MORAL CONCERN IN SOME OF THE LATER NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH
by Laraine Christiana O'Connell, B.A. Hons.
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, Potchefstroomse Universiteit vir Christelike Hol:!r Onderwys, in partial ful-filment of the requirements for the degree of MAGISTER ARTIUM
Supervisor: Prof. W.J. de
v.
Prinsloo, M.A., B.Ed., D.Litt. 1983CONTENTS 1. 2 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Biographical Note •••••••••.••...•.•...• :. 1 1.2 Bibliographical Note •••••..•..•...•...••• 2 1. 3 Foreword .••••••••..••.•••••..• •-'• • . . . • • • . . 3
1.4 Iris Murdoch's place in the contemporary literary scene .. • • . . • • • . • . . • . . . • . . . • . 4
1.4.1 The state of the contemporary novel . . • • . • • • • . . . . • . • • • . • . . . • . . . 4
1.4.2 The early post-war period... 5
1.4.3 1.4.4 The 1950s The 1960s
..
..
...
..
.
..
"'....
.
...
...
.
1.4.5 The experimental potential of the' 6 8 English novel . • • • . • . • • • . . • . . . • . • 10
' 1.4.6 Realism and Fictionality •...•....• 15
1.4.7 Iris Murdoch's position... 19
MORAL THEMES IN THE NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH 31 2.1 Introduction... 31
2. 2 Didacticism . . . • . . • • • • • • . . . . • . . . 31 2. 3. Reader Response . • . . . • . • . . • . . . 36
3 A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE CHOICE OF SPECIFIC WORKS 43 4 EVALUATION OF CHOSEN WORKS ••.•••••.•••••.•... 49
4.1 The Time of the Angels .•..••.•..••... 49
4.2 Bruno's Dream •...•..•••••.••...•.••...•• 66
4. 3 A Word Child ...•.... · .• •.. ... 73
4.4 Henry and Cato . . . • . • • . . • . . . . • . . . • . 86
5 EVALUATION: An attempt at an assessment of Iris Murdoch's contribution to the twentieth century novel in general and of her moral concerns in
particular .••••.•••...••••.•••••••... , . • . . . 105 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY ••• • •••.•..•••••••••
o.
o
.. o
...
113 6.1 Primary Sources •..••••.•...•...•...• 1131 INTRODUCTION
1.1 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 15 July 1919. She grew up in London and was educated at Froebel Education Institute, London, and at Badminton School, Bristol. She attended Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1942, and Newnham College, Cambridge (1947 - 48), where she was a Sarah Smithson Student in philosophy.
Her studies were interrupted by war work. She was assistant principal in the Treasury, London from 1942 to 1944, and administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in London, Belgium and Austria from 1944 to 1946.
She was elected Fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford in 1948 and named Honourable Fellow in 1963. She was lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, 1963- 67. She was the recipient of the Black Memorial Prize, and the Whitbread Literary Award in 1974. She also received the Booker prize for The Sea, the Sea.
She became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975.
She married the writer John Bayley in 1956, and lives in a village near Oxford.
1.2 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Iris Murdoch is an unusually prolific writer, and since 1954 has published no fewer than twenty-one novels of vary-ing quality. In 1953 she published a philosophical study of Sartre, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. She has also published many philosophical articles and treatises, includ-ing The Sovereignty of Good, and The Fire and the Sun, the latter being primarily a study of Platonic concepts.
The fact that she has written so much has. led to a certain amount of preju~ice. Critics and reviewers tend to ques-tion whether a novelist can possibly publish so regularly, while maintaining a uniformly high standard. The novels she has written are, in order of publication:
Under the Net 1954
The Flight from the Enchanter 1956 The Sandcastle 1957
The Bell 1958 A Severed Head 1961 An Unofficial Rose 1962 The Unicorn 1963
The Italian Girl 1964 The Red and the Green 1965 The Time of the Angels 1966 The Nice and'the Good 1968 Bruno's Dream 1969
A Fairly Honourable Defeat 1970 An Accidental Man 1971
The Black Prince 1973
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine 1974 A Word Child 1975
3 Henry and Cato 1976
The Sea, the Sea 1978 Nuns and Soldiers 1980 The Philosopher's Pupil 1982
She has also published a book of verse entitled A Year of the Birds (1978).
1 • 3 FOREWORD
Iris Murdoch is concerned mainly with moral issues, reveal-ing a preoccupation with ethics. Rubin Rabinovitz, an American critic of Murdoch's work, points out that her fic-tional characters often find themselves in moral dilemmas that they are hard put to to solve, because they are be-lievers in faulty ideologies (Stade, 1976:271).
Miss Murdoch has carved out a very important place for her-self in contemporary literature, and her philosophical articles have been widely acclaimed.
In this dissertation I intend to illustrate the manner in which Iris Murdoch handles moral concern and how she expres-ses it through character, particularly in her later novels. I consider her later novels to be more mature, and more concerned with moral issues than her earlier ones. Although The Time of the Angels and Bruno's Dream do not really be-long, chronologically, to the group of later novels under discussion, they do thematically, and for that reason I have seen fit to include them.
4
1.4 IRIS MURDOCH'S PLACE IN THE CONTEMPORARY LITERARY SCENE
1.4.1 THE STATE OF THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL
The contemporary literary scene in England is so diverse that it is difficult to characterize. There seems to be a tendency among critics to relegate all post-war fiction to one category, and to label it "traditional", "unmodern", and "anti-experimental", implying that the English novel is completely out of step with modern trends. David Lodge says that there appears to be a commitment to realism in England, and something amounting to prejudice against non-realistic modes. He has reviewed the history of the novel in the twentieth century, and come to the conclusion that "it is difficult to avoid associating the restoration of literary criticism with a perceptible decline in artistic achievement" (1971:7-8). Rabinovitz remarks that English novelists are afraid of stepping out of line, of committing a faux pas, and that this fear results in mediocre art. He makes the accusation that all too often the novelist himself is a critic and formulates theories which favour his type of novel (Lodge, 1971:8). Malcolm Bradbury gives .an ironical account of contemporary criticism: "Two themes
are prevalent in this criticism, the first being that the novel is dead ••• and the second that the novel is not dead but fled; it is alive and well and living in America" (1973:167). Bradbury himself does not uncondition-ally subscribe to this view. Scholes, again, believes that
the novel is closer to disintegration than ever before (Lodge, 1971 :9).
