no- G 1

COMEDY AND THE EARLY

NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH

Larry/Rockefeller

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1968

Approved by Doctoral Committee

_Adviser Department of English I a

Larry Jean Rockefeller 1969

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PREFACE

Why has Iris Murdoch failed in her attempt to resur­ rect the novel of characters? That is the question which has perplexed so many readers who find in her novels sig­ nificant statements about the human condition rendered by a talent equalled only by a handful of other writers of our time, and it is the question which the pages follow­ ing try to answer. In general, the implicit argument under­ lying those pages is tripartite: (1) only comedy of a kind which resembles closely Murdoch's conception of love will allow a novelist to detach himself enough from his charac­ ters to give them a tolerant scope within which to humanly exist; (2) Murdoch has succeeded in maintaining that balanced synthesis between acceptance and judgement only in her earli­ est work and only with complete success in The Bell; and

(3) the increasingly bitter tone of her satire — not to mention just the mere fact of her use of satire as a mode for character creation — has, in her most recent work, blighted the vitality of her characters by too strictly limiting them to usually negative meanings. Close analysis has been made, hence, of the ways in which comic devices affect us as readers in our perception of Murdoch's per­ sons. Analysis has also focused upon characters — or rather upon the verbal fabric which creates them — and ii not on plot or even meaning. Both successful and unsuccess­

ful characters have been analyzed in the hope of showing how the biting variety of comedy, satire in particular, is inimical to the creation of characters intended to be real­ istic. For, as Murdoch has argued, the bad contemporary novelist robs a rich reality of the very variety which is its essence — he oversimplifies, saps, dehydrates. In her own less successful characters, Murdoch has herself fallen into just that dehydrating error. In her best work, however, in that work where comedy is used as a mode of tolerance in character creation, Iris Murdoch has convinc­ ingly shown that the world which so many other novelists have seen as a dry wasteland peopled by a hollow race of living dead men is in fact so varied in multiplicity of particulars and so complicated in moral inter-relationships that any attempt to oversimplify it is little short of simple-minded. Murdoch's use of bitterly sardonic satire from An Unofficial Rose on has drained many of her later works of just that thing which she seems most set on most clearly portraying — human character. The recent appear­ ance of The Nice and the Good, however, seems to mark a rebirth of interest on Murdoch's part in more humane modes of comic perception, and the study ends with a comparison of that work with some of Murdoch's lesser, more negating recent works. It should, of course, be noted that there Ill may be other reasons for Murdoch's failure to resurrect the novel of characters, but the increasing bitterness of her comic outlook — what amounts to a souring, actually — is the most important factor involved. Or, to phrase the idea perhaps a little more simply: more and more bitter — and less and less human; that, I believe, is Iris Murdoch's main problem. 7

CONTENTS

Page

Preface i

I. Introduction 1

II. Under the Net 2 6

III. The Flight from the Enchanter 67

IV. The Sandcastle 105

V. The Bell 133

VI. A Severed Head 160

VII. The Later Novels.C onclusion 196

Critical Bibliography 228 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Judging by the amount of criticism it has excited, the central symbol of the bell in Iris Murdoch's novel

The Bell is the richest symbol anywhere in her work.

Whether we agree with Jacques Souvage that it is mainly a narrative device with overtones of several varieties of truth and truth-telling^ or whether we agree with Stephen

Wall that "Its meaning is shifting, not residual, and lies in its relation to the main characters of the story, rather than in any property in itself,' the bell is in any case multivalent. Besides the idea of the bell as a symbol of truth-telling which Souvage takes from the sermons of James Tayper Pace and Michael Meade (132 and 205),3 the bell is also associated with love through its legend, "Vox ego sum

Amor is11 (223) , with Christianity through the "carvings" on its lip and shoulder, "scenes of the life of Christ" which are, scholar Paul Greenfield informs us, "a very un­ usual feature" (43), and with the primordial life force

1"Symbol as Narrative Device: An Interpretation of Iris Murdoch's The Bell," English Studies, XLIII (1962), 95

"The Bell in The Bell," Essays in Criticism, XIII (1963), 265. 3The Bell (London, 1958). 2

through images of the bell raised from the lake "stranded"

before Dora and Toby "like a terrible fish" (221) and like

"a thing from another world" (222). More simply, the bell

is a symbol of the purest sort for a work of art; it was made by a "great craftsman," who turns out to have the

same name as a character in Murdoch's first novel Under the Net, "Hugh Belleyetere, or Bellfounder" (43), Toby

sees the plan for raising it as "so difficult and yet so exquisitely possible" that he broods over the plan "as over a work of art" (217) , and the final destination of the bell is not the belltower of the Abbey, where its religious sig­ nificance would take precedence over all other significances but London, sent there as an archeological find "for examin­ ation by experts" (286) and, possibly, final housing in a museum, the proper depository of art objects. Wall has even given this symbolism of bell as art work precedence over at least the religious symbolism when, speaking of Dora, he says that "she seems to feel a complex of reverence and fear, and these feelings are an aesthetic homage to the bell as a beautiful and resurrected artifact, not as a sacra 4 mental symbol," but such "aesthetic homage" is not just to any art work but to an art work of a very particular kind which Dora's perception of the "great craftsman's" style makes clear.

4Wall, 269. 3

The squat figures faced her from the sloping sur­ face of the bronze, solid, simple, beautiful, ab­ surd, full to the brim with something which was to the artist not an object of speculation or imagination. These scenes had been more real to him than his own childhood and more familiar. He had reported them faithfully. (270)

Here is an art beyond realism where the artist believes so

zealously in his own ontology, probably his own theology, that he can delineate that non-real world with a super­ abundant realism which he would not expend on what is usu­ ally thought — at least by the Romantics — to be the most inspiring time of one’s life, "his own childhood." The bell which symbolizes this transcendant realism is raised from the lake, and the lake itself is also used in the novel, at least once, to symbolize art. (The lake is used con­ sistently, however, as a symbol of mystery; Toby speaks twice of entering the lake "through the looking-glass," and the novel repeatedly draws attention to the reflecting qualities and the "obscurity" of the lake.) It is signifi­ cant, in contrast to what Wall said of Dora, that art and religion are not in this scene separated symbolically; for the scene in which Toby connects the lake with art occurs in the nun's chapel, and the connection is brought on when

Toby wonders what it might be like on the nuns' side of the barrier set up between lay persons and religious.

Looking through into the greater darkness Toby was suddenly reminded of the obscurity of the lake, where 4

the world was seen again in different colours; and he was taken with a profound desire to pass through the grille. (173)

This symbol of art is more clearly mimetic than that of the

bell, but it does add another element to the idea of art

symbolized by the bell. It adds the idea of mystery, for

it is the darkness of the recesses of the lake which optic­

ally effect changes in the "colours," or essences, of reality,

just as it is the nuances of an art work which constitute

its richness. This concept of an art "solid, simple, beauti­

ful, absurd," "obscure," and especially "full to the brim"

is as accurate a description of the novel The Bell as we can find, and in at least one important way, the symbol of the bell is a reflexive symbol of the novel The Bell — it comments on the aims of that book as a work of art and, in fact, on the aims of all of Iris Murdoch's novels to date. It is not, by any means, the first such Murdoch comment.

For in many ways the very best critic of the work of

Iris Murdoch is Iris Murdoch: she has regularly produced a series of polemical articles in the fifteen years of her creative activity, and the outlines of her principles could not be more clear to us. It is a far-reaching program that she designs for the future of the novel, though, for ¿he proposes nothing less than positing the novel as the anti-

Cartesian answer to the mind-body split which the modern 5 world waits for.

