canon. We also need to remember the views of Alistair Fowler and Wendell V. Harris, who suggest that multiple canons exist, such as the critical, official and pedagogical canon, as well as personal canons of individual readers.4 Harold Bloom defines the canon as a body of works by which writers are influenced; alongside lies Kermode’s view that a work is canonical by being modern, that is, still being alive and interpreted.5 Kermode feels, further, that works can slip both into and out of the canon (an example being Botticelli), a point with which Byatt agrees.6 Our nearness to Murdoch’s oeuvre – the fact that, for many critics, she has been a contemporary novelist – involves additionally the question of reputation. An acclaimed or – dare we say – fashionable novelist who achieves a high contemporary visibility might be seen as belonging to what Harris calls the ‘nonce’ canon (Harris, 1991, p. 11). I propose that this ‘nonce’ canon involves critical acclaim that is both ‘academic’ (critical, scholarly and pedagogical) and ‘popular’ (a wider reading public). Murdoch, most unusually in her era, spanned both. Murdoch entered the ‘academic’ canon in several ways. It began, of course, with the fortuitous success of Under the Net in 1954, at one of the many times when the novel was allegedly dead. This success was artificially consolidated by the mistaken identification of Murdoch as an ‘Angry Young Man’, and the placing of the novel as a product of the ‘New University Wits’. Similarly, it was the product of a novelist– philosopher who had, the previous year, introduced Sartre to Britain with her pioneering study, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. Thus began the twin careers of philosopher and novelist, unusual for a British writer, and quarry for investigation; despite Murdoch’s claims to the contrary, scholars were willing and able to find matter for philosophical investigation within the fiction. The essays ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ and ‘Against Dryness’ involved Murdoch in debates about literature in the same way. These were serious novels that embodied ‘intellectual weight’ then. After being read in terms of Murdoch’s statements on literature, and her philosophical writings, later they would be scanned for their allusions – the Shakespearean intertextuality, the references to art and music. The novels also participate in debates on ethics and theology.
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Byatt is quite right to acknowledge that her Degrees of Freedom consolidated something in canonizing Murdoch.7 What is particularly interesting is a reason she gives for setting out on the book: I began with a very simple, nagging curiosity to know exactly what Miss Murdoch was talking about, what sort of moral statement she was making, what were the ideas behind her novels. They presented themselves, it seemed to me, like puzzles out of which a plan of ideas, a scheme of references could be extracted for examination, with some effort.8 Given this view, it is no surprise that one of Murdoch’s most impenetrable novels, The Unicorn (1963), is the sole subject of two books, one of which appeared as early as 1969.9 A recognition of an academic market for a book which concentrates on one novel is paralleled by the many essays which grapple with The Black Prince. The mystifying nature of some of the fiction, then, has actually solidified Murdoch’s position within the academic canon. Byatt feels that Murdoch was ‘canonised’ by the early essays of Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage and Frank Kermode.10 Bradbury and Sage’s involvement with the Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia shows them as critics working with Murdoch’s fiction in an environment where new authors were germinating (including Ian McEwan, who is the subject of another essay in this volume). This literary parenthood proves Bloom right: both he and Byatt feel that the canon is the body of writers whom a new generation either works from, or reacts against; Peter Conradi, in his biography, lists a succession of novelists (including Candia McWilliam, Alan Hollinghurst, A.N. Wilson and Marina Warner) who are seen to be Murdoch’s heirs. And one member of this list is Byatt herself.11 Degrees of Freedom started a critical ball rolling: other scholars would join in the discussion, keeping Murdoch’s serious reputation high, a form of ‘shadow’ around the ‘substance’ of her actual work.12 By the 1970s, Murdoch’s ‘canonicity’ was illustrated by frequent doctoral dissertations, more monographs and, in 1978, a conference at Caen, the first devoted solely to Murdoch. This was of course the year The Sea, the Sea won the Booker – after Murdoch had won several other prizes in the decade – and in the era before the prize’s esteem was as commercial as it is now. 1986 and 1987 saw Murdoch’s critical and scholarly reputation at, perhaps, its peak. The number of published articles on her work per year
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was at its highest; Peter Conradi’s major study The Saint and the Artist appeared, as did Harold Bloom’s collection of essays in Modern Critical Views, in which he described Murdoch as the greatest contemporary British writer, and identified The Good Apprentice as the nearest to a great novel she had produced. An article by John J. Burke also appeared in 1987 entitled ‘Canonizing Iris Murdoch’, which found, in studies from Elizabeth Dipple’s 1982 Work for the Spirit onwards, ‘the newly settled conviction that she is a living writer whose work will almost certainly last’ and ‘a strong probability she will be thought of as one of the most important writers in English of the last part of the twentieth century’.13 At this time The Bell was the first Murdoch novel to become an A-level set text; several others have followed including, surprisingly, The Green Knight, one of Murdoch’s longest and most puzzling novels. An author’s place in the ‘academic’ canon is solidified, as we see them being studied prior to higher education: Shakespeare is read at school, as is William Golding, often called the greatest of the post-war novelists; not far behind lies Murdoch, now being introduced to many students taking English at A-level. It is impossible, of course, to completely separate the two fields of ‘popular’ and ‘academic’. By 1987 Murdoch had been nominated for the Booker Prize six times and been made a Dame of the British Empire; her work had appeared on stage, screen and television. She was – however dangerous the word might be today– something of a celebrity. The novels were being frequently republished under various labels; she was most definitely a bestseller. The foregrounding of narrative links the academic and popular fields: for example, the Graham Greene-like violence of Henry and Cato has both a moral point, and a drive which involves the reader at a surface level. This popular appeal is illustrated by the passenger seen relaxing with a Murdoch novel in the British Rail advertisement of the time. It is possible to place Murdoch’s novels within the genres of mystery, thriller and fantasy, if one desires. This wide popularity alongside intense scholarly interest helped the Iris Murdoch Society to be born, and her work has long been available in translation all over the world. Up to 1987, then, Murdoch belonged to what has been called a ‘nonce’ canon, both scholarly and popular: visible, discussed, contemporary work, which has not yet had the opportunity to pass into what Harris calls the ‘diachronic’ canon: a core which is ‘glacially changing’, and into which only a miniscule part of the ‘nonce’ canon actually passes (Harris, 1991, p. 113). Things changed, however. With The Message to the Planet, Murdoch’s general reading public, it seemed, began to tire of her, although the process had already begun
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with The Book and the Brotherhood, or even earlier. Certainly, although The Message to the Planet had its fans, many of her readership seemed exasperated; one of the most revelatory reviews was that of Jan Morris in the Independent, a Murdoch lover who, like Byatt, felt that her timeless world was beginning to seem dated.14 It is interesting, also, that 1989 also saw Anita Brookner and Margaret Drabble fare badly: the critics seemed to turn against the older ladies. Perhaps, after ten years of Thatcherite government, Murdoch’s own politics was beginning to cause annoyance in a left-wing intellectual climate. As the Young British Artists were emerging, and the new, post-Granta novelists of the 1980s had taken hold, was Murdoch being seen as both a literary and political reactionary, upholding tradition and the world of the middle classes in an unpalatable way? A similar problem arose with The Green Knight: mixed reviews saw the author’s failure to write about the ‘real world’ as a defect. Nicholas Spice, in the London Review of Books, for example, complained that although allegedly set in the present ‘the world of The Green Knight bears about as much relation to contemporary Britain as the ‘lanthorn’ to the moon in Pyramus and Thisbe’.15 The changing intellectual fashions of the time need to be considered: by the end of the 1980s, scholarly work was becoming increasingly politicized and theorized, increasingly drawn to feminist studies, for example, and this could not but damage Murdoch’s place in a ‘pedagogical’ canon. Byatt, talking of her book Imagining Characters: Six Conversations on Women Writers with Ignes Sodre – reports that her publishers would have been happier with Doris Lessing or Angela Carter, rather than the chapter on An Unofficial Rose.16 It is to the credit of Murdoch’s work that there have been noble and successful attempts to read her as a feminist, or to see the work in a post-modern, poststructural and Bakhtinian light; but these are the exceptions rather than the norm. Murdoch’s place in the canon is complicated by the high level of visibility of her work during her lifetime, and the attention surrounding her decline into Alzheimer’s. Writing in 2003, D.J. Taylor felt that ‘what might be called the legend of Iris Murdoch has been up and running for a good half-decade’.17 He felt that the biographies by John Bayley merely added to a process that had already begun, and that Conradi’s biography was ‘testimony to the eagerness with which predominantly nonreligious people will use religious language to describe someone or something that inspires in them feelings of reverence and awe’.18 Commenting on the Murdoch ‘iconography’, like Peter Conradi in this volume, Taylor links her to George Orwell: both are individuals who
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would deplore this focus on themselves. Murdoch’s depiction of the dubious attention given to Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planet and Peter Mir in The Green Knight has proved prophetic; in Murdoch’s case, the media have made her an ‘Alzheimer’s poster-girl’. Perhaps this, and the lapping up of the revelations about life in the Bayley household, say more about a general public interest in illness, unusual relationships and private lives, explored through biography.19 Certainly, if Murdoch has been canonized in a literal sense, according to Taylor, A.N. Wilson’s Iris Murdoch – As I Knew Her attempts to demolish the holiness and bring the image of Murdoch crashing back to earth. The reaction against his work suggests that he is a Judas figure. The curious thing is that Wilson does appear concerned about Murdoch’s literary reputation, which he wants to salvage from the image given out by the Bayley books and the film, although he is accused of a mercenary contribution to the Murdoch ‘industry’.20 Among such media hullabaloo – the film Iris, and several television documentaries in 2002 – the novels appeared to be taking a backseat. Philip Hensher, the previous year, had felt that ‘her serious reputation is at a low point, and the flaws and longeurs of her work are all too evident’; later, it was said, ‘she seems to belong to another era, and the protestations of Lorna Sage and Malcolm Bradbury that her work would survive seem premature’.21 It is tempting to say that the attention to Murdoch the personality caused this backlash, as a kind of reaction against the popular; but Murdoch’s novels have always had their detractors, and this is nothing new. Murdoch, for many younger critics and writers, will symbolize their parents’ generation, and something they may want to escape. She is also a victim of her own reputation as a popular writer. Margaret Drabble – ironically, given the trajectory of her own career – finds of Arnold Bennett that ‘in literary terms it was almost inevitable that his reputation should decline. He had been a popular writer; his popularity was certain to turn against him’; Bel Mooney cites this and applies it to Murdoch.22 Although Vintage, from 2001, have reissued almost all Murdoch’s novels, and they are said to be selling steadily and well, in our ratingsobsessed culture, Murdoch did not feature in the top two hundred books in the ‘Big Read’ of 2003; neither did she make a high rating in the Orange survey of the best books by women writers. Her first editions are not worth gold, and on Amazon’s Internet listings, only The Sea, the Sea has a sales rank above 5000. Such figures should be treated with caution, yet the evidence together confirms that Murdoch has slipped out of the ‘popular’ canon and become unfashionable. On the academic
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side, there are original and insightful essays in this volume that place Murdoch within cultural materialism and feminist studies; regrettably, this is an exception in scholarship, and Dominic Head’s use of Murdoch’s ideas as his summary to The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction 1950–2000 would appear unusual to many. Arguing against the foregrounding of theoretical readings, the historical novel, fantasy and magic realism, Head proposes that Murdoch’s moral philosophy of fiction influences several significant post-war novelists, and that her conviction about the novel parallels his central thesis: ‘that narrative fiction plays a crucial role in assisting our comprehension of public life, our understanding of cultural forms, and our recognition of diverse personal identities’.23 Head admits, however, that his arguments are currently unfashionable (p. 2). It is, perhaps, too early to be able to say whether Murdoch’s work will survive, despite A.N. Wilson’s assertion that it will: ‘At the moment her reputation is low. It will rise’.24 Two successful International Conferences on Murdoch at St Anne’s, Oxford and Kingston University respectively, alongside the opening of The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University in 2004, is a definite, ‘Kermodean’ form of attention to Murdoch, and a sign of the scholarly interest that continues to thrive.25 Reviewers still claim that novelists like Colm Toibin and Patrick Gale demonstrate the influence of her work, and Alex Ramon, in his essay in this volume, highlights Carol Shields’s acknowledged debt to Murdoch. Zadie Smith has produced work with strong ‘Murdochian’ elements, as has Ian McEwan, which Anne Rowe illustrates in her essay, also in this volume. Zadie Smith’s star may be waning, but she is nonetheless one of Granta’s Best of British Young Writers, from 2003. Will White Teeth or Monica Ali’s sensation of 2003, Brick Lane, become classics? I think they are too critically fashionable, too immersed in the culture and politics of their time, to last. It is interesting that Anita Brookner – whose work could not be more different from theirs – has been seen as one of the few contemporary writers whose work is likely to survive, since she writes about the ‘universal’ themes of love, death and loneliness.26 This bodes well for Murdoch. Ultimately, however, power lies with the publishing houses, for Murdoch needs to be in print, to be available for study and reading in the future; canon-membership might be said to be controlled by economic factors. Yet a recent article revealed that Waterstone’s had sold 7000 copies of The Sea, the Sea in the past year, ‘a rate of continuing popularity which almost all of today’s authors would give their eye teeth to equal’.27 Perhaps Murdoch is not so unpopular
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after all, and the existence of this volume itself is a testament to an enduring academic interest in her work. And if Bloom is right, and influence demonstrates canonicity, then the essays that follow suggest that Murdoch’s place is indeed being secured.
Notes 1. The Guardian (9th February 1999), p. 3. Michael Levenson calls Murdoch Byatt’s ‘literary mother’: ‘The Religion of Fiction’. Amanda Craig, in ‘When Ideas Get in the Way of Fiction’, describes Byatt as the ‘self-appointed heir’ of Murdoch, The Times (28 August 2002), Features, p. 20. 2. Private email, 27 October 2003. 3. See, for example: Annette Kolodny, ‘The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States’, American Literature, 57 (1985), 291–307; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 4. Alistair Fowler, ‘Genre and the Literary Canon’, New Literary History, 11 (1979), 97–119; Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Wendell V. Harris, ‘Canonicity’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 106, 1 (1991), 110–21. 5. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (London: Macmillan, 1995); Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (London & Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Frank Kermode, ‘The Future of the English Literary Canon’, (ed.) Robert Clark, English Studies in Transition: Papers from the ESSE Inaugural Conference (London: Routledge, 1993). 6. Private email, 27 October 2003. 7. Private email, 27 October 2003. 8. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom, (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 206. 9. Guy Backus, Iris Murdoch: The Novelist as Philosopher and the Philosopher as Novelist; “The Unicorn” as a Philosophical Novel (European University Studies 160) (Berne: Peter Lang, 1986); Robert Detweiler, Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn (intro.) Alan Bass (New York: Seabury Press, 1969). 10. Private email, 27 October 2003. 11. IMAL, p. 595. Conradi is quoting the suggestions of Sage. 12. The analogy is Kermode’s. See Forms of Attention, p. 95. 13. John J. Burke, Jr., ‘Canonizing Iris Murdoch’, Studies in the Novel, 19, 4, (1987), 486–94. 14. ‘Alas, for me it is also a world whose arcane and philosophical undertones, which have fascinated us for so long through so many opacities of the Murdochian vision, have lost their power to compel. I feel impertinent saying it about a truly great artist [. . .] but I think it is time that Iris Murdoch declared this particular genre closed.’ The Independent (30 September 1989), p. 34. 15. London Review of Books (4 November 1993), pp. 25–6. 16. A.S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre, Imagining Characters (Chatto, 1995). 17. D.J. Taylor, The Guardian (26 August 2003), p. 18. 18. D.J. Taylor, ‘The Baffling Beatification of Saint Iris’, The Independent (18 September 2001), p. 7.
Nick Turner 123 19. ‘It says something about the gross sentimentality of our culture that these repellent volumes could ever have been read as a love story.’ Joan Smith in The Times (6 September 2003, Review), p. 12. 20. ‘Having been gazumped by Peter Conradi, it is hard to see his contribution to an industry, which seems set to rival that of the Bloomsbury set or Sylvia Plath, as other than mercenary.’ Alan Taylor in Sunday Herald, (7 September 2003), p. 12. 21. Sunday Herald (20 January 2002), p. 10. 22. Bel Mooney, ‘The fleeting favour of fickle fame’, The Times (20 December 2001), Features. 23. Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction 1950–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 24. A.N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003), p. 11. 25. The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies houses Murdoch’s heavily annotated library from her Oxford home, and Peter Conradi’s working archive amassed during the writing of his biography of Murdoch. It also contains a number of smaller letter-runs, memoirs and essays, which complement an extensive collection of primary and secondary sources on Murdoch. Together these resources offer first-class research facilities for Murdoch scholars. For more information see the Kingston University website or contact Dr Anne Rowe at Kingston University ([email protected]). 26. Blake Morrison, Interview with Anita Brookner, The Independent (19 June 1994), p. 12. 27. The Guardian (21 October 2004), p. 11.
10 Houses of Fiction: Iris Murdoch and Henry James Priscilla Martin
Murdoch said in various interviews that Henry James was a major, or the major, influence on her fiction. Malcolm Bradbury, in a 1962 article on Under the Net, remarked that she had a Jamesian style but ‘very unJamesian subject matter’.1 But An Unofficial Rose, published in the same year, is strikingly Jamesian in subject matter. Indeed, the Jamesian influence can be perceived earlier, both in themes – what are Rowland Mallett and Roderick Hudson but the saint and the artist? – and allusions. Roderick’s mother, abroad for the first time in Rome, wishes that her doorknocker in New England shone like St Peter’s toe. She would admire the door of Millie’s Dublin house in The Red and the Green with ‘its brass knocker, shaped like a fish, polished as softly bright and smooth as Saint Peter’s toe’ (p. 58).2 Anne Rowe has pointed out that the portrait in The Sandcastle is literally the figure in the carpet.3 Murdoch shares or imitates some of James’s idiosyncrasies: in Bruno’s Dream, Bruno’s age and the nature of his fatal illness are never stated just as we never know exactly how old Maisie is or what malady kills Ralph Touchett and Millie Theale. Both writers are deeply absorbed in London: in Under the Net Jake buries his head in ‘dear London’ (p. 7) and James describes it as ‘the dreadful, delightful city’4 or ‘this town which I adore’.5 Both are intent analysts of the personal life and many of their characters seem to think of little else. Indeed, their characters, usually very intelligent, think – and both James and Murdoch firmly defend thought as action. In the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady James insists that Isabel’s ‘meditative vigil [. . .] throws the action further forward than twenty ‘incidents’ might have done’;6 in ‘The Idea of Perfection’, Murdoch defends as moral action the effort of the mother-in-law who teaches herself to like and value her very different daughter-in-law. 124
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Some types of character recur in the work of both: the artist, the connoisseur, the hostess, the loser, the expatriate, the enchanter. Though their personal lives were very different, their professional lives have elements in common: the unusual fluency, productivity and dedication; the interest in French literature and culture; the increasing density and difficulty of the later fiction. Both wrote a little for the theatre without much success but novels by both have been successfully adapted for film, television and radio. The Jamesian subject matter of An Unofficial Rose is obvious: the relationships between love, art, freedom and money, and between frustration and vicarious living. Many years before the novel opened Hugh was in love with Emma Sands, decided not to leave his wife for her and has regretted it ever since. Now his son Randall wants to leave his wife, Ann, for Lindsay, Emma’s companion, whose smile is ‘the other side of a turning screw’ (p. 102), and who will consent only if he can become much better off. ‘No dough, no go’ (p. 125), she stipulates. Kate Croy would not put it so vulgarly but the premise is similar. Money can buy you love. To finance the liaison Randall wants Hugh to sell his beloved Tintoretto and give him the proceeds. Hugh’s first reaction to this bombshell is incredulity and horror but he does it. And his sacrifice is not disinterested. He calculates that Lindsay’s departure will make a gap in Emma’s life which he can now fill. And, as importantly, he experiences huge excitement at the idea of Randall doing what he did not do himself. Randall can do it for him. This motivation is as powerful as in Henry James: in Roderick Hudson, Rowland finances Roderick to produce the works of art he has no talent to produce himself; in The Portrait of a Lady, the dying Ralph Touchett finances the questing Isabel to live for him. There is an exchange of vitality in An Unofficial Rose such as the narrator of The Sacred Fount obsessively perceives in all the couples around him: Hugh feels revivified by his recently dead wife: ‘Already he felt, from her death, obscurely more alive. She fed him’ (p. 49). On receiving the money Randall ‘felt as if he had killed his father. The sensation was not unsatisfactory. He was himself the more increased’ (p. 168). In Roderick Hudson and The Portrait of a Lady the freedom conferred by the benefactor proves disastrous; in The Wings of the Dove Merton and Kate are morally unable to benefit from the money left them by Millie. And in An Unofficial Rose, neither of the relationships enabled in theory by the sale of the Tintoretto works out. Like Edward Rosier’s collection in The Portrait of a Lady, the work of art has been sold for nothing: Emma no longer desires Hugh and briskly employs another young female companion, and it is clear that Randall will soon tire of
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the mercenary and ill-educated Lindsay. The Jamesian postulated equation money = freedom = love, again fails to add up. And were the characters free anyway? Isabel discovers that her choice was manipulated by Madame Merle; Hugh and Randall have been manipulated by Emma, the writer of detective stories. Randall finds his unselfish wife, Ann, passive and boring – she fails to satisfy the claims of his imagination and makes a virtue of not imagining. She tries not to react to his infidelities, tries even not to know of them. Ann has an analogy in James’s work, though Hugh is an even more Jamesian character. Ann’s forbearance from engaging with a ‘situation’ parallels Maggie’s in The Golden Bowl and Murdoch quotes and praises James’s image of the situation as pagoda in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (p. 261). We may also think of John Bayley’s very sympathetic account of Maggie in the chapter on ‘Love and Knowledge’ in The Characters of Love, published in 1960 and reprinted in 1962, the year that An Unofficial Rose came out. Murdoch probably read this chapter and perhaps re-read James’s novel while working on her own. Bayley defends Maggie’s refusal to ‘glory in any of the emotions; her lack of [. . .] immediacy and spontaneity is the cause of her repelling so many readers [. . .] she rejects both her immediate impulses and the desire for knowledge, and finds in the refuge of convention and deliberate “ignorance”, salvation [. . .]’ (pp. 237–39). Ann repels her husband for similar reasons and bases her behaviour largely on the conventions of her Christian faith.7 Randall, who ‘had never, he felt, really seen Ann when he loved her’ (p. 60), recalls the Prince’s words to Maggie ‘I see nothing but you’.8 The verb seems more insistently Jamesian in Ann’s last conversation with Felix: ‘“I don’t in a way see myself. I see him. It’s not that I’m being unselfish. He just too much is.” “Don’t you see me?” “Ah,” she said, “You. That’s the trouble.” “You mean,” he tried to read her face rather than her words, “that I’ve become – with you – invisible? You can’t see me because I’m – simply something that you want?” He feared to put it too clearly’ (p. 249). I described Ann earlier as unselfish, though she here denies it. But, whether her self-deprecation is justified or not, it is an example of how Murdoch employs a moral vocabulary far more than James does. And Randall’s more Jamesian thought about the problem indicates how Murdoch is suspicious of an aestheticizing of morality: ‘He could always, and after his own beautiful fashion, return to Ann’ (p. 263). Both Murdoch and James wrote a good deal about art and about the novel. Murdoch’s discussions are more theoretical and she was fairly reticent about her own novels. James lovingly recalls the composition
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of stories and novels in the Prefaces to the New York editions, discusses contemporary novelists in reviews and considers the novel as a genre in various essays. Both also explore aesthetic questions through the representation of artists in their own fictions. Although these include plenty of writers – in Under the Net, The Black Prince, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, The Book and the Brotherhood and ‘The Lesson of the Master’, ‘The Private Life’, ‘The Middle Years’, to name but a few – their novels are also inhabited by artists, from Roderick Hudson on, and from Rain Carter on. Both were deeply interested in the visual arts and had done some painting themselves. Murdoch taught part-time at the Royal College of Art in the sixties. Both see close analogies between visual and literary representation. Titles such as The Portrait of a Lady and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine allude to this analogy. James repeatedly describes the writer as ‘the painter of life’. ‘I think’, wrote Murdoch, ‘that painting often serves as a kind of explanatory metaphor for the other arts’.9 For James, the novel attempts ‘to represent life [. . .] the same attempt that we see on the canvas of the painter [. . .] and the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete’.10 To represent life is, of course, no easy business and the lesson learned by the illustrator in ‘The Real Thing’, that reality cannot simply be transposed into art, applies equally to the novelist. Murdoch also uses examples from painting to emphasize the opposite, that fantasy cannot per se be transformed into great art: When Burne-Jones is reported as saying, ‘I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be – in a light better than any light that ever shone – in a land no one can define or remember, only desire – and the forms divinely beautiful’, we are embarrassed, not least because this does indeed seem to describe many of his pictures in an aspect which marks them as delightful or marvellous but not exactly great. One would not think of applying such language to the work of (for instance) Seurat or Cezanne, or to remoter and apparently “fanciful” art, such as mythological subjects treated by Botticelli or Titian. When Artemis speeds by as Actaeon falls, the revelation remains mysterious but somehow true, and with the “hardness” of truth’ (p. 88). This idea comes from The Fire and the Sun, in which Murdoch engages with Plato’s objections to art. The painting she describes is Titian’s Diana and Actaeon in the National Gallery. In Henry and Cato the
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contemplation of this picture moves Henry to a Platonic anti-Platonic assertion: ‘Surely these forces were real, the human mind a mere shadow [. . .]’ (p. 96). As for Plato, this world seems a mere shadow but for Henry the greatest art and its representation of fictional gods is no shadow of a shadow (or shadow of a shadow of a shadow) but real. This is one of several scenes Murdoch places in art galleries of which Dora’s epiphany in the National Gallery in The Bell is the most direct and paradigmatic. Others of Murdoch’s characters experience opposite negative symptomatic visions: Tim in Nuns and Soldiers ‘no longer dreamed at night that the National Gallery was dim and senseless. The dream had become true, he experienced it walking in broad daylight. The pictures were all dull and stupid, trivial, incoherent, mean’ (pp. 378–9). In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Morgan, who observed of the late Turners in the Tate Gallery, ‘How calm great pictures make one feel’ (p. 228), is corrupted morally, imaginatively and aesthetically by Julius: ‘She looked round upon the Turners. She could see now how limited and amateurish they really were’ (p. 235). James, too, places characters in the National Gallery, but his can be more resistant to edification and he is more permissive to their aesthetic inadequacies. Millie in The Wings of a Dove finds that ‘something within her was after all too weak for the Turners and Titians [. . .] She gave herself up at last and it was a consummation like another: what she should have come to the National Gallery for today would be to watch the copyists and reckon the Baedekers’.11 And when she hears some other Americans remark, ‘handsome [. . .] in the English style’ (pp. 189–90), the object of their qualified praise proves not to be a painting but Merton Densher. The faith in the truth of art which both Murdoch and James affirm is something like religious faith. Neither belonged to any church. But both use religious language to describe the experience of art and of the artist. In The Bell the National Gallery is full of ‘shrines at which [Dora] had worshipped so often before’ (p. 190), and a secular painting inspires her as a vision of perfection and reality and to virtuous action. In The Fire and the Sun Murdoch described the highest art as powered by ‘divine fury’ (EM, p. 455). In ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ she affirms, ‘one’s theory must account for the fact that experience of art is spiritual experience [. . .] experience of the art of the novel is spiritual experience’ (EM, p. 282). For James the writing of novels is ‘a sacred office’ (HF, p. 26), and he commends Flaubert’s ‘virtually monastic cell’ and compositional ‘faith sincere, active and inspiring’ (ibid., p. 191). Both writers felt a particular reverence for the novel as a genre and for similar reasons. James praises ‘its large free character of an immense and
