Post-war British Fiction as 'Metaphysical Ethography'
Ikonomakis, R.
Citation
Ikonomakis, R. (2005, April 21). Post-war British Fiction as 'Metaphysical Ethography'.
Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3390
Version:
Corrected Publisher’s Version
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Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in the
Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden
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1
6WHOOLQJHQEHKRUHQGELMKHWSURHIVFKULIWYDQ5RXOD,NRQRPDNLV
3RVWZDU%ULWLVK)LFWLRQDVµ0HWDSK\VLFDO(WKRJUDSK\¶ ‘Gods, Godgames and Goodness’
in
John Fowles’s 7KH0DJXV and Iris Murdoch’s 7KH6HDWKH6HD
1) John Fowles and Iris Murdoch use speech and script as tools of power in their work. In the same way, Peter Greenaway’s allegory of control synchronizes the chirographic and the oral, in a perfect symbiosis of art and technology (in 3URVSHUR¶V%RRNV)
2) Iris Murdoch’s and John Fowles’s novels reveal that the godgame is well anchored in Man’s soul and that the pilgrimage to Goodness is a difficult journey out of this ‘god-complex.’
3) The sea monster – the ego-monster of death – in Iris Murdoch’s 7KH6HDWKH6HD bears much resemblance to the biblical Leviathan.
4) Iris Murdoch’s end sentence in 7KH 6HD WKH 6HD – ‘Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder’ – can be paralleled to W.B. Yeats’s poem “What then” in its relation to self-knowledge and self-improvement and its echoes of the idea of reincarnation.
5) Fowles’s 0DQWLVVD is the most ‘mytho-erotic’ and least ethographical of his novels, mixing sex and words in a way comparable to Peter Greenaway’s calligraphic writing on human bodies in his film, 7KH3LOORZ%RRN
6) The camera is to the film director what the pen is to the writer: modern magic rods or ‘godly fingers.’
7) Susannah is her name… In 3URVSHUR¶V %RRNV Peter Greenaway ‘paints’ Miranda’s mother’s untold story in William Shakespeare’s 7KH 7HPSHVW. By acquiring a name, she acquires a face, she becomes a person, she is restored to memory.
8) Art is a palimpsest, the perpetuation in time of a work through adaptations, ‘rubbing out’ pieces of inspiration from former art forms in order to beget new forms.
2 10) My knowledge signals my fundamental ignorance. Therefore, the more I know the more I realize how little I know. Knowledge should thus teach humility, but often breeds arrogance instead.
