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In his Modes of Modern Writing (1977) David Lodge usefully described the alternative virtues on the one hand of ‘realism’ – a writing that emphasises the uniqueness of things, persons, places – and on the other of ‘modernism’ – a writing which aspires to a concentrated symbolic formal unity. In the article that acts as an informal coda to this book he notably suggested that, since literary history over the last century could be seen as alternating between these two ideal types, one possible programme for a new writing might reside in the conscious attempt to combine the virtues of each in a single book.17
This is not unlike Murdoch’s avowed aim twenty-five years before. In 1958, after publishing her first four novels, she said that
I find myself thinking in terms of two kinds of novel which might be called ‘open’ and ‘closed’, and I cannot at the moment decide which kind I want to write: perhaps, more or less alternately, both. The open novel contains a lot of characters who rush about independently, each one eccentric and self-centred; the plot to some extent situates them in a pattern but does not integrate them into a single system. The closed novel has fewer characters and tends to draw them, as it were, toward a single point. Under the Net and The Flight from the Enchanter were, I think, [‘closed’], The Sandcastle and The Bell [‘open’]. The advantage of the open novel is that it is bright and airy and the characters move about freely; it is more like life as it is normally lived. Its disadvantage is that it may become loose in texture and it is more difficult to make the structure evident. A closed novel is more intensely integrated but may be more claustrophobic in atmosphere and the characters may lose their sense of freedom. Ideally, and if one were a great writer, one could, I think, combine both these things in a single work and not have to oscillate between them.18
I believe that Murdoch, having oscillated between these two kinds of work until about 1970, then produced a number of superb novels that do indeed combine these two sets of virtue, with the aesthetic interest divided equally between ‘form’ and ‘character’. Her ‘closed’ novels – especially The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels – have never been well understood in Britain. The essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ makes clear that, far from these religious novels being divertissements, or interruptions from the business of making attempts at the ‘true novel’, they are, whatever their individual success, central to her purpose; and the interview from which I have just quoted suggests that the formal intensity of which these books are capable is one essential ingredient in good art.
Character and image are mutually exclusive, therefore, only in second-rate art. In good art there is a dynamic tension between the two, and ‘character’ is as incalculable and private as the symbolic whole of the art-work itself, which it resists. Just as Murdoch always argued for the centrifugal primary value of ‘character’, so she also always argued for the centripetal value of a strong formal unity. In a straight fight between the two, since she was aware that she excelled at the latter, she would clearly have come down on the side of ‘character’, and hence on the side of the ‘open’ novels. What she wanted was ‘character’ sufficiently strongly imagined to hold its own in a living tension with the ‘myth’ embodied in the plot: ‘I care very much about pattern, and I want it to have a beautiful shape, an apprehensible shape.’ And she admired in Shakespeare the ways in which he has ‘an extraordinary ability to combine a marvellous pattern or myth with the expansion of characters as absolutely free persons, independent of each other – they have an extraordinary independence, though they’re also kept in by the marvellous pattern of the play’ (Bryden, 1968). They exist freely, yet ‘serve the purpose of the tale’ (Magee, 1978). Myth, she suggested to Kermode, (1963), is not altogether the enemy – it should be present also.
Two rare book reviews might serve to drive the same point home. Writing of Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball (1964) she distinguished epigrammatically ‘novels one inhabits’ from [crystalline] novels ‘one picks up in one’s hand’, and added that ‘perfection may belong to either’. And of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (1954) she said that ‘Form and economy have been sacrificed to particularity and comprehensiveness’, and criticised the work for lacking that ‘imaginative unity’ typical of the authority of a true work of art.19 In conversation with Magee she pertinently attacked the division between ‘autonomous’ and wholly ‘mimetic’ views of the art-work as, in its most reductive form, simply an irrelevance dreamt up by aesthetically-minded critics. Good art must be both autonomous and mimetic, unified and yet also expansive.
