Philosophical and aesthetic background of Iris Murdoch’s writing.

Jean Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) had a distinguished career as a philosopher and novelist. She has also written several plays and published a volume of poetry, A Year of the Birds (1978). Her intellectual interests include music, painting, Shakespeare, Plato, Kant, and Existentialism.

LIFE: Murdoch was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. Her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, came from a sheep-farming background in Co. Down; her mother, Irene Alice Richardson, who trained as an opera singer until her daughter was born, was from Dublin. Thus, her background is Irish, which was important to her.

In 1978 Murdoch stated, “My Irishness is Anglo-Irishness in a very strict sense... People sometimes say to me rudely, ‘Oh! You’re not Irish at all!’ But of course I’m Irish. I’m profoundly Irish and I’ve been conscious of this all my life, and in a mode of being Irish which has produced a lot of very distinguished thinkers and writers”.

Her father’s job in the Civil Service caused the family to move to London, where Murdoch grew up. From school Murdoch went to Oxford University, to read ‘Greats’ at Somerville College between 1938 and 1942. She returned to Oxford to teach philosophy in 1948.

In 1963, she quit teaching and devoted all her energy to writing. She produced almost a novel a year, achieving a total of 27, so some critics (e. g. Lorna Sage) described her as a “ Victorian writing machine ” of sorts.

Most of Iris Murdoch’s fiction is focused on ethical and moral topics, partly due to her philosophical training, though she kept denying that philosophy, or the Catholic faith, had any effect upon her novels.

Though Iris Murdoch wrote a set of theoretical works, in which she stated her own philosophical and aesthetic views. These are: Sartre. Romantic Rationalist (1953), The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts (1967), The Fire and the Sun. Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977), Acastos. Two Platonic Dialogues (1986), Above the Gods (1987), The Existentialist Political Myth (1989), Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992).

The analysis of these works gives the opportunity to follow the evolution of Murdoch’s moral and philosophical interests, which are reflected in her novels. They have focused on the problematic character of the human situation, through which man is continually confronted with diverse possibilities or alternatives. Man makes himself what he is by his choices and actions; choices of ways of life (Kierkegaard) or of particular actions (Sartre). This bias in favour of existentialism yielded her a reputation of one of Sartre’s followers.

By the time Iris Murdoch began to write, she was a convinced adherent of existentialism in philosophy with its vision of individual experience as the source of all knowledge, and its emphasis on the loneliness and isolation felt by an individual in the meaningless world of absurd.

Murdoch’s first published work, Sartre. Romantic Rationalist (1953), examines Sartre ’s philosophy, and the events in his personal life that led him to his conclusions, focusing on Sartre’s influential Being and Nothingness. It deals with three major philosophical problems, connected with Sartre’s views. These are: 1) the problem of language, claiming that people are not anymore able to accept the language as a means of communication and that the transparency of language is lost; 2) the problem of freedom and 3) the problem of aesthetic value.

For Murdoch “Sartre is profoundly and self-consciously contemporary, he has the style of the age”.

Similarities:

1) Like Sartre, Murdoch views man as a “lonely creature in an absurd world impelled to make moral decisions, the consequences of which are uncertain ”.

2) Like Sartre, Murdoch believes that writing is “above all else a collaboration of author and reader in an act of freedom”.

Though there are similarities, one may note some important differences between the two philosophers:

1) Murdoch rejected Sartre’s emphasis on the isolation and anguish of the individual in a meaningless world. She considers the individual always as a part of society, responsible to others as well as to herself or himself; and insists that freedom means respecting the independent being of others.

2) Unlike Sartre, Murdoch sees the claims of freedom and love as identical. She states that only when one is capable of love is one free.

Alongside Sartre, Iris Murdoch was greatly influenced by the ideas of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig J.J. Wittgenstein, which become the stimulus for the realization of the language problem and generally the sense of theorizing in Murdoch’s system of views and literary works. The basic concept for the philosophy of Wittgenstein is a “gap between vision and its verbalizing”. The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of truth (philosophy of silence) is already observed in Murdoch’s first novel Under the Net, which is based on Wittgenstein’s idea that we each build our own “net” or system for structuring our lives – “the net of language under which we may seek for what is real” (Murdoch).

Besides, Murdoch arrived at a form of neo-Platonism, arguing that the “Christian conception of God can be replaced with a neo-Platonic notion of the Good, being the background for her moral philosophy (the main concepts of which are Love and Good). Interpreting Plato, Murdoch writes, “The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God”.

Thus, Murdoch elaborated in her philosophical system the understanding of such concepts as Love and Freedom, Good and God, Art and True Artist, which found their futher treatment in her fiction.

Having not created her own philosophical system, Iris Murdoch, the follower of such philosophers as Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein, the researcher and critic of existentialism, belonged to the sphere of free mind handling, her world outlook is deeply philosophical: in the works of Murdoch-artist one can trace Murdoch-philosopher.

Murdoch’s characters and situations are the illustrations to her philosophical doctrines.

