Полная версия
The author cannot remain wholly outside such a system of feeling. Two characters die in circumstances that mock their and our childish desire for transcendence. The dying Alison is misheard when calling for her lawyer and has to endure a reading from the Psalms: ‘The words were at home in this scene. They had been here before’ (48). And the harassed Dorina on the point of death at last realises that what she had dimly recalled as spiritual advice – ‘Il faut toujours plier les genoux’ – was actually skiing instruction.
Austin is the infectious centre of this cruel pleasure, this ghoulish pity and fear. He is the most deluded and unfree, but his story is circumscribed by many others, which radiate outwards and give the illusion of a marvellous depth of field. There are chains of lovers, whose voices are overheard only through a series of letters. The letters, like the anonymous party voices, wittily punctuate the narrative. Schoolboy Patrick loves and pursues Ralph Odmore, who imagines he loves Ann Colin dale, who is certain she loves Richard Pargeter, who currently dallies with Karen Arbuthnot, who loves and pursues Sebastian Odmore, who pines for Gracie Tisbourne. Gracie loves and is loved by Ludwig Leferrier, and this affair is close to the book’s centre. In every other case the more dedicated lover uses the same successful gambit to attract his or her beloved – he or she feigns interest in a third party. This comedy is Bergsonian – we laugh because the characters are exhibiting, in a form carefully exaggerated for artistic purposes, their recognisable unfreedom, and obeying Proust’s law that only the inaccessible love-object attracts.
The comedy of the action is at odds with the idea-play, which meditates the theme of the Good Samaritan and of not passing by on the other side. Matthew as a diplomat in Moscow witnessed a passer-by coolly joining some protesters and thus condemning himself in an instant to certain state persecution. Garth in New York stood by and watched a street murder and later tries vainly, comically, to solace the dispossessed Charlotte. Ludwig (usually taken by American critics as the central character since he is American) is bypassing an issue of conscience in avoiding return to the United States to be tried for his refusal to fight in Vietnam. Later, in a mood of despair over the breaking of his engagement, he passes by and thus terrifies the tormented and needy Dorina, who is reading the world entirely in terms of her own guilt-feelings and on the way to her needless ‘accidental’ death, just as Ludwig sees entirely in terms of his own despair: ‘To walk by was the expression of his despair. His spirit was too tired, too troubled’ (347). This is compassionately done. Though there is a ‘tremendous moral charge’ it is also morality ‘at its most refined and least dogmatic’, as Murdoch noted of Shakespeare (Bigsby, 1982). The parable of the Good Samaritan enjoins kindness to the unlucky. But Austin is a character who positively wills his own bad luck, refusing help until the end when he is seen to move his (hysterically) paralysed hand. He blames his hand, as he blames his life, on his brother. And of course his brother, like everyone else, is not blameless. Each person has his own happiness, ‘however unglittering and inglorious’, a succeeding book proclaims (SPLM 16); each person also his own guilt. Austin’s bad luck, in seeming an infectious moral flaw, cheerfully shows the limitations to any Samaritan altruism, as well as its necessity.
Speaking at the University of Caen in 1978 Iris Murdoch noted her father’s recoil from the world of Ulster ‘black Protestantism’ but also recorded her own puritanism, and her attraction to Sartre as a puritan thinker of sorts. The different anti-art scepticism and puritanism of such diverse thinkers as Plato, Kant and Freud long preoccupied her. Indeed any thinker who intelligently questions the role of art interested her. Her puritanism was not – in any obvious or simple sense – sexual. The saintliest of her characters, the Christ-like Tallis of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, is shown justly disappointed when Peter interrupts an ‘interesting’ sexual fantasy he is having; and Will’s full-blooded sexuality in Bruno’s Dream is a force making for happiness. The word ‘puritan’ will nonetheless echo throughout this study.
It is clearly no accident that Murdoch named that character whom she has termed the ‘unconscious’ of the wicked Mischa Fox, Calvin Blick; and she remarked that ‘Puritanism and romanticism are natural partners and we are still living with their partnership’ (SG 81). Both puritans and romantics are marked by humourless impatience at the world’s ordinary amoral diversity, and wish to escape from or purge it in the direction of some simplified, purer ‘Original’, or some form of other-worldly release. Both puritans and romantics are other-worldly. The temptation to ‘sum up a character, to round off a situation’ (sbr), or to assume that ‘one has got individuals and situations “taped”’ (vc), which Murdoch stigmatised as formal temptations in art, are obviously moral temptations too. The temptations to moralise and to coerce the world are uncomfortably close, if not identical.
