Iris Murdoch – the author of novels, drama, philosophical criticism, critical theory, poetry, a short story, a pamphlet, a philosopher and a novelist

Iris Murdoch has written novels, drama, philosophical criticism, critical theory, poetry, a short story, a pamphlet but she is best known and most successful as a philosopher and a novelist. Al­though she claims not to be a philosophical novelist and does not want philosophy to intrude too openly into her novels, she is a Platonist and moral philosophy, aesthetics, and characterization are clearly interrelated in her novels.

Murdoch began to write prose in 1953. She soon became very popular with the English readers. Her novels Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter. The Sandcastle, The Unicorn, The Red and the Green, The Time of the Angels, An Accidental Man, The Black Prince, and many others are characterized by the deep inter­est in philosophical problems and in the inner world of the man. Iris Murdoch shows the loneliness and sufferings of the human being in the hostile world.

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. She attended school in Bristol and studied philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford, the two oldest universities in England. Then for many years Murdoch was teaching philosophy at Oxford. French writers and philosophers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett influenced her early writing. By the time she began to write Murdoch was a convinced adherent of the existentialist trend in philosophy and these prob­lems rule the focus of her attention in many of her novels. Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), has extensive existential derivations. She published two books on philosophy: Sartre, Romantic Rational­ist and The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Conceptions.

She always strived to be a realist in her novels and mentioned that not once in her interviews and critical essays on literature and style. Although honest, intelligent, and well written, the novels of Iris Murdoch nevertheless lack clear definition. Her manner was that of intricate weavings, blending both reality and dreams, and all that enveloped in a complicated psychological "pudding". Under the Net fits into the humorous pattern set by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim (1954) and John Wain in Hurry on Down (1953). Her Jake Donaghue of this novel is akin to Amis's Jim Dixon and Wain's Charles Lumley, in that he maintains his own kind of somewhat dubious integrity and tries to make his way without forsaking his dignity, and increasingly difficult accomplishment in a world which offers devilish rewards for less of integrity and dignity. Jake is an angry middle-aged man who mocks society and its respectability. He moves playfully around law and order; he does small things on the sly - swims in the Thames at night, steals a performing dog, sneaks in and out of looked apartments, steals food. His is a puerile existence in which he remains “pure" even while carrying on his adolescent activities.

Under the Net, Tke Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle, and The Bell established Iris Murdoch's point of view and method, and set up the major themes of her career: her wish to preserve in fiction the sense of the contingent, the unpredictability of human nature, the contraries of ordinary character, the intractability of the world where we live.

Murdoch's novels written in the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century such as A Severed Head. (1961), The Time of the Angela (1966), A Fairly Honorable Defeat (1970), The Sacred and Profane love Machine (1974), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976) are full of senseless crimes, horrors and intricate love af­fairs. The extreme situations in which she places her characters spring from the synthesis of two contradictory propositions that underlie her works. These propositions run as follows: "Everything must happen in accordance with the laws of logic therefore nothing that happens is intrinsically surprising" and "Everything that hap­pens is contingent, therefore it is free and involves a total response of the human personality, therefore it is always surprising." So the world of Iris Murdoch is a mixture of most of the elements of our everyday life and experience, and symbolic elements loaded with implications and puzzles. In her latest novels the writer's inlaid vision has become suppressed and obscured in a way by somewhat pessimistic approach to the individual and society.

Her characters are memorable primarily because they do have a realistic psychological and philosophical basis. Unlike those of many modern writers, Murdoch's characters exist independently, not as a reflection of their author, and she presents them, even demonic figures like Julius King in A Fairy Honourable Defeat, lovingly and without judgement. In keeping with her moral philosophy, few of Murdoch's characters possess correct vision, but many experience momentary enlightenment.

The Unicorn, one of Murdoch's best novels, gives a picture of different human passions and relationships. Marian Taylor, a young educated woman was asked as a private teacher to a family living in very lonely place. Very soon Marian begins to notice very strange, mysterious and unusual things about the place and the people.

Love is the dominant theme of Murdoch's later novels. They emphasize and aspire towards the truth-conveying capacity of art, for Murdoch believes that great art reveals truths for generations to come, and she insists on the artist's duty to tell truth as he sew it. Critics complain about unevenness, the need for editing, and intellectualism, but there is no denying the rich and varied texture of the Murdoch world, peopled with real and various characters.

The Bell. For Iris Murdoch, there are basically two kinds of people. There are those for whom life is desperate; they are deeply committed to whatever they are engaged in, and they can see noth­ing else. In their steadfastness, they may become grim and morbid. Then there are those for whom life has not settled into any fixed pattern; they are flexible and mobile, desirous of variety and will­ing to make changes. In the first group, we have Michael Meade, the leader of a lay religious community located near ah Anglican Order of nuns. In the second group, there is Dora, an easily dis­tracted young woman, who comes to the community with her youth­ful friend, Toby Gashe.

The conflict concerns the relations of the spirited, sensual and unintellectual Dora with her husband and later with the communi­ty, whose spirit is so completely different from her own. The clash between the two is inevitable, and Iris Murdoch chooses to define the conflict in terms of burlesque - a practical joke demonstrates Dora's need for self-expression at the expense of the community. The joke centers round a bell, a bell that comes with a legend from the past. In the legend, the bell of the then Benedictine order of nuns fell into the lake, the result of the Bishop's curse. The curse itself derived from the infidelity of a nun and her refusal to con­fess. When the bell flew into the lake, the guilty nun, overwhelmed by the demonstration of God's power of punishment, flew from the Abbey and drowned herself in the lake.

The present community is planning to install a bell of its own, and it occurs to Dora and Toby Cache that a bell they have located at the bottom of the lake should be substituted for the new one. The one at the bottom, they feel, is the bell of the legend; the substitution will provoke astonishment and also provide them with entertainment.

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