Prose literature can reveal an aspect of the world which no other art can reveal, and the discipline required for this revelation is par excellence the discipline of this art. And in the case of the novel, the most important thing to be thus revealed, not necessarily the only thing, but incomparably the most important thing, is that other people exist.5

Vie live in a philosophical world very much after the fall, for no satisfactory philosophical answer has ever been posed for the split between man's subjective and objective beings wrought by the speculations of Descartes. By relating man's mental processes and his being as a unity, Descartes really brought nothing new to philosophical thinking; he simply followed Acquinas who equated thinking and soul. But by making the mind its own proof for its own existence, Descartes cut the self off from outer reality and, most importantly, from the reality of other persons, and locked the self up inside itself, isolated, static, solipsistic. He solved one problem only to raise many others of a far worse nature. All philosophical thinking after Descartes must perforce try to solve the dilemma he created: Hume pointed out the failure in Descartes's system and tried to solve it by a leap of the imagination — the self knew it existed but could not prove

5"The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited," The Yale Review, XLIX (1959), 267. Referred to hereafter as Yale, 1959. 6 it; Hegel tried to assuage the self for its loss of cer­ tainty by relocating it in the larger context of the whole universe only to increase the self's sense of anxiety and alienation; and Jean-Paul Sartre, following Husserl, took the Cartesian debate to its ultimate nadir by simply admit­ ting that the self was a nothing, totally lacking in sub­ stance. Murdoch has had much to say about Sartre, and though it has been asserted that "Her own fiction is indebted to

Sartre or at least presents a view of the human situation very like his,"^ it might more accurately be said that Mur­ doch is a qualification of Sartre. In the statement which A. S. Byatt^ takes to be Murdoch's central thesis, Murdoch specifically qualifies Sartre's focal concept of the self as absolutely free, a shapeless flux which can even remake itself if it so chooses. Murdoch objects that

We need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian, and non-religious sense, the trans­ cendence of reality.8

g William Van O'Connor, "Iris Murdoch: The Formal and the Contingent," Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, III (Winter-Spring 1960), 46. 7 Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (Lon­ don , 1965), 12. ^"Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch," Encounter, XVI (January 1961), 19. Referred to hereafter as Encounter. See Also Wilfred Desan, The Tragic Finale: An Essay on the Phil­ osophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York, 1960), 173, where Desan states flatly that the idea of an absolutely free self is "thoroughly unrealistic." 7

Informing this idea is Murdoch's insistence on the existence

of others — it is only in one's relations with another that

one's freedom can be impinged upon, the material world being

dumb, will-less; and only when one's freedom is changed by

others can one speak of having a certain "degree" of free­

dom. The whole thrust of Murdoch's arguments about the

novel is anti-Cartesian. Love is "the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."^

Morality, the concept of which Murdoch takes "with homage"

from Simone Weil, is "a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality."^® The self is then "taken for

granted," as the idea is phrased by Iris Murdoch's husband

John Bayley, to whom she has said she is indebted.We

know the self in its relations with others -- we are our

relative differences.

Literature, Murdoch affirms, and the novel in particu­

lar, suffers from the same post-Cartesian bifurcation as man's being as the soul ails, so ails its art. She dis­ misses all "modern literature" as "the triumph of neurosis,

9 "The Sublime and the Good," The Chicago Review, XIII (Autumn 1959), 51. Referred to hereafter as Chicago. l°"The Idea of Perfection," The Yale Review, LIII (1964), 371. Referred to hereafter as Yale, 1964. l^The Character of Love (New York, 1963), 226. 8

the triumph of myth as a solipsistic form.She objects

to two kinds of novels in particular, the "symbolist" novel, a "small, quasi-allegorical object," characterized by the works of William Golding; and the 'journalistic novel," which she describes as a "large, shapeless, quasi-documentary object,"13 but which she does not treat of in any great de­ tail. (As an example of the journalistic novelist, John

Dos Passos comes immediately to mind. Sartre, who regards Dos Passos as "the greatest writer of our time,"^4 has said that "Dos Passos reports all his characters’ utterances to us in the style of a statement to the Press."15) in the place of these "dry" forms in which the reader's attention is focused upon a vision of the way things are (the author's personal version of the Human Condition) or the reader's attention is not focused at all, Murdoch calls for a return to the literature of character in which the creation of

"persons" takes precedence over an all encompassing state­ ment about the nature of reality. In various articles, 12 * * 15

12Yale, 1959, 265.

1f. Encounter.

^Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York, 1962) , 100

15 Ibid., 103. 9

she has stated her beliefs as a series of needs. (The

strong assertive tone of Murdoch's polemics is perhaps not

unrelated to her own youthful activism in Leftist politics

and the UNRRA.)

We need to turn our attention away from the consol­ ing dream necessity of Romanticism, away from the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards the real impenetrable human person.

What we require is a renewed sense of the diffi­ culty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons.17

We have established in our tradition, a respect for the individual person as such, however eccentric, private, messy, and generally tiresome he may be.I8

All of these needs are to be satisfied in a creatively reac

tionary way, for "the great novelists are of course Scott, 19 Jane Austen, George Eliot, Tolstoy, especially Tolstoy," - and the artist must imitate the "negative capability" of

Shakespeare and be the "lover who, nothing himself, lets other things be through him." In this way, characters

in novels become more important than ideas; the artist creates larger-than-plot personalities who are "other"

Encounter, 20. 17Ibid.

18Yale, 1959, 261.

19Ibid., 247.

20Ibid., 370. 10

than himself and lets them function accordiftg to the dic­ tates of their own natures — they do not fill a role in a metaphysical scheme whose all-manipulating god is the writer

"Reality," Murdoch asserts, "is not a given whole." Every artist must accept this as a fundamental principle, for "a respect for the contingent, is essential to imagination as opposed to fantasy." If "contingency is destructive of fantasy," then "Real people are destructive of myth,"22 and the novel can be saved, almost literally, from itself.

It can be saved by re-asserting the doctrine of the love of persons. Modern literature abounds in "lonely, 23 self-contained individuals," isolated centers of exist­ ence, who have little if any chance of escaping solipsism of self except by learning to love an "other." Murdoch specifically sees this isolation as the worst result of

Sartre's philosophy, and it of course carries over into his novels.

The Christian philosopher Marcel broods upon the tenacity and reality of human communion in the midst of its obscurities and perversions. Here

21 Encounter, 20. 22 Ibid. 23

23Ibid., 19. 11

by contrast Sartre shows as a non-Christian thinker. The individual is the centre, but a solipsistic centre. He has a dream of companionship, but never the experience. He touches others at the finger­ tips. 4

Such lack of communion has led post-Sartrean French writers

not to a younger generation's rejection of Sartre's isolation

of the individual self which tended to give at least that

self a solid reality, but to a complete rejection of self,

the notion of character, and the individual. "The novel of

characters," Alain Robbe-Grillet has written, "belongs en­

tirely to the past, it describes a period: that which marked 25 the apogee of the individual." It is interesting, however,

that even Robbe-Grillet senses the tenacity of the love for

the novel of characters, at least in literary critics.

How much we've heard about the "character"! More­ over, I fear we haven't heard the last. Fifty years of disease, the death notice signed many times over by the most serious essayists, yet nothing has yet managed to knock it off the pedestal on which the nineteenth century had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same — phony -- majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism. In fact, that is how this criticism rec­ ognizes the "true" novelist: "he creates characters."2245

24 Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (New Haven, Connecticut, 1959), l6~. 2^For a New Novel: Essays in Fiction (New York, 1965), 28.

6ibid., 27. For another contemporary view of the novel of character, see Natalie Sarraute, L'ere du soupgon, whose ideas resemble Robbe-Grillet's in everything except tone. 12

Robbe-Grillet's criticism might well be aimed directly at a writer like Iris Murdoch, but Murdoch would probably readily agree that the novel of character was a thing of the past — even of the nineteenth century. But whether or not the "individual" character — not the isolated char­ acter, but the eccentric, free character — is also a thing of the past is entirely another matter, a matter which can only be decided by the success or failure of writers like

Murdoch.