Although Murdoch repeatedly denounced the interpeters who persist in considering her novels disguised philosophical tracts, insisting that they be read for what they actually are, fictional works, Murdoch’s background as a philosopher is obvious in her fiction. Her novels often seem like dramatized philosophical debates on the nature of good and evil, on the conflict between rationality and sexuality, and on free will and determinism.

On the one hand, the novels of Iris Murdoch are considered to be philosophical and psychological, on the other hand – “ the novels of idea ”.

NOVELS:

1950s: Under the Net (1954), The Flight from the Enchanter (1955), The Sandcastle (1957), The Bell (1958).

1960s: A Severed Head (1961), The Unoficial Rose (1962), The Unicorn (1963), The Italian Girl (1964), The Red and the Green (1965), The Time of Angels (1966), The Nice and the Good (1968), Bruno’s Dream (1969).

1970s: A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), An Accidental Man (1971), The Black Prince (1973), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), A Word Child (1975), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, the Sea (1978).

1980s: Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989).

1990s: The Green Knight (1993), Jackson’s Dilemma (1995).

Peculiarities of style and method:

1) The most prolific of novelists Iris Murdoch is a writer whose work combines fabulation, symbolism, fantasy, magic realism, and metafiction, touching on complex, almost inarticulable, psychological states. Murdoch’s fiction is multi-layered and quite complex.

2) Her work addresses problems of representation, desire, and fantasy.

3) She explores concepts of freedom, goodness, intense suffering, moral choice, the power of fate, obsessive love and sexual desire celebrating the redemptive power of love while illustrating its fragility. Murdoch’s particular mastery is in representing the maelstrom of falling in love, which is the characteristic activity of nearly all her men and women, who somehow have time for busy professional careers in London while obsessively suffering convulsive love relationships.

4) Though intellectually sophisticated, her novels are often melodramatic and comic love stories.

5) Some of her novels rely upon magic, absurd passions, fantasy and gothic intrusions; this is all in the mode of romance. Iris Murdoch’s fiction has a way of exposing fears and insecurities. Suspense and a sense of death drive the plots of many of her novels. But for Murdoch suspense is not just a matter of plot. Murdoch’s novels are by turns “ intense and bizarre, filled with unpredictable plot twists ”.

6) Her novels often include upper middle class intellectual males caught in moral dilemmas, Anglo-Catholics with crises of faith, curiously “knowing” children and sometimes a powerful and almost demonic male “enchanter” who imposes his will on the other characters.

7) Her characters, almost always drawn from the intelligentsia or from literary, artistic, and theatrical circles, are often memorably eccentric.

8) She is noted for the gift of plotting, for intricate double plots.

9) Setting always plays a great role in Murdoch’s novels. Their settings are usually contemporary (Ireland or London), although the prevailing impression is one of timelessness.

10) Murdoch style consists also in “using a first person narrative almost in all her novels, but, rather than using a female voice, she relies on a male’s perspective. Some critics believe that in so doing, she is able to write less self-consciously”. Also, in using a first person narrator, Murdoch is able to develop the inner life of her protagonist. This limits the scope of the other characters in the story, however, because everything that happens is seen through the eyes of only one person.

11) Murdoch preferred to look back to 19^th-century English literature, which contained the traditional form of plot and conventional narrative formulas. Her novels are based on the real world. She is also exact in the naming of things and places.

12) It is difficult to give the clear definition of Iris Murdoch’s style or to associate her with some peculiar tradition. Murdoch was viewed as a realist, as a novelist-philosopher, even as a moral psychologist and the postmodern novelist.

Murdoch’s creation belongs to the tradition of English psychological novel of ideas, or psychological novel with philosophical depth.

Her model was the novel practised by the great Victorian novelists. “She wanted”, wrote her husband John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, “through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the atmosphere of her own original and created world – the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction”.

Harold Bloom, who ranks some of Murdoch’s novels alongside D.H. Lawrence’s, provides a brief summary of the features of her fiction, in which the fictional, the philosophical and the religious artfully merge:

“Was Murdoch too preoccupied with what her moral admirers call “ the search for human goodness ”? She was certainly a religious fabulist of a very original and unorthodox kind. By “ religious ” I mean something of that Romantic rationalism she found in Sartre but far more enduring in Plato. I don’t mean the Hermetist or Gnostic strain that appears so often throughout Western literature […]. Murdoch is her own revisionist of Plato, and intends to be friendlier to imaginative literature than Plato was. She certainly was aware of this danger, argued against Plato on behalf of art and desired above all to create characters as unlike herself as Shakespeare had done ”.

He continued, “ Austen, James, and Tolstoy were novelists: memorable characterization was crucial to their art. But great romance writers, like Stevenson, Kipling, Chesterton do not invest themselves in characters, but in story, imagination, visionary space. Murdoch is curiously mixed: she has the novelist’s concern with moral imagination and the romancer’s pragmatic disinterest in character. Her moral intensity and her London surfaces give us expectations appropriate to the realistic novel, but her personages belong to the typology of romance.