5
According to contemporary criticism of the novel, mainly by American critics, it is only the English novel that has suf-fered regression, "that bears the marks of exhaustion, of provincialism, of reaction against experiment, a reversion to an outworn materiality or a traditional realism in a time of significant generic revolution" (Bradbury, 1973:167). Nevertheless, the English have gone on writing novels, re-verting, according to the critics, to eighteenth and nine-teenth century traditions, and "the novel was dead in the lowest and dullest sense: it was simply uninteresting" (Bradbury, 1973~170).
1.4.2 THE EARLY POST-WAR PERIOD
In most countries the Second World War seems to have consti-tuted a watershed. This coincided with the emergence of a new group of writers into a strange new post-war world: in a world "with new problems, a period of great social solven-cy, great human exposure, great cultural restructuring ••• the spirit of high formalism was hard to maintain in the presence of a changed experience and new political orders" (Bradbury, 1973:176). There was, in many different coun-tries, a reappearance of certain constituents of the modern-ist impulse: "its emphasis on play and game, its stress on art as forgery, its surreal and fabulous dimension" (Brad-bury, 1977:10), The following arguments were once more
6
stressed: "the insubstantiality or corruptibility of his-tory; the problems of establishing solid character in a world in which humanism was threatened; ••• the idea of the novel as realistic tale" (p. 10),
The existential novel emerged in France and Bradbury agrees that in England, after 1945, that is after the experimental stage which included writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, the novel showed every sign of re-asserting its realistic potential, its concern with social and moral mores. This constituted a reaction against the pre-war modernism. The experimental novels were repudiated and the writers who made the first impact seemed "un-avant-garde, indeed, anti-avant-garde" (1973:177). A particular kind of angry "social realism" seemed to have appeared in English fiction and this had a vast influence on subsequent criticism of the contemporary English novel.
1.4.3 THE 1950S
It is true that a group of novels appeared in the 1950s which set the tone for the age, a sort of social protest fiction, which includes works like William Cooper's Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), Angus Wilson's Hemlock and After (1951), John Wain's Hurry on Down (1953), Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954), Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954), John Braine's Room at the Top (1957), Allan Sillitoe's
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and David Storey's This Sporting Life (1961). Nearly all these books were
first novels by new writers (Bradbury, 1973:177).
Although there was undoubtedly a liberal revival in the 1950s, it must be stressed that many of the best writers were not ~ntrinsically anti-experimental, although they
7
were classified as such by critics who read them, resulting in a sort of aura of orthodoxy which seems, unjustly, to surround the post-war English novelist, for around this time there also appeared a good number of novels, of a de-cidedly avant-garde style, mainly by writers who had begun writing before the Second World War. There is a remarkable contrast between these two groups: "Where the experimental writers wrote from an avant-garde place and from a posture inviting high inquiry into formal means, and sustained their force and authent'icity on that basis, the others were apt to employ a more commonplace rhetoric, to live with a known language rather than to make one" {p. 178).
Bergonzi distinguishes between "liberal" and "totalitarian" forms of the novel, but regards the second as the more im-portant. He associates the change of the novel with the decline of liberalism in Western culture. The novel has traditionally had an association with liberalism and a con-cern for character, people and their freedom of action in a probable world. In the modernist experiment he sees "the first imaginative responses to a changing world view which involves the death of liberalism" (Bradbury, 1973:172). He holds that the English novel does not follow the same de-velopment. "Hence it has not spoken to the universally
anguished, depersonalized condition of modern man, and his harsh relations with modern reality" (p. 172). The tendency of English fiction has been to reach back to the past, both in subject-matter and in technique. "The English novelist has reached back towards the humanization of art, that con-sonance between the individual and the circumstantial so-cial web that textures nineteenth-century English fiction and gives special value to the notion of 'character' and that 'contingency' and 'opacity' of persons of which Iris Murdoch speaks in her essays" (p. 172).
It must be admitted that the novelists of the post-war generation had difficulty in defining their position within the novelistic tradition. The major writers were slow to emerge with the result that some minor writers were afforded a measure of influence which was not really warranted
{p. 170).
1.4.4 THE 19608
In the 1960s the mood began to change, "Formal an~ epis-temological questions about the novel began to reassert themselves; many of the novelists who had begun writing ·after the war began to change their manner" (Bradbury, 1977:
10). A new form of novel appeared, "preoccupied with the status of its own fictionality, with the death of the cen-tral subject, with the collapse of realism, the unreality of history and reportage, the failing power of story, and with the nature of its own text and the
coming-into-exist-ence of its own making" (Bradbury, 1982:16).
According to Bradbury, Spender saw twentieth century writ-ing split between two traditions, the modern and the con-temporary. The modern tradition, belonging to the pre-war period, the earlier part of the century, ~as past, and the contemporaries reigned. "The evidence for this was visible· in the fifties in reaction against Bloomsbury and like Amis in I Like it Here (1958), against both romanticism and modernism in favour of a comic empiricism" (Bradbury, 1973: 171).
There are, however, a number of novels which seem to fit between these two extremes. Some of them are Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), Nigel DennisY Cards of Identity (1955), Muriel Sparks's Memento Mori (1959), B.S. Johnson's Travelling People (1963) and Doris Lessing's The Habit of Loving (1957). "In these writers there is characteristic-ally a mythical, religious, or comic grotesque bias, a dis-position towards a romance-like form for the novel, or else an element of fantastic vigour thrusting towards, but not finally at this stage sustaining authority from, the exper-imental spirit" (p. 178).
It should be clear that the picture of an "incorrigibly insular" England, resisting any form of change, in comparis-on with life-giving fabulation in countries like France and America, does not tell the whole story. To classify all post-war English novels as a reversion to social realism
10
is a gross simplification, although the assessment persists in spite of a highly varied and not at all depressing con-temporary scene (p.
171).
The realistic contemporary man-ner is concerned with making over into literature "the new social attractions and viewpoints of post-war Britain, often from a lower middle-class, or working-class perspect-ive." Then there is the more "visionary" and "fantastic" manner, including writers like Beckett, Durrell, Murdoch and Muriel Spark (p.177).
Apart from the abovementioned suggestion that to label all post-war novels as social realism is an over-simplifica-tion, there is a certain amount of truth in Rabinovitz's finding that "the critical mood in England has produced a climate in which traditional novels flourish, and anything out of the ordinary is given the label 'Experimental' and neglected" (Lodge,
1971:8).
Lodge says, however, that the consensus of literary opinion has been shaken up since 1960, and fabulation is not the only alternative to traditional realism
(1971:9).