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exquisite correspondence with life’ (ibid., p. 41). For Murdoch the ‘whole mystery of human individuality is involved here – how different we are from each other, and why it is that we love one person, we dislike another person and we are indifferent to a third person; and nothing in a way could be more important than this fact about us’ (EM, p. 254). With so much consonance in taste, style, subjects, view of the novel, there is a vital difference between James and Murdoch. It is in what Murdoch usually terms ‘contingency’, though other terms are associated with it: muddle, oddness, accident. In her view novels and novelists should be hospitable to the contingent as an irreducible element in our experience. The unproductive writer who narrates The Black Prince is repelled by the ‘foul contingency of life’ (p. 66). Jake in Under the Net fears contingency. He would not want a contingent address, such as Goldhawk Road where his philosopher friend Dave Gellman lives, and it is a stage in his moral and creative development when he recovers from a breakdown in Dave’s flat, takes a job in the nearby hospital and at last is able to talk to Hugo. A respect for contingency goes with a suspicion of formal perfection. Near the end of Under the Net there is a denial of endings: each empty dawn ‘will make mock of our contrived finalities’ (p. 239). After the deaths and dramas, The Sea, the Sea has a very discontinuous last section and the novel ends ‘What next, I wonder?’ (p. 502), gesturing beyond its own formal conclusion. Murdoch also gestures towards the independence of minor characters, each centres of their own formally peripheral lives. By contrast James sounds rather apologetic about his ficelles, such as Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady, characters who may be fun but are incidental to the design. (In my view, Henrietta contributes a vital incongruity to James’s design: she smells of the future and raises the question, never confronted in Isabel’s destiny, as to whether an intelligent young woman could support herself in a profession and not marry. At least Isabel finds it ‘unoriginal’ of Henrietta when she does.) To return to Murdoch’s minor characters, An Accidental Man (its title a recognition of contingency) is punctuated by choric conversations between minimal characters, as absorbed in their own lives as those at the centre. Some minor characters, however, even recognize their choric role. In Nuns and Soldiers one of les cousins et les tantes who are so difficult to sort out and remember remarks ‘Gertrude needs us as a chorus’. At the end of The Time of the Angels a minor character who has rather comically been trying to get into the vicarage and into the action all through the novel is revealed to have played a major role in the lives of some of the
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central characters before the novel opened. ‘Fancy old Anthea turning up like that [. . .] Well, it was odd, it was all confoundedly odd’ (p. 252). In Nuns and Soldiers, Tim keeps painting studies of people he calls ‘spectators at a crucifixion’ (p. 86). Tim is a mediocre, derivative and unsuccessful painter with no style or subject-matter of his own and these pictures have no centre. Tim’s name for them seems an attempt to dignify them with a meaning they do not embody. Or perhaps, more generally, they exemplify the absent there-ness of Christianity in a modern godless world, like the light shape of the cross on darkening wallpaper where a crucifix used to hang. And yet, whatever the quality of Tim’s paintings, there is something striking about this idea, just as a detail of a painting may compose into a form of its own and compel fresh attention to its content. Murdoch respects these loose ends and imbalances as art’s debt to life. To use her distinction between the crystalline and the journalistic, the crystalline is formally satisfying but veridically limited. Perhaps a formally perfect work of art would have to be imperfectly truthful. An excellent essay on Murdoch by Lorna Sage is entitled ‘The Pursuit of Imperfection’.12 James, by contrast, sides with art against life, as artist, at any rate. He represents some of his artists as choosing, consciously or unconsciously, between art and life. In ‘The Lesson of the Master’ the old novelist tells the younger that his art and his family have been incompatible, though of course he may be trying to get rid of the young man so that he himself can marry his young lady. But James himself, speaking to a young writer, the ‘disgustingly and, if I may be allowed to say so, nauseatingly young’ Logan Pearsall Smith, insisted: ‘There is one word – let me impress upon you – which you must inscribe upon your banner, and [. . .] that word is Loneliness’.13 The novelist in ‘The Private Life’ is literally two people, simultaneously his rather boring social self in public and the artist working in solitude and silence at his desk in private. Love is the death of Roderick Hudson. By contrast Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince is a blocked and costive writer, blocked partly by his pursuit of perfection, and is finally enabled to write a powerful book by falling inconveniently in love. At one point he tells the reader, ‘This is art, but I was out there in life’ (p. 205), but the life he was out there in produced the art. In Nuns and Soldiers Tim begins to paint better after he is happily married to Gertrude. Life is also for James the enemy of art in a different way. In his Preface to The Spoils of Poynton he makes this distinction: ‘Life being all inclusion and confusion and art being all discrimination and selection [. . .] life has no direct sense whatever for the subject and is capable, luckily
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for us, of nothing but splendid waste [. . .]’ (AN, pp. 120–21) and he reminisces revealingly about the genesis of the novel during a conversation at a dinner party. The lady sitting next to him began to relate an anecdote about acquaintances of hers and James immediately ‘in but ten words’ saw the germ of the novel. But as the lady continued the story she spoiled it or, rather, life spoiled it. ‘I saw clumsy Life again at her stupid work. For the action taken, and on which my friend, as I knew she would, had already begun all complacently and benightedly to report, I had absolutely, and could have, no scrap of use’ (ibid., p. 121). What really happened was not nearly as good as what the artist could make of it. James could continue the story better than life did. Similarly an anecdote about a divorced couple sharing the custody of a child was the germ of What Maisie Knew. One of the parents had remarried but James saw that he could improve on the actual situation: ‘the light in which the vision so readily grew to a wholeness was that of a second marriage on both sides [. . .] for the case to begin [. . .] to stand beautifully on its feet’ (AN, p. 142). The impulse given to the idea of The Aspern Papers was the discovery that Byron’s lover Claire Clairmont (James calls her Jane Clairmont) had recently died at a great age and was actually still resident in Florence when James had previously been there himself. He could have met her but did not and was quite relieved not to have had the choice: Had I happened to hear of her but a little sooner I might have met her in the flesh. The question of whether I should have wished to do so was another matter – the question of whether I shouldn’t have preferred to keep her preciously unseen, to run no risk, in other words, by too rude a choice, of depreciating the romance-value which, as I say, it was instantly inevitable to attach [. . .] to her long survival. I had luckily not to deal with that difficult option; difficult in such a case by reason of that odd law which somehow always makes the minimum of valid suggestion serve the man of imagination better than the maximum (AN, p. 161). A controlled experiment can take place within the confines of the novel or story which ‘clumsy Life’ could not conduct. I use a scientific metaphor. In the Preface to Roderick Hudson James uses a mathematical one: ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so’ (AN, p. 5).
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This contrast between James and Murdoch is visible in their reading as well as their writing. For Murdoch, Tolstoy is the greatest of novelists and George Eliot ‘at a level at times almost equal to that of Tolstoy, displays that godlike capacity for so respecting and loving her characters as to make them exist as free and separate beings’ (EM, p. 276). In ‘Against Dryness’ she writes: ‘Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination. Think of the Russians, those great masters of the contingent. Too much contingency of course may turn art into journalism. But since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid of incompleteness’ (EM, pp. 294–5). James, however, has mixed feelings about these giants and his discomfort articulates itself over the very qualities which Murdoch most reveres in them: their inclusiveness, their verisimilitude, their tolerance of the contingent. For James ‘Middlemarch is a treasure-house of detail, but it is an indifferent whole’ and it provokes the question, ‘If we write novels so, how shall we write History?’ (HF, pp. 259, 267). The Russians perplex him even more: ‘[. . .] what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we will remember, that such things are “superior to art”; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us’ (AN, p. 84). For one reader Tolstoy displays ‘godlike capacity’; the other looks ‘in vain for [. . .] the divine explanatory genius’ (ibid., p. 84). James is particularly vexed by the inclusion of ‘the accidental and the arbitrary’, so valorized by Murdoch, and she would understand the phrase ‘superior to art’, which reduces the great aesthete to (rather complacent) incomprehension. Although the contrast manifests itself most obviously in different views of form, it is not only a formal contrast. Both artists defend their views of form as commitment to truth. John Bayley observes of James, ‘For him the two [form and meaning] were not divisible but closely dependent on each other, and the incalculability of life was an effect which in art should only be secured inside a strict adherence to form. He would not have admitted a dangling ending, in which one of the threads was led off at a tangent instead of being tucked into the complete pattern’.14 For James his donnée has a logic which must lead to an ineluctable conclusion. For Murdoch respect for contingency is a moral, even a spiritual duty, which art should express but often evades: ‘Much art and religious myth has the effect, and the intended effect, of concealing the fact of death and the absolute contingency of existence which is an aspect of that fact’ (MGM, p. 139). The sublime finality of
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the perfect work of art can act as consolation for the inescapable unfinished finality of life. I would like to end by briefly considering the ways in which their contrasting views of form signify contrasting views of human experience, the contrast between a vision more tragic and a vision more comic. Of course, James’s novels are full of comedy and Murdoch’s of tragedy. James is a very witty writer with an eye for the odd and eccentric and an acute ear for the unconsciously comic. An irony seems to play over the obliquities of his style. Murdoch engages with World War Two, concentration camps, refugees, resistance to totalitarianism, the Easter Rising, terrorism. But James’s vision is finally more tragic, a vision of absolute losses, renunciations, impossible choices in which what you most want costs what you cannot do. Murdoch affirms the comic. She finds Plato’s dismissal of the absurd ‘one of his more shocking positions’, and sympathizes with ‘his Zen colleagues who take the funny as central to the human pilgrimage’ (EM, p. 450). She questions the finality of the tragic view of life. Life is every bit as terrible as the tragic writers paint it, but it is not only terrible and it goes on and makes ‘mock of our contrived finalities’ (Under the Net, p. 239). Murdoch’s most overtly Jamesian novel is Nuns and Soldiers, a reworking of the story of The Wings of the Dove. In Nuns and Soldiers, as in The Wings of the Dove, a penniless couple float the idea that he should save the situation by marrying a rich woman. But it is only a joke, although its discovery nearly destroys the marriage, which was undertaken for love and not with that motive and does finally survive. The last words of James’s novel, ‘We shall never be again as we were!’ (p. 457), re-echo through Murdoch’s but her characters are graced with a capacity for forgiveness and renewal reminiscent of Shakespeare’s last plays. There is even a renewing near-death by drowning. James’s characters are not thus let off their ‘thematic appointed dooms’ (AN, p. 277). An Unofficial Rose with its losses and disappointments is far more Jamesian in feeling. Nonetheless, at the end of An Unofficial Rose Hugh, who has lost both his Tintoretto and the relationship with Emma which it might have enabled, does not sit down with his sewing for life. He is finding some consolation with Mildred. ‘Human beings’, as Julius says in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, ‘are essentially finders of substitutes’ (p. 233). Hence the loose ends, the accidents, the contingencies have a touch of necessity. And of comic continuity. In James, however, the finding of substitutes can look shabby. Lord Warburton fancies Pansy because, though she is not the rose, she is near the rose. He has been in love with a major character and should not substitute a minor one. And,
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in James, minor characters should know their place and they are not allowed as a rule to marry major characters. In the Preface to The Ambassadors, he cuts Maria Gostrey down to size: ‘such an agent as Miss Gostrey, pre-engaged at a high salary, but waits in the draughty wing with her shawl and her smelling-salts’ (AN, p. 323). But in The Black Prince the very off-stage Hartbourne marries Christian. Substitution is, of course, bound up with repetition. Murdoch’s novels are full of repetition. Characters leave their partners, return to them, leave again, return again. Substitution can be repetition. Jake, who loves Anna, looks likely to turn to her sister Sadie. Michael Meade replays his disastrous affection for Nick with Toby. Alexander has taken his brother Martin’s girl yet again. Substitution and repetition are so similar and yet can have opposite formal implications. Substitution suggests the linear, contingency, loose ends, open endings, no sense of an ending. Repetition suggests the circular, necessity, the patterned, the determined termination. If it convinces, it satisfies. If it fails to convince, it annoys. The plot of A Word Child throws Valentine Cunningham into Lady Bracknell mode: ‘To lose your lover, your colleague’s wife, in a car smash as you speed down the motorway from Oxford to London is an unhappy accident; to lose your next one, the same colleague’s second wife, this time in the muddy waters of the Thames, is an Iris Murdoch novel’.15 Yes, it is excessive, it is preposterous. But it has a Freudian logic. For Freud there were no accidents. It is an Aristotelian probable impossibility. Or, to look at it in James’s way, clumsy life would not do anything so intelligent.
Notes 1. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net’, Critical Quarterly, 4 (Spring, 1962), 53. 2. All page numbers to Murdoch’s novels refer to the following Penguin editions: The Red and the Green (1965), Under the Net (1960), An Unofficial Rose (1964), The Bell (1962), The Black Prince (1975), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1972), Nuns and Soldiers (1981), Henry and Cato (1987), The Time of the Angels (1973). Edition of The Sea, the Sea quoted is (London: Vintage, 1999). 3. Anne Rowe, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), p. 33. 4. English Hours (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989), p. 14. 5. James in conversation with E.S. Nadal in S. Nowell-Smith, The Legend of the Master (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 67. 6. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), p. 57 – hereafter AN. 7. This comparison is also made by Byatt in Degrees of Freedom (London: Vintage 1994), pp. 149–53.
Priscilla Martin 135 8. The Golden Bowl (1904) (Penguin, 1966), p. 547. 9. ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’, in EM, p. 243. 10. The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel (ed.) Leon Edel (London: Mercury Books, 1962), p. 25 – hereafter HF. 11. The Wings of the Dove (1902) (Penguin, 1965), p. 88. 12. See ‘The Pursuit of Imperfection’, Critical Quarterly, XIX, 2 (Summer 1977), pp. 57–87. 13. See Nowell-Smith, p. 154. 14. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (London: Constable, 1960), p. 259. 15. Valentine Cunningham, ‘Shaping Modern English Fiction’, in On Modern British Fiction (ed.) Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 149–80.
11 A Literary Foremother: Iris Murdoch and Carol Shields Alex Ramon
In this volume, Nick Turner notes the infrequency with which contemporary novelists have cited Murdoch as an influence upon their fiction, despite the indication of ‘Murdochian elements’ in their work. Carol Shields’s remark in a 1998 interview that she ‘read everything that Iris Murdoch wrote as it was published’,1 may not constitute a direct admission of influence, but it is, nonetheless, a comment worthy of investigation, given some intriguing, and hitherto unexamined, connections between her and Murdoch’s fiction. In contrast with Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro, women writers who figured frequently in Shields’s list of literary influences, the cited interview is the only one in which Shields alluded to Murdoch directly. Yet there is further evidence which reveals her engagement with Murdoch’s writing. Most significantly, direct references to Murdoch ‘bookend’ Shields’s corpus, appearing in her first novel, Small Ceremonies (1976), and her last, Unless (2002). In Small Ceremonies, an unspecified ‘new Iris Murdoch novel’ is brought to the narrator, Judith Gill, during a period of illness: ‘expensively hard-covered and just exactly what I had yearned for’, as Judith describes it.2 In Unless, the narrator, Reta Winters, preoccupied by what she perceives as the abiding ‘lack of curiosity about great women’s minds’, is dismayed by a prominent male writer’s failure to include any female authors in his list of literary influences.3 Murdoch’s name, along with those of Woolf, Munro, Joyce Carol Oates and others, features in Reta’s canon of major twentieth century female writers and thinkers (p. 100). In the first of these citations, then, Murdoch’s fiction is evoked in ‘personal’ terms, as the source of a character’s private reading pleasure. The second reference, however, places Murdoch within a wider context, nominating her as one of the twentieth century’s ‘great minds’ and involving her in Unless’s critique of continuing male dominance in 136
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literary culture as well as its inquiry into goodness. (Unless also makes reference to the Julian of Norwich quotation which is often cited in Murdoch’s fiction: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’ [p. 218])4. Taking these allusions as a starting point, this essay proposes that Murdoch should be recognized as one of Shields’s literary ‘foremothers’ and that her work should be acknowledged as a major influence upon several significant elements of Shields’s fiction. Critics’ failure to note these connections may be due to the writers’ perceived differences. (Only Tim Adams, reviewing Unless for the Observer, vaguely detects ‘Iris Murdoch at the back of this book somewhere’.)5 Certainly, there are some thematic and stylistic disparities between their work, but I would suggest that any such differences are far outweighed by their affinities. Indeed, there are many potential areas for comparative study here. Discussion could focus upon the (often self-reflexive) portrayal of writer characters in their novels, or their shared concern with the purging of authorial personality from fiction.6 A tension between pattern and randomness underpins the work of both, reflected in their fascination with lists as signifiers of both order and multiplicity, and their insistence upon the role of accident in human experience. Their close attention to the details of the quotidian bears examination, as does their merging of those details with magic realism, the miraculous and transcendent. The translucent aeroplane witnessed by a boy in Shields’s story ‘Home’ strongly recalls the flying saucer observed by the twins at the end of The Nice and the Good, both episodes functioning as assertions of the limits of rational explanation and as challenges to the ‘realist’ framework of the texts themselves. Elsewhere, Sarah Maloney’s brief epiphany by painting in Swann evokes the many such episodes in Murdoch’s fiction,7 while Barker Flett’s close contemplation of the lady’s-slipper in The Stone Diaries similarly exemplifies the deep ‘looking’ she advocates: ‘the intensity of his gaze on this single living thing’.8 These are just some of many parallel incidents in which Murdoch’s work can be identified as inspiration or intertext for Shields’s. There is also some congruence in their personal and professional lives (long marriages, relatively late starts in fiction writing), and in critical responses which have lavishly praised their work but also accused it of similar faults: equivocal feminism, narrowness of social scope. Both maintain a reputation as ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ novelists. This essay isolates only three aspects of the similarities between these writers for discussion: it examines how reference to Murdoch can illuminate one of Shields’s
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major themes: the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’; it identifies some significant aspects of her stylistic debt to Murdoch in her development of the use of epistolary sections and extended conversational and anonymous voices; and it explores finally, the relationship of both authors to postmodernist discourses, suggesting that reflection on Murdoch’s ambivalent relationship to postmodernism can help to clarify Shield’s own equivocal relationship to it. It attempts, throughout, to place the work of these writers ‘in dialogue’.
The impossibility of ‘total image’: A Murdochian ‘ethics of biography’ The centrality of the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ to Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy has been widely noted. If in her ethical writings Murdoch develops a moral philosophy that defines love as the perception of the individual, which rebukes solipsism and the egoistic desire for control, and advocates a close attention to the reality outside the self, then her fiction criticizes what Peter Conradi terms ‘a self-serving world-view in which other people figure merely as subsidiary characters’.9 ‘I have in mind’, Murdoch writes, ‘moral attitudes which emphasize the inexhaustible detail of the world, the endlessness of the task of understanding, the importance of not assuming that one has got individuals and situations “taped”.’10 Conradi’s contention is that ‘[a]ll Murdoch’s narrators suffer into a state which may conceivably augur slightly better for their chances of deepening their sense of the otherness and separateness of other people’ (p. 101), and that moments in which characters ‘come to see their perception of others as having been lazy’ are frequently depicted in her fiction (p. 375). Emphasizing human difference and mysteriousness, Murdoch’s work recognizes ‘[o]ther people’ as ‘the most interesting features of our world and [. . .] the most poignantly and mysteriously alien’.11 Similar concerns are evident in Shields’s fiction, which also explores the partial and deceptive nature of perception and the human tendency to dismiss and diminish others. ‘How well or how poorly can we connect with another human consciousness?’ Shields asked in a 1996 lecture,12 and in her fiction the question is examined in two ways. The most frequently discussed scenario is the domestic sphere, by means of interactions between family members. Her first four novels are ‘companion texts’ narrated from the often contradictory perspectives of two sisters and a husband and wife, and each charts an awakening to the mysteriousness and unpredictability of others which is distinctly Murdochian.
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Discovering a pile of her husband Martin’s cryptic lecture notes and messages, Judith in Small Ceremonies is reminded, painfully, ‘that [Martin] possessed an existence of his own to which I did not belong, which I did not understand’ (p. 95). Such episodes might have been drawn directly from Murdoch, recalling particularly the scene in A Fairly Honourable Defeat in which Hilda is shocked into a sense of her separation from her husband Rupert, to whom she has been married for twenty years, intuiting a ‘whole dimension of otherness, Rupert’s otherness. He had needs and impulses of which she knew nothing’.13 Similarly, the ‘disbelief in the otherness of people’s lives’ expressed by Judith’s sister Charleen in Shields’s second novel The Box Garden is figured in unmistakably Murdochian terms: as both a symptom of a ‘raging ego’ and a ‘perceptual failure’.14 Charleen, horrified by the aberrant fact of her mother’s re-marriage, is unable to ‘conceive of [other people] functioning out of [her] sight’ (p. 117), a tendency which links her to many of Murdoch’s solipsistic narrators. Yet Berkeley’s notion of the non-existence of an unperceived reality is not endorsed by Shields any more than it is by Murdoch. Rather, in her early novels, a sustained testing of a self-focussed character’s assumptions urges him towards a refinement of perception and a move, albeit partial and provisional, in the direction of a more accepting response to human mystery. Such a journey is painful, comic and, of course, endless. In The Box Garden Charleen’s effort to ‘correct’ her distorted perception and ‘see’ her mother more lovingly is presented as positive moral action. Throughout, close daily observation works to challenge Charleen’s preconceptions, and the tentative suggestion of an improved relationship between the characters is signalled by her withdrawal from anxious speculation about what her mother’s new life will be ‘like’ to a humbler recognition of her ultimate mystery. The novel ends with an affirmative recognition of human separateness, proposing that ‘the proper response’ to otherness may not be ‘comprehension [. . .] but amazement and acceptance’ (p. 199). However, in Shields’s work, the limitations of human ‘knowability’ are also explored in relation to biography, and what is striking is how directly her fascination with the problems of this genre engages with Murdoch’s ideas regarding the difficulty and necessity of accepting ‘otherness’. For Shields, the writing of biography offers an analogue for the complicated partial processes by which human beings become ‘known’ to one another and for the problems of providing any adequate summations of an individual or of a human life. Accordingly, the anxious epistemophilia which afflicts many of her protagonists is experienced with particular intensity by her biographer characters. In Small Ceremonies, for
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example, Judith’s incremental awareness that aspects of her family members will always elude her desire for knowledge and understanding is paralleled by her researching of a biography of the Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie, and by her frustrated confrontations with the ‘voids’ and ‘silences’ which punctuate Moodie’s life. Judith initially believes in her ability to fix a ‘total image’ of Moodie from the ‘data’ that she has collated; she believes that ‘the real Susanna’ is accessible to her (p. 7). Small Ceremonies charts the fracturing of that belief and its replacement with a different one: ‘other people must be preserved with their mysteries intact’ (p. 174). ‘How can one describe a human being “justly”?’15 The question posed by Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince is precisely the one around which Shields’s critique of biography revolves. In her fiction, the biographical project is characterized less by loving attention to another human being than by diminishment, and by the biographer’s attempt to explain, possess and ‘tape’ the individual, ‘to classify and systemize’ the ‘rich and random’ nature of lived experience, as Swann terms it (p. 81). Swann also explores the hostility which can underpin biography, the frequency with which it can become ‘an act of contempt’ (p. 83). In the novel, for example, the biographer Morton Jimroy’s solipsism is signalled by the tendency of his biographies to turn their subjects into versions of Jimroy himself: ‘Once again he seemed to be looking in a mirror’ (p. 85). Repeatedly, then, what Shields’s biographer characters are confronted with in relation to their subjects is the ‘unfinalizability’ which Elizabeth Dipple sees as central to Murdoch’s conception of human personality and existence: ‘the sense that the last word about our lives cannot be written nor the final analysis achieved’.16 The moral work undertaken by these characters is, therefore, Murdochian: it involves a move from a belief that ‘total image’ or ‘final analysis’ is possible to a more modest acknowledgment that any recounting of a life must, at best, be a partial and subjective impression. ‘It’s unwise’, comments Judith towards the end of Small Ceremonies, ‘to do more than suggest’ (p. 152). In this novel in particular, the renunciation of the biographer’s desire for ‘total image’ evolves into a wider philosophy which stresses the value of ‘embracing others along with their mysteries’ (p. 179). ‘[T]he framework’ of connections linking human beings must be reconciled, it is suggested, with the ‘separate and private energy’ which divides them (p. 179). Like Charleen’s, then, Judith’s journey towards a somewhat more tolerant attitude to human mystery in both her life and her art recalls that of many of Murdoch’s narrators, particularly Jake Donoghue in Under The Net, a novel to
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which Small Ceremonies bears further resemblance.17 The proximity of Shields’s perspective to Murdoch’s cannot be over-emphasized here, with even the reference to ‘separate and private energy’ evoking a specific sentence in The Italian Girl where Edmund is described as learning to perceive Maggie ‘as a separate and private and unpredictable being’.18 Furthermore, the centrality of these issues to both writers makes it difficult not to read their work in the context of the biographical material latterly produced on Murdoch herself, and the range of approaches, laudatory and hostile, that such writing has engendered. All I would suggest here, however, is that what Elizabeth Raimer has termed Shields’s ‘ethics of biography’ can be usefully supplemented by reference to Murdoch’s ideas.19
Stylistic influence In Work for the Spirit, Dipple praises Murdoch’s ‘use of letters or sequences of letters to develop the characters’, drawing attention to ‘the great batches of them’ which constitute entire chapters in An Accidental Man (p. 198). Dipple associates this device with another that Murdoch develops in this novel: the incorporation of long stretches of conversation by anonymous voices overheard at parties. These choric speakers offer a gossipy commentary on the novel’s events, and, for Dipple, serve the function of ‘attach[ing] the reader’s attention to the extended world Murdoch is interested in depicting’ (pp. 198–9): ‘Gracie, it’s so lovely to partake in your happiness’. ‘I say, look at Austin’. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Look at his right hand’. ‘He’s holding his glass’. ‘He can move his fingers’. ‘I was telling Gracie it was so lovely to partake in her happiness’. ‘Yes, lovely’. ‘A privilege’. ‘I say, look at the time, we must be off’. ‘So must we’. ‘So must we’. ‘Our revels now are ended’. ‘Goodnight, darling’. ‘Goodnight, darling’.