Murdoch’s courageous exploration of Gothic romance in The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels, many years before the mode became voguish, and at the expense of the relative incomprehension of British reviewers, and her early aspiration to marry the advantages of ‘realism’ and ‘fantasy’ – ‘the best novels explore and exhibit [fantasy and realism] without disjoining them’ (Hobson, 1962) – are two ways in which she now seems always to have been more deeply in touch with her own time than have other writers. The division between Gothic romance and realism, on the grounds that one is ‘radical’, the other ‘reactionary’, has been exposed as facile. Gothic has for two hundred years been one element or wing within the traditional British novel and has been employed, as Marilyn Butler has shown, by writers of every political persuasion and for every possible ideological purpose. Moreover, during the last century, as Gerald Graff conclusively demonstrated, if the critic were obliged to insist on one genre as the ‘socially progressive’ one, it would be realism.20 Any convention, no matter how apparently austere, can cosily flatter the presuppositions of the reader, and will stay alive only so long as good writers are employing it.
What the alternation between open and closed works does evince is a conflict between Murdoch’s desire to set her characters ‘free’ and her belief that human beings are profoundly unfree. Her exploration of such matters is interesting, and in its very vulnerability, more compelling than the currently fashionable ‘fictionalist’ case, which turns on a facile self-exemption. It is not so easy, her work assures us, to become truly or honourably cultureless. As for shedding illusions, it is a curious fact about us, much displayed in all the books, that no matter how fast we think we are discarding them, there always seem to be a few more to lose. The opportunities for specious disillusion, and for seeing through everybody else’s states of mind but our own, are, her work reminds us, as long as life itself. The kind of man who does earn his right to be ‘outside’ society turns out in her work to be the good man or ‘mystical hero’ unsupported by religious dogma, in the world but not of it, the man who is trying to educate his own desires.
2 Under the Net and the Redemption of Particulars
Iris Murdoch once called Sartre’s La Nausée the ‘instructive overture’ to his work. The same description fits Under the Net (1954). It was at the time placed with novels such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (which she had not read) as new ‘Angry’ social realism, an ascription which, despite the Dryden epigraph (‘’tis well an old age is out/And time to begin a new’) bears little scrutiny. It has also been related to Murdoch’s interest in Sartre, to the dedicatee Raymond Queneau, and to Beckett. The hero cherishes books by Queneau and Beckett. These debts have been explored elsewhere by A.S. Byatt, Baldanza and Todd.1 In its concern with the role of art in redeeming contingency it clearly echoes La Nausée; but it is also a novel which differently undercuts its existentialist hero-narrator. It is in fact a novel which draws on the Romantic tradition, the first novel of a Platonist in the making, schematically enquiring into the nature of the Good man and his relations with art, with true vision, and with copying. Art as much as Jake is its hero, copying its prophetic subject-matter. It takes on anxieties about realism many decades before these became fashionable in England.
Under the Net’s success has been obscured by the later work. It would be a very odd and unintelligent writer whose work did not develop at all over more than thirty years, so that her first novel remained her best; and whatever else Iris Murdoch is as a writer, she is an exceptionally intelligent one. In comparison with The Black Prince, a better novel about art and the education of an artist, where the idea-play is fed by a much more interesting story and better-drawn characters, Under the Net is extraordinary but still clearly apprentice work. Apprenticeship is another of its subjects. Both Hugo and Jake end up apprenticed to their crafts, of watchmaking and fictionmaking respectively.