1.4.5 THE EXPERIMENTAL POTENTIAL OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL
Bradbury feels that despite the realistic bias of much con-temporary literary reviewing in England, which has limited the fictional debate, the experimental potential of the English novel has been greatly emphasized by contemporary English novelists, and has markedly increased in the later 1960s and 1970s (1977:20).
Scholes and Kellogg point out that literary realism depicts the individual experience of the common phenomenal world. As the writer probes deeper into the subconscious in search of reality, the common perceptual world recedes and he finds himself·in a region of myths and dreams that demand "fictional" rather than "empirical" modes·to express them-selves. If he tries to do justice to the phenomenal world he finds himself in competition with other media such.as tape and motion pictures, which can do this far more effect-ively (Lodge, 1971:5). In his book, The Fabulators, Scholes says that realism exalts life and diminishes words, but when it comes to representing things, a picture is much more illuminating. In view of the competition, fiction should abandon its attempt to "represent reality" and·rely on the power of words to stimulate the imagination (Lodge, 1971:6). Scholes's book is largely an appreciative study of those narrative writers who have already recognized that realism is obsolete, and are exploring the purely fictional modes of allegory and romance. He calls this "fabulation". Lawrence Durrell, Iris Murdoch, John Hawkes, Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth are discussed (p. 6). He re-gards Durrell's Alexandria Quartet as a ·sophisticated ex-ploitation of the intricate intrigues and reversals of Alexandrian romance; and Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn as an elaborate and multi-faceted allegory worked out in terms of Gothic fiction, aqout the conflict of secular and religious attitudes. Hawkes, Vonnegut and Southern write a sort of surrealistic picaresque. In Giles Goat-Boy Barth mixes
12
mythic, romantic and allegorical modes (p. 6).
Scholes finds that there is no longer any sense in main-taining the synthesis of the empirical and fictional modes, and advocates a move towards the fictional which is his particular predilection. Lodge believes that this diagnosis is one-sided. There is no reason why the movement should not be in the opposite direction, toward the empirical nar-.rative, and.that, in fact, is what is happening (Lodge,
1971:9). Lodge believes that the novelist today is stand-ing at a crossroads, at a compromise between fictional and empirical modes (p. 18). He says: "In the fifties there was a feeling that this was the main road, the central tradition of the English novel, coming down through the Victorians and the Edwardians, temporarily diverted by modernist experimentalism, but subsequently restored (by Orwell, Isherwood, Greene, Waugh, Powell, Wilson, etc.) to its true course" (p. 18). He says that the wave of enthus-iasm for the realisti·c novel of the fifties has abated be-cause the novelty of the social experience that supported the fiction of that decade - the break-up of a bourgeois-dominated class society - has faded. Moreover, the moral theorizing behind. the "movement" was very thin (p. 18).
Realistic novels are still being written, but as a result of the pressure of scepticism on the aesthetic and epistem-ological premises of literary theory, most novelists in England are now at least considering the alternatives at the crossroads instead of marching confidently straight on.
13 One of these routes leads to the non-fiction novel, and the other to what Scholes calls fabulation (p. 19).
Bradbury observes that curiosity about the fictional con-stituents of the novel has developed in English fiction, among some of the best writers. The most/important of these are Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, David Storey, B.S. Johnson, ·and John Fowles, "all of whom have speculated much about the value of realism, the relation-ship of writer to text, the coerciveness of plot, the sub-stance of character, the onerousness of form and endings" (Bradbury, 1977:18). I t is clear that by the sixties much of the realistic emphasis in the novels of the fifties was beginning to fade, for similar reasons that affected the novelists in other countries. Wilson's novels probed the ways of pastiche and parody, Murdoch's became_a.mythic en-quiry into the status of character, Muriel Sparks's middle work turned into an analysis of relationships. Neverthe-less, "it is certainly possible to discern, in the English novel more than in the bulk of novels in France or the United States, an attempt to salvage a modern humanism, to maintain the idea of character against the swamping text; but a sense of inevitable pressures has promoted a strong experimental disposition" (p. 19). This is illustrated in Miss Murdoch's essay "Against Dryness" which was published in 1961. It defends a modern contingency against the "dry" consolations of form, or an over-indulged absurdism. The essay also emphasizes that we are not isolated free
choos-14
ers, that we live in a contingent universe, from which we urge order only through comprehension and love (Bradbury, 1977: 19).
Bergonzi suggests that it might be a desirable state of affairs to maintain the values of humanism, but suspects that contemporary English fiction is somehow not in tune with the stylistic art of the times (Bradbury, 1973:173). Bradbury believes that we live in an age in which fiction has become more provisional, anxious and self-questioning than it was a few years ago. Many questions about the nature of fictionality and its constituent parts, for
example the role of plot and story, the nature of character, the relationship between realism and fantasy, have come to the forefront of attention. "Indeed, ideas about what the novel is, and what it might be, have shifted so markedly in recent years that we might well judge that a serious aesthetic shift is taking place; that, in fact, there are signs of a distinctive new era of style" (1977:8). To re-tain perspective one should note that although the present debate has intensified it is not new, for this is a subject
that comes up from time to time as part of .the development of the novel. Most· of the questions and issues go back to "the novel's full emergence as a form in the seventeenth and ei~hteenth centuries when the novel was indeed novel, when it evolved as a distinct species and as a significant social institution, and when its nature was much considered" (p. 8).
1.4.6 REALISM AND FICTIONALITY
The polar distinctions on which the arguments are based are as old as the novel itself: "its propensity toward realism, social documentation and interrelation with historical events and movements" on the one hand, and "its propensity towards form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination" on the other (Bradbury, 1977:8). Bradbury goes on to ex-plain that the novel has always had two reputations, one as
"a relatively innocent affair, an instrument for expressing our pleasure in tale and our delight in social fact through the one literary language, prose, that we all speak and write," and the other "as a complex verbal invention, in which the ambiguities of narrative, the complexities of structure-making, the problems of making a grammar for ex-perience, the perplexities of creating a sense of truth from falsehood have been explored" (p.
8
).