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‘Goodnight’. ‘Goodnight’. ‘Goodnight’.20 Both of the devices identified by Dipple influence Shields’s own experimentation: extended epistolary sections punctuate her novels from Swann; the ‘Work’ chapter of The Stone Diaries is completely comprised of letters, and, in 1991, she co-authored the epistolary novel A Celibate Season. Like Murdoch, an avid correspondent in life, Shields was drawn to the letter-writer’s creation of personae, the dual tendency towards self-revelation and self-protection, and exploited these elements frequently in her fiction. Her use of lengthy dialogue passages without authorial comment or description is even more pervasive. While Murdoch abandons this device after An Accidental Man, or at least employs it less self-consciously, Shields develops it, to the extent that increasingly extended dialogued party scenes, with unidentified speakers, become one of the most distinctive features of her fiction. The wedding reception which concludes The Box Garden is presented thus: ‘You must have been scared getting kidnapped like that’. ‘Scared?’ ‘I mean, did you think she was going to try for a ransom . . .’ ‘[I]t wasn’t like that. It was . . . kind of fun, the whole thing’. ‘May I propose a toast . . .’ ‘Good idea’. ‘I’ve never had champagne before’. ‘Neither have I’. ‘Really?’ ‘Delicious’. ‘Like ginger ale, only sour’. ‘Ah, look at the bubbles rising’. ‘You’re supposed to sip it, Richard’. ‘Here, have another glass, Judith’. ‘If you’re sure there’s enough . . .’ ‘Lovely’. ‘Tea is plenty good enough for me’. ‘Here’s to marriage’. ‘Here’s to the bride and groom’. ‘Here’s to the future’. ‘Happy days’.
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‘I love you, Eugene’. ‘Charleen, Charleen’. (pp. 211–2) With its mixture of digression and repetition, the banal and the cryptic, the section mimics the Accidental Man passages and their presentation of the comic incongruity of ‘party talk’. In Shields’s fiction, such dialoguebased episodes evolve from the relatively short party scenes of her early novels to the more extended conference sections of Happenstance and Swann, and culminate spectacularly in the near-chapter length gathering which concludes Larry’s Party (1997). Unlike the arch formality of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s dialogue, in which, as David Lodge notes, no attempt is made to create ‘the illusion of actual speech’,21 these sections resemble those of Murdoch’s novel in their attempt to duplicate more authentically the rhythms of verbal communication and to convey both the seriousness and the comedy of social interaction. It is perhaps unsurprising that both Murdoch and Shields were drawn to playwriting; the conversational mode of An Accidental Man follows Murdoch’s experiments with writing for theatre in the late 1960s. In the case of both, however, dramaturgical techniques were put more successfully to use in their novels, which seek to give equal emphasis to what Lodge terms ‘the stream of consciousness’ and ‘the stream of talk’ (p. 81). Conradi notes how, in An Accidental Man, the story of Austin is ‘circumscribed by many others, which radiate outwards and give the illusion of a marvellous depth of field’ (p. 82). This assertion of the impossibility of writing a life ‘independently’ from others is central to Shields’s multi-voiced ‘auto/biografictions’, The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party, in which the experiences of many ‘secondary’ characters share space with those of the ostensible protagonist. Echoing Murdoch’s critique of the spurious seclusion of the ‘existentialist hero’, ‘the lonely brave man [. . .] trying to impose or assert or find himself’, ‘the man of power [. . .] struggling on bravely, sincerely and alone’,22 Shields also expresses concern about the ‘unreal isolation’ in which contemporary characters were, in her view, too frequently situated.23 In its place, her fiction constructs, like Murdoch’s, a network of voices and relationships, demonstrating that any human life is located in an extended social world, a world full of other people, other voices, other views. The extensive use of letters, dialogue and other multi-vocal devices24 results in what Deborah Johnson, describing Murdoch’s work, has termed an ‘aesthetically rendered plurality of vision’,25 and suggests that Shields may have learned much from Murdoch about exploiting the novel’s potential for polyphony and dialogism.
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‘A step beyond postmodernism’: Murdoch and Shields’s ‘self-conscious realism’ Reference to Murdoch’s fiction can also help to clarify Shields’s highly equivocal relationship to postmodernism. Ian Gregson has identified recently a ‘shared resistance’ to the ‘more extreme forms’ of postmodernist theory in ‘the critical and theoretical writings of [contemporary] poets and novelists’.26 Murdoch and Shields were no exceptions to this, both expressing concern about, and indeed hostility towards, the implications of postmodern thought. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is, of course, a sustained critique of the ‘threat to accepted conceptions of truth, value, individual’ which, for Murdoch, was posed by structuralism and its descendants.27 ‘[L]anguage itself is a moral medium’, Murdoch maintained. ‘Life is soaked in the moral, literature is soaked in the moral’.28 For Shields, postmodernism was ‘a synthetic discourse unanimated by personal concerns’ and one that often sanctioned ‘bad writing’.29 Echoing Murdoch directly, she also proposed that it is not ‘language games’ but ‘the making of moral choices that lends power to fiction’.30 However, the perspective of both writers is more ambivalent than these rather stern statements suggest. Terry Eagleton’s review of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals noted the extent to which Murdoch’s fiction ‘values’ what poststructuralism ‘values’: ‘the sheer contingency of human life, its tragic-comic muddle and incompleteness against all that would seek to systematize it’.31 The paradox had, however, been identified in the early 1980s by Dipple, who acknowledged the ‘contradiction’ between Murdoch’s ‘practice of a firm defensible realism’ and the ‘games, tricks and ironies’ which permeate her fiction (p. 5). Conradi also notes Murdoch’s suspicion of metanarratives and totalizing theories: ‘[she] is wholly of our time in her insistence that ‘truth’ cannot be secured. There are short glimpses of clarity and insight, but the single Big Truth is always illusory’ (p. 372). Comparable contradictions are evident in Shields’s writing. Susan Billingham terms her fiction ‘deceptively difficult to categorize according to any single label’, contrasting the ‘postmodern elements’ evident in her work with its ‘humanist focus upon the internal consciousness and daily lives of [. . .] characters’.32 In Swann and The Stone Diaries these ‘postmodern elements’ are analogous to those in Murdoch’s novels, including ‘play’ with other texts and genres; self-reflexivity and metafictional commentary; a view of the self as multiple and relational; and the commitment to plurality and indeterminacy already identified. Perhaps
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the problem here is simply that any experimental writing has been labelled, however glibly, as ‘postmodernist’ and that philosophical and ontological questions associated with postmodernism predate the existence of the term itself. However, an alternative view is possible. Proposing that postmodern narrative strategies could offer writers ‘a precious oxygen of permission’, Shields advocated the development of a ‘double’ form which reconciles an inadequate postmodernist approach with a realism which has equally ‘failed us’ by seldom proving ‘real enough’: Some postmodernists think there can be no point beyond the language game, but I think there can be – and I don’t know why we have to talk about these two forms of fiction. Why can’t we have something in the middle – which is, I suppose, what I’m trying to do. Because postmodernist ideas do allow you to do things that you can’t do as a naturalist.33 This concern with what postmodernist theory might productively ‘do’ for the realist novel – liberating it from the conventions of form and genre and allowing for greater stylistic experimentation – becomes a central topic of Shields’s critical writing, but I would suggest that it is in the fiction of a writer such as Murdoch that Shields finds incarnated the ‘double’ form that she advocates here. For Billingham, the term ‘selfconscious realism’ (p. 276) best defines the hybrid approach developed in Shields’s later work but it is an approach which, I think, owes a great deal to the precedent set by Murdoch. Both writers practise formal experimentation while retaining a commitment to realism and firm ‘humanist focus’. Conradi modifies his sense of Murdoch as ‘a playful writer, playing with pattern, playing with the reader’ with the comment that her ‘play is somehow serious as well as playful’ (SA, p. 372). This notion of making narrative ‘play’ at once ‘playful’ and ‘serious’ resonates strongly with Shields’s fiction: ‘games and tricks’ such as the concluding film script in Swann or the family tree and photos in The Stone Diaries do not preclude humanist, moral engagement yet ensure multiple opportunities for readerly ‘play’. Thus Murdoch can be identified as one of the authors who points the way towards Shields’s particular brand of ‘self-conscious realism’. Of course such a merging of styles does not make Shields and Murdoch unique. Gregson identifies ‘postmodernist and anti-postmodernist’ elements in the work of Byatt and Toni Morrison among many others (pp. 32, 135–6). Yet a recent critical volume has placed Shields at the
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vanguard of such a ‘doubled’ approach to literary art. In Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, Edward Eden argues that her work takes ‘a step beyond postmodernism by suggesting that we can transcend the limitations of its epistemology’ (p. 6). In Eden’s view, ‘by affirming the ties that bind reader and writer, world and text’, Shields’s fiction challenges ‘what Patricia Waugh has termed “the generally apocalyptic vision of much postmodernist thought”’: By combining the concerns of the traditional realist novel with the formal experimentation currently associated with postmodernism, Shields makes a distinctive contribution to world literature [. . .] opening [the realist novel] up to new forms of narrative play and new opportunities to construct stories of moral consequence (p. 11). However, the ‘contribution to world literature’ for which Eden praises Shields can only be properly contexualized by reference to her engagement with the fiction of Iris Murdoch.
Notes 1. Alex O’ Connell, ‘Fresh Orange: Interview with Carol Shields and Ann Patchett’, The Times, 23 May 1998. 2. Shields, Small Ceremonies [1976], (London: Fourth Estate, 1995), p. 100. All subsequent references are to this edition. 3. Shields, Unless (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), pp. 137, 99. All subsequent references are to this edition. 4. Most notably Catherine Fawley in The Bell, 1958. 5. Tim Adams, review of Unless, The Observer (12 May 2002). [accessed 3/3/2003]. 6. Shields’s playful story ‘Absence’, in which a writer, due to a faulty computer keyboard, must construct a story without recourse to the letter ‘I’, is the ultimate exercise in ‘negative capability’. Shields, Collected Stories (London: Harper Perennial, 1999), pp. 482–5. 7. Shields, Swann [1987], (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 29. All subsequent references are to this edition. 8. Shields, The Stone Diaries (London: Fourth Estate, 1993), p. 46. 9. Conradi, SA, p. 19. 10. EM, p. 87. 11. EM, p. 257. 12. Shields, ‘Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard’ in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction (ed.) E. Eden and D. Goertz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 33. 13. A Fairly Honourable Defeat (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 343.
Alex Ramon 147 14. Shields, The Box Garden [1977] (London: Fourth Estate, 1995), p. 117. All subsequent references to this edition. 15. The Black Prince (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 81. 16. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 168. 17. The relationship between the two novels would reward closer scrutiny. Aside from the shared concern with otherness, both texts have writers as their (unreliable) narrators and both revolve around acts of literary ‘theft’ and plagiarism. 18. The Italian Girl (London: Vintage, 2001) p. 132. 19. Raimer used this phrase in a paper entitled ‘“Festivals of Inconclusiveness”: Carol Shields’s Ethics of Biography’. The paper was given at the ‘Carol Shields and the Extra-ordinary’ conference at the Sorbonne, 21–22 March 2003. 20. An Accidental Man (London: Triad Granada, 1979), pp. 428–9. 21. David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 83. 22. EM, pp. 225, 227. 23. Shields, Jane Austen (London: Phoenix, 2001), p. 158. 24. In particular the chapter arrangement of Swann, with its four subjective accounts of the title character, seems to draw directly upon Murdoch’s device of the ‘post-scripts’ in The Black Prince. Both texts construct a multiplicity of viewpoints for the reader to negotiate. 25. Deborah Johnson, Iris Murdoch (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), p. 24. 26. Ian Gregson, Postmodern Literature (London: Arnold, 2004), p. 33. 27. MGM., p.215. 28. EM, p.27. 29. Shields, ‘Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard’, p.34; Watchel, ‘An Interview with Carol Shields’, Room of One’s Own 13.1/2 (1989), 44. 30. Shields, ‘Lush Words: Review of Angela Carter’s Artificial Fire’, Globe and Mail, 7 March 1988. 31. Terry Eagleton, ‘Review of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’, The Guardian, 20 October 1992. 32. Susan E. Billingham, ‘Fragile Tissue: The Fiction of Carol Shields’, British Journal of Canadian Studies 13.2 (1998), 276. 33. Shields, interview with Watchel, p.21.
12 ‘Policemen in a Search Team’: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Ian McEwan’s Atonement Anne Rowe
Like policemen in a search team, we go on hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth (Atonement, p. 359). When Murdoch published The Black Prince in 1973, liberal humanism was being challenged by High Theory. When McEwan wrote Atonement in 2001, High Theory was itself being challenged and calls for a new eclecticism that restores authority to the text were being voiced.1 These novels, both written at transitional periods in literary criticism, selfreferentially engage with contemporary debates about authorship and the value of literature: each novel enacts a rigorous evaluation of its own status. Although McEwan has said that when he began writing he could find ‘no way in’ through the fiction of writers like Iris Murdoch, distinct parallels are evident between his mature work, Atonement and Murdoch’s The Black Prince.2 Despite being written by two generically different writers hailing from different generations and class (one committed to the tradition of English Realism, the other a macabre writer of a literature of shock), both pose similar paradoxes as they apparently subscribe to positions that undermine the stability of the literary text, while simultaneously subscribing to the moral tradition of the novel. Indeed, these novels could be said to perform a literary ‘duet’. Both novels are metafictions, self-conscious studies of the aesthetic and moral considerations of story-telling. Both narrators are established authors and both texts comprise their autobiographical stories. Briony Tallis’s story is told in the third person, then mutates into the first person to expose much of her story as a lie, while Bradley Pearson’s is told in the first person until the final four postscripts which also cast doubt on the validity of the preceding narrative. Both narratives create 148
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a dialogue between two distinct voices: one tells the story as events took place; the other is the voice of an older, wiser narrator who questions the younger narrator’s perception, hints at future events, philosophizes on morality and ponders on the nature of art, and the voices of the naïve narrators have a distinctly different tone from their older selves. Though unknown to readers, both narrators face a death sentence: Murdoch’s Bradley develops ‘a quick growing cancer’ and dies in prison (p. 412); McEwan’s Briony has been diagnosed with a ‘neural disorder’ that means her mind will close down until she ‘will have lost the ability to comprehend anything at all’ (p. 354). And both novels play out the history of the novel in their forms: part one of Bradley’s story is the realist depiction of his life up to his cataclysmic falling in love with Julian Baffin, while the first section of Atonement, set in the traditional English country estate, depicts Briony’s childhood in the realist tradition. Part Two of Bradley’s story describes his falling in love and displays a modernist concern with consciousness and perspective, as does the middle section of Atonement that describes Robbie’s war experiences. Both novels end with a flourish that exposes their fictionality. Such startling parallels pose a literary puzzle. Why should a paid-up postmodernist and a committed realist construct such similar texts? As a fledgling author, Murdoch was erroneously identified as a social realist and, so it seems, McEwan’s early work was also misinterpreted. Critics identified him as an ‘amoral’ enfant terrible, though recent criticism suggests ‘his interest in the marginal and the perverse has always aimed precisely at defining ethical limits’.3 McEwan and Murdoch may never have been as polarized as they initially appear and, certainly since 9/11, McEwan has expressed remarkably ‘Murdochian’ views: ‘imagining yourself into the minds of other people is, I think, a fundamental human act of empathy, which lies at the base of all our moral understanding. Now I’m an atheist. I really don’t believe [. . .] our moral sense comes from a God [. . .] [it’s] human, universal, it’s being able to think our way into the minds of others’.4 The denial of God and the idea of ‘Otherness’ echo the heart of Murdoch’s moral philosophy: her borrowing of the idea of ‘attention’ from Simone Weil to describe the individual’s constantly renewed attempt to see individuals as they are, and not as they exist in the fantasy-ridden psyche.5 Both writers thus suggest sustained meditation on the Other as a way to moral goodness and the artist’s imaginative construction of character as exemplifying such meditation. McEwan’s view of the novel is thus inherently as moral as Murdoch’s: ‘fiction is a deeply moral form in that it is the perfect medium for entering the mind of another’.6 Murdoch, to the same end,
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transposes Kant’s view of the sublime from nature to art, which produces ‘the moment of recognition of the separateness of another human being’ when readers ‘infinitely extend [their] capacity to imagine the being of others’ (MGM, p. 305). It is unsurprising, then, that both The Black Prince and Atonement dramatize the epistemological problems encountered by writers who share a commitment to the moral function of literature yet write under the umbrella of postmodernism.7
A crisis of truth Both novels acknowledge that there is no certain access to the real and thus demonstrate suspicion of any absolute claim to the representation of truth. Both writers understand the subjectivity of human perception and the limitations of the novel form and consciously destabilize authorial authority. But, paradoxically, both want readers to hold faith with the truth-telling capacity of art – whether revealed through a postmodernist’s celebration of fictionality, or a realist’s suspicion of it. Both novels therefore, juxtapose detailed realism with devices that announce their fictionality. At the beginning of The Black Prince, Bradley reveals that he will ‘lodge [his] vision somehow inside the layered stuff of ironic sensibility which if I were a fictitious character would be so much denser and deeper’ (pp. 80–1), and at the end, Loxias, the editor, remarks, ‘it has even been suggested that Bradley Pearson and myself are both simply fictions, the invention of a minor novelist’ (p. 415). In Atonement, Briony’s authorial volte-face reveals that her poignant reunion with her sister, Cecelia, and Cecelia’s lover, Robbie, is a lie. (Briony, at thirteen, had wrongly accused Robbie of raping her fifteenyear-old cousin, Lola, a crime for which Robbie was imprisoned.) The reunion and Briony’s promise of restitution is merely a fictional consolation: ‘Robbie Turner died of septicaemia on Bray Dunes on 1st June 1941 [. . .] Cecelia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station’ (p. 370). Such destabilizing of textual authority shocks readers precisely because their disbelief has been suspended by seductive realism. Bradley may only hint cautiously at his fictional status, while Briony relishes hers, and even invites readers to participate in her lie by imagining Cecelia and Robbie at her birthday party, ‘still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library’ (p. 372). At the rearguard of postmodernism, McEwan seemingly destroys illusions of realism, almost punishing readers for believing him. Murdoch, more fearful of any such loss of control, and wishing to preserve her readers’ goodwill, shrinks from
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such drastic exposure. McEwan rests confidently in this genre and demands a sophisticated engagement with the fictionality of the novel: ‘how can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes she is also God?’ asks Briony (p. 371), and even Bradley acknowledges that ‘all art lies’. But ‘good art’, he goes on to observe, ‘lies its way to the truth’ (p. 381) and if both writers want their novels to function on a moral level, some negotiation with the truth on a practical level has to be possible. In each case, in their fictional worlds, both narrators, blinded by self-centredness, tragically misread reality and cause suffering: Bradley is accused of a crime he did not commit; Briony accuses Robbie of a crime he did not commit. ‘Literature’, Murdoch has said, ‘must tackle [this] problem (often crudely simplified in philosophy) of “objective” and “subjective” reality which is also the problem of truth’.8 McEwan has said that he had often thought that he should build into his fiction ‘someone with imagination to cause some havoc’.9 Both writers make the same demands of themselves as they make of their narrators: the text must demonstrate the narrators’ distorted perceptions yet establish sufficient epistemological integrity to allow their version of events to have some truth or the moral structure fractures. Bradley certainly attempts to tell the truth about his affair with Julian Baffin, the twenty-year-old daughter of his friend Arnold, about Arnold’s murder and his innocence (of a crime for which he, like Robbie, has been wrongfully imprisoned). But the most cursory reading reveals Bradley’s paranoia, and in his dialogues about art he acknowledges that truth is a relative concept: ‘even the statement “I am tall” is only true in a certain context’ (p. 275). But the older, wiser Bradley is able to indicate when he misread signs and could have altered the course of events. A clear change in narrative tone distinguishes the ‘honest’ authorial voice from the deluded one. The passages where Bradley recollects falling in love with Julian, for example, are masterpieces of psychological construction. The deluded and honest voices interweave within a single sentence to illustrate how Bradley’s erotic fantasies are battling with his perception of the real: ‘When God said ‘let there be light’ this love was made. It had no history. Yet, too, my awakening consciousness of it had a history of bottomless fascination’ (p. 206). Bradley’s ‘honest’ voice gradually becomes distinct so that his love for Julian and his innocence of the crime of killing her father becomes clear to the reader by the end of the novel. Murdoch herself has said that it should be evident ‘how you should interpret the wanderings and maunderings of a narrator, where you should believe him
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and where you should not believe him’.10 Similarly, Briony’s quest is to relate the past truthfully and reveal her culpability for Robbie’s wrongful imprisonment. As Murdoch validates Bradley’s truthful voice so McEwan validates Briony’s. Paul Marshall is revealed as Lola’s attacker and sufficient clues are provided to his guilt; these clues were imperceptible to a fantasy-ridden thirteen-year-old, but visible to the elderly artist who can focus objectively on the psychology of a character in her story more efficiently than she could evaluate subjectively in life. Only then does Briony understand the significance of the scratches on Lola’s arm spotted at the dinner table before the attack, and imagines how after two gins Marshall might have awoken ‘uncomfortably aroused’, trespassed into the children’s room and ‘saw the girl was almost a young woman’ (p. 60). By remembering accurately, and making a sustained attempt at imagining Marshall’s consciousness, Briony comes closer to a rational understanding of what happened. The moral imagination works in both novels as a vehicle for finding as much of the truth as is possible. Thus both novels lay bare the paradox at their centres: the impossibility of a stable truth and the premise of the novel as a truth-revealing form. The moral quest of both novels becomes the education of readers in the sifting and reading of signs, and they make stringent demands, because one-dimensional perception is the demon for both writers. Both novels actively invite contradictory readings. (Bran Nicol argues that in The Black Prince what the reader is most suspicious of is not the narrator but ‘the very notion of truth itself’.11 He suggests that the postscripts reveal inaccuracies in Bradley’s story and that such indeterminacy overrules the very notion of a coherent text. He is right, but the indeterminacy of the text leaves the door open to conflicting, but equally convincing, interpretations: Peter Conradi argues that the postscripts support as much as question Bradley’s version and ‘thus service our sense of the plot more than they destabilise our grasp of it’.)12 Contradictory readings as a means of refining vision demand the perception of multiple perspectives simultaneously. Seeing only one possible truth engenders fanaticism, about which each writer expresses concern (in the 1970s fanaticism was manifesting itself in the Irish Troubles which were a source of concern for Murdoch; McEwan has written passionately about the fanaticism that generated the attacks on 9/11). Murdoch had illustrated the evils of one-dimensional vision in characters such as Carel Fisher in The Time of the Angels, who believed that ‘only evil is real [. . .] there is only power and the marvel of power, there is only chance and the power of chance’.13 Carel’s perspective is
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true, but his assumption that his is the only truth is dangerous. And art must provide an antidote. These novels can function morally only if the narrator’s positions are viable. Having established this, both can go on to explore how far moral action can be willed. Bradley comes to understand that the moment where subjective and objective reality meet is a slender space that offers a flash of moral opportunity before desire transforms reality: ‘in art as in morality great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to recognise it and be able to hold it and extend it’ (p. 237). Briony experiences a more childish, but no less profound, understanding as she meditates on her finger: ‘did it have some little life of its own? [. . .] The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, the part of her that was really in charge’ (p. 36). A quotation from Northanger Abbey prefaces Atonement: ‘Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you’, and McEwan has said, ‘I would like to write a novel in praise of rationalism, rationalism as I understand it – mediated by emotional wisdom’.14 The place of rationality is more equivocal in The Black Prince. Murdoch has less faith in it; for her, clear perception facilitates moral action without any decisionmaking process having to intrude. Murdoch demonstrates that it is not in willing but in perceiving that moral action lies by returning again and again to moments when Bradley could, by understanding the motivation and emotions of others instead of indulging his desires, have avoided tragedy. McEwan contents himself with Briony’s one cataclysmic moral failure, but the instant of time that separates moral from immoral action is warped by precisely the same psychological failings in the thirteen-year-old girl as in the fifty-eight-year-old man: both are acutely sensitive, and so selfobsessed that they fail to see accurately and act morally on a personal level. But they are so good at their craft as an artist that they can easily expand these moments imaginatively as a moral example to their readers. Like Bradley, Briony has little problem intellectually encompassing others: ‘was being Cecelia just as vivid an affair as being Briony?’ (p. 36), and in creative mode she knows very well that ‘she could write the scene three times over, from three points of view’ (p. 40). But neither can translate that objectivity into their own lives at crucial moments of heightened emotion. She understands ‘how easy it
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was to get everything wrong, completely wrong’ (p. 39) yet does not see when she is actually doing it. Constructed as they are by narrators with such moral blindness, these novels ask whether art has any role to play in the attempt to perceive truth. If it does not, it has no business meddling in human affairs. Thus it is not only the narrators who stand trial here; the novels themselves do too.
