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Iris Murdoch noted that Plato was one of the first to define the good man as opposed to the hero (FS 74). Under the Net has two heroes, not one. Jake, who is recognisably the typical jaunty anti-hero of his time, is systematically undercut by Hugo, who is presented as a truer and less visible kind of anti-hero.
Murdoch opposes to the man ‘trying to impose or assert or find himself’ (the existentialist hero) an alternative picture of ‘the anxious man trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself (the mystical hero)’ (em). In Hugo’s questioning of Jake’s picture of events, Under the Net partly mocks the voluntarist pieties of the age.
Jake tells us that his acquaintance with Hugo is ‘the central theme of the book’ (UN 53). At the heart of the great richness of comic incident the book affords is Jake’s fascination with Hugo and the misunderstandings and relative differences between them. Jake’s relation with Hugo shapes the book and helps fund its tone. Without Hugo’s presence Jake has slipped into a variety of illusions. Yet just as Jake is in Anna’s presence for only five minutes during the book, so he is in Hugo’s for only a few moments of ‘present’ time at the film studio, and then for half an hour at the hospital. This half-hour constitutes the book’s comic reversal and Jake’s sad, partial recognition of the truth.
We first see Hugo in the mime theatre where a ‘huge and burly central figure, wearing a mask which expressed a sort of humble yearning stupidity, was being mocked by the other players’ (36). The irony of the mask that Hugo wears here is that it expresses his real nature. He is the only character apart from Finn shown incapable of untruth or dissimulation. Thus towards the end Hugo speaks of Sadie to Jake with an air which Jake characterises as ‘disgustingly humble’ (225). In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch praised humility as ‘a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern…The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are. He sees the pointlessness of virtue, and its unique value, and the endless extent of its demand’ (103–4).
Jake and Hugo meet in a cold-cure centre where Jake takes Hugo for a mental defective and ignores him for two days, despite the fact that they are sharing a room. Hugo puts up with this snubbing with gentle patience and self-possession. When Jake engages him in conversation he realises he is closeted with a person of great fascination – indeed ‘the most purely objective and detached person’ (57) Jake has ever met. Jake notes that the conversation which ensues is germane to the whole story he has to tell. For Hugo
Each thing was absolutely unique. I had the feeling that I was meeting for the first time an almost completely truthful man; and the experience was turning out to be appropriately upsetting. I was but the more inclined to attribute a spiritual worth to Hugo in proportion as it would never have crossed his mind to think of himself in such a light. (61)
Given the care that Murdoch has put into picturing Hugo as a man aspiring to be good, connecting this quite explicitly to his scepticism about the act of classification, there is an irony in the way critics have positively rushed to classify him. Jake notes that to try to ‘place’ Hugo, as he at first attempted, was a failure of taste which showed a ‘peculiar insensitivity to his unique intellectual and moral quality’ (58). One critic links Hugo with pataphysics, another tells us he is an existentialist. Others have linked him with Wittgenstein,8 with whom he certainly shares a quality of ‘unnerving directness’ (Mehta, 1961) in his approach to persons and problems. Like Wittgenstein Hugo is a wealthy Central European attracted to an ascetic ideal, sexually tormented, with a curious care for his boots, and a man who worked in his family factory, and had a capacity to renounce. But Hugo’s forebears are as much literary as philosophical. In particular he seems to owe something to Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, another holy fool, half clown, half spiritual emperor, comic-pathetic and wise. The ‘sparse simplicity’ of Hugo’s bedroom (92), moreover, resembles not merely that of Wittgenstein but the simplified rooms of the other saintly figures in Murdoch’s novels, who are extremely unlike the Austrian philosopher. It is to Hugo’s renunciatory capacities, as much as his intellectual lineage, that Murdoch is drawing our attention. It has been well observed that her novels contain only fools and holy fools.9 Jake is the common fool, Hugo the holy fool.