This may be why the villains of Murdoch’s work, in so far as it admits of such, are frequently puritans or falseascetics who, however much they be loved by the author, often take the greatest punishment from the plot, while the pagan hedonists get off most lightly. In the sheer delight it affords her work indeed asserts the pleasure principle again and again, and the novels seemed to her, in interview with Haffenden (1983), to be ‘shining with happiness…works of art make you happy…Even King Lear makes you happy.’ To Haffenden she concurred with a definition of art as ‘pure pleasure’.
If critics have not always responded as enthusiastically to Murdoch’s work as did Elizabeth Dipple, this may be quite as much because they are puritanically embarrassed at the feast of pleasure she affords as that they are, as Dipple supposed, selfishly frightened at Murdoch’s unremitting righteousness. What a gallery of happy and innocent sensualists there are in her novels! Danby in Bruno’s Dream might stand in for the breed in general, a man who, if the world were ending, would at once cheer up if offered a gin and French, and a man who even enjoyed every moment of the war. Danby comes out of the book better than his puritan foil and brother-in-law Miles, but it should also be said that Murdoch clearly shows us the difference between them without reaching for any crudely moralised distinctions. Each has his own happiness, however unglittering, and however inglorious. It is the fact of their difference that engages and imaginatively uses her, like the factual difference in moral temperament between the innocent, feckless worldling Dora in The Bell and her insensitive ascetic husband Paul; or between Simon in A Fairly Honourable Defeat and his lover Axel – another pagan innocent living with a less than fully responsive puritan.
Each of these characters’ natures earns its proper reproach from the plot itself; each is cherished and chastised. In Murdoch’s own mediation between moral extremes hers might be said to be, like Buddhism, a dynamic and cheerful philosophy of the Middle Way. It is dynamic in that it insists on moral effort, but a mediation in that anything but a temperate self-denial turns out to reinforce what you already are. In her essay ‘T.S. Eliot as a Moralist’ she described Eliot as an ‘anti-puritan puritan’, a person who, while objecting to the vulgar Calvinism of the Reformation, none the less urged some fastidious discriminations of his own. The phrase ‘anti-puritan puritan’ admirably fits Murdoch too. It is a symptom of the difficulty of thinking about this area in her work that critics can be more royalist than the king. They have sometimes drawn a figure who, however apt the role of scourge of egoism might be in a zealot, is insufferable as an artist. The fact that art is a realm of moral compromise is a matter of regret to Murdoch, as The Fire and the Sun shows; but it is also a fact, as well as a theme in itself.
Iris Murdoch is in some sense both the most other-worldly and the most worldly of our novelists. The war between the best and the second-best fills her characters, her idea-play, and provides her narrative locomotion. Speaking at Caen of women’s liberation she discussed the extent to which women have become ‘more liberated…more ordinary’. That apotheosis of ordinariness is itself typical of the emancipations her work is in quest of. And if she could be said to urge any position in the old quarrel between worldliness and other-worldliness it might be Arthur Fisch’s counsel to the outsider Hilary Burde in A Word Child: ‘the spiritual urge is mad unless it’s embodied in some ordinary way of life’ (88).
In a splendid section of The Uses of Division John Bayley expounds the Russian critic Shestov. Shestov thought that great writers are, however much they protest the contrary, solipsists, and that the real virtues of their work are different from what they are usually taken to be. In the nineteenth-century novel this solipsism affects the way art faces its chief dilemma, that of serving the eschatological functions of which religion is no longer capable. It must ‘search for and reveal salvation while showing that no such thing existed’. ‘Tolstoi searched endlessly for the good and identified it with God,’ Bayley paraphrases Shestov, ‘but what his characters want and strive for is…contentment and assurance, even at the cost of hypocrisy.’13
I shall pursue this further in discussing The Nice and the Good in Chapter 6. In that novel, Kate Gray has a patrician and socially useful assurance, a ‘golden life-giving egoism and rich self-satisfaction’ (22), which is an active force for good in the world. It might be said that in Iris Murdoch’s world, just as in Shestov’s, morality appears not merely as a vengeful Fury haunting the characters – though they are certainly sufficiently haunted – but as a potent ambiguity. Contentment too plays an equivocal role, since it can defend against profitless despair, but also feed a less than perfect self-delight. In The Sea, The Sea Charles Arrowby significantly ascribes such an ambiguous content to Shakespeare himself: ‘There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the world’ (482).