Both reputations have been instrumental in shaping the novel into the various and complex form it is today, "highly implicated in history," yet tending towards self-examination. In some periods the one side of fiction has been emphasized, in some the other, "but in our century the process of oscillation has been very much sharper" (p. 8).Bradbury delineates the scope of modern .aesthetic fiction: from the fictions of Borges, preoccupied with the status of imaginary acts and the relation between the orders of the.mind and the orders of the universe; through Nabokov's massive invention of fictional worlds which, though unhoused from reality, separated
16
from rooted language, seen through mirrors and shim-mers, nonetheless afford butterfly glimpses of a sym-bolist revelation; to Samuel Beckett's linguistic minimalism, his pHilosophical reduction of language to utterance. It ranges from the vestigial, comic characters of Thomas Pynchon or William Gaddis, swgmped in a technological universe coded through with plots, yet experiencing entropy to the strange tropisms of feeling that replace character in the anti-anthropomorphic universe of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Nathalie Sarraute, to the contingent, undefined characters of Iris Murdoch, who finally discover in the dances of love and power a certain self-defini-tion (p. 13).
The stylistic changes that have taken place in recent years have thus not been limited to one country. They have taken place in various countries, against the background of various traditions and cultures. Novelists have become uneasy with the code of fictional expectations of the novel, and are seeking to remake its form by inquiring into its essentials (p. 14).
The code of fictional expectations comes from two main sources, one being "the realistic aesthetics of the nine-teenth-century novel, aesthetics which emphasized the re fer-ential and historical expressiveness of fiction, and re-vealed themselves in a working discourse of 1plot1 and
'character'," and the other is "the modernist aesthetics of ·the earlier part of this century, which emphasized the
for~al and symbolist resources of the novel, and expressed itself in an aesthetics in which 'pattern', 'form' and
'myth' assumed a paramount importance" (p. 14). To many novelists both these codes have become historical, and they are finding it necessary to redefine the fictional act. There has been a move away from the referential in the novel, as well as from formal organization, toward
"the presentation of the lexical surface
bf
the text itself." A preoccupation with "the fictional process as a parody of form" can also be discerned (p. 14).Bradbury believes that the thesis that the English novel has, since the war, taken a separate and self-isolating path is itself becoming a mystifying falsity. The presump-tion that the apocalyptic American and the surrealist French novel contrast with realism which is English and un-modern, compounds a number of confusions. Bradbury raises the question of whether realism is in fact an antithesis to experiment (1973:173). "For one thing, the idea of real-ism as a formally uncomplex species of fiction is undergo-ing, now, considerable disturbance, and rightly; we can see that in the developing discussion of nineteenth-c~ntury fiction •. For another, the notion of the English 'tradition' as somehow separate and distinct is also proving uneasy" (p. 175). He says that there are notable resemblances in the way in which Western novelists have attempted, in the post-war period, "to mediate between realistic or documen-tary, and introverted fictional novels" (p. 175). The terms naturally shift - neither "reality" nor "fiction" has a static meaning. He is convinced that English novelists
18
have been significant participants in the re-experiencing of fiction in the post-war period (p. 175). One has indeed only to inspect a sufficient range of works to see that in various forms mythic, symbolist and grotesque styles of writing, which might be thought of as non-realist styles, have constantly been produced in post-war English fiction. In this it consorts with much that is happening abroad (p. 178). It is often too easily assumed that technical speculation is in abeyance in realist fiction; it has in fact become increasingly explicit·and focused. In the past we have seen particular aesthetic preoccupations which have arisen from time to time for a wide number of reasons, as a movement away from realistic modes of representation, and it is not an entirely incorrect assumption. "But, in some areas, as David Lodge pointed out, there has been a decided intensification of the realistic mode, making it articulate and systematic" (p. 179). Bradbury supposes that the changed post-war period has generated a period of "new realisms, new passions for the grotesque, new commit-ments to the subjective, new disquiets about the writer's omniscience or his wisdom" (p. 180). He finds the present scene decidedly exciting, regarding the present stance of the novel not soimuch a diachronic activity as a reflection of the time we live in (p. 180),
The problem is that the novelist tod~y faces a world that has lost all certainty. There are no ready-made meanings as background as there were in the eighteenth century.
19 Each novel is therefore a quest for meaning in uncharted terrain. Post-war women novelists are aware of the limita-tions they are working in. They register the way in which the knowable world that .has sustained so much English fic-tion, is disintegrating. All of them have the sense of being faced with rather abstract and primitive choices
(Bradbury and Palmer, 1979:68). Doris Lessing, for instance, has come to believe that human beings have become more and. more isolated and egocentric, and are unconsciou7ly reach-ing out for contact with other people (p. 54). It is the question about the nature of freedom, the definition of self, which gnaws away at the foundation of a tradition which depends on the limitation of choice.
1.4.7
IRIS MURDOCH'S POSITIONThe question of where Iris Murdoch fits in now arises. When her first novel, Under the Net, appea.red in 1954 its excellence was immediately recognized, and it brought her to the attention of critics as "one of the most brilliant and certainly one of the most compellingly intelligent of our present-day English novelists" (Bradbury, 1973:231). She was hailed as belonging to the era of "angry young men". Scholes includes her in his list of "fabulators" for her book The Unicorn. Byatt is of the opinion that both Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson write in the English realist tradition. Their writing combines old realist morals and a new literary playfulness of which the reader needs to be aware (1976:35). Bradbury and Palmer,.too, are of the
opinion that her later novels are the result of an attempt, moral and formal, on the realism both she and John Bayley admire (1979:24). Iris Murdoch in fact calls herself a realist, but in opposition to Byatt, claims to be in the opposite direction from Angus Wilson's. Levidova finds that Murdoch's work is in the mainstream of English literary tradition, and that Dickens, the Brontes, and perhaps
Fielding, would have the right to be proud of their heir (Levidova, 1977:178). She is of the opinion that Miss Murdoch's novels display clearer links with the past than with her contemporaries, although she shows some points of contact with Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. She feels that the monolithic nature of Miss Murdoch's work is least important. She is brought close to the literature of the past "by the romantic atmosphere of parts of her books, by her use of the grotesque and by the balancing on the border-line of melodrama and the thriller" (p. 178).
Murdoch's work is a logical extension of the existing field and is historically embedded in English literary tradition. It is a simple matter to contrast her with earlier writers, and to trace similarities. John Holloway speaks of Joseph Conrad's "sense of life as a sustained struggle in moral terms: an issue between good and evil, in the fullest sense of these words, which individual men find they cannot evade" (1961:56). Iris Murdoch's work is similarly concerned with moral issues and the way men react to the moral situations they are confronted with.
Like Murdoch, Conrad is concerned with the exploration of moral values, although Murdoch does not state her moral criteria as explicitly as he does. Conrad's books are constructed in such a way that we are made aware of a moral pattern.