It is important to our sense of Hugo before we have met him that his flat, despite being so full of art-treasure (Renoirs, Miro, a Minton) should be left not merely unlocked but with the door ajar. His wholly austere and unornamented bedroom suggests that he is inwardly neither covetous nor attached. He has given up the armaments factory he inherited before the action commences and converted it to fireworks, and then, when these are acclaimed and pretentiously classified, lost interest in them too. At the end of the story he is giving up some remaining attachments: his passion for Sadie, whom he has persecuted, his film industry, his money, his friendship with Jake, London itself, and the role which he conceives of as false of consoling Anna. This is a different mode of detachment from Jake’s, though both are ‘outsider’ figures, Jake an Irish expatriate, Hugo the child of German refugees. Jake spends much time wondering where he will sleep during the tale and in fact passes one night, like a tramp, on a bench on Victoria Embankment. What distinguishes these modes of detachment has everything to do with the specially enlarged sense Murdoch gives to the word ‘artist’.
Jake’s separateness makes him extraordinary to himself; Hugo is nobly unself-conscious. If Hugo resembles anyone in the story it is the shadowy but truthful Finn who, like him, cannot imagine himself at the ‘centre’ of any story, or the dog Mars whom Jake has stolen. Hugo’s exit from the hospital and almost from the book is conducted on all fours, with his bottom in the air, dribbling into the boots he holds in his teeth. This noble unself-consciousness gives him, as the would-be good man who sees objectively, an alarming ordinariness, and an odd, dogged, animal intelligence.
Jake early notes that Hugo is devoid of general theories. All his theories, if they can be called theories – for they read as exercises in patient inquisitive particular enquiry – are local. An early conversation dramatises the difference between them and concerns the problem of describing states of mind or feelings. That such description belongs to the novel as a form, as much as to moral philosophy, is important.
’there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,’ said Hugo. ‘All these descriptions are so dramatic.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ I said.
‘Only,’ said Hugo, ‘that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt “apprehensive” – well, this just isn’t true.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t feel this,’ said Hugo. ‘I didn’t feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards…As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you…’
’touch it up?’
‘It’s deeper than that,’ said Hugo. ‘The language just won’t let you present it as it really was.’ (59)
’the whole language is a machine for making falsehoods’ (60), Hugo adds. Jake finds Hugo’s puritan suspicion of language not desiccating but life-giving because it is in the service of a love of truth and a love of the real. ‘For Hugo each thing was astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious. During these conversations I began to see the whole world anew’ (58). For Hugo as for Plato art is a special case of copying, and he shares Plato’s typically puritan suspicion of mimetic art. When Hugo creates his fireworks he ‘despised the vulgarity of representational pieces’ and preferred that his creations be compared, if to anything, then to music. Moreover he finds the impermanence of fireworks a positive recommendation.
I remember his holding forth to me more than once what an honest thing a firework is. It was so patently an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left. ‘That’s what all art is really,’ said Hugo, ‘only we don’t like to admit it. Leonardo understood this. He deliberately made the Last Supper perishable.’ (54)
Again this echoes Plato (Laws 956b) who argued that ‘artefacts offered to the gods should be such as can be made in a single day’ (FS 71) – should be deliberately impermanent. It is important that when Jake and Hugo reach the conclusion ‘in that case one oughtn’t to talk,’ they at once burst out laughing, thinking of how they had for days been doing nothing else. The puritan ideal of total silence is hedged around with irony. It is also important that, as Patrick Swinden points out, we never come into direct contact with Hugo’s philosophy. Even of the ‘original’ conversation between Jake and Hugo we are told that it took half a dozen cold-cure sessions for them to reach this point, so that what we have been given must be an ‘artistic’ conflation of many weeks’ talk into one discussion. This is as it were already at one remove from the truth. And given Hugo’s doubts about the ways, once you tell a story, you immediately begin to ‘touch it up’, it is ironic that Jake immediately finds himself very guiltily working up his and Hugo’s conversations into a flowery philosophical dialogue which he calls ‘The Silencer’. In the excerpt that he reads, art once more plays the pivotal role. The dialogue owes something to the Romantic, and the Buddhist, quest to get beyond the duality of self and world.