The ambiguity could be examined further by comparing Murdoch’s fine work of moral philosophy The Sovereignty of Good with the novels. In that work she spoke eloquently for the unconsoled love of Good, and emerged as a puritan moralist in a tradition sanctioned by Plato, arguing for unselfing, and for the difficult task of ascesis. The austere project of the book is to rescue a religious picture of man from the collapse of dogma, to attack all forms of consolation, romanticism and self-consciousness, and to study the necessary degeneration of Good in morals.
‘All is vanity’ is the beginning and the end of ethics. The only genuine way is to be good ‘for nothing’ in the midst of a scene where every natural thing, including one’s own mind, is subject to chance, that is to necessity.(71)
She also, however, insisted on the pursuit of happiness. In one 1982 Gifford lecture she discussed happiness as a moral duty, and she spoke often of the ways that the desire for happiness ‘keeps people sane and freshens life’, and insisted that ‘one should plan one’s life in order to be happy, and this involves decisions about work; and marriage and where you live, and cultivating your talents and so on. I think our sort of world here provides innumerable opportunities for happiness which sometimes, it seems to me, people don’t take advantage of.’14 The villains of her novels like Austin in An Accidental Man and George in The Philosopher’s Pupil are always (unlike the positive demons Mischa and Julius) worldly failures and incompetents.
Moreover, if there are few writers who have written as high-minded a book as The Sovereignty of Good, there can be few writers who have attacked or tested the high-mindedness of their own characters – their uninhabited idealism – with greater ferocity or precision. ‘Wasn’t it deliciously high-minded?’ asks the satanic Julius of the lovers’ loftily self-deluded antics (FHD 266), and we are chilled by his wicked irony because we are obliged to take its grim and comic point. It is Rupert, the most primly high-minded of all the characters in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, who is destroyed by the plot. Murdoch published this novel and the book of moral philosophy in the same year, and their ironic relation seems intentional. It is partly that ‘Any man, even the greatest, can be destroyed in a moment and has no refuge; any philosophy that denies this is a lie’ (BP 19), and that she is showing the defencelessness of all philosophy against mischance: any attempt to incarnate the Good must be vain. None the less if there is something apt about the destruction of the high-minded Rupert, there is a further level of irony that Julius would surely have savoured in the swiftness with which critics have explained that Rupert really deserved to die because he was prim.
This meting out of punishment to the puritan characters is comic unless it involves disaster – as with Harriet in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, who is destroyed partly because of her need ‘to play a good, even an absurdly good part’ (213); or Cato in Henry and Cato, accused by Beautiful Joe similarly of being too unworldly. Both The Bell and The Unicorn concern communities in which, as Dipple put it, the characters are attempting to jettison all the imagery of the culture and face the ensuing blackness. In each case, though the pagan innocents in the story certainly suffer, the cruellest suffering accrues to the murderously high-minded votaries of the Good itself – Hannah in The Unicorn, Michael in The Bell – who seem convicted of moral hubris or of being spiritually on the make.
The two sermons of The Bell debate whether it is more proper to live by James’s maxim ‘Be ye therefore perfect’ or Michael’s more tolerant ‘Be ye therefore slightly improved’. The first posture is shown to be uninhabitable, and yet morality cannot survive without it: the need for the form of the Good is a moral need, not a logical need. The second posture is also inadequate. This debate, which funds all that Murdoch has written as an unresolvable ambiguity, is conducted in Art and Eros, where Plato is absolutist but Socrates argues that truth ‘must include, must embrace the idea of the second-best’. For Socrates ‘our thought will be incomplete and all our art tainted with selfishness. This doesn’t mean there is no difference between good and bad in what we achieve and it doesn’t mean not trying. It means trying in a humble modest and truthful spirit.’ Art, for Socrates, is the realm of the second-best par excellence. Our duty, says the Abbess in The Bell, is ‘not necessarily to seek the highest regardless of the realities of our spiritual life’ (81). In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch suggests that the idea of love arises necessarily in the attempt to mediate between best and second-best (62).