A crisis of authorship Issues of authorship form one of the philosophical threads of both novels15 as they blur the distinction between narrator and author, use the novel as confessional, acknowledge the inevitable presence of their own obsessions and defy those limitations by constructing works of dazzling imaginative virtuosity that have incited critics to identify them as their creators’ finest achievements. McEwan had habitually dealt in disturbing material: sordid sexuality, abused children, castration and bestiality. Murdoch’s novels have also depicted incest, evil children (Miranda in An Unofficial Rose competes with the worst of McEwan’s depraved children) and have never shirked from the violent and demonic situations that extreme suffering or sexual obsession generates. But Murdoch’s ‘depravity’ is sanitized by the milieu of ‘the chattering classes’ and her ambition was always one of ‘negative capability’, that the artist should attempt to create art free of the unconscious despite her acknowledgement that all ‘art comes out of the unconscious mind’. But, she adds, ‘the intellect comes in very much to prevent it’.16 All his narrators, McEwan admits, ‘bear some relation to myself’, but he has also said that ‘imagination is linked to morality because imagining oneself as another is at the core of compassion’.17 These novels wrestle with the problem of how far the unconscious inevitably plays a part in the construction of literary texts while suggesting that more important concerns govern their production. They lie in their service of a larger, moral ambition to refine readers’ perception by means of the artistic imagination devoid as far as possible of the author’s fantasies. If all art can do is reveal its narrator – then for Murdoch and McEwan it suffers from its own tunnel vision, and fails in those larger moral ambitions. Both novels cross the ‘gender-barrier’ to write from male and female perspectives, respectively, in response to the moral duty of the novelist to construct characters who are ‘other’ than themselves. However, the self-revelatory role of The Black Prince has been well documented as Murdoch acknowledges her presence in this and by implication all her novels. Bradley and Arnold respectively represent
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the first-rate artist she aspires to be and the inevitably second best she fears she is: Bradley is the perfectionist who never writes and Arnold is an agent of self-mockery, ‘empty[ing] himself over the world like scented bathwater’ (p. 186). Arnold’s self-defence is Murdoch’s own: ‘I do not believe that I would improve if I wrote less’ (p. 375). Francis Marloe’s postscript, which parodies Freudian literary criticism, embodies a plausible psychoanalytic picture of Bradley (and implies that The Black Prince reveals the similar subliminal presence of Murdoch herself). Atonement is equally McEwan’s self-revelation and atonement. His characters can also be read as confessional mouthpieces: Briony knows that ‘self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character’s weakness’ (p. 6) and Briony’s moral failures mirror Bradley’s. As he is so absorbed in his love affair with Julian that his sister commits suicide, Briony is so absorbed in her play The Trials of Arabella that she ignores Lola’s plight: she ‘did not regard [divorce] as a proper subject [for her art] and gave it no thought’ (p. 6). And all Bradley’s and Briony’s acquaintances are cast into roles in their own internal drama. Briony, like Bradley, is aware of the ‘chasm that lay between an idea and its execution’ (p. 17). The conscious and unconscious failings of the artist inform both narratives. If both novels acknowledge their authors’ unconscious presence they also provide the opportunity for flights of artistic virtuosity that allow them to transcend such limitations, and a meditation on suffering functions in both novels as just such a vehicle. Murdoch tries to imagine the experience of redemptive suffering; McEwan attempts to imagine the horror of war; both sections offer an accumulation of detail so real that it persuades the reader that these events really occurred and each writer succeeds in momentarily creating a moment of sublime, where reader and writer become so immersed in the imaginative detail that both momentarily cease to exist. But both fictional and actual writers acknowledge the transience of these moments and their limitations: ‘No-one would ever know what it was like to be there’, thinks Robbie (p. 175) and Bradley understands ‘how little in fact any human being understands the practice of art soon teaches one’ (p. 381). As the novels’ and the novelists’ limitations are built into these novels so are the limitations of literary criticism: in The Black Prince they are expressed by means of Bradley’s review of Arnold’s latest novel; in Atonement in C.C.’s (Cyril Connolly’s) criticism of an earlier draft of the novel we have just read. Bradley’s review of Arnold’s latest book is both a ruthless self-castigation on Murdoch’s part and an illustration of the self-interested paranoia invested in any criticism; the letter from Briony’s publisher in Atonement functions similarly, and points to
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critical misreading and pedantry. While Bradley accuses Arnold of ‘confusing Mahayana and Theravada’ (p. 146), Briony’s publisher comments that ‘the Bernini you refer to is the one in the Piazza Barberini not the Piazza Navona’ (p. 314) and gives the condescending advice that she create more narrative pull, reinforce the moral of the story and not write about the war. (Like McEwan’s early critics, C.C. failed to appreciate the moral core of Briony’s tale). Briony does incorporate his suggestions (the Piazza Barberini is changed to the Piazza Navona) but inserts her war story into the text anyway. McEwan is kinder to critics than Murdoch (Bradley does severe injustice to Arnold’s work) but McEwan does assert a writer’s independence. So, both novels set out ideals for writers and critics and explore how they can so easily be compromised: both Bradley and Briony attempt the kind of art to which their creators aspire, and both fail. Briony’s rationale for trying is both writers’ own: ‘It was always an impossible task’, she says, ‘and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all’ (p. 371).
A crisis of love Any anti-humanist challenge to the emphasis placed on love by classic realist novelists troubles both writers, and both offer a love story as an antidote to such tendencies. ‘What I am concerned about really is love’,18 Murdoch has said repeatedly, and McEwan reveals, ‘I had this thought as to whether it was possible, at the end of the twentieth century, for the literary novel to explore the subject of love in quite the way it was automatically a subject in the Nineteenth Century [. . .] have we wrapped ourselves in so much irony and self-reference that we can no longer tell a love story’?19 If, for Murdoch, love is the ultimate condition that enables the kind of deep, objective seeing that generates morality, then the same might be said for McEwan, who has said, ‘we must never lose sight of the fabulous redemptive quality of our capacity for love’.20 Both novels are love stories: the subtitle of The Black Prince is ‘A Celebration of Love’, and it celebrates Bradley’s love for Julian, while Atonement celebrates both Briony’s love for her sister and Cecelia and Robbie’s love for each other. More importantly, the writing of these novels is also an act of love: Jean Logan, a character in Enduring Love, the novel that precedes Atonement is, like Bradley and Briony, guilty of a damaging failure of perception when she wrongly assumes that her husband died while on a picnic with another woman, and asks, ‘who’s going to forgive me? The only person who can is dead’ (p. 230). Both authors offer literature as an atonement, a vehicle for understanding
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human frailty, for helping readers see the world more clearly than their characters and, by illustrating how difficult it is, invite tolerance and forgiveness. Murdoch persistently italicizes the word ‘see’ to emphasize the significance of clarity of vision in her moral philosophy: ‘art [. . .] is the place in which the nature of morality can be seen’.21 Interestingly, the word is also italicized in an interview with McEwan: ‘you’ve got to make your reader see’.22 Empathy is impossible without just vision and Bradley’s aphorism that ‘in art as in morality great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes’ (p. 237), could govern both novels because empathy is the moral key to the writing and reading of both: in The Black Prince immorality is generated by a failure of empathy; in Atonement morality is generated by means of it. Bradley fails to see the damage he does to Rachel Baffin by his dallying with her affections then turning his attention to her daughter; his failure results in Arnold’s murder and his own false imprisonment. The moral damage is compounded by his revulsion from his broken-hearted sister, Priscilla, who seeks his comfort after her marriage disintegrates. His lack of care is instrumental, if not central, in her suicide. Bradley comes to see that Priscilla’s death ‘was not inevitable’ (p. 389) and his failure to imaginatively perceive the suffering of both women is the moral pivot around which the plot revolves. Robbie, on the other hand, does try, selflessly, to understand Briony’s motives for her accusation: ‘He saw it clearly, how it had happened’ (p. 139). But he meditates more deeply still, and in a moment that practically illustrates Murdoch’s idea of ‘attention’, remembers Briony’s childish declaration of love that would generate jealousy. As a result, Robbie penetrates to a motive that would have been inaccessible to the thirteen-year-old girl, and such empathy breeds tolerance and a lack of self-pity that could otherwise turn into the murderous anger that is seen in The Black Prince. To draw attention to such moments both writers provide symbolic moral beacons to help the reader see: in The Black Prince, the Post Office Tower symbolizes the needle-like space between subjective and objective vision,23 and the cracked Meissen vase in Atonement recurs to symbolize the irrevocable damage done to lives by a moment’s imperception. The echo of James’s golden bowl transforms it also into a symbol of art itself, flawed, but valuable. Although both writers are keen to align themselves with the moral tradition of the novel, McEwan has never acknowledged any particular debt to Murdoch, although he has said that he ‘patrol[s] other people’s territory’ and ‘absorbs things from other people without being aware of it’.24 It is more probable that these similarities arise from two writers
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meditating on the contemporary literary climate and negotiating what they saw as threats to the moral integrity of literature. McEwan thinks that ‘what we need in the world is more doubt, more scepticism’,25 and Murdoch went on to demonstrate a similar sentiment in The Green Knight (1993), where she poignantly questions herself as a role model and aspects of her moral philosophy. Such concerns about the iconic status of any writer account for some of the deliberate ambivalences and complexities in The Black Prince and Atonement. Neither writer denies the validity of positions that militate against the moral force of the novel, such as the idea that the novel can be read as play on the impossibility of any secure meaning; both complicate any distinct authorial position and deliberately undermine any facile constructing of wholeness with mystification and irony; and both flaunt their unoriginality, acknowledge an author’s unconscious presence and understand that readers and critics construct the text independently of authorial intention; both admit a myriad textual presences and neither encourages naive readings that edit out such complexities. However, both writers demand from readers the same ability to perceive antithetical perspectives to be simultaneously true as they do from their characters. And by aligning themselves closely with their narrators, and speaking candidly about their intentions, both writers also align themselves with the tradition of liberal humanism and imply that intention can be a legitimate part of textual interpretation, though it should not exhaust it. What Murdoch and McEwan both say about their novels is that they are about truth, morality and love, and both believe that these values can be communicated. In subsequent novels, both unashamedly construct poignant vignettes that illustrate the redemptive powers of literature. In Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice (1985), Edward Baltram, in despair after causing the death of his friend, reads Proust’s À La Recherche. Its ‘intimations of other places, of elsewhere, of freedom’ prevents his guilt turning to murderous despair. In McEwan’s Saturday (2005) Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach is read by Henry Perowne’s poetdaughter when she is threatened with rape, and the words affect her assailant, Baxter, so profoundly that he leaves her unharmed. Dover Beach embodies the link that Murdoch and McEwan attempt to uphold between literature past and present, and between writer and reader, and even, perhaps, encapsulates the link between these two novels: ‘Ah love, let us be true to one another’. Both writers take their ‘sacred office’ seriously, but both also understand that such a role can only be perpetuated by acknowledging the challenges of postmodernism. Success, of course, relies on readers understanding that both positions are being
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equally upheld; as Bradley reminds us, ‘all art lies, but good art lies its way to the truth’ (p. 381).
Notes 1. See Valentine Cunningham, Reading After Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) and Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (London: Penguin, 2003). 2. Editions quoted are: The Black Prince (Penguin, 1986), Atonement (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). 3. This reassessment arrived with the publication of Atonement. See The Fiction of Ian McEwan (ed.) Peter Childs (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005), p. 6. 4. [accessed 6 January 2006]. 5. EM, p. 372. 6. [accessed 6 January 2006]. 7. These texts engage with contemporary trends in literary theory, but the detail of this much larger analysis lies outside the boundaries of this essay. My discussion is confined only to a close reading that finds strikingly similar moral psychology, themes and critical positions, though such a reading necessarily feeds into a bigger theoretical picture. 8. MGM, p. 305. 9. [accessed 6 January 2006]. 10. Dooley, pp. 103–104. 11. Nicol, IM:TRF, p. 97. 12. See Conradi, SA, pp. 233–65 and Nicol, IMRF, pp. 95–107. 13. The Time of the Angels (Chatto, 1966), p. 184. 14. [accessed 6 January 2006]. 15. The Black Prince appeared only six years after Barthes had declared the author to be dead and poststructuralism had identified the text as a site for plurality of meanings, replacing the author with a decentred system of language. Two interpretative methods for analysing the texts came to prevail: deconstruction facilitated attention to the surface of the texts while Foucault’s locating of an omnipresent force in the space left by the absent author paradoxically opened the floodgates for the subjectivity, biography and psychology of the writer to be identified by psychoanalytic discourse which delved beneath that surface. This dialogue was brewing when Murdoch wrote The Black Prince and by the time Atonement was written the identifying of a complex intertextuality and/or covert authorial presence was central to the way texts were being conceptualized or theorized. 16. Dooley, p. 115. 17. McEwan, ‘Only Love and then Oblivion. Love was All they had to Set against their Murderers’. Special Report: Terrorism in the US. The Guardian (15 September 2001). 18. Dooley, p. 25. 19. [accessed 6 January 2006]. 20. [accessed 6 January 2006]. 21. EM, p. 372.
160 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment 22. Ian McEwan: The Essential Guide (ed.) Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes (London: Vintage, 2002), pp. 22–3. 23. McEwan uses the post office tower similarly in his next novel Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005) and it appears on the cover of the paperback edition. It functions in the way Murdoch uses it in The Black Prince – as a symbol of communication, only expanded here, perhaps, to include science and technology. 24. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/ mcewan.html [accessed 6 January 2006]. 25. [accessed 6 January 2006].
Part V Renegotiating Gender, Sexuality and Feminism
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13 Plato, Foucault and Beyond: Ethics, Beauty and Bisexuality in The Good Apprentice Tammy Grimshaw
Iris Murdoch demonstrates a keen interest in the themes of gender and sexuality throughout her fiction,1 but in order to understand her fictional representations of gender and sexuality, one must fully consider the author’s moral stance, especially the impact that Platonism had on her views on sexuality and ethics. I hope to demonstrate that, in displaying an interest in these themes, Murdoch’s work provides a forum for a consideration of other contemporary thinkers, particularly Michel Foucault, who also displayed a preoccupation with sexuality and ethics in The History of Sexuality, Volume 2 (1982) and Volume 3 (1984). A review of Murdoch’s fiction and interviews reveals how her views on gender developed over many years. Her belief in androgyny first appeared in The Bell (1958) as the narrator comments that ‘Toby was far from the sophistication of holding that we all participate in both sexes’.2 Albeit brief, this narrative remark reveals that Murdoch engaged with the topic of gender even in her early writing. Later, in an interview granted during 1976, Murdoch endorsed the ‘gender-bending’ trends of the 1960s and 1970s, stating that ‘my own characters are often androgynous [. . .] because I believe that most people are androgynous’.3 Yet, Murdoch soon became disenchanted with the way in which sociocultural stereotypical notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ restricted individual freedom. And since androgyny encouraged individuals to strike a balance between their ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics, Murdoch began to question whether all social constructions of gender, including androgyny, were a way of categorizing human beings and limiting their autonomy. At a conference on Virginia Woolf’s life and works in 1984, Murdoch’s growing pique with gender categorizations was patently obvious: ‘There’s an awful lot in her [Woolf’s] stories which is to do with portraying a feminine sensibility in contrast to a 163
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masculine intellect, [. . .] and I don’t think that I see the world quite in those terms’.4 Murdoch reiterated these views in another interview three years later, making a comment that simultaneously echoed and rejected a view of androgyny similar to Coleridge’s: ‘People go on about how every man has a female aspect, every woman has a male aspect. I don’t know that this takes one very far: I mean, I think we are all individuals, that scientific generalizations of this sort are not very valuable’.5 Murdoch’s increasing disaffection with sociocultural gender stereotypes stemmed from her firm conviction that men and women do not differ on an intellectual level. She once stated, ‘there is certainly no difference [between men and women] in terms of mental make-up [. . .]. There are not different kinds of minds’.6 Further, in her view, gender differences were a fallacy not only on an intellectual level, but also on the spiritual plane as she asserted that ‘at a higher level – a more spiritual level – I think the difference [between men and women] vanishes’.7 In her ultimate rejection of androgyny, as well as in her denial of the existence of gender on the intellectual and spiritual levels, then, Murdoch asserts that gender classifications – like any form of categorization – should be disregarded since they are limiting of human individuality and personal autonomy. Murdoch was also very interested in the effect that societal constraints had on the expression of one’s sexuality. Believing that these restrictions were morally unjust, she vehemently spoke out against society’s prejudice against homosexual love. In her 1964 article, ‘The Moral Decision about Homosexuality’, she engages in an extended diatribe against this form of prejudice: ‘It does not [. . .] seem to me that [. . .] there is anything inherently immoral about being a homosexual; [. . .] if there is an illness here it is our society at large that is ill, in the sense of prejudiced and morally blind’.8 She expressed her staunch insistence on homosexual rights throughout her lifetime, stating in a 1991 interview, ‘I feel very strongly that there shouldn’t be any sort of prejudice against homosexuals, or suggestions that homosexual love is unnatural or bad. I hope such views are tending to disappear from society’.9 While Murdoch’s concern with gender and sexuality may appear to be two separate preoccupations, much of contemporary gender theory rests upon the view that society and culture conspire to conflate gender, sex and sexuality. In her landmark essay, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980), Adrienne Rich makes a claim that informs much of contemporary gender theory. Positing that society promotes ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, Rich suggests that the notion of separate ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ genders for men and women fortifies societal
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constraints on sexuality because it reinforces the sociocultural ideology that women possess an innate sexual attraction only to men.10 Challenges to this sociocultural paradigm accordingly serve to free human beings to new experiences of both gender and sexuality. As Judith Butler explains, it is only through the loosening of the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality that ‘bisexual and homosexual possibilities’ can emerge and the artificial construct of gender can be overthrown.11 For Murdoch, too, gender and sexuality were inextricably linked. Even though Murdoch would have quarrelled with Butler’s reliance upon poststructuralism, she presents in her fiction new possibilities for sexual identities that challenge the traditional order of gender – representations that bear resemblance to Butler’s claim.12 For instance, in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), Tom McCaffrey cross-dresses before having what could be described as a quasi-erotic encounter with his male friend Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor (pp. 217–18). In The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) Gulliver Ashe, who challenges gender dress codes by wearing makeup, is attractive to, and attracted to, both men and women (p. 206). Similarly, Harvey Blacket, who is often described in a feminine way in The Green Knight (1993), wishes that he could be a lesbian before pondering what it would be like to be a gay male (p. 76). Since Murdoch subscribed to the view that gender ceases to exist on a ‘higher [. . .] spiritual level’, one has to evolve morally and spiritually before the artificial constructs of gender can be overcome. In order to illuminate her views on spirituality, Murdoch turned to Platonism, which informs the ethical stance in her thought and art. Because of the strong influence of Platonism on Murdoch’s work, this subject has, not surprisingly, been the focus of much recent scholarship. While it is not my intention to repeat the content of previous studies, I should briefly mention here that the Platonic construct that was most important to Murdoch was Eros, the concept that sexual love is part and parcel of spiritual and ethical development. Murdoch makes this point clear in her tome on moral philosophy, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, explaining that the ascent to ‘spiritualised sexuality’ is based on the transformation of ‘base egoistic energy and vision (low Eros) into high spiritual energy and vision (high Eros)’. Like Plato, Murdoch insists that spiritual and ethical development, that is the ‘the approach to [. . .] the Form of the Good’, can be achieved only ‘through a difficult disciplined purification of intellect and passion, wherein passion (Eros) becomes a spiritual force’.13 As individuals undergo this process of discipline and purification, they begin to approach the higher, spiritual level where Murdoch claims there are no genders.