A very paradoxical Platonist, Murdoch may well have found her genius’s appropriate form in her overplotted romance-novels, a very mixed genre, yet perfectly expressive of her highly individual genius”.

In Murdoch’s essay Against Dryness, the author gives original novel theory, where she defines her point of view for the literature. In her essay, Murdoch divides novels into “journalistic” and “crystalline”, and claims that the main thing for literature is not the “clash of ideas and theories, but the creation of vivid and full characters”.

Iris Murdoch is the successor of at least two traditions – English fiction of the 19^th century from J. Austen to T. Hardy and intellectual fiction of the modern period from V. Woolf to Sartre. She valued the realist history of fiction, and considered it should be a fit house for free characters to live in. Robert Scholes called her novels “fabulations”: they are more concerned with ideas and ideals and less concerned with things.

Murdoch combined a variety of techniques, so that her novels usually contained the intrigue of a thriller, the twists of an adventure story, the dynamics of a romance tale, and the comic patterns of Shakespearean and Greek literature.

Iris Murdoch made debut in 1954 with her novel Under the Net. Although the novel called for enthusiastic comments, literary criticism in its reviews made a serious mistake. It was identified as the work of Angry Young Men, even though Murdoch was none of these things: the book takes its title from Wittgenstein; there are innumerable allusions to Sartre; there was evidence of the influence of the early Beckett.

In short the book drew a good deal on the tradition of French surrealism (regarding its atmosphere), and was also philosophically contemporary with the French existentialist novel, with which it conducts a kind of debate exploring the idea about freedom.

The narrator-protagonist, Jake Donaghue, is a writer concerned with his own silence and his relation to the world, and he is engaged on an obscure and absurd quest which results finally in some form of revelation about language and creativity. He exists in the world of philosophers and artists, scientists and critics. This is a hermetic world, which exists according to its own rules. It is a kind of a net with its theories, concepts and ideas.

Language is also a net. There are many debates about the nature and limits of language, the relationship between word and silence, act and image.

Silence speaks louder than words! In the novel the bearers of silence philosophy are Anna Quentin with the idea of mime theatre, a theatre without words (where words are useless), which she considers a pure art; and Hugo Belfounder with his idea of silent movie.

The word “ silence ” prevails in descriptions and conversations, thoughts and impressions of the night city and mime theatre. “Silencer” is a title of Jake’s first book.

A net is not only a language but a city of London with its streets and the dark waters of the Thames. London is acting here as an alive substance, netting Jake and other characters.

The novel is characterised by detailed descriptions, though there appears the impression of fantasy.

Besides, Under the Net can be read simply as a fascinating love story, a popular genre in English literature. Some intricate links bond all the characters of the novel: Jake loves Anna, who loves Hugo, who loves Sadie, who loves Jake. Like a Shakespearian drama, unrequited love weaves through Murdoch’s first novel. Jake, who claims that he does not like people and would rather stay clear of relationships, accidentally falls for Anna, and though she gives into him from time to time, she is forever elusive. Anna instead becomes enthralled with Hugo, whose mind is like a drug for Anna. His thoughts liberate and inspire her. But Hugo falls in love with Anna’s sister Sadie, etc.

The novel is set in London, in a mime theatre, a film studio, a hospital and in Paris.

The Unicorn (1963), a gothic pastiche, is structured around a doubled narrative and focuses on how the act of interpretation (the reading of the story within the story) is conditioned by the literary presuppositions imposed on the embedded text by its (fictional) readers. The Unicorn (1963) can be read and enjoyed as a sophisticated Gothic romance, or as a novel with Gothic trappings, or perhaps as a parody of the Gothic mode of writing. Iris Murdoch borrows from the gothic tradition in literature to create a world of mystery and enchantment, and her plot relies heavily on surprise, suspense, and fragmented revelations of past actions and their present consequences. The isolated west coast of Ireland, with its ancient dolmens and megaliths, great cliffs of black sandstone, dark coastline, killing sea, dangerous bogs, caves, and underground rivers, provides the compelling setting of The Unicorn.

The Black Prince (1973) is a self-reflexive novel about links between fiction-making and fantasy. Its main protagonist is an aspiring writer. His search for creative power replays Marsyas’ musical competition with Apollo, while his sexual affairs reprise Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier. The protagonist’s first-person account offers two perspectives on events, since it oscillates between the perceptions of his younger self and his mature reflections. This doubled perspective is further complicated by competing accounts offered by other characters and by an editorial “frame” (two forewords and six postscripts) in which the tale is enclosed. The novel makes the question of narrative integral to its metafictional exploration of language, perception, and knowledge. It is, as the protagonist says of Hamlet, “a work endlessly reflecting upon itself, not discursively but in its very substance, a Chinese box of words as high as the tower of Babel, a meditation upon the bottomless trickery of consciousness and the redemptive role of words in the lives of those without identity, that is human beings”.

The Black Prince (1973) is a remarkable “study of erotic obsession, and the text becomes more complicated, suggesting multiple interpretations, when subordinate characters contradict the narrator and the mysterious “editor” of the book in a series of afterwords”.

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