Annandine:… All theorising is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net…
Tamarus: So you would cut all speech, except the very simplest, out of human life altogether. To do this would be to take away our very means of understanding ourselves and making life endurable.
Annandine: Why should life be made endurable? I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story – but that doesn’t stop all stories from being lies. Only the greatest men can speak and still be truthful. Any artist knows this obscurely; he knows that a theory is death, and that all expression is weighted with theory. Only the strongest can rise against that weight. For most of us…truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. (81)
All speech lies, and art is only a special form of speech, yet great art alone can tell us essential truths. The same idea occurs in An Accidental Man twenty years later, where the novelist Garth says, ‘you may know a truth but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie’ (107). Under the Net is as full of artists as it is of philosophers – it concerns, in part, the ancient quarrel between the two, between art and truth. Jake is an artist who writes philosophy of a sort, a translator who has written and had torn up an epic poem, and who ends the book ready to write a novel. His friend Dave Gellman is a ‘pure’ linguistic philosopher. Mrs Tinckham, whose shop Jake finds welcoming, reads Amazing Stories and lives in a world ‘where fact and fiction are no longer clearly distinguished’ (18). Anna is a singer who, being in love with Hugo, takes over like Jake what in him is lived out (Hugo is the man trying to get beyond duality) and creates a second-hand vicarious version of it in the mime theatre. She calls singing ‘corrupt’, ‘exploiting one’s charm to seduce people’, compared to the puritan ideal of mime, which is ‘very pure and very simple’.
The art-form which dominates the story and links most of its picaresque worlds – raffish-bohemian, sporting, and high capitalist – is film. This is the world Madge is suing to enter, over which Sadie reigns as a star, and which rumours tell us Anna may be seduced by, though we last hear of her not in Hollywood but as a singer in Paris. Murdoch wrote of the necessity of thinking of reality as ‘a rich receding background’ (ad). This idea – which is incidentally not the assertion of a simple realist but rather of one who believes that truth lies in a certain kind of directedness – gets into the text in a variety of ways. Just as we meet Hugo for most of the text only through Jake or Anna’s reflections and copies of his world-view, so there is in the worldly realm of film also a recession of power figures. Hugo is involved in film-making too, which gives this recession another kind of piquancy. Jake is outwitted by Sadie and Sammy Starfield over the theft and use of a Breteuil translation he has made. They in their turn are outwitted by Madge and possibly H.K. Pringsheim, who are going to ‘wipe out’ Hugo’s film company. Madge undergoes two changes of style during the book, and there is some ‘final’ paymaster behind Madge’s second metamorphosis into a starlet in the making, but though Jake muses about this person and imagines him in three different guises, his curiosity remains unsatisfied. Just as Hugo is the absent centre of the world of ideas, so there is some final paymaster in the world of power who also makes Jake feel peripheral.
Murdoch drew attention to F.M. Cornford’s comparison of the cinema with Plato’s Cave, a place of darkness, false glitter, specious Goods, mechanical fantasy. In The Fire and the Sun television figures twice as an image of Platonic eikasia, the lowest realm of illusion. Film’s standards of truthfulness and accuracy are evoked for us in the scene at Hugo’s studio in Chapter 12. Sadie is playing the part of Orestilla in a film about the Catiline conspiracy. Sallust says of Orestilla that no good man praised her save for her beauty, and Cicero professed to believe her to be not only Catiline’s wife but his daughter too. Despite three eminent ancient historians on the film’s payroll the script presents her as ‘a woman with a heart of gold and moderate reformist principles’ (UN 140)!
Jake rejects the inglorious, tawdry consumerist fantasies of film in Paris where Madge offers him a sinecure position as scriptwriter, a rejection paralleled by his distancing himself from Lefty Todd’s requirements also. Madge asks him to use his art, if only part-time, to prettify capitalism; Lefty wishes him to serve the revolution. Though this is to make the book sound unduly allegorical, the echo is there. Jake is declaring for the independence of art, which best serves society when it serves its own truth, in rejecting both Lefty and Madge.