Hewitt says that "Conrad's concern is with a powerful sense of potential weakness and betrayal lurking under an appa-rent confidence in an established code of behaviour and waiting for the right circumstances of stress to emerge, often with devastating power" (1975:129). This same moral theme is fundamental to Murdoch's work, but whereas Murdoch's is concerned with the resolving of moral problems arising from highly personal situations, Conrad's strength lies in his portrayal of the individual in relation to politics and public and professional duties. His interest lies in the interplay of groups.
Gillie points out that part of Dickens' power as a novelist is his capacity to make the reader feel an environment act-ing upon him. This is also the case with Murdoch. On a more superficial level than with Conrad, there are many similarities to be traced in the novels of Dickens and Murdoch. They both possess an intimate knowledge of London, not only of its geography, but of its atmosphere. As is the case in Bleak House (Dickens), three of the five Mur-doch novels discussed later are placed against the back-ground of a London shrouded in a thick blanket of fog, or drenched in rain, the elements contributing significantly
22
to the atmosphere, and indeed being symbolic of the moral condition of the protagonists. As in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, the Thames plays a major symbolic role in Murdoch's novels. A further point of similarity between these two writers is their shared feeling for social varieties and gradations, and a fine sense of the comedy of human behav-iour.
Miss Murdoch's unfortunate classification as an "angry young man" probably rested on a misconception that Under the Net is about an alienated young man. It is, in fact, "a quest into the nature of language and art, the relation between contingency and design, and the function of love and silence" (Bradbury, 1977:19). By the sixties her novels had become decidedly more mythic· than realistic, and Robert Scholes probably rightly identifies her as one of the modern fabulators. In her books questions of form and the reality of character play a central part (p. 19). Nevertheless, Miss Murdoch's novels are totally modern, dealing with modern man and his peculiar social and ethical problems. Each of them contains responses to important problems of the day. Her books are filled with modern people, intruded on by society, "with their tragi-comic rambling, their illusions, and their struggle with their destinies and with themselves" (Levidova, 1977:178). Levi-dova says that one does not have to share Murdoch's beliefs in order to respect and trust her as an artist who, while portraying all that is bad and mean in man, nevertheless
23 believes in his ability to strive for better things (p. 178). Bradbury says that the expression of her brilliance has taken her into the production of a very distinctive version of the novel of sentiments. All her novels are love ro-mances, but they are made distinctive by the fact that "the forces and powers displayed give rein to' metaphysical and emotional speculation of a decidedly unusual kind. In particular the notion of compelling or transcendent power, a transmutation of the texture of the love emotion beyond selfishness or self-engrossedness into a mysterious appre-hension of otherness, is obsessive.
A difficulty which is encountered in most of Miss Murdoch's novels has to do with her idea of reality. Reality is a central preoccupation of her philosophical articles. In "Against Dryness" she has offered a precis~ placing of the word "reality" in a phiiosophically and historically mean-' ingful context. Bradbury and Palmer compare her and B.S. Johnson. Johnson, too, is obsessed with truth-telling, but where Iris Murdoch's truth-telling involves the aban-doning of solipsism, a recognition that reality is other than ourselves, Johnson's entails the abandoning of "sto-ries" and reduces his subject-matter to a carefully con-structed autobiography. Murdoch's is an Eliot-like ideal of the impersonal artist, a return to the "hard idea of truth" as opposed to the facile idea of sincerity (Brad-bury and Palmer, 1979:32). "Roquentin in La Nausee sees that there are 1no stories' because what exists is formless;
24
Miss Murdoch says art is 'adventure stories', a necessary
technique for discovering truth" (p. 32). Non-realistic autobiography and impersonal storytelling are exactly
opposite solutions to the problem of the nature of lies and the difficulty of truth. Miss Murdoch also says that "we no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of man and
society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities which transcend him" (Bradbury, 1973:
234). The problem is that we no longer have a fixed value system, and morality means different things to different people. The value system within which a work of art is
judged.is inextricably linked with the value system of the
one who judges. This is a field at present being explored
in some depth by Reception theoreticians.
Her first novel, Under the Net, contains elements of delibe-rate parody and surreal joke. It is partly a philosophical
game with Sartre and Wittgenstein. She has accused Sartre of being impatient with the stuff of human life and com-plained that he "lacked an apprehension of the absurd, irreducible uniqueness of people, and of their relations with each other" (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 1953:75).
·Critics have accused· Iris Murdoch of failures in density,
and of triviality. This criticism fails to realise that Under the Net is a fable about realism, "a conceptual game
about the need for concepts, language and emotional move-ments of a new realism. It is not intended itself to be
25 Many critics have voiced the view that Miss Murdoch is writ-ing about the "wrong" sort of character, an "irrelevant" group of the upper bourgeoisie. In terms of her own moral-ity there is no reason why she should not. Free and sepa-rate persons can be studied in any social setting. Parttt of the readers' dissatisfaction is aesthetic, to do, per-haps, with the tradition which was made by such a society for such a society, and helped create and perpetrate it. "These are the people of James's and Forster's fiction and this, perhaps, makes them feel artificial and unreal even where they are not" (p. 25).
Iris Murdoch has spelled out her views on the role of the novel in her various philosophical essays. In "Against Dryness," for example, she expresses the opinion that the novel should not be a philosophical fiction, instead "it should conjure up an exemplary chaos, a densely populated world that generates random couplings and partings, and lets in some of the unreasonable specificity that protects us against our easy abstractions" (1961:16-20). She argues that the inadequacy of language is only depressing for those who identify the written word with the nature and ext~nt of experience. "If you spread words like a thin synthetic plastic coating over things and refuse to believe that any-thing escapes, then it is hardly surprising that you arrive at a Midas~like poverty. If, on the other hand, you admit that reality eludes words, then their shortcomings are an occasion for celebration, and novels can be made·out of their
26
unending approximations and wasteful clashes" (Bradbury and
Palmer, 1979:69). She is both utilitarian and
anti-idealist, and dislikes equally what she calls the
"journal-istic" and the "crystalline" fashions in modern fiction
(p. 69).
Todd points out that some of Miss Murdoch's theoretical be-liefs are not always amply illustrated in her own works of
fiction. She says that art must to some extent be false
to reality, since the form which distinguishes it as "art"
is at variance with the irrelevance and contingency of life
(1979:11). In aiming to depict life, art must lie to life
whenever it imparts a sense of form where none is actually
present (p. 12). She also says that somehow the power of
irrelevance is celebrated within the art form, but Bergonzi
is of the opinion that this theory is not proved in her
novels (p. 12).