Iris Murdoch's novels must stand or fall on their ability to convince us of the existence of other people, their comparative success or failure to refute the Car­ tesian dilemma. Murdoch herself is perfectly aware of this:

I would venture to say that ultimately we judge the greatest novelists by the quality of their awareness of others, and that for the novelist this is at the highest level the most crucial test.27

By that test, however, the critics seem to feel that Mur­ doch does not come off too well. Graham Martin, for one, in a study of Murdoch and the symbolist novel, has judged that "Iris Murdoch's most successful novels are in fact as securely within the symbolist mode which she anathematizes

27 Yale, 1959, 266. 13 in the Encounter article, as are the 'quasi-allegorical' 2 8 novels of William Golding." And Byatt, commenting on

Murdoch's method of characterization, seems to imply that

Murdoch is herself doing exactly what she has said not to:

"The characters are approached from the theme, whereas with other writers, Joyce Cary, Angus Wilson, one has the sense that character or action is where the novel began and that theme developed from there. 3 And Murdoch herself has even said that her fourth novel, The Bell, was "better" since it contained "more people," and that her fifth novel, A Severed

Head, was not as good — it represented a "giving in to myth.But clearly Murdoch's principles have not changed, even if the critics are right in saying that she has succeed­ ed in producing a masterwork in the literature of character only once, in The Bell♦ It is still the novelist's task to assert the existence of others, to fill his characters

"to the brim" with as much reality as he can, to deny the dry, dehydrating forces of solipsistic thinking, to free being from itself to know itself and love others — none of this has changed from its first appearance in embryo in

2 o "Iris Murdoch and the Symbolist Novel," British Journal of Aesthetics, V (1965), 298. 29 Byatt, 184. 30 Frank Kermode, "The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists," Partisan Review, XXX (Spring 1963), 64. 14

The Listener, 1950, to its most recent appearance in The

Yale Review, 1964. But this matter of Murdoch's use of symbols is in no way as simple as the critics' label,

"symbolist novelist," would seem to imply.

Byatt has spoken of "the uneasiness that Miss Murdoch's 31 readers experience with her symbols," and there has cer­ tainly been much confusion about many of Murdoch's symbolic devices. Speaking specifically of the bell, Byatt has also said that "It is something planted there, which one is sur­ prised to be reminded of, when occupied with more serious things."82 Most of the uneasiness results not from mistakenly taking a realistic device for a symbolic one — Murdoch does

"use" symbols, but from a failure to see the manner in which the symbolic device is used. When Murdoch told Frank Kermode that "the bell itself has significance, and is quite explic- itly used as a symbol by the characters," she too pointed out the use without explaining the "explidit" manner of it.

To consider only the bell, it starts out as a mysterious object to both Dora and the reader: a 14th-century nun's extra-ecclesiastical affair, its discovery, the bell's magic­ al flight from the tower to the lake, the nun's suicide —

^Byatt, 190.

32Ibid., 75.

33Kermode, 65. 15 all of these elements were and are the stock-in-trade of the Gothic novel.34 But any supernatural symbolic value that the bell might have is stripped away during the course of the novel: the rich suggestion of spiritual love im­ plied in the bell's legend Vox ego sum Amoria is rendered merely physical when Dora and Toby, after discovering the legend, fall into the mouth of the bell and start to make love, only to cause the "voice of love" to "speak" out — as Wall says, "this was not perhaps the kind of love the 35 bell had in mind." The transcendant art work on the bell's lip and shoulder which suggests Christianity is also stripped of that meaning when we are reminded of the passing of the religious fervour which inspired; the art by the bell's being

"warm" but "encrusted" (268). And the symbolic suggestion of the bell as significant of truth-telling associated with it from the sermons of Michael and James is given a ludicrous denouement when Dora, after overhearing Nick telling news reporter Noel Spens the "secret" that the bell has been re­ covered, reveals the bell's resurrection herself by ringing it, awakening the whole countryside — it is an act of piqued ego, and Dora scores a beat on both Noel and Nick. Byatt was

34so much so that Jane Austen's Catherine Morland, con­ templating the proposed visit to Northanger Abbey, "could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some aw ful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun" (Chapter 17). Her young hopes, however, are not fulfilled.

35Wall, 270t 16 much puzzled by Dora's ringing of the bell, but it is be­ cause she feels that "a symbolic action has been substituted for a real one."3^ It is partially the other way around: a symbolic action is stripped of a certain symbolic meaning.

It is precisely because Dora's grandiose motive that the

"truth-telling voice . . . must not be silenced" (270) is so inappropriate to her action, so much greater in import than her action will bear out, that makes the ringing of the bell have the effect which Murdoch designed for it — it is comic, not silly. Murdoch does not build up the num­ ber of symbolic meanings in her use of symbols — as a sym­ bolist proper would; she diminishes them. A Murdoch symbol often starts out as a rich analogue and ends as a naked fact

In this regard, it is significant that the new bell, with no symbolic attachments, is "unceremoniously bundled" (304) into the Abbey where it marks time. The old bell has ceased to have any symbolic value at all relevant to its intended purpose. Much of the same kind of diminishing effect is true of other Murdoch symbols — the net, the rose, the more obvious "dark" angels. Indeed, each of Murdoch's novels to date, with the exception of The Nice and the Good, is named after the central symbol whose various levels of

36 Byatt, 75. 17

meaning the novel strips away — the net, the enchanter,

the sandcastle, the bell, the severed head, the rose, the

unicorn, the Italian girl, the red English vs. the green

Irish, the "dark" angels. In every case, the stripping

process removes levels of fantasy only to reveal a reality

at the core of each symbol which possesses a richness of

its own — the irreducible complexity of the particular.

Such diminishing symbols are, paradoxically, one of the

chief riches of Murdoch's art.

That art is more rich than any other of recent years:

Bernard Brugiere has even seen its richness as a problem,

speaking of Murdoch's "excessive versatility," 3 7 while

Frank Baldanza has compared her novels, with qualifications,

to "certain Greek vases of the Geometric period," since

"she insists on covering the entire surface of her work with 3 8 significance." It is important when considering the charge of Murdoch's relative inability to create the novel of char­ acter that she always approaches the problem of form with a good deal of timidity, even fear. "There is a temptation," she has said, "for any novelist, and one to which if I am

37"L'univers romanesque d'lris Murdoch," Mercure de France, CCCLII (1964), 711. 38"Iris Murdoch and the Theory of Personality," Criticism, VII (1965), 180. 18 right modern novelists yield too readily, to imagine that the problem of a novel is solved and the difficulties over­ come as soon as a form in the sense of a satisfactory myth has been evolved."39 yet "the question of form" is "what differentiates art from life,"40 even if "Form is the great consolation of love," but also "its great temptation."4

And in restating this idea, she has made it clear that form is more often than not fatal to the novelist of characters.

Form is the temptation of love and its peril, whether in art or life: to round off a situation, to sum up a character. But the difference is that art has got to have form, whereas life need not.42

Murdoch's art, then, fights against the necessary temptation of form. She longs for a fiction of large personalities, peripheral ideas, and for tangent, digression, even irrele­ vancy — all the things which are most enlarging in the nine teenth century English novel. But she lives in a post-

Bloomsbury, post-Jamesian age, and the value of form in the novel is a distinctly proven matter. George Whiteside

39Yale, 1959, 271.

4QIbid.