The plots of the novels have always made especially cruel fun of those puritans who wish to change themselves fast, or who try in other ways to detach themselves from reality, living beyond their moral income. Three different pseudoascetic narrators all detach themselves from their various milieux, becoming self-encaged in a hermetic routine like Hilary in A Word Child, retreating ludicrously to ‘repent of a life of egoism’, like Charles in The Sea, The Sea, or cocooning themselves in censorious and self-serving moral rectitude, like Bradley in The Black Prince. The word ‘puritan’ is used of Bradley some dozen times in the book. In each case a pandemonium supervenes, an irruption of the forces of low Eros out of which the puritan hero had attempted a premature levitation. The idea-play of Murdoch’s novels urges unselfing and moral ascesis. The always rapid and compressed plots, rarely taking more than a month, constitute a set of warnings about the dangers of moral overreaching, or of a spirituality inadequately rooted in the deep structure of the personality and in some ordinary customary way of life in the world. What John Bayley wittily termed the ‘higher self-seeking’ is castigated.15
A.S. Byatt usefully drew attention in Degrees of Freedom to Murdoch’s debt to Simone Weil. Weil urged morality as an almost impossible counter-gravitational striving against a sinfulness so natural and irresistible it is compared to gravity itself. Weil was, in the English title of her famous book, ‘Against Gravity’ in the sense that she was against sin.
She was also, however, author of The Need for Roots, which Murdoch has called ‘one of the very few profound and original political treatises of our time’ (kv), a book which has at its heart the view that ‘loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy’.16 Weil was always aware that the attempt to change oneself – or to be changed – too fast acts as a violent deracination which could radically demoralise. She often wrote of the corruptions that can attend the act which is ‘above one’s natural level’ – ‘forçant son talent’ – and Murdoch herself paraphrased this Weilism: ‘It is of no avail to act above one’s natural level’ – for example, ‘If we give more than we find natural and easy we may hate the recipient’ (kv). Drawing too on this second, sceptical aspect of Weil’s genius Murdoch might be said to be ‘against gravity’ in a second sense, that she is antipathetic to a solemn and self-dramatising moral intensity and aware of how often sin and solemnity are secret bedfellows. The idle and selfish Gracie in An Accidental Man is never more sympathetic than when she finally explains to Ludwig her shy and intensely English dislike of ‘moral fuss’ (360); perhaps it is this quality which has made the novel so hard for American critics to write persuasively about.
This aspect of Murdoch’s indebtedness to Weil and indeed to common sense has been neglected, but is just as important as Weil’s ascetic legacy, or arguably more so, since it is the means by which she accommodates the individual case, escapes from allegory, and complicates any general rule. Thus in Henry and Cato Henry finds that his renunciation of his inheritance was not intrinsically wrong, but was ‘above my level. That’s been my mistake all along, mistaking my moral level’ (378). The moment echoes another in a novel written two decades earlier, when Michael in The Bell, upset that he may have distressed young Toby by kissing him, stages a scene of apology which he then comes to see has only entangled them further.
The trouble was…that he had performed the action which belonged by right to a better person; and yet, too, by an austere paradox, a better person would not have been in the situation that required that action. It would have been possible to conduct the meeting with Toby in an unemotional way which left the matter completely closed; it was only not possible for Michael…What he had failed to do was accurately to estimate his own resources, his own spiritual level. (201)
The usually painful discovery of moral level is not infrequently a part of the education of the agents in Murdoch’s books. It is never a process that is free from paradox. As so many of her titles make clear, hers is essentially a dualistic imagination, and she repeatedly makes out of the idea of two worlds a special poetry whose resonances are complex. If many of the plots – like that of A Word Child or Under the Net – oblige the puritan dreamer to rejoin the ordinary world, the movement can be more complicated. In An Accidental Man the more worldly Mavis replaces her fey sister Dorina as minister to Austin and finds that this promotion or demotion is accompanied by the same supernatural manifestations that had formerly worried only Dorina. In the same book Garth and Ludwig exchange places as fiancés of Gracie, who clearly represents the pleasureprinciple itself, and the half-worldly would-be contemplative Matthew makes an ambiguous escape in pursuit both of Ludwig and of moral perfection. In Nuns and Soldiers, whose title enacts this dualism, the acquisitive Gertrude hopes to go through life with the ex-nun Anne Cavidge, ‘like Kim and the lama’ (105), the very image of the mutual usefulness of a worldly cunning and an other-worldly wisdom. But these two poetries separate out.