According to Todd there seems to be no reason to believe
that the acknowledgment of a problem such as the falseness to life of representative art necessarily entails the
solv-ing of such a problem. It seems rather, particularly on the
evidence of more recent novels, that what Iris Murdoch's
readers are being offered is a novelistic meditation on the
question of "form versus contingency". It is therefore
pointless to pursue explicating central symbols in Iris
Murdoch's novels, because they don't seem to be very
Bradbury summarises the ambiguity which characterizes Miss Murdoch's work:
Miss Murdoch is a theoretical empiricist, and that is a strange thing to be, Her novels are in flight from concepts, and conceptualize the flight. Her drift is towards the grasping of the contingent, but this is done by way of a theory of very flexible· necessity, or growth into form. She is a critic at odds with the crystalline fiction of symbol and myth, above all the hard, dry modernist symbol which 'has the unique-ness and separateness of the individual, but ••• is a making sensible of the idea of individuality under the form of necessity, its contingency purged away' ('The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited'); yet the ele-gant phrases, which are condemnatory, almost amount to the best possible account of her own disposition toward the symbolistic (Bradbury, 1973:235).
Her anti-symbolist, realist theory is primarily concerned to protect the substance of individuality or character, both at the philosophical and at the imaginative level, in terms of a created human agent in fiction.
The theories which she spells out in her philosophical es-says are very much an attack on the mode in which she most seems to write. "It is the life-giving framework .. of know-able society, the substantial and natural·istic idea of character, the weakening of the urgent emphatics of plot or myth, that she appeals to as the virtues of. a significant modern fiction; yet her own work typically veers back in the direction apparently condemned" (pp. 235:236).
the nostalgia with which she alludes to the "rich receding background" in "Against Dryness," of reality in Victorian novels, act as a welcome reminder of unfreedom. The sense of such a pressure from elsewhere, from the past, seems a guarantee of belonging - not being shapelessly and point-lessly "free". Though she doesn't exactly make an explicit statement, she seems to be in reaction against the modern-ist attitudes to literature which she characterized so well in her book on Sartre (Bradbury and Palmer, 1979:70). Her connection with the "other-centred" model of fiction is clear. She calls Middlemarch "that brilliant study of being-for-others," (Sartre, p. 60) or again, "we need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth" (Bradbury and Palmer, 1979: 171).
Her view of character involves a· sharp distinction between "the Ordinary Language Man of linguistic empiricism, who surrenders to convention, and the Totalitarian Man of exist-entialism, who surrenders to neurosis" (p. 172). In her sense of the term, .a character is an agent capable of ac-knowledging the contingency around him. It does not mean a self-centred person, and it implies that an agent may become a character 'in the course of a novel, by developing from a state of self-centredness to one of other-centred-ness (p. 172).
29 to such principles, such as the comic apocalyptic dimen-sions of much American fiction and the dehumanized world of the nouveau roman. "In refusing to accede to the idea that reality has become apocalyptic and incredible, and the inde-pendent self unprotectable, English writers have tended to evade new fictional possiblilities" (p.
i7
3).
Bradbury saY:s that in some writers elaborations of technique are aimed at "the reinforcement of truth, the assertion of exposure to familiar contingencies, and involve a heightened autobio-graphical statement" (p. 179).Bergonzi points out that we need to be reminded of the ir-reducibility of the physical world over which we think to exert some control. "In her novels she recognizes a real.:.. ity that is outside of characters and cannot be deformed by them. He suggests that her interest in unlikely mechanical problems is possibly a playful acknowledgment of this at-titude. "However symbolical her novels become - and they are full of intriguing objects and radiant artefacts - these physical realities are supposed in ·the last analysis to re -main beyond interpretation" (Bergonzi, 1970:271).
What Miss Murdoch achieves in her novels is aesthetic joy and self-awareness. They have the capacity to say so me-thing which is humane and true "and they achieve this by a high sceptical caution about·consoling us too easily in either area, be it that of art or truth" (Bradbury,
1973:
239).2 MORAL THEMES IN THE NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH
2.1 INTRODUCTION
31
It is clear, even from a superficial reading of Iris Mur-doch's novels, that she is preoccupied primarily with overtly moral themes. That she is justified in this, and that morality has a place in literature,..- cannot be denied, because morality exists; it is part and parcel of man's existence which is portrayed in literature. Baldanza quotes Iris Murdoch as saying that "art and morals are, with certain provisos, one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality"
(1974:26),
this last statement representing the central moral theme of Murdoch's novels. "For Murdoch, therefore, morality is love, the realization of the opacity of persons, of their individuality, the admission that they exist other than in relation to oneself.2.2 DIDACTICISM
The following statement by Hough cannot be substantiated in our contemporary society: "A moral theory of literature is without definite content unless it refers to a scheme of moral values existing outside it"
(1966:30).
The moral theorist addresses his criticism to an audience supposedly sharing his moral views. It is, however, important to remember that we live in an age of such divergent moral32
norms that it is almost impossible to determine moral influ-ence. As Kenneth Allsop says, "you have to decide about the importance of a novelist's conception of moral issues by relating them to those in which all of the Western World is involved you have to take into account a universality that perhaps cannot be found here" (1964:210).
Iris Murdoch expresses very definite opinions on the moral influence of literature. Rabinovitz points out that for her the link between art and morality is subtle and meta-physical: "A writer must love his characters and cause the reader to love and understand them too. A reader who has observed this process in a novel will then be able to cul-tivate an analogous apprehension of people in his daily life" (Stade, 1976:235). Cunneen supports this rather
naive view when she expresses the opinion that Iris Murdoch's moral purpose permeates all of her published works, and re-marks that in her later novels she has demonstrated her theory that literature can be our best moral teacher (1978: 2-3). This theory is not adequately substantiated in Mur-doch's work. Although moral concern is clearly discernible in her novels, she seldom descends to obtrusive didacticism. Her novels deal with morals but do not point a moral. She
is clearly fascinated by the influence of morals on the lives of people, and she explores this influence fully in her novels.