4 ‘’'Chicago, 55. 42 Yale, 1959, 271. 19

has suggested that Murdoch's tendency toward the tight form

is a result of her logical turn of mind and that "since she

thinks with precision, it is hard for her to loosen up her plots and introduce extraneous material.3 it has also been

suggested that perhaps the ideal novel is neither the loose

human chroniclfe which she seems to admire so much, nor the

tight art novel which she so dislikes; that perhaps the

ideal novel is a combination of both, one in which there

are "more people" than in the usual twentieth century

symbolist novel, and in which a given device can be "quite

explicitly used as a symbol by the characters." Murdoch,

at any rate, despite the fact that The Bell was already

published when she spoke, told Kermode that she had not yet

achieved the kind of "synthesis" between reality and myth 44 that she desired. Whether or not Murdoch was just being modest, what she has produced is vitally concerned with

attempting to achieve that synthesis: as Frederick Hoffman

has said, "each successive novel contains a new experiment 45 of means toward ends."

43"The Novels of Iris Murdoch," Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, VII (1964), 41. 44 Kermode, 64. 45 "Iris Murdoch: The Reality of Persons,1' Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, VII (1964), 55. Despite fine in- sights this article is marred by serious error — it is not "Nan Mor" who cries in the last paragraph of The Sandcastle but Felicity, who believes she has brought her brother and 20

Those means are many and complex, but one important

element which we seem to have lost sight of in our study

of Murdoch to date needs greater emphasis: her genius for

comedy. When Murdoch first appeared as a novelist, her

comedy was often cited as one of her finest accomplishments,

but we soon became so interested in what she was saying

that notice of her manner of saying it tapered off and then

disappeared — we were helped too by her ever-increasing

earnestness of manner. Actually, the use of comedy, of at

least two kinds, is a consistent characteristic of Murdoch's

art from Under the Net to The Nice and the Good, the variety

of her comic effects including the entire spectrum of tra­

ditional modes from light, humane humor to biting, sardonic

satire. Ultimately — and most significantly — Murdoch's

comic effects have increasingly become more and more bitterly

satiric, however, as we see by comparing the hilarious moment of slapstick in Under the Net when Jake has his dog the Marvelous Mister Mars "sham dead" (171)46 to escape from

the riot in the Belfounder movie studio — and arrest (only

to have a newspaper the next day report Mars as "A CANINE

father home with the aid of magic. It is the daughter, then, who cries, not the mother, but Hoffman misreads the pronoun reference and hence misreads the passage. Compare The Sandcastle (London, 1957), 318, and Hoffman, 52.

Under the Net (London, 1954). 21

VICTIM OF POLICE BRUTALITY" (173), with the moment of damn­ ing, negating satire in The Time of the Angels when the im­ possibility of Pattie and Eugene ever really loving one another is shown in their futile attempt to both get inside

Eugene's overcoat, a scene set in blinding sunlight with

Pattie's hand trying "to claw a hold upon the material of his jacket" (153).4? At other points in her novels, Mur­ doch uses other kinds of comedy, sometimes with thematic overtones. Even in Under the Net, the theme of identity as a mystery is given comic embodiment in Jake's inspection of Magdalen at the beginning of the novel. As he walks around her, she says, "'What do you think I am, the Albert

Memorial?'" To which Jake replies, "'Not with those eyes,'

I said, and I looked into their speckled depths" (12). One of Jake's failures is just this inability to look at another human being as real, an idea brought out here through comedy — comedy of a light humane sort. In other places, however, especially in later novels, the character satirized does not come off so wittily, as in the brilliant scene of Randall

Peronett's first intercourse with Lindsay Rirnmer in which he becomes so excited that she has to undress him, drag him into bed, and then wait until his momentary impotence passes —

4^The Time of the Angels (New York, 1966). 22

"'Do you know,'" Randall finally says, "'I think it's going to be all right after all'" (148).In Murdoch's treat­ ment of Randall, as in her treatment of many of her later characters, her attitude seems to be entirely negating, and her treatment of Martin Lynch-Gibbon in the scene when he serves wine to his wife Antonia and her lover Palmer Anderson while they are in bed is only a little less negating, this time through Martin's own unconscious self-revelation — the couple in bed are described by means of a ludicrously inappropriate image: "I closed the door on them," says

Martin, "as one closes the door of some rich reliquary or 49 glorious triptych" (135). Murdoch, however, was not al­ ways so negative, In a justly celebrated paragraph in the early novel The Sandcastle3^ the comedy is of the warmest, most human sort.

Mrs. Prewett was a tall stout woman, with a broad tranquil face and very large hands. She had elected to don a dinner-gown made of coffee-coloured lace, with a coffee-coloured slip to match. A serrated line crossed her enormous front from east to west, below it the generous contour of her breasts, above it a flicker of underclothes and an expanse of flesh mottled by the sun to a deep reddish brown. Her arms, which were white and rather plump, swung

4R An Unofficial Rose (New York, 1962). 49 A Severed Head (London, 1961). 30Cf. Honor Tracy, "Passion in the Groves of Academe," The New Republic, CXXXVI (June 10, 1957), 17. 23

energetically from the short puffy sleeves of the lace gown as she looked about for Mr. Prewett. She saw him and swept forward with a shout. Prewett was obviously delighted to see her. He began com­ plimenting her on her appearance. (288-289)

The comedy is effected of course by the too-accurate geography locating the "serrated line" running "from east to west," a detail largely tangential, delivered with just the right reportorial tone. As Honor Tracy points out, Murdoch seems to achieve her ideal of characterization most often in these incidental, comic descriptions, and such comic moments were seldom absent from her narrative method until her most re­ cent work. To cite only a few more contrasting moments, some of which come close to authorial comment of the nine­ teenth century sort, here is how Murdoch rapiers Eugene

Peshkov's dreams: "His Russian memories came in brilliant colour. All his other memories were monochrome"(52). Here too, in a similar tone, is how Murdoch imagines Effingham

Cooper's falling in love with Hannah Crean-Smith: "No spaceman about to step into his rocket was more meticulously fitted to go into orbit than Effingham at that moment was 51 ready to fall in love with Hannah" (77). Effingham, it should be noted, is the brunt of much Murdoch satire. When he first sees Hannah in the novel, Murdoch puts into his

S^The Unicorn (New York, 1963). 24

mind the statement that Hannah "was the only one, the great

phoenix, his truth, his home, his hapax legomenon" (95).

And here, in contrast, is how Murdoch describes the bridge

over which Dora and Paul Greenfield pass — arguing: "The

causeway was not quite wide enough for two people to walk

side by side when disputing" (250) . The difference between

that happy deflation of intensity in the last instance and

the sharp build-up of intensity in the description of Effie's

feelings is the difference between early and later Murdoch.

It has often been noted that Murdoch's later novels seldom

vitally involve readers in the crises which the characters

go through — for all Murdoch's continued intensity of situ­

ation, the reader usually remains outside of the later events,

experiencing butnevenemore, judging at the same time. This

relative lack of involvement in the later novels is a result of Murdoch's scant use of humane comedy, a failure which brings about in the reader a judging detachment from the persons presented which makes believing human involvement

impossible. The irony is always there, always asserting itself, keeping the reader from involving himself too close­ ly with any one character. In this regard, it is very im­ portant to remember that Murdoch often too obviously cen­ ters her later novels on persons of whom she does not onto- logically approve, and hence ultimately the success of the 25 whole novel she produces is vitally bound up with the kind of comedy used. In her early work, Iris Murdoch is not, 52 however, "bedevilled" by "a sense of humour," as Byatt seems to feel —- she is more often saved by it as a novel­ ist of characters. But the artist's "sense of humour" is of a very special sort, as we can most readily see by look ing more closely at her best — and worst — work to date.

It might be helpful, though, to keep one guideline in mind the more humane the comedy, the more human the comedian.