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The appreciation of beauty plays an important role in this process. Murdoch emphasizes that ‘beauty [. . .] prompts the spirit’, meaning that sexual love is an impetus for the ‘ascent from physical passion to a vision of divine absolute beauty’. She explains that the desire for goodness can be based on the appreciation of, or desire for, beauty: the ‘perception of beauty as unselfish attachment can bring about spiritual change’. The purification of sexual desire which springs from the appreciation of and desire for beauty was, for Murdoch, one of the most important aspects of Eros because ‘we see and love beauty more readily than we love good, it is the spiritual thing to which we are most immediately and instinctively attracted’.14 Being allied with sexual love, Eros is necessarily associated with various forms of sexuality. Since sexual love is so intimately joined to the ethical life and spiritual ascent, one wonders to what extent sexual love for persons of both sexes – what we call bisexuality in the present day – might enable one’s spiritual development. Michel Foucault explores bisexuality in his last two book-length volumes, The History of Sexuality Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure and The History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self. Foucault’s work is enabling for a reading of Murdoch’s fiction because both writers were interested in the views on sexuality in Greek antiquity, especially those of Plato. The similarity of Foucault to Murdoch in their readings of Plato vis-à-vis bisexuality and beauty is evident in the following passage from The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: Were the Greeks bisexual, then? Yes, if we mean by this that a Greek could, simultaneously or in turn, be enamored of a boy or a girl; that a married man could have paidika [young boy lovers], that it was common for a male to change to a preference for women after ‘boyloving’ inclinations in his youth. [. . .] We can talk about their ‘bisexuality,’ [. . .] but for them this option was not referred to a dual, ambivalent, and ‘bisexual’ structure of desire. To their way of thinking what made it possible to desire a man or a woman was simply the appetite that nature had implanted in man’s heart for ‘beautiful’ human beings, whatever their sex might be.15 Bearing resemblance to Foucault’s analysis of the classical model, Murdoch’s fiction illustrates the manner in which an individual can move freely between love and desire for persons of the same sex and the opposite sex. As I will later argue, she also represents male characters who have pseudo-pederastic relationships. In the same way that
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Foucault describes the natural appreciation for ‘“beautiful” human beings, whatever their sex might be’, Murdoch believed that bisexuality derived from an appreciation of beauty that was not contingent upon the sex or gender of the object choice. In addition, Murdoch, like Foucault, would have objected to the term ‘bisexuality’ to describe this alternating pattern of desire, although not for the reason Foucault cites. While Foucault was opposed to the use of the term on the grounds of ahistoricism, Murdoch would have objected since she decried any sociocultural regime that attempted to categorize individuals. For the sake of brevity and rhetorical convenience, however, I shall use the terms ‘bisexual’ and ‘bisexuality’ in the analysis that follows to describe the alternating pattern of desire that derives from an appreciation of the beautiful. Murdoch’s illustration of Platonic bisexuality is present throughout her novels. For example, in An Unofficial Rose (1962), Emma Sands divides her attentions between Hugh Peronett and Lindsay Rimmer. Violet Evercreech in The Unicorn (1963) also experiences sexual love for both female and male characters. Murdoch’s fiction of 1970s and 1980s expands her representation of bisexual love to include the appreciation of beauty that enables one’s moral growth. Simon Foster in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) has had a sexual relationship with Morgan Browne, a female character, before settling down in a long-term relationship with a same-sex partner – a relationship that both challenges and enables his ethical development. In The Black Prince (1973), Bradley Pearson, while certainly not a role model for spiritual development during most of the narrative, comes to appreciate the beauty in both Julian Baffin, a female character, and in Arnold Baffin, her father. Similarly in Henry and Cato (1976), Cato Forbes supports the moral growth of his friend, the aptly named Beautiful Joe, in spite of having been attracted to girls during his school years. Likewise, Tamar Hernshaw in The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) experiences as sexual love an admiration of the beauty of both Jean Kowitz and Duncan Cambus, a married couple. The Good Apprentice (1985) also portrays bisexual characters. Although he does not pursue beauty to approach the Good because of his sexual greed and selfishness, the painter Jesse Baltram has had affairs with numerous women, as well as having had a long-standing same-sex relationship with fellow artist Max Pointe.16 Midge McCaskerville speculates that her husband, Thomas, has homosexual desires (p. 171). Additionally, even though Edward Baltram later falls in love with his step-sister, Ilona, others speculate that he may be more inclined towards same-sex love (pp. 34, 299). However, it is Stuart Cuno, Edward’s
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half-brother, who uses his bisexual desire to appreciate beauty and pursue goodness. The remainder of this discussion will therefore focus on Stuart, since he best exemplifies Murdoch’s views on bisexuality, beauty and ethics. In The Good Apprentice, Murdoch illustrates how an appreciation of the beautiful can be used as a path to goodness. Peter Conradi, who considers this one of Murdoch’s best novels, explains that ‘Stuart wants to do good and stay unspotted by the world’; however, this character has ‘antagonised or baffled most reviewers, and is to distress many of the characters in the novel too’.17 Elizabeth Dipple has noted that ‘whenever Murdoch chooses to depict a character with a commitment to the rigors of the good [. . .], she presents him/her as an outsider whose participation in life is marginal and often unhappy, and Stuart Cuno is no exception’.18 Suguna Ramanathan has found that Murdoch’s ‘good’ characters may appear non-integral to the plot, yet the presence of these characters is of central significance to their narratives.19 I would add that Murdoch’s ‘good’ characters are often bisexual in that their appreciation of beauty is not gender-specific and that this representation of bisexuality is indeed central to the narratives since it vividly illustrates Murdoch’s belief that all human beings encounter difficulties when attempting to develop morally. Murdoch sometimes depicts pseudo-pederastic relationships in her fiction to explore the themes of moral development and sexuality. In other words, even though Murdoch does not depict the sexual component of pederasty in her fiction, she does illustrate the ethical obligations inhering in the love of an older man for his younger beloved. Plato discusses the obligations associated with pederasty in many of his writings, stating in the Phaedrus that the lover must give ‘counsel and discipline to the boy’.20 In The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Foucault explains the moral dynamics of pederasty at length: ‘The Greeks [. . .] believed that [. . .] desire called for a particular mode of behaviour [. . .] in a relationship between two male individuals [i.e., a man and a boy]. [. . .] Such a relationship ought to be given an ethical form different from the one that was required when it came to loving a woman’.21 The moral instruction and intellectual education of the youth were the foundations of pederasty, and Murdoch portrays several characters who engage in this aspect of pederastic relationships: Michael Meade attends to Nick’s intellectual and educational needs in The Bell (1958). Likewise, in The Nice and the Good (1968) Theodore Gray’s attraction is to younger males, namely Pierce Clothier and the young boy who tragically died in India. In An Unofficial Rose (1962) Humphrey Finch has a
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traditional heterosexual marriage, yet attends to the emotional and educational support of young Penn. Edgar Demarnay takes the younger David Gavender under his wing in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) to be his academic mentor and protector. Further, Cato hopes to guide and direct Beautiful Joe in Henry and Cato (1976) by offering to support the boy financially while he obtains vocational training. According to the tenets of Platonism, ‘a person’s beauty naturally prompts you to care, not just about their beauty, but about them’, which means that the older lover gives his attention to the younger beloved’s ‘character rather than his physical beauty’.22 In the same way, Stuart Cuno’s relationship with Meredith McCaskerville in The Good Apprentice revolves around the development of Meredith’s moral character and spirituality. This focus is apparent in the conversation in which the two characters talk about goodness, sex, pornography and art, particularly when Stuart entreats Meredith to look at objects that are ‘beautiful or elegant’, rather than engaging in ‘human vulgarity’ by viewing ‘filthy pornographic videos’ (pp. 248–52). Moreover, in attempting ‘to bring out what is best in his beloved, the lover brings out what is best in himself’.23 Thus, as Stuart strives to guide Meredith and improve his beloved’s moral life, he improves morally himself, making the ‘unnerving discovery’ he too must shun his own attraction to pornography and ‘bad’ art (pp. 250–51). A cursory review of Foucault’s thoughts on ethics arguably bears some resemblance to this depiction of the moral life since, for Foucault, moral action requires an individual to ‘monitor, test, improve and transform himself’.24 Because certain aspects of his relationship with Meredith could be described as pederastic, Stuart initially appears to be homosexual. Murdoch sets up Stuart’s ostensible homosexuality by having other characters muse about his sexual orientation. Harry Cuno, Stuart’s father, exhorts his son to reconsider his sexual choices, warning that others will view him as abnormal or a repressed homosexual (p. 38). Later, Midge and Thomas McCaskerville speculate about the potential homosexual element in Stuart’s affection for their son, Meredith (p. 64). But although Stuart’s urge to guide and direct his younger samesex friend Meredith resembles homosexual pederasty in certain ways, this character’s respect for and appreciation of beauty are hallmarks of bisexuality – the appreciation of the beauty of others regardless of their sex or gender. In The Good Apprentice Murdoch draws on the Platonic notion that beauty should be attended to with awe, reverence and temperance, and her portrayal of Stuart’s struggle to transform his low Eros into high Eros
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represents that described in the Phaedrus. Plato’s description of the soul in this work is as a charioteer who has two horses. One of the horses ‘is good and the other is not’. The good horse is ‘honourable [. . .] upright [. . .] temperate and modest’, but the bad horse consorts ‘with wantonness [. . .] and [is] hard to control with whip and goad’.25 When the charioteer sees Beauty ‘enthroned by the side of temperance upon her holy seat [. . .] [he] is compelled to pull the reigns so violently that he brings both steeds down on their haunches, the good one willing and unresistant, but the wanton sore against his will’.26 As Foucault succinctly points out, the Phaedrus addresses the lover’s long struggle to transform his own desire.27 Similarly, Stuart has given great thought to what kind of desires should control his life. When he does experience desires of a sexual nature, he is not alarmed, realizing that these impulses are an integral part of Eros. Murdoch writes: He loved Meredith. Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy. He had, or had had, more or less vague sexual feelings about all sorts of things and people, school masters, girls seen in trains, mathematical problems, holy objects, the idea of being good. Sex seemed to be mixed into everything. [. . .] The desires characteristic of his youthful age he dealt with himself, privately and without guilt, easily blanking out any tendency to erotic fantasy (p. 247). Finding that his love for Meredith has a sexual component, Stuart understands that this sexual desire is like a ‘holy object’ – something to be regarded with awe and reverence. The large number and rather unusual array of people and objects in which Stuart invests his sexual desire show that he is attempting to situate this desire in its proper moral place. As she brings up ‘the idea of being good’ as an integral part of this passage, Murdoch continues to illustrate the Platonic view that spiritual goodness and sexuality spring from the same life force. Since Stuart is able to deal with his desires ‘privately and without guilt’, he experiences Eros as a spiritualized sexuality which is disciplined and temperate, like the ideal described in the Phaedrus. In addition, Stuart’s avoidance of fantasy demonstrates that he wishes to leave behind the Platonic state of eikasia – the illusions that the prisoners in Plato’s cave parable experience. Significantly, because Stuart can see and appreciate the beauty in persons of both genders, he displays a sexual love that is bisexual in nature. And since sexuality is linked to gender under the
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framework of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, one could argue that Murdoch subtly opens up opportunities for new expressions of gender as she presents such new sexual possibilities in her fiction. Nevertheless, it has been noted that Murdoch’s interest in sexuality and in representing new sexual possibilities is often too subtle or even oblique. In a recent article, Hampl asserts that Murdoch’s representations of same-sex love are ‘nonsensical’ since many of her characters who experience same-sex desire are not ever depicted having sex.28 Unfortunately, though, Hampl makes no attempt to interpret the representation of celibacy in Murdoch’s fiction in the light of the author’s interest in Platonism. I would like to point out here that Murdoch depicts sexual abstinence based on Platonism to illustrate that celibacy can help one to achieve reverence, temperance and self-control. Foucault provides a useful exegesis of this phenomenon, linking celibacy back to bisexuality: ‘if one wanted to show that a man was self-controlled, it was said of him [. . .] that he was able to abstain from relations with boys and women alike’.29 Stuart in The Good Apprentice ‘detested sexual promiscuity, vulgar public sex, the lack of privacy and reticence, the lack of restraint and respect, the lack of reverence, the lack of inwardness’ (p. 53). The restraint, respect and reverence mentioned in this passage echo the virtues of temperance, modesty and awe put forward in the charioteer’s myth in the Phaedrus, and Stuart wishes to remain celibate in order to experience these virtues. Accordingly, he has ‘given up sex, or rather never had it’ (p. 39). While Stuart thus strives for the good, as Conradi rightly points out, ‘Stuart is by no means made only of love and light’, and his moral development is not without its setbacks.30 Stuart particularly struggles with the desire to use power for manipulative, unloving ends, and since this type of power springs from the selfish impulses of low Eros, this character’s struggles illustrate the overwhelming power of low Eros over an individual’s moral growth. According to Foucault, moral growth and moral agency must focus on ‘the question of the self, of its dependence and independence, of its universal form and of the connection it can and should establish with others’. Even though Foucault seems to argue for a view of others in this extract, it is the only direct acknowledgement in his writing that individuals other than the moral agent should be considered, and it is at this point that Murdoch goes beyond Foucault. Indeed, Foucault’s primary emphasis is on the self, which he expresses particularly clearly when he insists that ‘self-knowledge occupies a considerable place’ in the
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‘cultivation of the self’. He adds that if self-knowledge is achieved, the individual moral agent can establish ‘a complete supremacy over itself’.31 Murdoch would have expressed great antipathy towards these claims since she stated that ‘“self-knowledge”, in the sense of a minute understanding of one’s own machinery, seems to me, except at a very simple level, usually a delusion’. Rather than focussing on the self, Murdoch’s moral philosophy is based on the premise that one’s ‘attention’ should be directed ‘outward, away from [the] self’, a view she borrowed from Simone Weil.32 Ramanathan provides an excellent explanation of Murdoch’s views on this topic, pointing out that even though the moral agent may attempt to focus on others, relationships are often clouded since the agent may believe that he or she is helping others to improve morally, rather than seeing that his or her power is actually being used to manipulate them.33 Stuart illustrates this moral dilemma as he becomes open to the charge of using his power for manipulative purposes. When he encourages Midge to end her clandestine affair with Harry Cuno, his father, because of the damage it brings to her son, Meredith, Midge blurts out: ‘You think I’m corrupting Meredith – I think you are. You [. . .] want him to be in your power, and you dress it up as morality, as if you were a kind of moral teacher or example’ (p. 329). While the reader may wish to discount Midge’s point of view because of the selfishness and other manifestations of low Eros to which she has succumbed herself, other characters also claim that Stuart has a problem with power. When Stuart goes to see Mrs Wilsden in an attempt to help her come to terms with her son’s death, she and her friend, Elspeth Macran, also charge him with being cruel and harmful by holding others in his power (p. 387). Illustrating that individuals are often not able to see and hence to love others fully, Murdoch portrays characters who, like many human beings, are not in touch with what really confronts them because they live in a world of self-centred illusions. Although he has struggled with similar shortcomings, Stuart nevertheless makes spiritual and moral progress in this novel because of his innocence and respect for beauty. Indeed, he undergoes the Platonic process of askesis at the close of the narrative. Having gone through a large portion of the narrative attempting to inculcate his values in others by brute force, Stuart becomes an unwelcome presence to many of them who see his attempts to help them as being misguided and high-minded. Stuart, like the prisoners who leave the cave to see the sun in Plato’s cave parable, ultimately experiences askesis as he realizes that his proper role is to use language in educating the young, who he implies might be more receptive to
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acquiring moral values (p. 520). Stuart’s bisexuality – his appreciation of and respect for beauty – therefore supports his pursuit of goodness, resulting in progress in his moral development and allowing him to approach the higher spiritual level where genders cease to exist. Although Murdoch thus displayed a great deal of interest in gender and sexuality in the characterizations in her fiction, it must be noted that one encounters several difficulties when attempting to categorize her as a feminist writer. For instance, the similarities of Murdoch’s work to Foucault’s could be subject to feminist reproach since Foucault is often seen as a privileged white male whose theoretical stances epitomize and perpetuate androcentric models. Murdoch’s affinity with Platonism could also be criticized from a feminist perspective because much of Platonism addresses the experience and needs of men, rather than those of women.34 Equally, while Foucault was by no means a feminist writer, some feminists see value in his work because his theories on power and sexuality can be interpreted to support feminist ideas about the subjugation of women under patriarchal power. Feminist views on Platonism are also divided, and it has been noted that Plato argues against gender dichotomies in certain of his other writings, in particular the Laws and the Meno.35 Hence, a consideration of Murdoch’s work in the context of feminist thought is fraught with sometimes unexpected contradictions and paradoxes. Altorf considers the relationship between Murdoch’s work and feminism more deeply in the next chapter of this anthology.
Notes 1. For an analysis of Murdoch’s representations of gender and sexuality, see Tammy Grimshaw, Sexuality, Gender and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005). 2. The Bell (Chatto, 1958), p. 174. 3. Sheila Hale and A.S. Byatt, ‘Women Writers Now: Their Approach and Apprenticeship’, Harpers and Queen (October 1976), 180. 4. Eric Warner, ‘Panel Discussion I’, in Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective (ed.) Eric Warner (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), p. 127. 5. S.B. Sagare, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47.3 (2001), 707. 6. Hale and Byatt, p. 180. 7. Dooley, pp. 70–96. 8. ‘The Moral Decision about Homosexuality’, Man and Society, 7 (1964), 5–6. 9. Dooley, pp. 218–34. 10. Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (ed.) Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 228–29.
174 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment 11. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 95. 12. For Murdoch’s views on poststructuralism, see ‘Derrida and Structuralism’ in MGM, Chapter 7, pp. 185–216. 13. MGM, pp. 241, 11. 14. Ibid., pp. 14, 16. 15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, (trans.) Robert Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 188. 16. The Good Apprentice (Chatto, 1985), p. 171. 17. SA, pp. 331, 337. 18. Elizabeth Dipple, The Unresolvable Plot: Reading Contemporary Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p. 203. 19. Suguna Ramanathan, Iris Murdoch: Figures of Good (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 7. 20. Plato, Phaedrus, 253B. 21. Foucault, Vol. 2, p. 192. 22. G.R.F. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 147. 23. Ibid., p. 147. 24. Foucault, Vol. 2, pp. 58, 28. 25. Plato, Phaedrus, 253D-E. 26. Ibid., 254B-C. 27. Foucault, Vol. 2, p. 39. 28. See W.S. Hampl, ‘Desires Deferred: Homosexual and Queer Representations in the Novels of Iris Murdoch’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47.3 (2001), 657–73. 29. Foucault, Vol. 2, p. 188. 30. SA, p. 338. 31. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self, (trans.) Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1986), pp. 58, 238–9. 32. ‘On “God” and “Good”’, in EM, pp. 354–5. 33. Ramanathan, p. 153. 34. Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 18. 35. Plato, Laws 805; Plato, Meno 73b.
14 Reassessing Iris Murdoch in the Light of Feminist Philosophy: Michèle Le Doeuff and the Philosophical Imaginary Marije Altorf In 1962, Harold Hobson interviewed Murdoch for The Times, in what is described as ‘the comfortable Ladies’ Section of the Union Club’. Murdoch asks if women are allowed to join the club, and Hobson is astonished: ‘Good heavens, no. What an extraordinary idea’ (Dooley, p. 1). The Ladies’ Section may have been comfortable, but the interview cannot have been. Hobson proceeds to express some unpleasant views: he slights Simone de Beauvoir, arguing that because she only taught in secondary schools, she cannot be called a philosopher proper. Murdoch retorts, ‘But she is a philosopher, a real one out of the Ecole Normale Supérieure! I admire her very much indeed’ (Dooley, pp. 2–3). Hobson makes an outrageous misreading of The Second Sex and asks Murdoch whether she also accepts the superiority of the male: ‘It must be admitted that the achievement of women in the arts is less than that of men’. Murdoch replies with an emphatic defence of women’s education, noting that the emancipation of women was already under threat. But Hobson is still not convinced: ‘Surely you exaggerate when you say that men are still trying to suppress women?’. Only then does Murdoch alert Hobson to his own prejudices by reminding him of his opening words (Dooley, p. 5). Astonishing as it may be to read this interview now, it appropriately introduces my concerns in this essay. Here, Murdoch demonstrates a keen awareness of sexual inequality, yet this is something she never addresses in her essays.1 The scarcity of her writing on this topic, however, does not necessarily imply an absence of any interest in gender issues, as Grimshaw demonstrates in her essay in this volume. I would like to consider the reception of Murdoch’s philosophical work and hope to demonstrate that an often implicit understanding of philosophy as universal, and feminism as biased, may have inhibited the 175
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reading of Murdoch’s philosophy in the light of feminist theory. By reassessing the presuppositions embodied in these understandings, feminist readings may offer new insights into Murdoch’s work. In interviews Murdoch is often questioned about the relationship between her own gender and her work as well as about her portrayal of women in the novels. Her responses present an ambivalent picture. She is reluctant to consider the inequalities between the sexes in relation to herself or her work. She is cautious, in fact, of any interpretation of her work which would single her out as a female writer, rather than merely a writer. Thus she is reluctant to answer questions about her preference for male narrators, about her unwillingness to consider women’s issues in her novels, or about the fact that none of the women in her fiction have her strengths.2 Murdoch seems determined not to acknowledge any (innate) difference between men and women and fiercely objects to any form of feminism which is a form of separatism: ‘The point of liberation is not, and this is to differ with certain views of women’s lib, to say we’re better, or we’re special, or we’re wonderful, but just to be equal, to be ordinary, to join the human race, to be people, just people like everybody else’ (Dooley, p. 83). These interviews also demonstrate Murdoch’s awareness of persistent sexual inequality. To Hobson she argues that women’s emancipation is only starting; to Heusel she says, ‘unfortunately, it’s still a man’s world. A man doesn’t have to explain what it’s like to be a man, but a woman has to explain what it’s like to be a woman’ (Dooley, p. 207). Murdoch approves of women’s liberation as far as it seeks to get rid of these distinctions, and the most important tool for achieving this equality, she repeatedly stresses, is education. Implicit in these remarks is a distinctive understanding of what it is to be ordinary. As Margaret Moan Rowe puts it, ‘Murdoch asserts that men and women are the same [. . .] Then she goes on to suggest there is a great difference: somehow men are already there. Their presence defines the human race. Women have to join the human race and a principal route to that connection is education’.3 If Murdoch were to be associated with feminism, it would be with the kind which seeks social and political reforms. She keeps this form of women’s liberation strictly separate from the world of literature and philosophy, which are in the realm of humanity where gender does not play a part. This position raises problems for feminist interpretations of Murdoch’s work because for feminists, this separation does not hold. They would argue that social or natural differences between men and women are reflected in literary and philosophical writing and endorse the examination of texts from the point of view of the depiction of gender, or of partiality
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towards a certain writing style or certain topics. Yet feminists need to justify such an approach to an author who refuses to address gender issues and is even averse to singling out women’s problems. It is not surprising then that feminist interpretations of Murdoch’s novels had a cautious start.4 In 1993, Gabriele Griffin finds only a few critical studies on Murdoch that consider gender, and the scarcity of such analysis may illustrate the extent to which Murdoch herself influenced interpretations of her own work.5 Of the four authors Griffin discusses – Goshgarian (1972), Cohan (1982), Seiler-Franklin (1978) and Johnson (1987) – the last most significantly illustrates how Murdoch’s position has shaped interpretation of the novels. Johnson almost apologizes for reading Murdoch’s novels through feminist theory. In what she calls her ‘short’ or ‘very short’ book she acknowledges that to place Murdoch in a feminist debate ignores Murdoch’s stated position. Both the modest length of the work and the different perspective create Johnson’s misgivings. She expects her approach to appear ‘partial and eccentric’, and admits to ‘being particularly anxious to avoid what might be construed as a “narrowly feminist” reading’.6 However, it is not clear what Johnson’s misgivings are. Griffin remarks that ‘[o]ne cannot help wondering [. . .] why [Johnson] was “particularly anxious to avoid”, what she assumes would “construe” and what she takes to be a “narrowly feminist reading”’(Griffin, p. 12). Would Johnson have had similar misgivings if her approach had been equally un-Murdochian yet not feminist? Does she think that feminist readings as such are more likely to be narrow, or that a feminist reading of Murdoch’s work in particular is more vulnerable to such criticism? Yet, Johnson’s qualms are not isolated. They reflect generally held assumptions by (feminist) critics concerning Murdoch’s work. Nevertheless, despite such a cautious start, there is now a growing body of research into the role of gender in Murdoch’s novels. Her philosophical texts, by contrast, have not received the same amount of attention from feminist thinkers.7 This is unsurprising as, with the exception of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, it is doubtful whether Murdoch was familiar with existing feminist literature. And even though Murdoch is known to have appreciated this feminist classic, there is little to suggest any connection between it and her own work. Conradi mentions that the book’s ‘“fierce war-like manner” [Murdoch] believed fifty years ahead of its time’ (IMAL, p. 309). But this tantalizing remark raises more questions than it answers. And, when Murdoch herself suggests that The Second Sex has had a profound influence on her, she carefully describes her admiration for de Beauvoir in terms of a personal relationship.
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To Sheila Hale she says, ‘Simone de Beauvoir is someone I admire enormously. The Second Sex is a very good book and makes me like her as a person, although I’ve never met her’ (Dooley, p. 32). Because Murdoch does not address any gender issues in her philosophical work, it is easy to forget that for women to study and teach philosophy at university as she did was a rather new thing to do. She certainly experienced the regulated inequality of the past when she was at Cambridge, as the University did not allow women to graduate until 1948; Murdoch was there a year before.8 In the year that Murdoch went to Oxford, Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, yet Murdoch still confesses to being ‘not very interested in the female predicament’ (Dooley, p. 61). Instead, she maintains: ‘I have never felt picked out in an intellectual sense because I am a woman; these distinctions are not made at Oxford’ (Dooley, p. 32). Such indifference may of course indicate an important achievement in the feminist endeavour to create equality. When Murdoch began her philosophical career, Oxford and Cambridge, unusually, employed a number of female scholars. Among them were prominent philosophers, friends and colleagues of Murdoch; with Elizabeth Anscombe, Murdoch shared a passion for the work of Wittgenstein and she dedicated Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals to her; with Mary Midgley, she vied for the same job at St. Anne’s and, from the days of their studies at Somerville, Philippa Foot was a life-long friend. Mary Warnock entered Oxford only a few years later.9 None of these women address their novel existence as female philosophers employed by a university. They must have been aware of the novelty of their positions (if only in monetary terms), but they did not feel the need to make it the subject of academic scrutiny. Being a female philosopher does not, of course, obligate one to comment on the relationship between women and philosophy, or to be a feminist. Given the fact that most feminists are women it is more likely, but certainly not necessary. The subject of ‘woman’ is, and has been, as Simone de Beauvoir argues, often ‘irritating, especially to women’.10 Ignoring the novelty of one’s position can, moreover, occasion a situation in which it becomes more ordinary. However, I would argue, it is worthwhile to consider the exceptional position of this exclusive group of women, if only to explain why fifty years later philosophy departments still employ comparatively few women. In recent years it has become more widely recognized that the practice and nature of philosophy is not always hospitable to women or members of other minority groups who have only recently had access to universities. Feminists would argue that the practice and content of
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almost all professions contain means of excluding women, and philosophy is no exception. Yet philosophers are more reluctant to consider this suggestion than scholars in other disciplines. The reason for this reluctance may be found in presuppositions implied in the understanding of both philosophy and feminism, and are evident in the writings of two of Murdoch’s contemporaries, Midgley and Warnock, on the few occasions when they approach the topic of ‘women and philosophy’. In her recently published memoirs, Midgley considers why she, Anscombe, Murdoch, Foot and Warnock ‘all made [their] names in philosophy’ and comments on the exceptionally large number of women in Oxford when she was a student. Most men, she observes, were fighting in the Second World War and their absence had important consequences for the future academic career of these women: ‘The effect was to make it a great deal easier to be heard in discussion than it is in normal times [. . .] Sheer loudness of voice has a lot to do with the difficulty, but there is also a temperamental difference about confidence in the amount of work that one thinks is needed to make one’s opinion worth hearing’. Having found their voices, Midgley continues, all of them went on to challenge the prevalent understanding of ethics, which was inspired by logical positivism.11 Warnock also expresses regard for Foot, Anscombe and Murdoch – all ‘remarkable and original women’ – and wonders ‘whether their originality had anything to do with gender’. She suggests that ‘women are less prone to jump on bandwagons than at least some of their male colleagues, and more reluctant to abandon common sense’.12 Again, the women are praised for their independence of mind, but unfortunately Warnock does not pursue the relation between common sense and good philosophy.13 One would certainly have expected Warnock to address the relationship between women and philosophy in her earlier collection of essays by women philosophers. However, even here she appears surprisingly reluctant to consider the possibility that there would be anything different to say about ‘women and philosophy’ than there is about ‘men and philosophy’. She refuses to consider any possible reason for compiling this collection. The reason for this refusal becomes apparent, though, when she explains why she has included only a few feminist texts. While Warnock admits that much of what is written on ‘the Women Question’ would satisfy her ‘criteria of generality and of the hoped-for explanation of phenomena’, Warnock finds ‘too much unexamined dogma in these writings, too much ill-concealed proselytising, too little objective analysis, to allow them to qualify for inclusion among philosophical writing proper’. Like Murdoch, Warnock understands that
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philosophy ‘must be concerned with “us” in the sense in which “we” are all humans. The truths which philosophers seek must aim to be not merely generally, but objectively, even universally, true. Essentially, they must be gender-indifferent’.14 Warnock’s dislike of dogma and her decision to include only writing which is ‘universal’ would find support from many philosophers. However, support does not enforce practice. Warnock appears unaware that this criterion, used strictly, would exclude many prominent works from the philosophical canon. Many philosophical texts consider only a privileged group, and thus are not ‘concerned with “us” in the sense in which “we” are all humans’. Warnock’s collection thus suffers from a contradiction in its conception: on the one hand, she has selected texts by women philosophers only, and it cannot have escaped her that there is no need for such a selection of essays by men. On the other hand, the possibility that this difference may be to do with ‘women and philosophy’ is repudiated from the beginning: the text on the cover states that the ‘great subjects of philosophy [. . .] are arguably gender indifferent since the search for truth is objective’. Warnock recognizes that female and male philosophers are not equal in all respects, but her understanding of philosophy prevents her from exploring whether any such differences may be significant for doing philosophy. This contradiction is endorsed in Warnock’s conclusion, where she finds that despite the omission of specifically feminist authors from her anthology a disproportionate number of texts are concerned with moral or political philosophy, and as such recall the view of the 1950s and 1960s ‘that moral philosophy was a woman’s subject, a kind of soft option’ (WP, p. xlvii) but she hastens to add that this is not the only field in which women philosophers have been successful. She concludes, ‘in the end, I have not found any clear “voice” shared by women philosophers [. . .] they turn out, unsurprisingly, to be as various as their male colleagues. I believe this a matter not for disappointment but for pride’ (p. xlvii). So, neither Midgley nor Warnock considers gender to be of any philosophical significance. They may allow for some points of similarity among female philosophers: Midgley notices a shared opposition to the understanding of ethics prevalent in logical positivism, and Warnock finds that many of the texts by female philosophers are concerned with either moral or political philosophy, but these observations are made casually and are not given any philosophical relevance. Even though Murdoch does not say so explicitly, it would seem from her observations that she would agree with her contemporaries.