There are many arguments for didacticism. In his essay "The Humanist Critic", Bush says that "the ultimate end is
33 that literature is ethical, that it makes us better" (Simon-son, 1971:106). He feels that "unless literature is in its
effect didactic, I do not know of any sufficient reason for
its existence" (p. 106). This point of view is entirely
unacceptable. Gardiner insists that irrespective of his
personal convictions the honest critic must judge a book primarily on its literary merits, and only then on its doc-trinal, historical or philosophical merits, where it is warranted by the subject matter. The novel's own intrinsic merit is what must be judged (1960:32). Intrinsic merit depends on aspects like plot, character, language and
themes, of which a moral theme is only one.
There are, however, sufficient grounds for a study of the effect of literature on morals and the effect of morality
on literature when one has studied the moral theme in
Mur-doch1s n9vels. According to Rabinovitz she does not insist
on an overt moral core in a work of art. "Too much
empha-sis on morality in art can lead to didactic art, and d~dac
tic art, apart from being dull and uninspired, is art which
begins with a pattern and does not represent a contingent view of reality (Stade, 1976:293). In her earlier philosoph-ical writing, Iris Murdoch discusses the effect ?f inject-ing moral ideas into literature. She insists that a work need not be didactic because it is ethical. "Art and ethics have a similar basis, a 'loving' discovery of
real-ity; hence, art which is moral need not teach a lesson if
34
328). The ethical in her work is a thematic concern and
not a coercive strategy.
Obvious moralization is mostly inartistic and even
offen-sive. Grace says that when a work openly moralizes, it is
~nartistic because we hear the voice of the author, instead
of its morality being indistinguishably fused into the work of art - the great artistic coherence. He concludes by pointing out that "art has a moral responsibility, but must
exercise that responsibility according to the nature of
art" (p. 190). As Allen Tate confirms, "specific moral
problems" are the subject matter of literature, but the
purpose of literature is not to point a moral (Simonson,
1971:33).
To D.H. Lawrence the novel seemed the best medium :for the
cultivation of moral awareness. In his essay, "Morality
and the Novel", he says that if a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships may consist in.
In "The Novelist as Moralist", Derwent May dismisses a
cer-tain type of novel as a "moral story" because for all its
moral claims, it fails to create these attitudes in its readers: "This i9 the 'moral' novel that tries to seduce
or frighten us into ways the author thinks desirable for
us or the world or him, by telling a story in which the
'wrong' by his lights all come to a sorry end and the
35 Apart from the fact that this is not true to life, May sug-gests that "if we draw a parallel between ourselves and the characters as we are supposed to do, the attitude we are likely to find ourselves in will not be either of the moral ones ••• but the unmistakably amoral one, 'I had better not
do anything like that or I shall pay for it"' (p. 179). Matthew Arnold too had very definite ideas about the moral influence of literature. He believed that literature irre-vocably changes everything that happens afterwards.
Imagin-ative bounds are not final, they are capable of expansion, and at each expansion the previous moral assumptions give
way (Simonson, 1971:55).
Holland says that our own associations are transformed when we read a work of fiction, the transformation occurring during and immediately after reading, giving us the feeling that we have mastered something. He then asks the ques-tion whether these short-term effects result in permanent change in_character, or an improvement in our humanity., From a purely psychological point of view he finds this highly unlikely for character is formed largely in the oedipal and pre-oedipal stages. "By the time we get round to reading books we bring to them a rather firmly struc -tured personality" (1968:334). He continues: "The best information we have suggests that we should make no claim of a long-term effect for literature. At most, literature may open for us some flexibility of mind s_o that growth
36
(p. 430). Having accepted the moral and social limitations of literature, we can now accept literature, "not for what we wish it were but for the one thing we can be certain it is - a source of rich and special pleasures, good in them-selves, needing and perhaps having no further justifica-tion" (p. 340).
Hough points out that "no novel worth the name can be pared down to a structure of moral significances" (1963:5). The moral critic does not tell us much about the essential na-ture of the novel. When Leavis admires Emma of Jane Austen in "moral" terms, he is not telling us anything more than is explicit in the novel itself. Hough says that Leavis is not as a rule doing any moral exploration. "He is the ordinary kind of public moralist, making propaganda for a
set of community values" (1963:53). As such he may have an important task to carry out, but an educational task rather than a literary one.
The implied author shapes the opinion of the reader by
en-couraging specific attitudes: sympathy for this or con-demnation of that character or idea. This is not
didacti-cism, but the relationship between implied author and
·receptive reader which gives substance to the text.
2.3 READER RESPONSE
This leads to an aspect of literary criticism that has
re-ceived much attention of late: Reception Aesthetics. Although the theory has only recently been formulated by
critics like Iser, Tompkins and Fish, reader response has been touched on intuitively by various critics in the past. It is raised by Murray (1977). He says that discussion of the function of the moral element in fiction has been il-luminating. "What has been lacking is an interest in the moral element in fiction which will help· to ~how how a novelist's moral sense of his subject together with how he thinks that sense will be understood by the public, deter-mines the way in which he employs 'technique'" (p. 250). The idea of reader response is also suggested by T.S. Eliot when he says that the author of a work of imagination is attempting to affect us as human beings, consciously and
unconsciously, and we are being influenced whether we
in-tend to be or not (Scott, 1963:48). He warns that even
the effect of better writers in an age like ours may be degrad-ing to some readers, because what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do. "It may be only what people are capable of having done to them. People exercise an unconscious selection, in being influenced" (p. 51).
Fish makes some interesting remarks in his book Is there a
Text in this Class? (1980). In the preface h~ replies to
his own question. If by text is meant "an entity which always remains the same from one moment to the next" then the answer must be negative. "But there is a text in this and every class if one means by text the structure of
38
of whatever interpretive assumptions happen to be in force" (p. viii).
Marianne de Jong, in discussing Iser1s theories, says that what the text is, depends on the reader. There is no com-plete object called a literary work, that is merely the text. Only on being read and experienced in relation to previous experiences and emotions does it become a work of literature (1983:22). The reader's response will of neces-sity be subjective, but according to Iser subjectivity is a factor in the experiencing of literature. Joan Hambidge comes to the conc·lusion that the literary text is an arte-fact which becomes an aesthetic object through the reader's act of perception (1983:81),
The following is a brief statement of Fish's initial prin-ciple:
I challenged the self-sufficiency of the text by pointing out that its (apparently) spatial form belied the temporal dimension in which its meanin_gs were ac-tualized, and I argued that it was the developing
shape of that actualization, rather than the static
shape of the printed page, that should be the object
of critical description. In short, I substituted the
structure of the reader's experience for the formal structures of' the text on the grounds that while the
latter were the more visible, they acquired
signific-ance only in the context of the former (1980:4). He forestalls the criticism that dependence on reader re-sponse would be giving up the possibility of saying any-thing m•?aningful about literature, because of the infinite
variety of responses, by pointing out that there is a level of experience that all readers share, providing a fair amount of common ground for meaningful response (p. 4).