Byatt, 209. The full context is interestingly contradictory: "We are bedevilled in our time by a sense of humour — which Miss Murdoch excellently poss­ esses — and prefer things said indirectly, or with understatement, or irony" (209). Is it incorrect to see in the contradiction an irrepressible sneer at "humour"? CHAPTER II

UNDER THE NET

From the way in which Iris Murdoch talks about returning to the novel of characters, it might be expected that she herself would produce a number of eccentric, free individuals to help effect that return. That fact is, however, that she tends to work with only a few easily recognizable types, with eccentrics being consigned to the periphery of her vision or, at most, developed into only secondary characters. Those characters to whom

Murdoch gives the greatest share of her attention, those who narrate her novels or experience them through third person interior monologue or even figure prominently in the action though they report none of it in their own voices, have beings of about five or six different kinds. We recognize clearly as a distinct category the type of male egoist first represented in John Rainborough and then recurring in Martin Lynch-Gibbon and Effingham

Cooper, as we recognize the frequent recurrence in Mur­ doch's work of the demon figure first represented in

Mischa Fox, then in Nick Fawley, Miranda Peronett,

Gerald Scottow, and most recently in Father Carel Fisher--- none of whom is allowed to narrate. (Felicity Mor is also a sort of demon, but only to a certain extent.) We 27

have come to fexpect the refugee beast first represented

in the Lusiewicz brothers, then in the Levkins, followed

by Leo Peshkov, and the domesticated variety of that

type represented in Nina the dressmaker and in Eugene

Peshkov. None of these refugee characters, however, is

in fact sufficiently developed to be called major. There

are several earth goddess figures in Murdoch, with the

first embryonic suggestion appearing in Rosa Keepe,

though earthliness remains only a part of her character, with later, fuller embodiments coming in Honor Klein, who in many ways is a sort of norm in Murdoch, and in

Maria Magistretti the Italian girl. There are also

several persons who kick over Victorian traces, usually with a distinct lack of success: Bill Mor; the Peronetts,

father Hugh and son Randall; Otto Narraway. Of all these recurrent types, only the male egoists could be called

fully developed — indeed, a part of the fascination of a Mischa Fox or an Honor Klein is just that tanta­ lizing scantiness of the evidence we are allowed to see.

Of all the characters in Murdoch, major or minor, however, the one type which recurs again and again in novel after novel is the shapeless soul, about twenty-years-old or so, lacking in self-knowledge, artistically creative but untalented, lacking in the kind of experience with others which can give self-knowledge. Sometimes, if this 28

shapeless being is a woman, she will have a lack of

taste in clothes to reflect her lack of self-knowledge —

she does not know what will go well with her personality because she does not know what her personality is.

Intelligence seems to play little if any part in deter­ mining the shapeless being's lack of self-knowledge" characters in Murdoch who fit this category range all the way in intelligence from brilliantly reflective to mentally retarded. Quite often the shapeless being possesses an instinctive, spontaneous love of the life force within himself which is one of his most attractive qualities. The shapeless being has been present in Mur­ doch's work from her first novel, Under the Net, when it appeared as Jake Donaghue, the narrator, and as Magdalen; it recurs in Annette Cockeyne and Rosa Keepe, Dora

Greenfield, Geòrgie Hands, Anne Peronett, "Maid" Marian,

Edmund Narraway, Andrew Chase-White, and most recently in Muriel Fisher and the mentally-retarded Jamaican Pattie

O'Driscoll. These characters possess radically differ­ ing qualities, but all of them are united in their un­ focused beings and, most importantly, in their detach­ ment from the world of other people — they all want to keep others from getting too close. Paradoxically, they are quite often the very characters in the novels who have the strongest desire and need for love and the greatest capacity for loving. Usually, though, they do not succeed in coming to a loving awareness of others; 29

usually they remain detached. These shapeless persons

are, however, for better or worse, at the heart of Mur­

doch's thinking. Her attitude toward them has varied

from novel to novel as radically as the externals of

their beings, and though she has not always approved

of them, her career began in high spirits. Jake Donaghue

is an example of conscious detachment, and he, to Murdoch,

for the moment, is comic in that detachment.

Jake's consciousness plays quite an important part

in his character: his detachment is self-willed and

self-constructed, and it is rendered comic by the clarity with which Jake is aware of but content with it and by

the frankness with which he relates it to us. He suffers from no unconscious self-delusion. He is aware at every moment of the distance which he wilfully creates between himself and others and the reason for creating it. He is never pitiable nor self-pitying, and there are few points in the novel when his acceptance of detachment, for all its comic absurdity, is not admirable. From the beginning,

Jake tells us in a very direct way what he is up to. He orders his life by a series of rules which are sometimes so obviously rationalizations and so obviously clearly such in Jake's own thinking that we can seldom laugh at him without also laughing, at least partially, with him. 30

Jake involves us as few of Murdoch's detached persons

do. Jake's frankness is abundantly evidenced in the

very first chapter when he is being put out by Magdalen,

for he tells us openly that he is not emotionally attached

to the woman he has been living off. Coming upon

Magdalen,irk.the bath, he plays out an actor's scene

which is comic not only in its melodramatic overstate­

ment but in Jake's conscious self-satisfaction at having

brought it off well.

"What is all this?" I shouted. "All this about your marrying a bookie? You can't do this without consulting me!" I felt I was making a passable scene outside the bathroom door. I even banged on the panel. (11-12)

The rules by which he governs his existence usually relate

to either his nerves or to women, most of the latter. rules being used to keep women at a distance. At one point in the first chapter, Jake says,

I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this. It is not in my nature to make myself responsible for other people. I find it hard enough to pick my own way along. (13)

At another point, he frankly shows Magdalen how he con­ structs his detachment. Interested to know more about the man who replaces him in Magdalen's affections, Jake asks, "'Where did you meet him?'" but then adds hurriedly 31 to cover up the fact of his interest, "'I ask this question in a purely sociological spirit'" (15). It is so obvious that his intentions are more than just

"sociological" that only Magdalen, who is far from quick, could miss the actual meaning — that she is taken in makes Jake's rule doubly amusing. Jake is detached from almost everybody: he is a writer of sorts, and he consciously tries to make of even his own real life something dramatic. When Mrs. Tinckhara tries to find out about his housing problem, he "grits his teeth against speech" (20), and adds,

I wanted to wait until I could present my story in a more dramatic 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?

It might be noted, however, that this very passage seems to catch Jake "unawares," for his admission of fictiona- lization is itself a frank statement of the truth. The only persons Jake seems willing to tell the truth to are his readers — at least in this instance. Though most of Jake's conscious detachments are amusing, some have a double-edged quality about them, as in Jake's reason for translating Breteuil's junk best-sellers rather than doing original writing of his own: "it's like opening 32

one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge" (22),

a statement comic in its image of a human as a ventri­

loquist's dummy, but critically reflexive in its suggestion

of a human's willful abdication of the use of his own

voice. At the beginning of Under the Net, however, the

undercurrent of criticism remains only an undercurrent,

and in fact can only be read out of Jake's utterances

in reflection after reading the whole novel. We sense

a certain dissatisfaction with Jake as a person which

Murdoch communicates indirectly to us, but in the novel

itself, Jake is realized in such a just way that even his wrongness has an authority about it. We may judge him

in restrospect, but while we are with him, we laugh.

Sometimes the laughter is of the sort that results

from viewing a Mack Sennet'or Charlie Chaplin film, though

"short man" Jake (23) is free from the pathos of Chaplin's

"little" tramp. Quite often we see Murdoch working for comic effect by juxtaposing a relatively mild, serious episode like Jake eavesdropping on Sadie and Sammy with a wildly hilarious comedy of situation — the neighbors mistaking Jake crouched on the fire escape for "an escaped loony" (131). This particular scene even indulges in slapstick to an extent that the later, more grave,

Murdoch seldom uses, especially in Jake's attempt to 33

convince the neighbors that he is not mentally unbalanced.