The point I am trying to make here is that Murdoch’s moral passion, which can be felt in all that she has written, does not emerge in her fiction in a simple-minded way. She is no more simply hostile to pleasure than was Plato, who thought an enlightened hedonism might suit the majority. A final characteristic example of ambiguity might be taken from The Philosopher’s Pupil, where the philosopher Rozanov is absolutist in ways Murdoch has disavowed (Haffenden, 1983). The war between best and second-best is present in his relations with his mad, demonic, third-rate pupil George, who finally tries to murder him to avenge a perfectionism by which he feels judged and rejected. To the question, ‘What do you fear most?’ Rozanov answers: ‘To find out that morality is unreal…not just an ambiguity with which one lives – but that it is nothing, a fake, absolutely unreal,’ a point of view that Murdoch, with provisos, has echoed (Haffenden, 1983). Of George’s Alyosha-like brother Tom, the sympathetic innocent of the book, the narrator comments:
Thus Tom enlarged his ego or (according to one’s point of view) broke its barriers so as to unite himself with another in joint proprietorship of the world: a movement of salvation which for him was easy, for others (George for instance) was hard. (121)
That typical note of equivocation, which does not diminish the distance between Tom and the unspeakable George, but which certainly vexes the attempt to account for it in too simply moral a manner, is a good one on which to end the chapter.
4 Eros in A Severed Head and Bruno’s Dream
One problem in discussing Iris Murdoch’s works is that the truths they meditate turn out often to be as simple as ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ or ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ That such dull commonplaces can radiate as much light as apparent profundities is her point. It has proved difficult to relate her ‘ordinariness’ and her Platonism.
At Caen (1978) she termed her philosophy a ‘moral psychology’, presumably because it is a complex mass of living insight into what being human is like, rather than a simple counter-structure. The paradox for the critic is that as Murdoch moves towards a surer sense of her philosophical position, the novels become less, not more rigid in structure. Neoplatonic themes, often taken from painting, can be found in her work even at the start, and abound in the novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Lorna Sage has shown the echo of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love in Rosa and Mischa’s last tableau in The Flight from the Enchanter as well as in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine;1 Apollo and Marsyas, Diana and Actaeon figure elsewhere. But the shape of Murdoch’s career is towards a use of myth that is consciously disposable and provisional, subordinated to the moral psychology of the characters. She becomes less absolute, more dialectical and playful, patient, comprehensive and open. After 1971 the novels do without chapters and increase, one after another, in length.
This chapter will attempt a description of Murdoch’s philosophy as it affects her fiction. Like Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (1980), Murdoch takes the Platonic myths not as an ecstasy that transports us to another world, but as an ironic counter-image of the process by which we attain a more accurate perception of this one.2 In a sense there is nothing new here. Since the Romantic revival, which must in part be seen as a revival of Platonic thought, two opposed strains might be elucidated, best crystallised in Pater’s 1866 attack on Coleridge’s ‘lust for the Absolute’. Pater chose a more relaxed, sceptical position and later argued, against the readiness of Coleridge’s remorseless idealism to coerce away human difference, for the habit of ‘tentative thinking and suspended judgement’.3 For such a liberal Platonism the novel has always been an appropriate form. Julia Kristeva has noted the resemblance between Socratic dialogue and the ambivalent word of the novel, and Mikhail Bakhtin too saw how the dialogues are characterised by opposition to any official monologism claiming to possess ready-made truth; and championed the traditional novel’s ‘polyphony’. The novel became, as D.H. Lawrence was to proclaim, mercifully incapable of the Absolute; ‘a sort of Platonic ideal of the anti-Platonic Heraclitean spirit’.4 Or as Iris Murdoch put this, the novel is ‘the most imperfect of all the great art-forms’.5 She always rejected the classic Neoplatonic stance of believing that art is in direct contact with the Forms: ‘I cannot accept these “Ideas” even as a metaphor of how the artist works’ (Magee, 1978).