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The idea that philosophy is gender-neutral is still current, despite being increasingly an object of feminist criticism. In ‘Is the Feminist Critique of Reason Rational?’ (1995) Linda Martín Alcoff convincingly argues why this idea remains so prevalent. Her landmark essay offers the possibility of finding certain tropes in Murdoch’s philosophical writing that have not yet been drawn into feminist readings and make it more difficult to group her with her contemporaries. Alcoff responds to appeals by Martha Nussbaum and Sabina Lovibond to keep feminism and philosophy separate. Her summary of Nussbaum’s position bears echoes of Warnock’s: feminism is ‘[considered] a substantive set of empirical claims and political commitments’, and philosophy ‘a discipline of thought organized by the pursuit of truth but uncommitted to any particular truth’ (WP, p. 59). From these two premises follows the conclusion: ‘to forego this separation by committing philosophy itself to some particular truth before it even begins its work is to risk inviting dogmatism. Therefore, philosophical reasoning must be kept prior to and primary over feminism, else feminism itself will be doomed to irrationality’ (WP, p. 59). Nussbaum presents the discussion as one with only two alternatives: either one holds philosophical reasoning to be universal, or one abandons reason and in doing so loses the means to claim equality. Not surprisingly, Nussbaum strongly endorses the first possibility. She explicitly expresses the fear that the intrusion of feminism into philosophy jeopardizes feminism’s project. By questioning reason’s universality, feminism risks a return to those days when women were restricted to a limited choice of roles. Again, women are to be excluded from philosophy, only now by radical feminism rather than by the authorities within a patriarchal society.15 Alcoff counters these arguments by maintaining on the one hand that philosophy is not as universal as Nussbaum assumes, and on the other that any feminist challenge to reason does not necessarily lead to irrationality. In other words, the relation between philosophy and feminism does not need to be put in Nussbaum’s absolute terms; there are more possibilities than these alternatives suggest. Feminists’ challenges to philosophy’s assumed neutrality have often begun with exasperation at the various misogynist remarks in philosophical texts. Female philosophers have had to engage with texts which deny them their own ability to think rationally. While it has been argued that the misogynist excerpts are merely incidental slips or that they reflect the mores of the time, Alcoff doubts this conclusion because the disparity between misogyny and philosophy’s alliance with truth is too significant. However, this doubt is controversial, because it entertains a connection
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between the form of the argument and its content. In other words, it supposes a connection between philosophy and rhetoric, which stands in complete opposition to a philosophical anxiety which has troubled the discussion, and from which Alcoff knows herself not to be exempt: ‘the Philosophy/Rhetoric split we all intoned in graduate school as the primary legitimation for philosophy, that is philosophy’s distinctiveness from and superiority over writing which aims primarily to persuade, which appeals to emotion, which supplants aesthetic for logical criteria, or which conceals from view its ideological content or overriding strategic aim’ (p. 69). By contrast with philosophy, rhetoric has traditionally been considered at best superfluous, at worst misleading. It is this anxiety that has singled out feminist philosophy for the criticism of being irrational. However, as Alcoff points out, feminist philosophy is not alone in challenging reason. She illustrates how the feminist project of rethinking reason and expanding the notion of rationality may be situated within a long philosophical tradition of criticizing reason. Referring to MacIntyre, she argues that a historicist understanding of reason does not imply relativism: ‘to locate an epistemology or a concept of reason in a social history [. . .] is not to say that it cannot understand or communicate with other traditions, that it shares no common ground with them upon which it can criticize their positions or learn from them how its own positions are limited. Nor does it follow that nothing we say represents the real’ (p. 69). Rethinking reason is not restricted to feminist philosophers, Alcoff points out. It is a general, philosophical activity. Thus Alcoff pleads for ‘philosophy [. . .] to become more rhetorically self-conscious’ and she introduces a ‘dialogical model of truth’ where the relationship between philosopher and subject is not a ‘positivistic’ one, ‘in which an active knowing agent confronts a passive object’, but rather ‘a conversation between participants’ (p. 70ff). She concludes, ‘If truth is understood as the product of an argument (involving two or more participants), then all the contributing elements of that argument need to be analysed within an epistemological characterisation of its results’ (p. 71). The imagery, metaphors and myths of a philosophical text are part of this conversation and Alcoff at this point endorses the work of Michèle Le Doeuff. It is in the work of this feminist philosopher that I find inspiring new ways of reading Murdoch. While Le Doeuff may be best known for Hipparchia’s Choice (1991), when relating her work to Murdoch’s, I am most of all concerned with the notion of the philosophical imaginary, which Le Doeuff identifies as a constant element in her own oeuvre.16
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The philosophical imaginary expresses her engagement with imagery, metaphors and myth, and in particular her research into the part a specific image, or imaginative idea, can play in a philosophical argument. Philosophical imagery, Le Doeuff maintains, has arisen from the interplay between cultural, social elements and the constraints of philosophical writing. An image may appear once in a text, but it can also reappear throughout an author’s oeuvre, or even a philosophical tradition. Le Doeuff gives a diverse list of such images to be found in philosophy’s history: ‘statues that breathe the scent of roses, comedies, tragedies, architects, foundations, dwellings, doors and windows, sand, navigators, musical instruments, islands, clocks, horses, donkeys and even a lion, representatives of every craft and trade, scenes of sea and storm, forests and trees’.17 The one she omits here, but analyses at length elsewhere is, of course, that of woman. This image in particular serves to preserve practices of exclusion within philosophy.18 With the notion of philosophical imaginary Le Doeuff indicates that philosophical texts not only contain such images, but that they even have their own recurring imagery. Moreover, these images cannot be excluded from the text without altering the argument. The idea of the philosophical imaginary provides important new insights for reading Murdoch. First, it explains why Murdoch did not easily fit into the analytical tradition of her time, and why her work has remained comparatively outside of it, despite its influence on some central concerns. In her earlier essays it is apparent how much difficulty she has in expressing her thoughts. This difficulty, I would argue, arises from having to challenge not only particular arguments, but also ways of arguing which present themselves as neutral. For instance, in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ Murdoch expresses discontent with contemporary moral philosophy in terms which recall the work of Alcoff and Le Doeuff. Existing moral philosophy, Murdoch argues, does not consider certain ‘facts’, nor does it allow for the existence of other positions.19 On the contrary, the strong device of the ‘genetic argument’ enables it to reduce every position which differs from its own.20 But even though Murdoch exposes the falsity of this supposed neutrality, she still has difficulty challenging it and defending her own ideas. At first, she presents them in surprisingly unphilosophical terms, for instance by the repeated use of terms such as ‘simply’, ‘obvious’ and ‘surely’. The use of these terms expresses the need to hold on to a position even though arguments fail her. At one point she exclaims, ‘This is one of those exasperating moments in philosophy when one seems to be relentlessly prevented from saying something which one is irresistibly impelled to
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say’. She finds herself presenting her case ‘in a rough and ordinary way and as yet without justification’ (EM, p. 316). Yet feminist philosophers’ challenges to philosophy’s universality would caution against too rapid a dismissal of her ideas, even though they may be presented in unphilosophical terms. Indeed, after Murdoch had left St. Anne’s, thus creating some distance between herself and the dominant philosophical tradition, she wrote the two additional essays, later collected in The Sovereignty of Good, which are considerably shorter, and demonstrate less struggle and have more room for her own voice. Le Doeuff’s ideas, secondly, draw attention to how in her ‘philosophical struggle’ Murdoch is concerned with the position of people who are outside philosophy. However, while Le Doeuff is mainly concerned with the exclusion of women, Murdoch is more generally concerned with those outside philosophy; they seem to have stepped out of the nineteenthcentury novels she favours so much: virtuous peasants, or ‘some quiet unpretentious worker, a schoolteacher or a mother, better still an aunt’ (EM, p. 244). The virtuous peasant may be slightly problematic because of a similarity to, for instance, the noble savage. Yet Murdoch recognizes that not all philosophy is universal when it does not allow space for such mothers or aunts or for the supposition that ‘an unexamined life can be virtuous’.21 Le Doeuff’s notion of the philosophical imaginary also illustrates ways in which Murdoch makes ample use of imagery and other rhetorical devices. ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’ opens by confirming the importance of metaphor and image-play in past philosophy. Yet Murdoch acknowledges, that such image-play ‘is usually inconclusive, and is regarded by many contemporary thinkers as valueless’.22 Is one justified in discerning a causal relationship here? Is it that because image-play is inconclusive, that it is regarded as valueless? Her contemporaries may think so, but Murdoch certainly does not. Her work is saturated with imagery. The example of M and D is perhaps the most famous, but it is not isolated. The first few pages of ‘The Idea of Perfection’ alone provide many examples, such as likening morality to visiting a shop. Le Doeuff’s work directs readers to such images, not just so far as they illustrate an argument (in the way that Maria Antonaccio reads the M and D argument) but also to the extent to which they simultaneously counter a quite different argument, thus adding voices to the dialogue.23 This discussion aims to inspire further reassessment of Murdoch’s work in the light of feminist philosophy such as Le Doeuff’s. First, however, it is important to acknowledge how the assumptions about
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philosophy and feminism which I have outlined may have deterred such reassessment. Feminism should not be thought of as more partisan than philosophy; it is not necessarily the secluded thinking Murdoch takes it to be, any more than philosophy is the universal quest for truth. As is often the case, Murdoch’s interviews do not fully tally with her writing. Indeed, her philosophical writing shares important concerns with those of feminists like Alcoff and Le Doeuff, more so than perhaps she herself may have allowed for.24
Notes 1. Except for an occasional letter on education for girls. See The Times (16 January 1960), p. 9. 2. I have consulted mainly the interviews collected in Dooley. See in particular the interviews with Sheila Hale (pp. 30–2), Bellamy (pp. 44–55), Biles (pp. 56–69), Chevalier (pp. 70–96), Brans (pp. 155–66) and Heusel (pp. 194–208). 3. M.M. Rowe, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Case of “Too Many Men”’, Studies in the Novel (36.1), pp. 79–94 (p. 80). 4. There are a growing number of commentaries on Murdoch’s novels from a feminist perspective. For a discussion of these works up to 1993 see G. Griffin, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (San Francisco: Mellen University Press, 1993) pp. 7–13. See also references throughout this and the preceding essay. 5. Griffin, p. 2; compare G. Backus, Iris Murdoch: The Novelist as Philosopher, The Philosopher as Novelist: ‘The Unicorn’ as a Philosophical Novel, (Bern: Peter Lang, 1986) p. 13, and M.M. Rowe. 6. Deborah Johnson, Iris Murdoch (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987), p. xi. 7. Exceptions should be made for the use of Murdoch’s philosophical writing in the context of care ethics. The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) pp. 647–66 mentions Murdoch’s work as a possible subject for further research. 8. IMAL, pp. 261, 633n1. 9. See Conradi (2001): passim and also Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places (London: Duckworth, 2002) – hereafter PP. 10. De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (trans.) H.M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 13. 11. Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 122–23. Midgley did write about feminism. See Women’s Choices: Philosophical Problems Facing Feminism (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1983) with Judith Hughes. This work does not acknowledge a change in philosophical reasoning as a consequence of women philosophers but rather a change in topics. 12. PP, p. 37. 13. The contrast with Le Doeuff could not be more marked. See Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. (trans.) T. Selous, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 29; compare L.M. Alcoff, ‘Is the
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14. 15.
16.
17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.
24.
Feminist Critique of Reason Rational?’, Philosophic Exchange 26 (1995–96), 59–79. Warnock, Women Philosophers (London: Everyman, 1996), pp. xxxiii–xxxiv – hereafter WP. It should be noted that Nussbaum has also criticized philosophy for failing to understand the importance of emotion for rationality. This has been a permanent recurring theme in her work since The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1986). Le Doeuff explains this notion in her introduction to The Philosophical Imaginary (M. Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary [London & New York: Continuum, 2002]) pp. 1–20 – hereafter PI. Compare R. Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 80–91. PI, p. 1. See in particular PI, pp. 100–128. EM, p. 299. See Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 75–84. EM, p. 299; compare Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice, pp. 6–7. EM, p. 363. See Antonaccio, pp. 87–95. Compare my reading in M. Altorf. ‘De verbeeldende wijsbegeerte van Iris Murdoch’. Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte, 96.1 (2004), 40–52. I would like to thank Edith Brugmans for comments on earlier versions of this essay.
Part VI Reinvestigating Negative Capability
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15 Oedipus, Peter Pan and Negative Capability: On Writing Iris Murdoch’s Life Peter J. Conradi
The fascination and difficulty especially of first biography writing are that no a priori solutions exist. It could be compared to landing in enemy territory in war-time at night without map, torch or compass, in order to capture a nameless city in a disputed location. The formal aspect of this great responsibility is one topic of this paper, which concerns the contest between a fixed and an open view both of Iris Murdoch’s ‘character’, and also that of those she invented. One reason I read little biography is a fear on my part that its subject-matter may be diminished or reduced. And reduction is another topic here. On the necessary tension between a fixed and an open view of the subject of biography, Malcolm Bowie has written that you need a simplifying model, a schematic life pattern, in order to give your work an arresting plot and prevent it becoming a mere chronicle of particulars: ‘But if your model insists too much and alters too little, you may lose all sense of a life being lived, a motivated individual moving forward in time and occupying, as he travels, a border-zone between inner and outer circumstances’.1 Another writer has argued for a strictly chronological method in biography as showing greater reverence and respect than confident analysis does for the changefulness and mystery of human beings.2 He argues, for example, that Hermione Lee’s conflation of three periods of Woolf’s madness into a single chapter diminishes and belies the singularity of each. ‘We do not, alas, live our lives in themes, but day by day’.3 When I wrote Iris Murdoch: A Life I struggled for my publisher’s agreement to include even two partly thematic chapters (19 and 20). Such a unifying, analytic urge in biography may currently be dwindling, together with the desire to locate an underlying explanation, theme or unified life-myth which can be read backwards and forwards irrespective 189
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of chronology. Murdoch herself employed the term ‘life-myth’ in an interview with Malcolm Bradbury.4 ‘Life-myth’ was a common term among inter-war writers, signifying an unconscious script for your life: for example, the compulsive need Alexander feels to steal his brother Martin’s women in A Severed Head. And since she shows, in many of her novels, characters struggling for release from exactly such life-myths, it is reasonable to enquire what her own were. A life-myth, Murdoch believed, was usually unconscious. It has been argued5 that discussion of life-myth offers biographer and reader the linear passage of a childhood paradigm through an indefinite series of adult scenes: one early cause produces an unceasing procession of later effects. (One might query the word ‘unceasing’). ‘[Each] young child is hero of the Oedipal drama. Within her early experience the explanation for neurotic misery is found: the early configurations of the individual’s libido [. . .] within the family group hold a key to her later erotic career’.6 Of the possibility of a female Oedipus complex Freud noted, ‘Things happen in just the same way with little girls, with the necessary changes: an affectionate attachment to her father, a need to get rid of her mother as superfluous’.7 In 1970, Murdoch appeared to be praising Freud’s discovery of Oedipal conflict.8 If, one might ask, Murdoch had no direct experience of Oedipal conflict, why did she write about it with such conviction and obsessionality? So, although she referred to her family life as a ‘perfect Trinity of love’ – which unconsciously proposes a Messianic role for the child – I thought that I would try first to construct a basic Freudian and thematic reading. In a later part of this essay I summarize her resistance to such theorizing, and then try briefly to relate this to two of her best novels. Such Freudian reading will be undeterred by my ignorance of psychoanalytic theory. ‘Since she was hostile, she must have had something to hide’ – or so they say.
Oedipal conflict And of course Iris Murdoch was in love with her father. At a home cricket match at Badminton school in July 1937, her mother Rene struck observers by appearing to contemporaries like a ‘younger sister’ of Iris’s. Our Freudian might say – without ignoring the role of superior intellect – that Iris had won the Oedipal competition with her mother hands down by the age of eighteen. Mary Midgley, a witness with a remarkable memory, who knew Murdoch and her family from 1938, observed, ‘Irene and Hughes seemed to expect of Iris only what she wanted’.
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She added, ‘The family-home seemed happy [. . .] [without] the kind of conflicts most people experience’.9 John Bayley too attests to how peaceful and harmonious Eastbourne Terrace was; and Iris herself wrote of her parents’ bringing her up ‘too leniently’. [Reference needed] A world beyond conflicts is presumably – to a Freudian – a world in which a war has been won. That her father, Hughes, sometimes acted as mother in the home10 might suggest an unconscious collusion between father and daughter to render the mother yet more powerless: after Hughes’s death Rene proved herself a perfectly competent housewife. Iris ‘loved’ her mother but identified with her father.11 And Murdoch’s identification with men has often been noted.12 Six of her first-person narrators are men, and Murdoch has been commonly criticized for failing to invent womennarrators. She wrote in 1988, ‘The sex of one’s god must be a very deep matter. I think my daemons are all male’.13 John Bayley surmised that Hughes and Rene’s was by mutual agreement a mariage blanc, that is, a marriage in which the commonest form of contraception is abstinence. By contrast almost any relationship in a Murdoch novel can be sexualized and there may be a connection here. Tension caused by a mariage blanc might cause an adolescent girl to feel an unusual degree of unconscious responsibility for the well-being of her father. When he died Murdoch noted in her Journal, ‘He was so gentle, so quiet, so kind [. . .] few knew him or knew how good he was. He taught me so much’. It was of Hughes she was thinking when Charles Arrowby writes of his own father, ‘I was his comrade, his reading companion, possibly the only person with whom he ever had a serious conversation’. She often fell in love with father-substitutes: some good, a few notably unpleasant, cold-hearted, power-driven. Fraenkel was 31 years her senior, MacKinnon older by seven years, Balogh and Canetti by 12, Momigliano by 11 years, Steiner by ten. All but MacKinnon were Jewish.14 Philo-Semitism is an aspect of hunger-for-fathers: ‘if only my wise Jew were not such a bore’,15 she noted of one novel, and Jews in her work belong to a race of involuntary teachers or father-figures, ‘wise’ willy-nilly. Murdoch answered in 1968 the question as to whether her work is autobiographical by saying that, though she did not wish to write from life, there were friendships which ‘influenced me deeply when I was younger, and something to do with them is in my books because it is within me’.16 This remark refers to what she called ‘the quadrilateral tale’ played out at Seaforth in 1943–4. In 1993, she remarked in answer to a confidence, ‘I wish I’d kept the flat I shared in the war’.17 I felt I was
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being told something bigger than a tenancy of a flat. Undeclared emotion and a certain rehearsed casualness later recalled Prospero’s words to Miranda about ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’.18 A friend’s comment on these years, ‘She lost a family’, is resonant. The themes of that year – two ‘siblings’ in apparent competition for two partners – got into many of her fictions:19 the erotic symmetry of her plots, where couplings obey unconscious patterns, what one reviewer called ‘the guiltily gratifying rhythms and geometries of passion and form’, have an evident life source.20 In ‘taking on’ the theme of erotic imbroglio she was also mapping something, if not universal, at least true to its time.21 Imbroglio relates also to the theme of incest, which famously recurs in her early fiction, mainly brother-sister, though once father-daughter:22 Muriel’s witnessing the act of father–daughter incest in The Time of the Angels is one crux of the plot. Although she claimed her ‘incest period was over’, grandfather/granddaughter incest crops up as late as The Philosopher’s Pupil, and a father also has incestuous designs on his daughter in The Good Apprentice. Indeed many of her characters are in love with their parent of the opposite sex.23 The Oedipal rivalry between mother and daughter for the affections of a father surrogate is a buried theme in An Unofficial Rose, where Miranda and Anne compete for Felix. The theme crops up again in The Black Prince, avowedly autobiographical, on the model of Hamlet, where Julian and Rachel Baffin are in competition first for Arnold’s affections, later for Bradley’s, and Murdoch’s own notes-inprogress for the novel remind her to emphasize Julian’s intense love for her father. Indeed Bradley’s seminar with Julian on the secret meanings of Hamlet confirms the Freudian reading before exploring a Neoplatonic alternative. The novel, moreover, concerns a mother – Rachel – murdering her husband over the theft of her identity, and the authorial Bradley’s acceptance of complicity in the guilt of this. After Marx and the saints of Anglo-Catholicism, her favoured philosopher was Plato. She wrote that Plato ‘is in favour of religion and Fathers [. . .] and although he never “invents” a full-dress Father-God, his work abounds in images of paternity’ and that Freud, by contrast, was ‘against religion and against fathers’. And ‘it would be hard to overestimate the effect upon [Plato] of the death of Socrates’.24 By no means all agree that Freud is ‘against fathers’. And while we may infer how Plato felt when Socrates died, it is hard to avoid feeling that she was simultaneously speaking here of her own grief at Hughes’s death.25 Her life and work too, like Plato’s, also abound ‘in images of paternity’ while mistrusting power.
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Her oeuvre itself starts by addressing the question of good and bad father figures. The message of both her first two novels is that you must wean yourself from fathers and empower yourself:26 Jake becomes a writer-in-his-own right, free from Breteuil and Hugo; in The Flight from the Enchanter the characters variously seek independence from Mischa, wishing to find their own autonomy. Hugo is a good father to Jake; Mischa Fox an equivocal father to his creatures. Later novels of course often address religious issues27 and the question of life after the demise of God-the-Father. Dying or murdered fathers abound: Carel, Bruno, Rupert, Baffin, Guy, Rozanov, Jesse, Vallar, Peter Mir.28 If, as has often been argued, the nineteenth-century novel often concerned good and bad parenting, good versus bad fathering and discipleship – by contrast – figure throughout Murdoch’s fictions. These themes link Under the Net with The Message for the Planet and The Philosopher’s Pupil. There are more bad fathers than good. Her saints too – Hugo, Bledyard, Tallis, Stuart – are often male.29 And there are few children.