Almost in despair, I nodded, and added to my smile such gestures indicative of total well-being as it is possible to perform in a sitting position with one's back against a door. I shook hands with myself, held up my thumb and index finger in the form of an 0, and smiled even more emphatically.

This same device of juxtaposing a serious and a comic inci­

dent occurs many times in the novel, as in the exciting scene

of the theft of Mister Mars and the sudden chilling appear­

ance of the porter. Our fear that Jake may be caught in

the act is allowed to inflate upon the porter's sudden appear

ance and then is abruptly deflated when it turns out that

the porter is very much in favor of the removal of Mars:

"'’Performing dog," I says to him. "It'd better not per­

form here or I'll have the trustees on you"'" (148) — it

is a case both of classic debunking and of a comic fevel- ation of the porter's character. Many characters, especi­ ally minor ones, in Under the Net are comically revealed as free, separate beings, like the London taxidriver who watches silently the filing through of the bars of Mars's cage and then reveals a strange omniscience by reaching directly for the spring lock and opening a side of the cage "with oily smoothness" (151) and without batting an eye. Some of the comedy of Under the Net is, however, just fun for fun's sake. At one moment, while Jake, Dave,

Finn, and Lefty are in the post office, a piece of comedy is added which is utterly tangential to the plot, let alone 34

relevant to the themes: "While Lefty bought stamps and dis­

patched cables," Jake says, "I organized the singing in

round of "Great Tom is cast,' which continued, since I never have the presence of mind necessary to stop a round once it is started, until an official turned us out" (114).

It is Jake's serious reflection on his own inability to stop a round which is made to be the serious point of this passage, but the comedy actually results from Jake's bland ignoring of the question of the propriety of starting to sing a round in a post office. Some of Jake's comedy re­ sults from his taking it for granted that there can be no questioning his actions, no matter how much they may flout conventions. To do the unconventional thing as if it were the most conventional of things is one of the oldest and most effective of comic devices.

A great part of the comedy of Under the Net, however, results from the fact that Jake is a sort of non-writer, a would-be romantic who is constantly being thwarted in his attempted flights of imagination by mundane, contingent details and by his own lack of artistic discipline. Jake is a man of definite artistic impulses and more than a little taste, but his creativity is uncontrolled, largely a hit- and-miss matter. Jake is quite capable of producing beauti­ ful images, which is particularly evident in Chapter Fifteen, the search for Anna in Paris. At one point a fountain is 35 described as "an unheard sound, a gentle refutation of

Berkeley" (208), while later Jake uses two wonderfully apt images to describe his voice calling out to Anna:

"it was like shooting an arrow into a storm. Thousands and tens of thousands of voices covered up my cry" (214), and "my voice was caught up in the velvet of the night like a knife-thrust caught in a cloak. It was useless"

(219). Many of Jake's best images relate to his feelings, as when he first hears Hugo's name from Sadie and says,

"my stomach was rearing up inside me like a wildcat"(59), or when he hears the phone ring while locked in Sadie's apartment and says, "My heart sprang within me and fell like a bird striking a window pane" (95). Jake's images do not, however, always succeed. Sometimes he is too clever in the way metaphysical poets could be too clever and hence silly, as when he "smells Hugo's thoughts" (250) or when he tries to explain Mrs. Tinckham's lack of matches to keep her chain-smoking going by imagining "an undying cigarette which burns eternally in her bedroom" (17). Some of Jake's images are intentionally ineffective because they constitute tautological analogies, as in Jake's comparing

Dave's face when Dave wants a drink to that of "a man who wanted a drink" (104). For the most part, however, Jake's romantic tendencies are thwarted by an irrepressible comic urge — even in his most serious moments he is perfectly 36 capable of bringing forth a comic image. Comic imagery con­ stitutes by far the largest part of Jake's narrative method.

Magdalen's hand is described at one point as being "unrespon sive as a toasting fork" (14); Anna's props room is littered the contents seeming "to adhere to the walls like the con­ tents of a half-empty jam jar" (42); Jake explains his de­ sire to see Hugo by saying that "The bullfighter in the ring cannot explain why it is that he wants to touch the bull"

(101); a bartender peers from his stall "like an enclosed ecclesiastic" (106); when Jake rejects Magdalen's offer of money, he explains, "I felt like Judas" (202); Lefty's eyes are like those of "a wombat or a Roualt Christ" (107); when

Jake catches up with Anna and he sees her move toward the woods, his "heart leaped up as the heart of Aeneas must have done when he saw Dido making for the cave" (216) — even a random sampling of the comic images of the novel will demonstrate that we are, when in Jake-Murdoch's pre­ sence, in the presence of a first-rate comic talent, a talent which is not the talent of a satirist but, when at its best, is impish, the talent of a parodist. Jake's is an unfocused talent, however, a talent that is all-too- familiar with the worst excesses of pulp art, especially with the use of gratuitous imagery and cliche. Under the

Net is full of images thrown in without thought to their ».v*/ " * t** 37 relation to the theme or to theiMj^Te^atiVe* effectiveness .u 1 in relationship to other images Üra&érrthe Net, these • ------images work because Jake is an *4uncontrolled talent, but

in later novels, where the same superfluity of imagery is

used in third person interior monologue into which Murdoch

herself intrudes, the device is ineffective, even distract­

ing. In Under the Net, too, Jake makes frequent use of

cliche with no attempt to pass it off as related to the

theme of his story. A partial listing would have to in­

clude a woman "as cool as a lettuce" (13), a man shooting off "like an arrow" (14), an untalkative woman "a jewel in velvet" (19), a "dyed-in-the-wool Jew" (24), a movie busi­ ness expanding "like wildfire" (73), bestsellers selling

"like hot cakes" (22), a bookie a "tough customer" (70) and then a "peach" (80), a drunk "laughing like a lunatic"

(87), a memory with "the force of a hurricane" (92), a happy man feeling "like a king" (151), and a beneficent prostitute with a "heart of gold" (157), not to overlook such inevitables as the "arms of the law" (170), "weighing a ton" (171), "breaking the ice" (187), and "playing a big fish" (252). Of all these, only one of two (cf. 151 and

187) are intentionally satiric; the rest are just there, the result of Jake's all-too-easy facility for translating

Breteuil's junk. That Jake knows he uses a great deal of cliche is shown consciously in at least two instances, first 38

when he answers a serious question,'.!©f Lefty's about

morality with a facile quip about doing‘the right thing

by women and then describes the facile"answer as coming

"quick as a flash" (109), and secondly when Jake comically

describes his brief encounter with Hugo in the movie

studio by a double cliche and mixed metaphor: "But

it is possible to break the ice without burying the

hatchet" (187). If Murdoch had to rely herself on Jake's tastefulness in expunging cliche", she would never stylis­

tically succeed as a writer.

Jake is, however, often intentionally bad. He is

just as aware of his use of bad style in prose as he is

aware of his methods for keeping people in their places.

He uses bad style quite often to be funny, to detach himself from others, and he succeeds, if only momen­ tarily. If we find in retrospect that the comedy was purchased at some cost, we are not allowed by Jake to feel that way while he is talking. We see Jake's conscious badness in various devices, especially in his use of bathos. Bor various purposes, sometimes/, using bathos in his own special, consistently belittling way, to show his contempt for possible involvements with others: he rejects Mrs. Tinckham's hint for more details of his split with Magdalen by saying her voice "must have 39 greased the way to many a confession" (19). The same contempt is implied in Jake's attitude toward knowing

Sadie: "few people are so free of earthly vanity as not to find it pleasant, other things being equal, to be on matey terms with someone whose face is displayed all over London on posters twelve feet high" (53).