And yet if Murdoch had written nothing else she would have been remembered for Under the Net. It is only the stature of her later work which dwarfs it, an astonishingly assured, inventive and funny first book. She had destroyed three or more earlier unpublished novels*; on the grounds of their immaturity, and this rigour had paid dividends. Under the Net partly resembles The Pickwick Papers: a picaresque, charming, light and innocent first novel, an episodic account of the boozy journeyings of a quixotic, illusionridden knight and his cannier squire. There have indeed been few critics who are not Chestertonian in their enthusiasm for the zest and buoyancy of her early novels, and because this has meant an undervaluation of the later work it seems useful to try to see the early work in a perspective which the later work makes available, and to read the early work through the later. I’m not – or not simply – pleading, like Edmund Wilson with the ‘dark’ Dickens, for a demonic and alienated later Murdoch to set off against her early optimism. One aspect of the brilliance of the later work is the critique it offers of that facile pessimism which is nowadays the insignia of the intellectual: to have a passion for imagining the worst, as John Bayley puts it in The Characters of Love, is the main premise for being thought serious.2 The general movement, however, is, as Murdoch put it, from the ‘quaint, funny, absurd and touching’ early work towards the ‘sad and awful’ later dark comedies (Bellamy, 1977). A crucial word here is ‘comedy’. The later books are not only darker, much more confident and less anxious to charm us than the early ones – they are thereby also wiser and funnier. She latterly showed us terrible things and made us laugh, and without diminishing the awfulness one whit. The face of the mature work resembles Martin Lynch-Gibbon’s in A Severed Head, ‘the face of someone laughing at something tragic’ (15). There are connexions between comedy and ‘contingency’ in her work which cut across all other distinctions, and where the books are less than fully successful it is often not because they are more ‘symbolic’, but because they are less comic.3
By these high standards the interest of Under the Net is partly in its exposition of themes which were to recur. It is the first and least disquieting of her brilliant first-person male narrations. She called her identification with the male voice ‘instinctive’ (Caen, 1978); I know nothing quite like them. There are male novelists who can persuade you into the minds of young women – Tolstoy, Henry James, Angus Wilson; the reverse feat seems rarer. Virginia Woolf’s pleasure in animating Orlando as a man can seem winsome and create a mild disassociation. In Murdoch what you detect is not so much the author’s pleasure as her relaxed and businesslike efficiency, into which she has wholly disappeared. The question of her relation with these heroes is a legitimate one. The subversive power of these narrations comes from our intimate relation with them and hence from our identification. This is solicited through a strenuous suspension of moral judgement on the author’s part, which comes to mean that judging these ‘loveable monsters’ resembles passing judgement on ourselves. This is one reason why reading these books can be, as well as a hilarious and spellbinding experience, also a very uncomfortable one. The prototype for this subversive relation between author-character and reader is Dostoevsky’s blackly comic Notes from Underground, a work to which The Black Prince, A Word Child and The Sea, The Sea show a debt. Dostoevsky’s relations with his hero, like Murdoch’s, are profoundly equivocal, and depend on devious intimate play with his own potential worst self or selves. Murdoch’s mastery of this equivocation is extraordinary.4
What might be added is that if there is a naïveté involved in identifying the author with her, very different, first-person narrators, as if this were a mere feat of literary transvestism, another sort of simplicity wholly detaches her from this crew as if they were moral exhibition-pieces, waxworks in some cautionary tale. Her success depends on the warmth of her identification as much as on the rigour of her simultaneous detachment. Where she gets too close (Jake in Under the Net), or too distant (Edmund in The Italian Girl), the book can be less successful. Moreover, despite conspicuous differences between these narrators, there are also evident similarities. Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea and Jake Donaghue in Under the Net are both short men who blush and like swimming. All these narrators, from Jake to Charles, are within a year of their author’s age at the time of writing. All are in her specially extended sense ‘artists’. All are differently fastidious, are in some (not simply sexual) sense puritans, and experience that terror of multiplicity or contingency which Murdoch acknowledged in her interview with Ruth Heyd (1965). ‘I hate contingency; I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason’ (24), says Jake. Such fear marks us all; what Murdoch shows in each portrait is also that relaxation of censorship at the threshold of consciousness which Schiller emphasised, in a well-known letter admired by Freud, as the peculiar, dangerous gift of the artist.5 Her suspicion of this relaxation of censorship, and her mastery of it alike, make for a sense of drama.