Peter Pan Murdoch has argued that philosophers attack their own faults. And those she herself repeatedly attacked – and which she therefore saw within – were solipsism, romanticism and fantasy. It would have been odd if her life had lacked them. Her novels have been called crash courses in maturity:30 growing up in each is always to be begun again. As a 90-year-old Catholic priest once remarked, ‘au fond ils n’ya pas des adultes’. Peter Pan might be taken to illustrate this perennial theme. J.M. Barrie noted in 1921 as the real meaning of that ‘terrible masterpiece’, ‘Desperate attempt to grow up but can’t’. Iris believed that the ‘greatest of all moments in theatre’ was Peter Pan’s appearance outside the Darling nursery window: ‘very exciting [. . .] very moving [. . .] frightening’.31 She admired the division within the play between the world of the Darlings and Never-never-land. While J.M. Barrie, moreover, twice notes that Peter Pan if he grew up might turn into Captain Hook, Iris by contrast noticed a quite different doubling: she was interested in the fact that Captain Hook and Mr Darling might be played by the same actor: the good father is the bad father. On Saturday 2nd April 1938, after one year’s correspondence, she elected to meet James Henderson Scott by Peter Pan’s statue in Kensington Gardens. Froebel children evidently visited and loved the
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statue,32 described in An Accidental Man as one of the sacred places of Matthew’s childhood. Here by the statue a fantasy love-relationship by letter turned into friendship instead – or, as a Freudian might say, primary narcissism received a check. Peter Pan is a boy played by an actress; Iris sometimes felt herself similarly mixed, and the ‘sinister boy’ Peter Pan haunts her novels. In An Accidental Man, Gracie pursues Matthew to the statue. Rachel compares Bradley with Peter Pan in The Black Prince; Charles Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea loves to direct the play; in A Word Child crucial scenes take place near the statue, the play is to be the office pantomime and there are informal comic seminars on it. Her narrator-heroes are in love with their own youth, youth-haunted. Hilary is possessed by events that happened during his early adulthood; Charles by a love affair forty years before; Bradley falls in love with a girl forty years younger. Iris typically saw in Peter Pan an ‘immature spirituality’, a play about the terrible necessity of growing up. But it is also a subversive celebration of the powers of invention explicitly denied to grown-ups. Why bother to grow up if, as Wordsworth suggests, you lose the ability to quicken or wonder at beauty? She thus also saw in Peter Pan a ‘play about the relationship of an author with his own subconscious mind’.33 The saint needs to grow up: the artist’s immaturity is valuable beyond cost. It is striking that Peter never intends to abduct the Darling children. He arrives because he loves to listen to stories about other people’s lives, and his own. Starved of stories, he oddly inhabits an alternative reality like a novelist’s, put together from old narratives. Never-never-land is made up out of bits of old stories: pirates, mermaids, Red Indians, fairies. Iris, like Peter Pan, lived in a narrative world and was hungry for inspiring stories. She wrote to a friend in 1964 that she too ‘liked being told things’,34 and included this appetite at the end of The Philosopher’s Pupil, where the narrator acknowledges that he is one whose role in life is to listen to stories. Peter is first sighted behind glass, self-sufficient yet lonely, unable to engage in real relationships or grow up, never physically touched during the play, a ‘being from elsewhere’.35 It is not without interest that one Somerville contemporary remembered Iris as having a ‘covering of ice’, and even a sympathetic friend has described her as belonging, like a cat, essentially to herself. Anna in Under the Net has Iris’s ‘calculated avoidance of self-surrender’ (p. 30). While Murdoch’s falling for difficult older men – monstres – may suggest a desire for vulnerability, her running of concurrent affaires, on the other hand, implies an unreadiness fully to commit herself. Canetti in
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1993 maliciously observed that ‘she was unable truly to lose herself’.36 This was a condition of separateness he – like many creative writers – shared and he might easily be declared all-time world champion, a theme to which I shall return. Separateness of course also belongs to saints. And separateness also belongs to pen-friendship, which offers intimacy without proximity. Epistolary friendship with Scott began a series of such friendships. Frank Thompson replaced Scott as distant love-object from 1941 to 1944; David Hicks replaced Frank from 1944 to 1946;37 Queneau replaced Hicks from 1946 to 1956. She wrote to David Hicks, ‘When I was younger [. . .] I loved writing long letters to all sorts of people – a kind of exhibitionism I daresay’.38 Marriage and artistic success in 1956 – which is to say ‘happiness’ – attenuated two patterns: the pattern of a bullying older man and the sequence of absent lover-friends. Like the children in Peter Pan she was divided between two worlds: the nursery world of Steeple-Aston with its ‘Wind-in-the-Willows’ food and the Never-never-land of London to explore outside: her first-person novels are always also London novels. Absent pen-friends henceforth were often admirers of her work.39
Negative capability It is relatively easy to describe someone’s love life, much harder to evoke their spiritual life. This is doubly hard when these two – sex and spirit – coincide. How do you evoke goodness and the challenge of ‘becoming Good’? The problem of her work is also that of her biography. Her religious urge – which repeatedly emphasizes the moral importance of ‘transformed sexual energy’ or sublimation – cannot simply be collapsed down into Oedipal guilt. To do so fails to honour her courage closely to examine who she once had been, in the service of change. In earlier life an enthusiast for Freud, around 1960 she began to disapprove of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy alike. The psychoanalyst in A Severed Head is a demon; the psychiatrist in The Sacred and Profane Love-Machine a temporizer, sexual cheat and poor listener, reducing experience to formula; in The Black Prince Freudians are editors, simplifiers, diminishers and indeed the Freudian Francis Marlow’s epilogue offers a fatuous reduction of the novel’s events. Only Thomas McCaskerville in The Good Apprentice, having given up all faith in his subject as a ‘science’ and turned to Buddhism, is a good therapist.40 At the Psychoanalytic Society in London the year The Good Apprentice was published, Iris duelled remorselessly with Juliet Mitchell on this
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subject and would allow analysis only demerits: the analyst had illicit power which he might abuse, and abuse sexually; only a ‘saint’ could be a therapist (and there are no good men or women). 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.41 In practice she was not so foolish as to fail to see that, when miserable, there are worse fates than employing a decent therapist. In an unpublished interview42 she got close to another and interesting objection: analysis might ‘solve’ an artist’s conflicts, without which she would lose the need to create. It is paradoxical that to a number of close friends she acted as mother-confessor or wise counsellor – which is to say roughly a therapist herself – making no objection to any ‘transference’ entailed. It mattered to her that she be worthy of the role. Elsewhere, ‘If you are a writer, you psychoanalyze yourself anyway’.43 For the biographer, Freudian analysis sometimes offers a ‘sustained flight from uncertainty and ambiguity’,44 but its singling out of one theme can be a willed impoverishment of other modes of explanation. It can minimize change and contingency, both themes of Iris’s story. About her distinctive desire to honour contingency, one passage in particular is suggestive: ‘Art and morals are, with certain provisos [. . .] 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’.45 Love is not much discussed by English literary critics, or – perhaps – philosophers. Nor is a secular recovery of ‘sainthood’ felt to be pressing. Though she has a distinguished constituency in North America,46 hers are not ideas towards which Oxford philosophers have been friendly. She thought the demise of religion the most important event of her century. She wanted philosophy and religion to communicate, to help defend the idea of the ‘inner life’. And love and secular sainthood are central to her. The ideal of sainthood – or ‘perfection’ – is to act as a kind of ‘ideal limit’ by which the moral agent can be drawn. And the ability dispassionately to love many persons defines this limit. It was always important to her not – in Hamlet’s words – to ‘pluck out the heart’ of the human mystery, to allow interpretation to stay un-fixed. Encouraged by a fellow Oxford student’s enthusiasm, Iris sought in 1942 a volume by ‘Bachtin’ [sic] in the Bodleian. Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) emphasizes the ‘unfinalisability’ of Dostoevsky’s portraits.
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Here is a unifying topic in her letters, novels, essays and journals.47 In a 1943 letter she wrote: ‘Human lives are essentially not to be summed up, but to be known, as they are lived, in many curious partial & inarticulate ways’.48 In her first published novel the narrator muses, ‘When does one ever know another human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it’.49 Two years later she praised moral attitudes which ‘emphasise the inexhaustible detail of the world, the endlessness of the task of understanding, the importance of not assuming that one has got individuals and situations taped, the connection of knowledge with love and of spiritual insight with apprehension of the unique’.50 The same year in The Sandcastle, Bledyard asks, ‘Who can look reverently enough upon another human face?’.51 In Bruno’s Dream, Nigel asserts that, ‘A human being hardly ever thinks about other people. He contemplates fantasms which resemble them and which he has decked out for his own purposes’.52 In The Sea, the Sea in 1978, Charles sees that ‘Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration’.53 Murdoch had the gift Keats praised in Shakespeare, that of ‘negative capability’, that wise passivity and receptivity which allow those so gifted to be touched by, and to enter into, the lives, thoughts and emotions – the private worlds – of many others. The truth of negative capability, which Shakespeare ‘possessed so enormously [. . .] the capacity of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’,54 is not that the writer is simply and religiously absent, but rather that he is mysteriously omnipresent within his characters. ‘The poet has no identity’, Keats asserts, adding that ‘in a room with people [. . .] the identity of everyone in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time an[ni]hilated [. . .] it would be the same in a Nursery of children’.55 Coleridge concurred. ‘Myriad-minded’, he called Shakespeare’s genius, and ‘Protean’,56 finding Shakespeare in the nurse in Romeo and Juliet as much as in the Constable in Much Ado About Nothing. Richard Holmes terms this gift ‘a sort of passionate transmigration of the soul’.57 We might also term this a virtuous promiscuity, and ascribe it to Iris. She wrote in The Black Prince, ‘We are tissues and tissues of different personae and yet we are nothing at all’.58 Holmes has argued, ‘The true biographic process begins precisely at the moment [. . .] where this naïve love [of biographer for subject] breaks down’.59 For me this happened when seeing with much discomfort that the relations of the young bohemian Iris around 1953 – power/ collection/the enjoyment of dependency – resembled those of Canetti.60
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Chapter 13 was for me the biography’s centre, and I detected Canetti behind those notably bad manipulative father-figures: Mischa in The Flight From the Enchanter, Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat and Charles in The Sea, the Sea. Canetti, reminiscing shortly before he died, confirmed the central importance of those friendships within Iris’s imaginative universe whose portraits I had tried painstakingly to paint: MacKinnon, Fraenkel, Momigliano, F.B. Steiner, his own.61 He termed these her Verwandlungen/Transformations, a key word for him, meaning something akin to alter ego. That Canetti was himself her most important Verwandlung had been my burden throughout. She created characters who were half herself, half not, rather as in her poetry album poems were sometimes literally co-written with friends. Her essays – true – defended a human ‘difference’ that her fiction does not always implement. Her plotting can be repetitive, her characters recognizable. Her last novels are too long, and remote from ordinary life. She was a puritan and a romantic who wished the world to be different. The list of those she tended to romanticize includes Jews, homosexuals, foreigners, scholars. André Gide pointed out that, for Dostoevsky, beautiful feelings make for bad art (as for bad biography!). She had some investment in ‘beautiful feelings’. Yet in her six or more best fictions her frailties, as can happen, turn to gold. Here she tests her own pieties. The themes of discipleship and of learning to perceive the individual apart from his or her Freudian ‘type’ run throughout. Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat makes an interesting devil, given the best tunes. He tells us that, ‘Driven along by their private needs [human beings] latch blindly onto each other, then pull away, then clutch again. Their little sadisms and their little masochisms are surface phenomena. Anyone will do to play the roles. They never really see each other at all [. . . .] Human beings are essentially finders of substitutes’.62 The plot of this brilliant and satisfying novel tests out Julius’s premises, which are also those of Murdoch’s fictional universe. Crudely, Julius tries to ‘write’ an Iris Murdoch novel ‘in real life’. Julius combines the roles from Much Ado About Nothing of Don Pedro – who brings Beatrice and Benedick together – and Don John, who tries to separate Claudio and Hero. Julius partly – but only partly – succeeds in his manipulations. Love, at least once, shows the power to resist him. Promiscuity, broadly construed, has an epistemological angle: if anyone can fill a role for us, then it may be that we have difficulties separating one person from another, difficulties in apprehending any given
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person’s uniqueness. The promiscuous lover is subject to the laws of repetition and substitution, a victim of blind need and ‘doubling’. The Black Prince, equally satisfying, is her most intimate and difficult work. In it the narrator Bradley gives young Julian a seminar on Hamlet: ‘The unconscious delights in identifying people with one another. It has only a few characters to play with’ (p. 195). Bradley’s scholarly reference is to Ernest Jones’s famous and Freudian reading of Hamlet, in which Hamlet identifies Ophelia with his mother and Claudius with his father. An intensely private reference is to Iris’s own love for her father. During composition she dreamt of telling a friend that her father was dead, and wept about this, as if it had happened anew, not fifteen years before. Julian Baffin’s love for a man she later on discovers to be nearly forty years her senior has parallels in Iris’s beloved father-figures. Both Julian and Iris struggle to see beyond selfish identifications. And the black prince of the title is partly Hamlet, seen as both the most autobiographical and yet also the most rhetorically dense and thus remote of Shakespeare’s works.
Conclusion Biography is often said to be heir to nineteenth-century realistic fiction, concerned with verisimilitude, story and detail. Yet it is also profoundly different. The great nineteenth-century novels – from Emma to Anna Karenina, let us say – are memorable for their variety of characters. Biography concentrates remorselessly on a single consciousness. By contrast I wanted Murdoch’s story to resemble one of her novels, a group portrait whose characters keep re-appearing in new guises. I admired Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month, and Penelope Fitzgerald’s portrait of her father and three Knox uncles, The Knox Brothers. I was happy that many who counted in Murdoch’s story in 1939 could be brought back in again later. Each chapter had to honour the then available human sources, which of course constantly diminish and then invent its own emblematic unity and coherence; its own path through the daunting masses of available material. (Speaking of available sources, some thirty key original respondents are no longer with us.) Of course there must be an overall trajectory too, but how to define this? ‘Brigid Brophy’, Murdoch noted in 1958 during a crisis of faith in her own fiction, ‘distinguishes between me and my work, and the person who is to help me must not do that’.63 We can no longer help her; but how should we read her into her novels? As biography and memoir start to reveal her, the reader can
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begin to see some continuities between her life and art. In both, a facile and promiscuous falling-in-love features. In both, the ‘problem’ of goodness looms, underlined in the paperback of the biography by re-naming its parts, Innocence, Innocence Lost, Innocence Regained. That trajectory apart, I made other early decisions: to let the biography, where appropriate, resemble a Murdoch novel; to address the issue of ‘sublimation’, a common theme of her fiction, moral philosophy and life; not to suppress the uncomfortable, but to find the right tone of voice in which to tell it; to keep myself out of it in order to allow the reader to undergo the immediacy of the story, as this hit me in her letters and journals; to deal principally with the period 1919–56 – a formative time about which least was known, even by John Bayley, who scarcely touched on it in his three memoirs; to tell (of course) shapely stories but allow such stories to collide without necessarily offering a single overview; to present Murdoch as a figure in a shifting landscape, with close attention to successive frames or contexts: Ireland, Froebel, Badminton, Oxford, Treasury, the refugee camps, the Royal College of Art, making each of these internally coherent, like a succession of short stories. A series of perspectives (ideally cultural histories) might productively collide with each other and thus honour both her protean nature – ‘tissues and tissues of different personae’ – and her ‘irreducibility’. Richard Holmes has hymned what he calls ‘the peculiar music of biography [. . .] always incomplete and unsatisfactory and sending out many echoes into the future’.64 This celebration both of biographical incompleteness and of biographical dissatisfaction alike seems a good note on which to end.
Notes 1. Malcolm Bowie, ‘Freud and the Art of Biography’, in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, (ed.) Peter France and William St Claire (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2002), pp. 177–92. 2. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘Writing Lives Forwards: A Case for Strictly Chronological Biography’, in France and St Claire, p. 252. 3. Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life Volume 1, xxvi–xxvii. (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks), p. 244, apropos Ellman. 4. ‘Iris Murdoch in Conversation with Malcolm Bradbury’. British Council Literature Study Aids Recorded Interview RS2001 (London, 27 February 1976). 5. Malcolm Bowie, ‘Freud and the Art of Biography’, in France and St Claire, pp. 177–92. 6. Ibid., p. 180. 7. Sigmund Freud in Freud: Volume One (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 376.
Peter J. Conradi 201 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
20. 21.
22. 23.
24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
29.
Murdoch, ‘A Note on Drama’, in Cue Magazine (September 1970), 13–4. See interview in Conradi Archive CIMS. Cooking, washing up, cleaning – see IMAL. Indeed she later imitated parental role-reversal: wife (John) attempting the cooking, while the major wage earner in the public world washed up. John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998). Letter to author apropos Tibetan Buddhism in Conradi Archive in CIMS. So were, by part descent, David Hicks and Yorick Smythies. Journal, 10 July 1953. IMAL, p. 221. Murdoch in conversation with the author. Tempest, I, ii, line 50. Under the Net (1954),The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), A Severed Head (1961), The Time of the Angels (1966), Bruno’s Dream (1969), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), An Accidental Man (1971). See Susan Eilenberg’s review of IMAL, in London Review of Books (5 September 2001). In the lower photographs of Badminton School in my biography of Murdoch, Bernard Leach’s dark-haired daughter Eleanor is identified below a smiling Murdoch. Leach (apparently) later committed suicide after many sorrows including her husband’s falling in love with her sister Jasmine – a tragic story that recalls Iris’s plots, which are, by contrast, essentially comic, as reflected in Malcolm Bradbury’s parody that begins ‘Augustina says that Flavia tells her Hugo is in love with Fred’. Malcolm Bradbury, Who do you think you are? Stories and Parodies (London: Macmillan, 2001) pp. 166–71. The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The Time of the Angels (1966). Rain Carter in The Sandcastle (1957) and Peter Foster in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) find surrogates in Mor and in (Aunt) Morgan respectively: also Edmund Narraway in The Italian Girl (1964), Elizabeth Fisher in The Time of the Angels (1966), Bruno in Bruno’s Dream (1969), David in The Sacred and Profane Love-Machine (1974), Henry in Henry and Cato (1976). ‘The Fire and The Sun’, in EM, p. 419. Something she expressed in the early 1960s to her Royal College of Art protégé, David Morgan. As Mary Midgley pointed out in a recorded but unused comment for the BBC Omnibus programme on Murdoch in 2001. The Bell (1958), The Unicorn (1963), The Time of the Angels (1966). In respectively: The Time of the Angels (1966), Bruno’s Dream (1969), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), The Black Prince (1973), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Message to the Planet (1989), The Green Knight (1993). The sequence of good women – Ann Peronett in An Unofficial Rose (1962), Kathleen Drumm in The Red and the Green (1965), Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers (1980) – are, it could be argued, marginally less compelling or interesting to their author and hence to us as readers. Others of what Barbara Pym termed ‘excellent women’ are the edge of the action, like The Abbess in The Bell (1958) or Pat Raven, mistress to John Forbes out of loyalty and love to John’s dead wife Ruth in Henry and Cato (1976).
202 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment 30. Peter Kemp, ‘The Flight Against Fantasy’, Modern Fiction Studies, XV, 3 (August 1969), 403–415. 31. Dooley, p. 88. 32. Miriam Allott in Conradi, IMAL, pp. 45–7. Where did Murdoch see the play? Perhaps, if the dates fit, at the Scala where, later (in my post-war childhood) it was put on every Christmas. 33. Dooley, p. 88. 34. Letter to David Morgan. 35. A Word Child, p. 227. 36. See IMAL, p. 584. 37. Her brief 1946 engagement to Hicks after a seven-year correspondence shows that this writing had power-in-the-world, was not mere ‘fantasy’. 38. Murdoch, unpublished letter to David Hicks, dated 10 October 1945. 39. A novel, too, is (a) the creation of an elsewhere and (b) through the responses of its readers, a communication with and about this elsewhere. Murdoch’s readers became her pen-friends: like Anna in Under the Net (1954) who yearned for love ‘as a poet yearns for an audience’. Unrequited love is the theme, not just of the child, but also of the mystic: ‘only if love is all, all imagination can it remain love while being unsatisfied’ (p. 40). 40. A Severed Head (1961), The Sacred and Profane Love-Machine (1974), The Good Apprentice (1985). 41. Murdoch disputed Hampshire’s view that a ‘perfect analysis’ could ever make us wholly self-aware. Our energy should in any case be turned outwards in close loving attention of the quiddity of the world, not inwards, which tends to reinforce habitual patterns. 42. Murdoch in conversation with David Pears, ‘The Idea of Freedom’, Logic Lane/Oxford Philosophy series, Chanan Films Ltd, 1971. 43. Dooley, pp. 44–55. 44. Bowie, in France and St Claire, p. 190. 45. ‘The Sublime and the Good’, in EM, p. 215. 46. Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Mark Platt, Maria Antonaccio and others. 47. This was one reason why Murdoch loved and emulated Shakespeare. She believed that the mysteriousness of great novels connected with the opacity of human personality: novels celebrate human difference. Shakespeare was the patron saint of novelists because he invented, and delighted in, free and eccentric personalities. Such celebration of otherness could happen only when the author got out of the way. While bad writing is full of the ‘fumes of personality’, Shakespeare was invisible. ‘Art’, she wrote, ‘is not an expression of personality, it is a question rather of the continual expelling of oneself from the matter in hand’ (EM, p. 283). Such removal of the novelist from her work was a condition for success. 48. To David Hicks, unpublished. 49. Under the Net (1954), p. 238. Compare D.H. Lawrence, who once wrote: ‘a book lives only as long as it in unfathomable – once it is known and its meaning is fixed, it is dead’. The same was true, he felt of its author: ‘I hate understanding people’, he wrote in 1921, ‘and I hate still more to be understood. Damn understanding more than anything’. 50. ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, in EM, p. 87. 51. The Sandcastle (1957), p. 77.
Peter J. Conradi 203 52. Bruno’s Dream (1969), p. 239. 53. The Sea, the Sea (1978), p. 477. 54. Letter from John Keats, dated 21 December 1817 to his brothers George and Thomas Keats in Selected Poems and Letters of Keats (ed.) Robert Gittings (London: Heinemann, 1986), p. 41. 55. Letter from John Keats to R. Woodhouse, dated 27 October 1818, in Gittings, p. 88. 56. Lecture by Coleridge in November 1810, cited in Coleridge: Darker Reflections by Richard Holmes (London: HarperCollins, 1989), p. 270. 57. Ibid., p. 270. 58. The Black Prince, p. 200. 59. Holmes, ‘The Proper Study?’, in Frances and St Claire, p. 332. 60. Elias Canetti, by the way, whose father died when he was a child, was singled out for immensely cruel bullying by his mother. She is said to have wanted all three of her sons to win the Nobel Prize, but Elias was a special case: Canetti is a startling victim-hero of Oedipal rivalry. 61. Elias Canetti, Party in the Blitz (London: Hutchinson, 2005). 62. A Fairly Honourable Defeat, p. 233 – my emphasis. 63. Journal (26 November 1958). 64. Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, p. 561.
16 Alzheimer’s Amyloid Analogy: Disease Depicted through A Word Child Rivka Isaacson
When Iris Murdoch resolved to donate her brain to science, she could not have anticipated the extent of her potential contribution to medical research. Last year, Garrard et al.1 published a headline-grabbing study of Alzheimer’s disease, utilizing Murdoch’s first and last published novels Under the Net (1954) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) and one from the height of her career The Sea, the Sea (1978), which won the Booker Prize. In an extension of a longitudinal study performed on an enclosed religious community (shadows of The Bell), the scientists analysed the syntax and lexical diversity of all three novels, drawing conclusions about the onset of various aspects of dementia in Alzheimer’s sufferers. This work continues as an exciting example of fiction informing science. To complement this theme, the following essay uses Murdoch’s work allegorically, studying plot and character from A Word Child (1987) to develop a multifaceted analogy that illustrates the current mechanistic theories of Alzheimer’s disease. Though there are still notable gaps in the present understanding of Alzheimer’s (most urgently we require a cure) scientists have now reached a consensus on the basic pattern of events that marks its path, which begins long before any symptoms are observed and ends in death from secondary respiratory complications.2 It is this sequence of events that I will describe in the following pages, drawing on examples from A Word Child to explain some physiological principles. A Word Child lends itself to this type of analysis for reasons that have, perhaps, lessened its popularity with critics. Though repetitive, cyclical plots abound in Murdoch’s novels, A Word Child probably offers the most obvious example. A.S. Byatt, for example, feels duped by the novel because expectations aroused by ‘the patient and delicate introductory analysis’ of its protagonist, Hilary Burde, are not borne out by the 204
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emerging plot which she describes as ‘an adventure story with [. . .] contrived repeated relationships’.3 It is precisely these symmetrical constraints on the freedom of Hilary Burde that facilitate my analogy with Alzheimer’s disease and its repetitive cycles of pathology. The possibility that such metaphors are frequently oversimplifications, and often misleading, is put forward in A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman (2002) when a fictional cognitive psychologist from La Jolla, Hodder Pinsky, warns of the pitfalls of analogy in his opening address to the Body-Mind Conference. Giving various examples, mostly pertaining to thought and memory, he suggests that ‘difference was endlessly more instructive than the analogy’. And the tetralogy’s heroine, Frederica Potter, uses her brain, eyes and ears to digest Pinsky’s opinions, and marvels at how capably she exploits these physical faculties while their actual workings elude her. Frederica illustrates how we can all use our senses (or contract diseases) without understanding how they work. But since we are all manifestations of science it might be useful to attempt to construct analogies that can help us comprehend how such devastating processes as Alzheimer’s work. While understanding the differences, of which there are many, between this fiction-based analogy and the bodily process whose substance it allows us to picture, this paper is designed to stimulate discussion for both artists and scientists.
Plot unfolding The ‘word child’, Hilary Burde, is a man who transcends the academic and social but not the psychological legacies of his underprivileged background. The son of a poor uneducated mother (who dies very young) and an unknown father, his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (my diagnosis) is arrested and his delinquency harnessed by a mentor in the shape of inspirational French and Latin teacher, Mr Osmand. This nurturing gives rise to a blossoming academic career which is prematurely curtailed by a scandalous incident involving his infatuation with a senior colleague’s wife (Anne Jopling) and events leading to her death for which Hilary is responsible. Following this fall from grace, and a period of physical and mental dysfunction, he adopts a mundane existence, working in a government department (‘it boots not which’! [p. 6]) punctuated by such idiosyncracies as always doing certain things on specific days of the week and futilely riding the Inner Circle line of the London Underground system, stopping, sometimes, for alcoholic refreshment at Sloane Square or Liverpool Street stations. After one and a half decades of an emotional
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plateau, his obsessive routine is interrupted by the reappearance of Gunnar Jopling (now equipped with a new wife, Lady Kitty), who comes to manage the same Government Department. Inevitably, Hilary falls in love with this wife as well, and accidentally effects her death too. All principal characters wind up miserable or dead. In subsidiary plots Hilary has a long-suffering and devoted sister Crystal who has an on-off relationship with his work underling, Arthur, whom she eventually marries despite being simultaneously in love with both Gunnar Jopling (who, while under the influences of alcohol and trauma, relieved her of her virginity the night his first wife died) and Clifford Larr (friend and esteemed boss of Hilary, victim of an undisclosed secret sorrow, who had possibly been romantically involved with Christopher, Hilary’s musical, Buddhist flat-mate and who commits suicide in the end). Hilary also has a theatre-obsessed girlfriend called Thomasina Uhlmeister (Tommy), who ought to leave him but wants to marry him; his flat-mate Christopher has an affair first with Laura Impiatt (wife of Hilary’s boss, Freddie – they entertain Hilary on Thursdays) but ultimately, in a surprise move, marries Biscuit (Lady Kitty’s Indian maid and messenger).