Under the Net is full of lockings-in and lockings-out, of unlocking and of theft. It is also full of jokes about copying, and Jake occupies a world perplexingly full of copies. Murdoch noted that in writing the novel she was copying Beckett and Queneau as hard as she could, but that it resembles nothing by either of them (Caen, 1978); such an account of the book’s gestation also mirrors its themes.
The theme of doubling is most apparent in Jake’s feelings about the Quentin sisters who, like Gainsborough’s daughters in the painting that Dora visits in the Tate Gallery in The Bell, are ‘like, yet unlike’. Jake mistakes the sisters and his feelings for them. He thinks the singer Anna ‘deep’ because she handles her own emotional promiscuity with an apparent slippery success, and finds the film star Sadie glossy and dazzling and hard. His quest is dramatised for us in the superb scene in the Tuileries where he pursues a woman he takes for Anna but who merely resembles her, and where the statuesque stone lovers mock and imitate the human ones. Moreover Paris, full on the fourteenth of July, recalls and parodies the City of London, empty at night, and the glassy Seine is explicitly compared with the tidal Thames. Notre Dame is reflected in the tideless Seine ‘like a skull which appears in the glass as a reflection of a head’. There is a catalogue of churches in both London and Paris. We are told that all women copy one another and approximate to a harmonious norm (10). In another episode which has been related to G.E. Moore and David Pears,10 Dave Gellman is writing an article for Mind on the incongruity of counterparts:
he wrote sitting in front of a mirror, and alternately staring at his reflection and examining his two hands. He had several times tried to explain to me his solution but I had not yet got as far as grasping the problem. (157)
Finally, in the last chapter, and before Jake meets Mrs Tinckham and her cat, which has perplexingly but only partly copied itself, producing half Siamese and half tabby kittens, he hears in an upper room someone playing the piano. ‘Someone else picked up the tune and whistled it’ (224).
Thus is one of the novel’s themes – plagiarism – mockingly elaborated. The sea of small, shy jokes about copying matters because copying is one of the book’s great themes. Jake copies Hugo’s ideas in ‘The Silencer’ just as Anna copies his ideas in the mime theatre. In each case Hugo ironically turns out to be too modest to recognise the reflections. He is, as Jake comes to see, a ‘man without reflections’ (238). He is closest to the truth of all the characters, because he lacks much self-image. He can begin to educate Jake twice – first in showing him what the world looks like to one who lacks preconception, and then at the end by showing him the truth about his relations with the other characters. Hugo’s wisdom represents the direction in which art must be pulled if it is to succeed in making a structure that illuminates what it points to without too greatly obscuring it; in a sense, without lying.
The point that Jake lies and is an unreliable narrator is made many times. He has a rule of ‘never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion’ (13). He lies to the reader that he pays Madge ‘little rent’, and confesses that he pays none. Soon afterwards with Anna he tells ‘my first lie’ (43), that he has nowhere to sleep that night. He assumes that others are lying back to him, and his habit of untruth has consequences since when Sadie – whom he has decided is a ‘notorious liar’ (68) – tells him plainly that Hugo is in love with her, he permits himself to believe that it is really she who loves Hugo. When questioned by Lefty he notes that under direct questioning he usually lies (96). During his crucial encounter with Hugo in the hospital his asseveration that ‘I felt I had to be desperately truthful’ is followed within five lines by ‘uttering my first lie’ (220).
Jake’s habit of untruth is explicitly connected with his being an ‘incorrigible artist’ (25). His care for verbal shapeliness and impressiveness is evidenced when, in considering how to tell Mrs Tinck about his homelessness, he says:
But I gritted my teeth against speech. I wanted to wait until I could present my story in a more dramatic way. The thing had possibilities but as yet it lacked form. If I spoke now there was always the danger of my telling the truth: when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what’s duller than that? (18)
We are to see a connexion between Jake’s habitual carelessness with the truth and his working-up of Hugo and his talks into a stylish, shapely, pretentious dialogue. By contrast the two most truthful people in the story have problems with the very act of writing, apart from Hugo’s suspicion of art. Of Finn, who ‘never tells lies, he never even exaggerates’, we are later told that Jake had never seen his handwriting: ‘Some of my friends had once had a theory that Finn couldn’t write’ (246). And of Hugo, who is ‘an almost completely truthful man’, we learn that, despite being so successful a businessman, he ‘finds it very hard to express himself on paper at all’ (67). Like Socrates, Christ and Buddha, who never wrote anything at all, the good man here is inarticulate on paper. Hugo notes that ‘when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth completely dead’ (60). He represents the charmlessness of truth itself.