Under the Net is told by Jake Donaghue, a bohemian, an Irishman brought up like Murdoch in London, and a ‘professional unauthorised person’, a raffish outsider. Talkative yet secretive, an irresolute sentimentalist with ‘shattered nerves’, he announces himself as a swift, intuitive type of thinker. This comes to mean, as the story unfolds, that he is impulsive, restless, profoundly impressionable, romantic and somewhat lost. Jake is a charming, feckless bohemian hack given to bouts of melancholia who earns money by translating the French novelist Breteuil, whose work he despises. At the beginning he arrives back from France to find himself homeless. His squire Finn tells him that Madge, with whom they have been living rent-free in Earl’s Court, is marrying and has kicked them out. The book concerns Jake’s subsequent journeyings; as Frank Baldanza has pointed out, they represent a mixture of flight and quest.6 Flight and quest are indeed often indistinguishable here. The mystery he is seeking seems to him partly embodied in the two Quentin sisters, Anna and Sadie, partly in his erstwhile friend Hugo Belfounder. Like Jane Austen’s Emma, Jake makes mistakes about who loves whom. He thinks he loves Anna who he imagines is pursued by Hugo who he thinks must be loved by Sadie. In fact Anna pursues Hugo who loves Sadie who is keen on him, Jake. He has been told all this but has licensed his own fantasies. He similarly thinks that Breteuil will never write a good book and that Finn will never return to Ireland, though Finn often says he wishes to. Finn does return to Ireland and Breteuil wins the coveted Prix Goncourt. Jake is progressively disenchanted, and ends the book with a newly-won joy at such withering into the truth, ready to write a book of his own, and trying to eschew theory.
What distinguishes Jake’s tale from that of a nineteenth-century hero or heroine – Emma, or Isabel Archer, also a ‘person of many theories’ – is the special use of picaresque convention, which is more self-conscious than Dickens’s, the extraordinary relations between the two central figures and what passes between them, and finally the tale’s openendedness.
A.S. Byatt noted the peculiar difficulty of discussing this ‘light, amusing, rapid’ book without making it sound portentous.7 This is a problem with all of Murdoch, but especially here with her least unphilosophical novel. She has rightly resented the attempt to ‘unmask’ the work, or to allegorise the books as if they were merely philosophy-in-disguise, preferring to be thought a reflective, religious or speculative novelist like Dostoevsky rather than, like Sartre, directly a philosophical one. To use her own favourite metaphor of water, we might say that good art is philosophy swimming, or philosophy drowning. ‘Ideas in art must suffer a sea-change’ (Magee, 1978). There is always more event, story, incident than the idea-play can use up, here as everywhere in her work, and this surplus of sense and action over meaning helps constitute the particular mysterious and instructively frustrating atmosphere. Reviewers of the first two novels noted that there was ‘too much’ in them (I shall discuss this ‘too much’ and its function in Chapter 5).
The play with the picaresque takes two forms. Traditionally it is the quest of the knight that matters, while that of his Sancho Panza takes second place. Jake fails, however, to see that Finn too has his story. He tells us that Finn has ‘very little inner life’, and that he connects this with Finn’s absolute truthfulness: ‘I count Finn as an inhabitant of my universe, and cannot conceive that he has one containing me; and this arrangement seems restful to both of us’ (UN 9). Finn is the first of a series of Murdoch characters who disappear from the narrative – some commit suicide, some die by avoidable accident, others, like Luca in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, are locked up in institutions – without ever having been properly apprehended. Their demise or disappearance is a direct result, we are made to feel, of the failure of the other characters to imagine their needs or to see them as other than ‘subsidiary’ characters. This is an inability in which the author, as her virtuosity grows, is herself decreasingly complicit. When the despairing Clifford Larr dies in A Word Child our curiosity about him is aroused and carefully cheated. Henry James said that he felt he could pass a stiff examination on Mrs Brookenham in The Awkward Age. We feel that the examination Murdoch could pass on Larr would be a stiffer one than she might care to sit on Finn. This conditions our sense of her success, not in persuading us of Jake’s shortsightedness, but in intimating what a longer vision might resemble. By the time she writes the later books her mastery of the confessional mode is such that one senses a greater authorial grasp of that depth of field which her narrators are busy simplifying, as well as the narrator’s simplifications.