There is quite a good deal of personal face-saving im­ plied in Jake's contempt, and we find it again in his rationalized decision to revise The Silencer for publi­ cation despite the possible injury to Hugo: "since the thing was now on paper it might as well look decent"

(70) — are we to believe that Jake is saving Hugo's ideas from indecency? Bathos also works to express

Jake's extremities of delight, though again not without some contempt for those at whose expense delight is gained. Meeting Magdalen again in Paris and finding her

"deeply moved, relieved and delighted" to see him, Jake reports, "with a whoop I fell upon her" (92), and as we would expect from that detaching "whoop," the en­ counter is soon terminated, Jake having again refused an involvement. Bathos plays some part in Jake's fond­ ness for recreating proverbs to suit the occasion, and here his comedy, which is not gained at the expense of others, is more lastingly amusing. He uses personalized 40

proverbs in several instances: "prevention is better

than a fracas" (79), he thinks, while expecting a fight with Sammy; and "Maxim: never tread underfoot the food which you can put in your pocket" (73), a parody proverb — comedy on an empty stomach. Bathos is also related to

Jake's frequent lapses into French. Of course like many Murdoch characters Jake has both English and French, but he often uses French to comically overstate or to engage in cute euphemism — confining the indecent to the not-so-dead French language, learned or not. Jake uses Frenchified diction ranging from so familiar an Anglicized word as "tête à tête" (130) to phrases like

"bien renseigne" (113), most of them quite naturally, even simply. But he is out for fun when he says, "Madge was lancée ; nor could I know after describing what parabola she would finally return to earth" (200), and he engages in self-parody when he says he does not want to visit Sadie "partly because, au fond, I was a bit afraid of Sadie" (235). Preciosity being out of style now, such Frenchified dandyisms are a conscious attempt on Jake's part to deflate the potentially real and involving of its intensity of meaning. Even if he has to be a bad writer to remain detached, Jake will do it. 41

Like most comedy which is gained at the expense of

other people, Jake's bathos has a potential satiric

quality which is softened by his own frankness and self­

parody. When Jake applies comic devices to things other

than people, our laughter is freer since any criticism,

implied or merely potential, reflects back only upon

Jake. Jake has a penchant for bad styles, and we could

construct a list of the types of books he reads based

only upon the styles he employs — other than Breteuil's

best-sellers, Jake may read mystery novels, sentimental

romances, and travelogues. (He is of course a movie

fan of some knowledge, at least in regard to the Marvelous

Mister Mars, and some of his sense of style may even come

from cinematic scripts.) The mystery novel style is mostly a matter of hyperterse staccato sentence structure

with a few conventionalized mystery images thrown in —

houses with secrets in their hearts, and such. Jake

uses mystery style for a variety of purposes, not all of

them comic. When Hugo arrives in the hospital where

Jake is working, the staccato style is used seriously ;;

to heighten tension. As Hugo is brought in on a trolley,

Jake describes his feelings.

Then I lowered my eyes to the face of the man on the trolley, which was at that moment passing in front of me. The man on the trolley was Hugo. 42

His face was dead white and his eyes were closed. A darkly stained bandage encased his head. I stood there rigid. Then the trolley had passed. I stepped back inside the cubby­ hole and closed the door and leaned against it. A conflict of emotions filled me. My immediate feeling was one of guilt — like Hamlet con­ fronted by the ghost of his father. (236)

Here the relative plainness of style and the crispness

of statement is evidence of one of Jake's rare moments

of serious emotional involvement. Usually, the mystery

style is evidence of detached parody, however, sometimes

even of pseudo-sentimentality. In the passage describing

Jake's discovery of the breakup of Anna's mime theatre, the staccato style is mixed with the kind of trite images used by many a pulp mystery writer to clue in mysterious­ ness.

Doors were banging. Through every window there came in the busy murmur of the summer morning. Violent hands had been laid upon the house; it had been violated. With a sudden impulse I approached the door of the auditorium. I shook it, but it was still locked. Whatever secret the heart of that strange building had contained, here at least it could for a while longer, brood upon it still. (123-124)

This same staccato sentimentality is used later in Jake's description of the aging Mars, but this time Jake's feel­ ings are ambiguous — he identifies with Mars and makes a major decision not to accept Magdalen's money on the basis of that identification. Serious as a part of Jake's feel­ ings are, however, the decision is questionable, as the 43 falsity of the emotion shows.

I was thinking about Mars. Mars was old. He would do no more work. He would not swim flooded rivers any more, or scramble over high fences, or fi^ht with bears in lonely places. His strength was waning, and his intelligence would avail him nothing. He would soon die. This discovery com­ pleted the circle of my sadness; and with it my resolution crystallized. (199-200)

Here style is used by Jake to detach the reader from the situation, to make him see the falsity of the thinking by making him conscious of the falsity of the emotion; we cannot take Jake's rejection of the money seriously as a defensible choice when it is motivated by the pathetic fallacy of identifying with an aging dog. Had Jake identi­ fied with an aging person, it would be another matter al­ together. The passage was, however, written in retrospect and Jake may be parodying himself as well as the decision, for at least once in the novel he makes us aware of his own consciousness of the use of mystery style for detaching comic effect. This occurs at Jake's first visit to Hugo's apartment, and the scene is as bumblingly comic as any slap stick scene in the novel. Having built up a certain fear­ ful expectation in the reader about Hugo's reaction to see­ ing the man who stole his ideas again, Jake, the scene is a series of comic deflations, of promised encounters that never come off.

We proceeded with caution; only another bend of the stairs separated us from Hugo's door. I pushed 44

the two of them back and went up alone. The door was ajar. The noise was not deafening. I threw my shoulders back and walked in. I found myself in a completely empty room. There was another door opposite to me. I walked quickly across and opened it. The next room was empty too. As I stepped back through the doorway I banged into Finn and Dave. "It's birdies," said Finn. It was. (103)

This is something of a comic parody of the concept of the tragedy of being prepared for events that never happen, for Jake tightens the style here as closely as possible and then walks into not one but two "empty" rooms and

finds only "birdies," not the awesome Hugo. There is much self-parody here, too, especially in the superfluous verification, "It was." Jake is working consciously to detach his readers from the events. He is laughing him­ self at his former attitude toward Hugo, and he uses the mystery style throughout as a deflating device.

The purpose for the use of styles Jake adopts from romances and travelogues, however, is more complicated.

In the romance of the Melville or Conrad variety, long descriptive passages could be quite beautiful, lush in illuminating imagery; and in such descriptions, the pathetic fallacy which animates nature could be put to effective use by making it a matter of projecting the characters’ emotions onto inanimate objects. At worst, the use of pathetic fallacy and gratuitous imagery 45 could produce purple patch. Some of Jake's descriptions are pure purple patch, as in his description of a letter falling down a chute, "turning over and over like an autumn leaf" (114), an image which is just too sad to be sad. This is the sort of "flower" which Jake approved of in Lefty's speech (162), but it is an analogizing device of the mechanical sort that makes one wince at its unreality. Many of Jake's usages of pathetic fallacy, however, are impressionistic projections of his feelings, and not all of them are ineffective. Of the deserted streets of London, Jake says, "The rare street lamps revealed pittfed black walls and cast the shadow of an occasional cat. A street as deep and dark as a well ended at last in a stone breakwater, and on the Other side, at the foot of a few steps, was the moon again, scattered in pieces upon the river" (117), and later, in a mood of isolated melancholy, Jake projects his feelings onto Waterloo Bridge: "Naked as a bridge in a picture, on which no one will ever tread, Waterloo