In The Philosopher’s Pupil we learn that Hugo has died and left his clocks to Jake. In that book also the philosopher Rozanov suggests that ‘art is certainly the devil’s work, the magic that joins good and evil together, the magic place where they joyfully run together. Plato was right about art’ (192). Rozanov, however, dies of his perfectionism and puritanism. Against his severe judgement might be set the comment of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue Art and Eros. There Plato condemns art, on similar grounds, but Socrates defends it: ‘Art must embrace the second-best,’ he argues, since human beings are second-best creatures who occupy a second-best world.
Murdoch was not hostile to conceptualising, but argued for a particular, provisional relation to it. She was scarcely an advocate of silence. In her aptly named essay ‘A House of Theory’ she blamed modern philosophy for having discouraged theorising. In her polemic ‘Against Dryness’ she called for a modern liberal theory of personality. ‘Where we can no longer explain, we may cease to believe’ (sbr). In The Sovereignty of Good she advocated a dialectic between theory and fact, called for a deepening of concepts and vocabulary, and urged a ‘siege of the individual by concepts’ as an access to moral growth. ‘The discipline of committing oneself to clarified public form is proper and rewarding: the final and best discoveries are often made in the formulation of the statement’ (FS 87). She suggested that ‘the paradox of our situation is that we must have theories about human nature, no theory explains everything, yet it is just the desire to explain everything which is the spur of theory’ (mmm). And her Blashfield address (1972) was aptly entitled ‘Salvation by Words’.
It is rather that she placed no absolute trust in theory. It should be local and provisional, not general and imperial. It is a means, not an end, and she was as aware as Sartre that most cerebration tries to control experience rather than submit to it. Thought itself tries to freeze what is ‘brute and nameless’ behind words, to fix what is always ‘more and other’ than our descriptions of it.
In Nuns and Soldiers we are told of the Count that ‘he loved Gertrude and he classified Anne’ (487). The opposition between love and classification runs throughout Murdoch’s work. We might say, à propos Under the Net, that the two activities are both mutually necessary and yet permanently opposed. Classification by itself produces a world of dead facts, love a world mysteriously alive and inexhaustible. In a sense it is the capacity to love the world, as well as to be more ordinary in it, that Hugo teaches Jake; both depend on attenuating the desire for cognitive mastery, and Jake aptly at the end gives up having any ‘picture’ of Anna at all (238) as a premise for apprehending her aright.
The critic too has to struggle to crawl under the net. To study Murdoch is to become newly aware of the puritanism of critical discourse, which makes for embarrassment about the discussion of character and bewilderment about the ‘centrifugal’ pressures within the work: it is easy enough to speak about ‘structure’, but hard to find a context in which to celebrate those particulars which break away from and blur the structure, and give us the artful illusion that the work is overflowing back into life. Jake’s problem is also the reader’s.
In a discussion of Under the Net with Murdoch in 1983 she pointed out that a problem with the book is how little Jake and Hugo’s combat engages with the other characters, especially the women. Their relationship is, she suggested, uncompleted because they are such different kinds of being. Hugo is ‘a sort of unconscious spiritual being’ by whom Jake is shaken up. Jake might be a better writer later on as a result of meeting Hugo, but what Hugo is doing is not real to either of them.11
This seems just. In comparison with later treatments of the theme of the artist and the saint this is schematic and shadowy work, more interesting than it is good, and interesting in part because of what it foreshadows in the later work. Anna, Sadie and Madge are caught at the edge of the book’s vision. It is not that we disbelieve in them, but that we never get close enough to test our unbelief.