The second use of the picaresque has to do with play with a great and continuing theme in Murdoch’s work, that of iconoclasm, the destruction of images, pictures and states of mind. Here the pathos and impermanence of the phenomenal world distantly mirrors, perhaps prefigures, the Socratic smashing of illusions and of all theoretical attempts to dominate reality with which the tale ends. The Hammersmith theatre where Anna conducts her mime is seen first full and then empty, and there is a film-set of ancient Rome which looks real, then rapidly collapses. The emptiness of the City of London at night, through which Jake hunts for Hugo, contrasts with the fullness of Paris on the fourteenth of July, through which he hunts for Anna. Hugo’s flat is perceived full of art-treasure (apart from his sparsely furnished bedroom) and then, soon after, in the process of being stripped. London is in this book as patiently apprehended as the characters, and this is distinctly an immediately post-war London, with bomb-sites and the coming end of Empire to link it with Catiline’s Rome.
The writing which evokes all this is freshly done, the emotions are felt, the structure vivid and alive. At the same time this picaresque theme is a Platonic one. Other critics have usefully shown the book’s indebtedness to Wittgenstein, from whom the title comes. The ‘net’ in the title alludes to Tractatus 6.341, the net of discourse behind which the world’s particulars hide, a net which is necessary in order to elicit and describe them: language and theory alike (which constitute the net) both reveal and yet simultaneously conceal the world. The use of the idea of the ‘provisionality’ of theory in this book is as much Platonic as Wittgensteinian. Wittgenstein, it is true, wrote of the disposability both of the ‘ladder’ at the end of Tractatus and of the various stages of his argument once understood. Murdoch’s bias is Neoplatonic in the sense that it gives a primary, and highly ambiguous, place to art itself in the discovery of truth, and also in that it subordinates the argument to the moral psychology of the characters. Under the Net enquires into the nature of the Good man vis-à-vis art.
Murdoch described her novels as pilgrimages from illusion towards reality (Bradbury, 1976), and also pointed out that ‘reality’ as such is never arrived at in the books, any more than it is in life. The dismantling of the various scenes connects with the book’s interest in the guilt and the attempted purification of art. The novel is much concerned with lies, art-as-lies, and the deceptive nature of all copying. Debates in the West about the value and the danger of art have a way of finding their way back to Plato, some version or private use of whose philosophy lies behind both most attempts to censor art by the virtuous, and also the grandest defences. Murdoch’s book on this (The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists) is notable for the sympathetic vigour of her explication of Plato’s objections to art, and also for the pyrrhic victory she awards herself, and art, at the end. Her sympathy for Plato, as for all puritan thinkers about art and morals – Kant, Tolstoy, Freud, Sartre would be others – is quite clear. In a lecture at Caen (1978) she might be said to have crystallised her own objections. The magical nature of art cannot be overestimated. It is an attempt to achieve omnipotence through personal fantasy and is the abode of wish-fulfilment and power mania. It is a prime producer of illusory unities. It both pretends to be more unified than it is, and allows us in reading (or looking, listening) to conceive of ourselves as more unified than we are. Art is an egoistic substitute for and copy of religious discipline. To Plato, who originated a metaphysical theory about the nature of copying, art is far removed from the truth, springs from merely vicarious knowledge, is the product of the inferior part of the soul, and harms by nourishing the passions which should be educated and disciplined.
At the same time she pointed out that great art is also lofty, and expresses or explains religion to each generation. All art lies, but good art lies its way into the truth, while bad art is simply bogus. Moreover since no art is perfect, all art partakes of a degree of moral ambiguity.
Anxieties about art have been lately much in the air again, though the most puritan reactions to it have come not from the censors but from formalist critics who are inclined to denounce the illusions of ‘realism’ as inauthentic or naive. Under the Net is decades ahead of its time in its concern with these anxieties, and perhaps further ahead of its time in its relaxed and cheerful mediation between two extreme positions: that truth is simply and immediately knowable, or very distantly accessible through a recession of intervening cultural conceptions. These anxieties enter into Jake’s relationship with Hugo, and are thought out at the level of character. The experience of solipsistic anxiety, the apprehension of the world’s inexhaustibility: Murdoch submits neither to any grand reduction, but shows them engaged in playful warfare.