Protein folding – a fine balance Within the course of these events, Hilary has to make some tough decisions, and there are usually significant pros and cons to consider each time. Often, difficulty arises when the collective arguments for and against seem equally weighty. The following table outlines some factors affecting, for example, Hilary’s dilemma of whether to marry Tommy; I will use the following table to illustrate the ways in which the proteins in our body exist in a similarly precarious state of indecision. Pros
Cons
Would end T’s persistent nagging T intelligent and engaging T loves H H’s trueloves are unavailable T would look after H Would make T happy Crystal free to marry Arthur (good aspects)
Victory for T difficult to swallow T infuriating at times H does not love T H’s love lies elsewhere H would give up bachelor existence T’s happiness potentially irritating to H Crystal free to marry Arthur (bad aspects)
Further forays into the realms of psychiatry would no doubt provide a more exhaustive list, but my point is that there are major influences
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on both sides and yet the outcome depends on a minor tipping of the scales one way or the other. In this particular example the situation does seesaw between the two possible outcomes at different points in the story. Most of the proteins in our bodies exist in a similarly precarious state of indecision about whether to adopt useful mechanical shapes or flounder like strings of beads with the clasps undone. While the Second Law of Thermodynamics urges them to tend towards maximum selfish disorder (Hilary’s cons or in scientific terms, entropy), enthalpic forces remind them that they are better off with their water-loving parts on the outside and their water-hating parts closeted in their dry interiors (Hilary’s pros) and remind them also that every negative charge becomes agitated without the companionship of a positive charge. Although this fragile stability may sound like an evolutionary design flaw (as Hilary’s self-centred introspection might be a by-product of his potentially advantageous superior intellect), in fact, it is vital to our continued dynamic development. For example, sometimes we require one of our cells to divide once and so we employ a protein machine called a ‘growth factor’ to facilitate this division. If this protein remained in its working condition for too long our cells might continue to divide yielding a tumour. In just such a way, Murdoch’s moral philosophy demands that such self-centred introspection should be transformed into a meditation on the other, in this case Tommy, or it develops into neurosis or paranoia. Therefore, we need to be able to remove the machine as soon as it has performed its function and this can require a shape change followed by physical clearance. Our proteins can only be marginally stable to facilitate their rapid turnover, but this leaves them vulnerable and almost every human disease results from unwarranted changes in protein stability.
Alzheimer’s – the protein culprits Just as, left unattended, Hilary’s self-absorbed indecisiveness results in misapprehensions, an invasive paranoia that destabilizes him mentally, and wreaks havoc with his relationships by causing disruptive tangles, so does, mutatis mutandis, protein misbehaviour. In a cascade of activity, which gets underway up to twenty years before symptoms present themselves, a normal bodily protein, of undiscovered function, called app (beta-amyloid precursor protein) is aberrantly chopped in two places by two different pairs of molecular scissors. The resulting fragments adopt a rogue conformation and stack upon each other to form invasive threads
208 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
called amyloid fibrils which weave their way through brain tissue wreaking havoc with thought and memory. In response to this nerve-damage the body activates a signal which adds large amounts of a negatively charged phosphate to an ordinarily useful soluble intraneuronal protein called tau which then precipitates into neurofibrillary tangles which disrupt nerve cells in a similar way to that seen in Parkinson’s disease. The combination of -amyloid which accumulates in the extracellular spaces between nerve cells and the tangles inside the nerves themselves causes the observed sequence of cognitive impairments that characterizes Alzheimer’s disease. Similarly, the combination of obsessive behaviour, guilt and indecisiveness characterizes the moral degeneracy that causes Hilary’s tragedies. His state of mind serves as an adequate analogy for the degeneration caused in the human mind by protein.
The central dogma transcription DNA
translation RNA
protein
This diagram illustrates how proteins are the practical end-products of a well-oiled process whereby our genes (which are the stable DNA codes for all the physiology that keeps us going) are transcribed into disposable RNA templates which are modified to suit the particular cause and then translated into protein machines which carry out our cellular functions. This process can be visualized by alluding to Murdoch’s lament against ‘loss of persons’ in twentieth-century fiction. She suggests that when we recall great nineteenth-century novels ‘we are not remembering Tolstoy and George Eliot, we are remembering Dolly, Kitty, Stiva, Dorothea and Casaubon’,4 and she attempts to emulate the great nineteenth-century realists in her construction of character. Proteins are the Kittys and Dorotheas (and Hilarys) of the biological realm to the extent that they are the manifestations of complex design set free into the world to be buffeted by reality, and can fulfill the moral purposes of the author only by being made to interact with other characters. The events leading to protein or character synthesis, however, offer many levels of control that begin with the transcriptional process (authorial control) which decides which genes will be used, and include the splicing of the RNA transcript into a variant which will yield the required protein. Once a gene has been copied into its disposable RNA format, protein ‘scissors’ can cut down the RNA or chop bits out to encode
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whichever version of the protein end-product is required. This provides yet more scope for variety. In Murdoch’s fiction it is her characters that gain lives of their own and make their mark on readers while Murdoch herself metaphorically shrinks into the background. Despite Alzheimer’s disease having a genetic component, it is proteins, like the characters, that come to the fore, and do the damage. If analysis of character leads to the moral core of the novel, so study of protein will simultaneously provide us with information required to develop a cure for Alzheimer’s. While the root causes of many genetic diseases (including Parkinson’s and Huntington’s) were identified by comparing the DNA of affected families to find common sequence errors, Alzheimer’s disease is unusual in that its cause was discovered through a top-down approach. Scientists worked backwards, utilizing proteins isolated from the amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles found in Alzheimer’s victims to trace the offending genes. Some people are genetically predisposed to develop Alzheimer’s because they have mutations in the genes for either app itself or the molecular scissors or other proteins which affect the process in some way, leaving them more vulnerable to amyloidogenesis. Current therapeutic avenues include developing a vaccine against -amyloid and designing drugs to stabilize the uncut form of app among many others.
Forces of nature The method of describing character in terms of degrees of freedom was employed by Murdoch in The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, where she criticizes T.S. Eliot for failing ‘to distinguish between two senses of ‘free’: ‘free’ as meaning ‘independent of the author’ and ‘free’ as meaning ‘independent-minded’ (p. 276) and in Against Dryness (1961), where she discussed personal freedom in the context of its interplay with ‘the transcendence of reality’.5 This theme was expanded by Byatt in her book Degrees of Freedom (1965) in which she chronologically examined Murdoch’s novels and identified varying degrees of freedom in her characters. A Word Child spans a fair gamut of power struggles against oppressive relationships (both filial and abusive), social structure, the elements and the author. These varying levels of control and forces pulling characters in every direction find parallels in the world of thermodynamics and the wide range of energetic forces that determine whether proteins adopt useful or diseased shapes.
210 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
With the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 we now know the sequence of every human gene and, by extrapolation, the sequence of every human protein, since three consecutive letters in a DNA sequence encode one letter of the corresponding protein sequence. While DNA only really comes in one shape, the famous ‘double helix’, proteins exist in a wide range of shapes and sizes which provide their unique properties and specific functions. Applying concepts of entropy (tending towards maximum disorder) and enthalpy (ordered freedom through cooperation with environment) to Hilary Burde, this paper proceeds to analyse his personal behaviour and his interactions with the ancillary characters in A Word Child. The regularity of Hilary’s habits, for example, while inconveniencing those around him, also affords them the liberty to conduct their affairs in his absence and ignorance of them. Similarly, energetic favourability is a juggling act between an entity, be it ‘self’ or protein, and the ‘other’ (humans, proteins, water) in its immediate vicinity.
Free as a Burde If, at the time of writing his story, Hilary were to exercise his ultimate entropic energy and indulge in the utmost freedom with no regard for his surroundings, he would probably commit suicide: ‘Not to have been born is undoubtedly best’, he opines early on in the novel, ‘but sound sleep is second best’ (p. 16).6 As an unfolded protein imposes pockets of order onto its solvent, maximizing its own entropy while decreasing that of the solution, Hilary’s suicide would produce localized and temporary effects on his fellow characters, Crystal, Tommy, Clifford, for example, and these would vary in intensity depending on their proximity to him and their individual temperaments. If proteins persist in occupying the entropically favourable unfolded state, they usually forfeit their ability to do anything useful (since their functions generally depend on their mechanical folded shapes) and the body retaliates against this lack of contribution by invoking the ‘unfolded protein response’ a procedure which sends the errant proteins hurtling to their doom down the cellular recycling chute which chops them up to be made into new proteins. To combat this flagrant anthropomorphizing, I feel obliged to point out that proteins are at the mercy of their chemical composition and are not equipped with decision-making abilities, though some may say the same of Hilary, labelling him a puppet-victim of his particularly trying nature/nurture combination.
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Hilary does not commit suicide because, on balance, it makes more sense to satisfy his enthalpic inclinations and compromise his absolute entropic freedom in order to interact favourably with his surroundings, favourably, that is, in the sense of satisfying his need to indulge in guilt, self-torture and pity: ‘Had I ever considered marrying Tommy [. . .] an equivalent of the suicide I could not commit because of Crystal?’ (p. 44). Such a marriage would constitute the precise opposite of entropic freedom and it is strange that he equates it with death. Hilary’s desires change as he ages and, as he contemplates the future after his cold, watery run-in with the Thames (which kills Lady Kitty), he remarks, ‘the deepest me, who knew of no-one else, was desperate to survive’ (p. 382). Did the enthalpic then eclipse the entropic? Like app, which comes to a subtle rearrangement of its shape based on changing energetic needs, Hilary readjusts his level of functionality in society in response to his changing freedom requirements. Interestingly, there is a direct parallel between Hilary’s ongoing, internal suicide debate and the behaviour of Alzheimer’s disease proteins. Clumps of tau from the nerves of post-mortem Alzheimer’s patients are found to be tagged with ubiquitin (the label that cells use to mark proteins for destruction) implying that the cell has recognized the protein’s ‘decision’ to remove itself but the process has broken down and instead the ‘dying’ tau lingers and festers causing obstruction and disease, as does Hilary to his nearest and dearest. Three suicides are committed in A Word Child. Of two out of three we, in essence, learn only that they occur, though the news of them promotes such a wealth of unavoidable speculation that in retrospect it is hard to remember how little solid information we are actually given. Tristram, the only son of Gunnar and Anne Jopling, aged four at the time of his mother’s death, takes his own life at the age of sixteen. Mr Osmand, alone and abandoned by society, takes a fatal overdose of sleeping pills after seeking out his old protégé and finding him in a deplorable state. Unfortunately, the measurable effects of the best documented suicide in the novel, that of Clifford Larr, are limited to Hilary’s distressed visit to St Stephen’s church, of which T.S. Eliot had once been the warden. It is also difficult to isolate the disasters caused by Clifford’s suicide from all the other disasters that have befallen Hilary. The same can be said of the impact of Tristram’s death on Gunnar. One hopes that others, in addition to Hilary, suffered ill effects from Clifford’s suicide but if they did not then it was certainly the most energetically favourable course of action.
212 Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment
A wider analogy On a grander scale one can envisage the entire story of A Word Child as analogous to the Alzheimer’s disease mechanism. Picture Hilary Burde as app – he has potential for a normal function in life whose details are unclear and never realized because he is broken by two different devastating events, namely, his falling for two different inappropriate women and events leading to their respective deaths. Both Mrs Joplings, who start as innocent bystanders and functional members of society (analogous to the protein tau), change and are changed as a result of their interactions with the troubled and troublesome Hilary Burde. They become disorientated and their roles are thrown into question until death eventually removes them from the frame, while their emotional legacy continues to do damage. One might see Gunnar Jopling, of whom we learn relatively little, as the human whole who is incrementally torn apart by the tumult of influences exerted by the pathogens described above.
Cooperative symmetry The spiral shape features heavily in Alzheimer’s disease, from the double helix of DNA strands that encode the proteins, app and tau, to the shape of the amyloid fibrils from whose presence the disease is diagnosed and the neurofibrillary tangles that crowd the nerve cells from within. Each of these helices is built gradually from its constituent macromolecules in repeating cooperative cycles. This can be a natural, stable and necessary process like the building of the DNA double helix, or a negative and destructive sequence as in the case of assembling amyloid fibrils and neurofibrillary tangles. The plot of A Word Child contains many levels of symmetry, contrasting the static circularity of the Inner Circle line (with its two points of vulnerability – the bars at Liverpool Street and Sloane Square – which precipitate some crucially bad decisions on Hilary’s part) and the perimeter of the Royal Parks (which define the geographical boundaries of the story and constitute solid and necessary cycles analogous to those of the DNA double helix) with the spiralling progression of Hilary’s rigid schedule, the sine wave of emotional peaks and troughs he imposes on Crystal and Tommy, among others, and the ultimate repetitive manslaughter of the first and second Mrs Joplings. These latter equilibria, like those governing the Alzheimer’s disease state, inevitably break down as the system tends towards disorder. Thus the rigid repetitive
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structure of A Word Child also mirrors the cumulative events that characterize the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
Notes 1. Of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College, London. 2. For a thorough and readable review, see D.J. Selkoe, Annals of Internal Medicine, 140 (2004), 627–38. 3. A.S. Byatt, ‘The Writer and her Work’, in Degrees of Freedom (London: Vintage 2004), pp. 296–336. 4. ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959), in EM, pp. 261–86. 5. ‘Against Dryness’ (1961), EM, p. 293. 6. A Word Child (London: Triad/Panther, 1976).
Index Adams, Tim, 137 Aesthetics, 7, 17, 109–10, 126–7 Alcoff, Linda Martin, 8, 181–3, 185 Ali, Monica, 121 Altorf, Marie, 8, 173, 186n Alzheimer’s, 9, 119–20, 204–13 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 8, 17–18, 72, 83n, 178–9 Anselm, 23, 25, 28, 30, 49–50 Antonaccio, Maria, 4, 6, 22n, 58n, 70–1n, 98–9n, 184, 186n Aristotle, 15, 17, 37, 88 Arnold, Matthew, 158 Art, 1–3, 7, 11, 15, 17, 37, 63, 89–93, 95, 97, 101, 104–5, 116, 126–8, 130, 132–3, 149–59, 165, 169, 196 Askesis, 87, 94–5, 97–8, 172 Attention, xi, 5, 17, 33, 62–3, 72, 76–7, 81–3, 90–2, 94, 96–7, 138, 140, 149, 157, 172 Augustine, 88 Austen, Jane, 136, 153
Brophy, Brigid, 199 Buddha, 30, 34, 38–9, 41–2, 44n Buddhism, 5, 19, 30, 36, 38–9, 41, 44n, 54, 195 Bultmann, Rudolf, 36 Burke, Jr., John J., 118, 122n Burne-Jones, Edward, 127 Butler, Judith, 1, 8, 165, 174n Byatt, Antonia Susan, 11n, 115–7, 119, 134n, 145, 204, 209
Backus, Guy, 122n, 185n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 119, 196 Balogh, Thomas, 191 Barrie, J.M., 193 Barthes, Roland, 1–2, 104–5, 108, 110, 111n, 159n Baudrillard, Jean, 103 Bayard, Pierre, 111n Bayley, John, 119–20, 126, 132, 135n, 191, 200, 201n Bennett, Andrew, 120 Billingham, Susan E., 144–5, 147n Bloom, Harold, 6, 116–7, 122 Booker Prize, The, 117–8, 204 Botticelli, 116, 127 Bowie, Malcolm, 189, 200–1n Bradbury, Malcolm, 111n, 117, 120, 134n, 190, 200–1n Brookner, Anita, 119, 121
Caen, Conference at, 117 Canetti, Elias, xvii, xixn, 191, 194, 197–8, 203n Canonicity, 1, 6, 115–22 Carter, Angela, 119 Cavell, Stanley, 51, 59n Cézanne, Paul, 91, 94, 127 Chatman, Seymour, 111n Chekhov, Anton, 104, 111n Childs, Peter, 159 Christ, 30, 32, 34, 36–43, 44n, 49 Christianity, 5, 19–20, 24, 30–4, 35–43, 44n, 50, 54–5, 90, 110, 130 Clark, Robert, 122n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, xviii, 197, 203n Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 143 Conradi, Peter J., xixn, 6, 8–10, 58–9n, 87–8, 95, 97, 98n, 110, 117–9, 138, 143–5, 152, 168, 171, 177 Consciousness, 7, 17, 19, 35–6, 38–9, 42–3, 48–9, 60–4, 66, 70, 72–3, 77, 80, 89–90, 94–8, 138, 149 Contingency, 2, 33, 43, 51, 54, 129, 132, 134, 144, 196 Cunningham, Valentine, 9–10, 11n, 134, 135n, 159n De Beauvoir, Simone, 175, 177–8 Delillo, Don, 110 Derrida, Jacques, 1–2, 35–6, 43, 44n Descartes, René, 29–30, 57
214
Index 215 Detweiler, Robert, 122n Diamond, Cora, 26, 34n Dickens, Charles, xiv–xviii, xviiin, 4 Dipple, Elizabeth, 118, 140–2, 144, 147n, 168, 174n Dooley, Gillian, 3, 159n, 185n Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xvi, 196, 198 Drabble, Margaret, 119–20 Eagleton, Terry, 2, 10, 144, 159n Eden, Edward, 146 Eliot, George, 132, 208 Eliot, T.S., 209, 211 Ethics, 7, 10, 15–22, 27, 40, 60–6, 74, 89, 92–3, 95, 97, 109–10, 116, 163, 169, 179–80 Ferrari, G.R.F., 174n Fitzgerald, Penelope, 199 Foot, Philippa, 8, 187–9 Foucault, Michel, 1, 8, 163–73 Fowler, Alistair, 116, 122n Fraenkel, Eduard, 191, 198 Franco, F., 44n Frankfurt, Harry, 70n Freud, Sigmund, 31, 61, 80, 90, 96, 104–5, 134, 155, 190–2, 194–6, 198–9, 200n Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 36 Gale, Patrick, 121 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, 122n Gauguin, Paul, 49 Gaunilo, 28 Gender, 8, 154, 163–73, 175–85 Genette, Gérard, 111n Gide, Andre, 198 God, 5, 19–20, 23–34, 36–9, 41, 43, 47, 149 Goertz, D., 146n Golding, William, xvi, 118 Good, xv, xvii, xix, 16, 18–22, 29–33, 35–40, 43, 47–51, 58, 64, 67, 69, 88, 90, 96, 98, 195 Gordon, David, J., 90, 98n Greene, Graham, 36, 118 Gregson, Ian, 144–5, 147n Griffin, Gabriele, 177, 185n Grimshaw, Tammy, 8, 175
Hale, Sheila, 174n Hampl, W.S., 171, 174n Hampshire, Stuart, 67–8, 71n, 74, 84n Harris, Wendell V., 116, 118, 122n Hartshorne, Charles, 25 Hayter, Alethea, 199 Head, Dominic, 7, 9–10, 11n, 121, 123n Heidegger, Martin, 34n Hicks, David, 195 Hinduism, 5, 19, 36, 38–9, 41 Hobson, Harold, 175 Hogle, Jerrold, 111n Hollinghurst, Alan, 117 Holmes, Richard, 197, 200, 203n Holocaust, the, 40, 42 Imagination, xviii, 4, 15, 17–20, 31–2, 38, 47–50, 53, 56, 58n, 93–5, 97, 132, 152, 154 Iris (Film), 6, 120 Iris Murdoch Studies Centre, the, 121, 123n James, Henry, 7, 124–34, 157 Johnson, Deborah, 143, 147n, 177, 185n Jones, Ernest, 199 Joyce, James, 98 Judaism, 36, 40, 42 Kant, Immanuel, 24–5, 34n, 53, 58, 150 Keats, John, 197, 203n Kermode, Frank, 116–7, 122n Kolodny, Annette, 122n Language, 2, 4, 9, 27–8, 31, 35, 41, 92, 103, 128, 144–5 Le Doeuff, Michèle, 8, 182–5 Lee, Hermione, 189 Lessing, Doris, 119 Levenson, Michael, 109, 111n Lewin, Jane E., 111n Literary Canon, 116, 118, 122n Literary Gothic, 106 Lodge, David, 143, 147n London, xvi, xviii, 124, 195 Lovibond, Sabina, 181 Lyotard, Jean-François, 110, 111n
216 Index MacIntyre, Alasdair, 182 Mackinnon, Donald, 191, 198 Malcolm, Norman, 25–8, 34n, 47 Marx, Karl, 37 McEwan, Ian, 7–8, 117, 121, 148–60 McWilliam, Candia, 117 Metanarrative, 110 Metaphysics, 10, 19, 36, 39, 50 Midgley, Mary, 190, 178–80, 185n Mitchell, Barbara, xv Mitchell, Juliet, 195 Mole, Christopher, 5, 18, 58n, 70n Momigliano, Arnoldo, 191, 198 Mooney, Bel, 120 Montaigne, Michel de, 61, 70n Moran, Richard, 71n Morris, Jan, 119 Morrison, Toni, 145 Mulhall, Stephen, 34n, 59n Munro, Alice, 136 Murdoch, Iris, Acastos, 35, 40 Accidental Man, An, xvi, xixn, 5, 47, 51–3, 55–6, 58, 129, 141–3, 194 ‘Against Dryness’, 116, 132, 209 ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’, 100–1, 104–5 Bell, The, xvi, 6, 104–10, 118, 128, 204 Black Prince, The, xvi, 7, 101, 104, 117, 127, 129–30, 134, 148–60, 192, 194–5, 197, 199 Book and the Brotherhood, The, 6, 40, 108, 119, 127 Bruno’s Dream, xvi, xviii, 197 ‘Darkness of Practical Reason, The’, xixn ‘Ethics and the Imagination’, 44n Fairly Honourable Defeat, A, xvi, 128, 133, 139, 198 Fire and the Sun, The, 127–8 Flight from the Enchanter, The, xvi, 193, 198 Good Apprentice, The, 8, 40, 104, 118, 158, 192, 195 Green Knight, The, xv-xvi, 118–20, 158 Heidegger Manuscript, 34n
Henry and Cato, 40–1, 118, 127 ‘Idea of Perfection, The’, 63, 124, 183 Italian Girl, The, 141 Jackson’s Dilemma, 204 Jerusalem, xv Message to the Planet, The, 40, 42, 118–20, 193 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 11n, 23, 33, 35, 64, 93, 126, 144, 178 Nice and the Good, The, xv, xvii, 78, 137 Nuns and Soldiers, 40–1, 128–30, 133 ‘On “God” and “Good”’, 65 Philosopher’s Pupil, The, 40, 192–4 Red and the Green, The, xvi, 124 Sacred and Profane Love Machine, The, xv, 101, 127, 195 Sandcastle, The, xvi, 124, 197 Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, xixn, 116 Sea, the Sea, The, xvi, 41, 101, 104, 117, 120–1, 129, 194, 197–8, 204 Severed Head, A, xv-xvi, 101, 109, 190, 195 Sovereignty of Good, The, 5–6, 17, 22n, 59n, 60, 64, 68, 72, 77–8, 88–9, 93, 95, 97, 184 ‘Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts, The’, 77, 184 ‘Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, The’, 116, 128, 209 Time of the Angels, The, xvi, 129, 152 Under the Net, xv–xvi, 116, 124, 127, 129, 133, 140, 193–4, 204 Unicorn, The, xv–xvi, 117 Unofficial Rose, An, xv, 119, 124–6, 133, 192 ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, 101, 107, 109 Word Child, A, 9, 104, 109, 134, 194, 204–13 Music, 116 Nagel, Thomas, 51 Narrative, 100–10 Negative Theology, 26, 29, 41, 43 Nicol, Bran, 2, 6, 152
Index 217 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51 Noakes, Jonathan, 160n Nussbaum, Martha, 17, 22n, 70n, 88–9, 98, 181, 186n Oates, Joyce Carol, 136 O’Connell, Alex, 146n Ontological Argument, 23, 25, 29–31, 49 Ontological Proof, 5, 19, 27, 29–30, 47, 50 Orwell, George, xiv–xvi, xviiin, 119 Pannikar, Raimundo, 42, 44n Parmenides, 37 Peter Pan, xixn, 9, 193–5 Plato, 15, 17, 31–32, 37, 47, 49, 51, 66, 87–91, 98, 127–8, 133, 163–73, 192 Pre-Socratics, 36 Proust, Marcel, 158 Pynchon, Thomas, 110 Queneau, Raymond, xv, 195 Raimer, Elizabeth, 141, 147n Ramanathan, Suguna, 2, 5, 17, 44n, 168, 172, 174n Ramon, Alex, 7, 121 Reader-response, 102–6, 108–9, 150, 152–5, 157–8, 200 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, xvii, xixn Reynolds, Margaret, 160n Rich, Adrienne, 8, 164, 173n Rilke, Rainer Maria, 91, 94, Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 111n Rowe, Anne, 7, 121, 124, 134n Rowe, Margaret Moan, 176, 185n Sagare, S.B., 173n Sage, Lorna, 117, 120, 130, 135n Sartre, Jean-Paul, xvii, xixn, 17, 20, 101 Schweiker, William, 22n, 98n Scott, James Henderson, 193, 195 Selkoe, D.J., 213n Seurat, Georges, 127 Shakespeare, William, xvi, xviii, 197, 199, 202n
Shields, Carol, 7, 121, 136–47 Smith, Zadie, 121 Smollett, Tobias, xv Socrates, 53, 79, 192 Sodre, Ignes, 119 Soul, the, 30, 39, 41, 66, 90, 197 Spice, Nicholas, 119 Steiner, Franz Baermann, 191, 198 Strawson, Peter, 51, 58–9n Taylor, Charles, xvi, 16, 22n, 70–1n Taylor, D.J., 119–20 Theology, 1, 4–5, 15, 19, 35–43, 90, 116 Thompson, Frank, 195 Tillich, Paul, 36 Tintoretto, 125, 133 Titian, 127–8 Todorov, Tzvetan, 103, 111n Toibin, Colm, 121 Tolstoy, Leo, 132, 208 Tracy, David, 22n Turner, Joseph, 128 Turner, Nick, 6, 136 Updike, John, xvii Van Dine, S.S., 103 Vice, Samantha, 5, 18, 58n, 73 Virtue Ethics, 15, 18, 47, 74 Vision, 3, 15–8, 48, 53, 62–7, 81, 90–7, 157 Void, the, 33, 57 Warner, Eric, 173n Warner, Marina, 117 Warnock, Mary, 8, 178–80, 185–6n Watchel, Elaine, 147n Waugh, Evelyn, 36 Waugh, Patricia, 146 Weil, Simone, 33, 149, 172 Williams, Bernard, 16, 22n, 51 Wilson, A.N., 117, 120–1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 26, 28, 56, 178 Woolf, Virginia, 136, 163, 178, 189 Wordsworth, William, 194 Young British Artists, 119