Fish's view of the importance of the reader is supported by
Purves: "The reader is marked by a curious combination of
detachment and engagement. The detachment emerges from a
sense that the text inhabits a shadow world brought into
reality only by the reader's consciousness. The
engage-ment emerges from the aesthetic surrender to the text in
all its subtlety and complexity" (1980:229).
This emergence of reader response criticism constitutes an
attack on formalism. The reader, and not "the word on the
page", has become the'field of investigation. "This
crit-icism ••• is characterized by the phenomenological
assump-tion that the subject and object of knowledge are simul-taneously interdependent" (Greenfield, 1983:122).
Green-field briefly justifies this approach: "To consider the
text without the reader, or to consider the reader and ~he
text as finished or formed before their 'encounter', is in
this view to misrecognise both entities and to miss the
work of reading which brings both into being" (p. 122).
Fish gives a closer and more radical definition bf this
approach: "Whatever the size of the unit j~entence,
para-graph, nove:!], the focus of the method remains the reader's
experience of it, and the mechanism of the method is the
magic question, 'What does this [word, phrase, sentence,
40
Greenfield emphasizes that this analysis does not ignore the internal features and relationships of a text, but de-nies their autonomy and the primacy of their logic (p. 123). "The syntactological relationships of a sentence will not then determine its meaning, as in a formalist analysis: meaning becomes instead an event, the dynamic unfolding of relations in an exchange between (amongst other things) these differentiated structures and 'the mental life of the reader'" (p. 123). Fish defines this "mental life": ."It is the formulation of complete thoughts, the
perform-ing and regretting of acts of judgment, the following and making of logical sequences" (Greenfield, 1983:123).
Green-field emphasizes that this mental life is an endless process of "becoming", "in which each experience adds to and shifts the amalgam of responses to the next linguistic experience. The conditions of this 'becoming' are the phenomenological
concepts of space and time, the space and time of the sub-ject moving in language" (p. 123).
Reception aesthetics being a relatively new field, there is
constant development , and even at this early stage various
directions of development are discernible. It will
prob-ably be found in time that the overlapping areas of read-ers' experience are far greater· than one would perhaps
expect, and that reader response might, on closer examina-tion, reveal an amazing measure of correlation. The major-ity of readers will probably respond similarly to a given
for returning to a qualified belief that "text" is not devoid of independent existence.
41
Nevertheless, a novelist's appeal, and that of Iris Mur-doch, depends on reader response, from readers who, al-though they may not share her moral views, share her moral concern and appreciate her illuminating treatment of this theme.
43 3 A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE CHOICE OF SPECIFIC WORKS
The novels I have chosen for discussion are the following: The Time of the Angels (1966)
Bruno's Dream (1969) A Word Child (1975) Henry and Cato (1976) The Sea, the Sea (1978)
With the exception of The Time of the Angels, relatively little has been written about these later novels, in com-parison with the earlier ones.
Levidova points out that Murdoch is convinced that "in a world that has lost the idea of God, man is left with one main support in his struggle against his own egoistic and destructive tendencies and that support is an ideal of good, truth and beauty, unattainable and never fully com-prehended, that is not attached to any practical aim or profit" (1977:174). Another important belief of Murdoch's is that a grasp of the otherness, the opaqueness of the individual, and the ability to see beyond oneself, leads to the understanding that is the essence of genuine and active love. I believe that these two ideas are ably il-lustrated in the chosen novels. 11 [Her] concern i.s with ordinary people caught up in a moral conflict but trying to improve the quality of their inner lives. These are no heroes, for only in tragedy can heroes exist" (Schneider-meyer, 1974:145).
44
Schneidermeyer also points out that the theme of moral suf-fering pervades all Iris Murdoch's novels, and this is particularly true of the later novels. "Moral pain is characterized by its capacity to awaken the soul. Extern-al suffering, because it consumes the self, cannot be the test of courage in the way that inner or moral suffering can Suffering can purify only if the sufferer and the
one who inflicts suffering are one, that is only if one
suffers from his own conscience" (p. 53).
The Time of the Angels is a disquieting book, powerful
with its images of darkness. It presents a curious
inver-sion of community, and contains the recurring Murdochean theme of the struggle of love against the many guises of
evil in everyday life (Sullivan, 1977-78:560). It
concen-trates on the mostly incestuous relationships within this
one isolated ingrown household. Carel's plight is another
version of the self-involvement which Miss Murdoch abhors
(Stade, 1976:315). This novel dramatizes the consequences
of solipsism: "the psychological and sexual enslavement of oneself and others through fantasy, delusion, self-ab-negation, and power" {Sullivan, 1977-78:561). Sullivan
says that this novel is about "the power of the demon to
contaminate himself and others the enchanter
manipu-lates the fantasies of victims who need a dominating figure
to provide metaphysical meaning and dynamic tension to their otherwise vague drifting lives" (p. 565). The plot centres on Carel 's attempt to maintain his hold over his
. 45 family, Muriel and Pattie's attempts to break loose from his evil hold, and the pitiable struggles of various kinds of good against Father Carel's dynamic evil (p. 566). Every one of the characters in this novel is morally
in-volved. Carel represents the evil against which the others
suffer. He is the external agent who causes moral suffer-ing.
Iris Murdoch is opposed to Heidegger because she believes
that his continuance in the Nietzschean tradition of
nihil-ism poses a threat to any system of ethics based on the idea of goodness. "Heidegger1s idea of nothingness
intro-duces a moral vacuum from which Carel never emerges
Heidegger's phenomenology does not offer a positive
expres-sion of the idea of being, but begins instead with negative
ideas like nothingness and death ••• the human Dasein [the
being-there quality of every existent thing] confronted
with its own eventual non-being in death, must respond to its own inner voice which constantly underlines its fin!-tude" (Stade, 1976:315).
Perhaps this theory of Heidegger's is the source of the
despair characterizing so many modern novels: the absence
of any transcendental Being, man having to turn qack upon himself, and finding there nothing but his own limited
existence. If there is one thing that has remained
un-changed throughout the ages, from paganism through
Christ-ianity to existentialism and beyond, it is the indisputable, deep basic need of man for something beyond himself to