Bridge brooded over the river" (175). These usages are relatively more successfully integrated with Jake's feelings than some, but even when Jake's use of pathetic fallacy seems forced or too conscious, there is still 46

some residue of seriousness of intention. Few of Jake's

pathetic fallacy projections are amusing only. None of

them is without its imagistic authority. "It was a

warm evening," Jake says at one point, "cloudless and

brilliantly blue, and the place was mute around us, walled

in by a distant murmur, which may have been the sound

of traffic or else the summery sigh of the declining

sun" (102), and before we can scoff that of course it

was the traffic, we cannot fail to be "impressed," as

Finn and Dave were, by the beauty of the evening seen

through the image, pathetic fallacy or not. The same

ambiguous reaction is brought forth by many images in

the book, as in the place where "The darkness hung in

the air but spread out in a suspended powder which only

made the vanishing colours more vivid" (106), or where,

a little later, "The declining sun struck on glowing

bricks and flashing tiles, and warmed the stone of an

occasional fallen pillar" (106). Even the images of

nature which are most obviously forced are not entirely to

be dismissed: "On the other side" of the park in Paris,

Jake says, "began the unnatural garden, with its metallic green grass under the yellow lamps, and its flowers

self-conscious with the colour and quiet as dream flowers which can unfold and be still at the same moment" (217). 47

There is no attempt at self-parody here, not even a hint that Jake does not seriously accept his perceptions as valid, nor is there any suggestion of ironic self-parody in one of the most preposterous images of the novel.

Finally catching up to Anna in Paris only to find that

Anna is not Anna, Jake feels that "suddenly the wood seemed to be full of statues and lovers. Every tree had blossomed with a murmuring pair, and every vista mocked me with a stone figure" (219). The ambiguity of Jake’s attitude toward these images is an important key to his character, for the use of pathetic fallacy, in the posi­ tive, projective sense, is a romantic tendency, and Jake himself is a would-be romantic who cannot quite give up his tendencies in that direction no matter how thoroughly empirical a critique might be leveled against them. For all of our awareness that pathetic fallacy is a false process of thinking, Jake's use of it, especially in the episode in Paris, has an authenticity about it which is a sort of argument with a compelling logic of its own.

Another of Jake's romantic tendencies is shown in his use of travelogue style, at least two different varieties of which are evident. For Paris, which Jake knows only from a distance and for which he retains a certain idealized detachment, Jake uses the most densely 48

imagistic of his styles; while for London, which Jake

knows intimately, he uses a style which treats his

feelings about the city almost as documentary phenomena

or even parodies them. Paris, Jake tells us in a de­

scription of its difference from London, is a city he

"approaches with expectation and leaves with disappoint­

ment" (188) .

There is a question which only I can ask and which only Paris can answer; but this question is something which I have never yet been able to formulate. Certain things indeed I have learned here; for in­ stance, that my happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away. But Paris remains for me still an unresolved harmony. It is the only city which I can personify. London I know too well, and others I do not love enough. Paris I encounter, but as one encounters a loved one — in the end and dumbly, and can scarcely speak a word. Alors, Paris, qu1est-ce-que tu dis, toi? Paria, dis-moi ce que j1aime. But there is no reply, only the sad echo from crumbling walls — Paris. (188-189)

In this passage there is a certain tone of self-parody

in Jake's expression of these vague feelings, the mixup over "happiness," the "sad face," and "unhappiness," which is more confusing than moving, but parody or not, the majority of the passages in the novel about Paris contain the most beautiful images of the book, the most romantic of styles. Usually these images concern love, as when Jake imagines that "Beyond the green trees the towers of Notre-Dame rose tenderly like lovers rising 49

from the grass" (201) , an image in which even the sacre-

ligious comparison is submerged in the loveliness of the

picture. In treating London, however, despite Jake's

love of the city, there is a certain blunt quality to

Jake's descriptions. Again, as with Paris, feelings

are projected, but Jake is very much aware of the projections

as projections. With London, his use of travelogue

attempts cleverness instead of beauty: "dear London" (7), which has for Jake the mundane familiarity of an old shoe,

can be seen with cleverness to cover up one's dissatis­

faction with its mundanity. About Paris, on the other hand, one can be symbolistic or imagistic — it is far

enough away, even exotic enough. London is described at various points as a very conscious external correla­ tive of Jake's inner states: "There are some parts of

London that are necessary and others that are contingent.

Everywhere west of Earl's Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency"

(24); or "On Chiswick Mall the houses face the river, but on that piece of Hammersmith Mall which is relevant to my tale they turn their backs to the river and pretend to be an ordinary street" (38); or "If you have ever visited the City of London in the evening you will know what an uncanny loneliness possesses these streets which 50

during the day arei’so busy and noisy" (102) ; or "The

Bounty Belfounder studio is situated in a suburb of

southern London where contingency reaches the point of

nausea" (156). In Paris, images are images, not clever

self-parodies, but in London, images are sacrificed for

more ordinary, less romantic truths: "It is a character­

istic of central London that the only thing you can buy

there at any hour of the day or night is a stamp" (113).

One does not worry about stamps in Paris, only about

eternal, if vague, questions. Jake applies travelogue

to London for amusement and to detach himself from his

familiarity with it. To make this need of detachment

clear to the reader, Jake carries travelogue to an absurd

finale when he solemnly includes the reader in his know­

ledge of London, respectable and otherwise: "If you

have ever tried to sleep on the Victoria embankment you

will know that the chief difficulty is that the seats

are divided in the middle" (174). Chances are, few of

Jake's readers have tried to sleep on the Victoria

embankment. We might even desire not to know such a

thing, redolent as it is of "vagrants," bums, hoboes,

and such, and we laugh to show we do not know. The

romanticizing process works for Jake with Paris but not with London. Both Jake's Paris imagism and London wit, however, are processes of distancing. 51

Similar to Jake's scenery descriptions, Jake uses

projection onto the Marvelous Mister Mars, but with

Mars, the device is almost always consistently comic.

Mars is the first of Murdoch's superintelligent dogs,'

a group of animalssimilar to the dogs in Tolstoy and

George Eliot which Murdoch connects with openly spon­

taneous affection, vitality, and almost totally free will, and which includes Nick's Murphy, Alice Lejour's

Tadg, and even, to a certain extent, the dead Liffey.

Jake projects his feelings onto many animals; as he pro­

jected himself onto the "sensitive evening air" (159)

in nature, he projects himself onto Mrs. Tinckham's

"objective" (17) and, at one point when Mars enters the

shop, "scandalized" (175) cats. The projection onto animals, however, is just as ambiguous as Jake's use of pathetic fallacy with objects, though in its own way.

For Murdoch is careful to point out the fact that Mars has an "intelligence" (146) that one can count on, and that there is just the possibility that the feelings we read into an animal's face and actions are, though we laugh consciously at seeing understanding there, the actual signs of a real intelligence. Though Jake uses

Mars's actions for comedy throughout, in one of his serious moments, at the beginning of Chapter Sixteen 52

just after the return from Paris, Jake seems to take

seriously Mars's disturbingly human reactions? sometimes,

Jake says, Mars "would dome and thrust his long nose

into my face and give me a look of anguish which came

so near to transcending his nature that I would push

his face away and ruffle up the fur of his back to satisfy

myself that he was only a dog" (222-223). This ambiguity,

this opacity which keeps us from knowing if Mars really

is intelligent or if we just read the signs as we wish,

is evident even in the most hilarious of Jake's projec­

tions. When Jake returns to Dave's flat at one point

he receives an "ecstatic welcome" (177) from Mars, but

when the talk turns to the cost of feeding the dog and

it appears that the cost will be exorbitant, Jake sees

his hostage as an "enormous carnivore" who, wise dog

that he may be, happen^ ; to be "fast asleep" (179) while

his costliness is being discussed. Does Mars know what

is happening? Well, of course not, we say — but he is

asleep. This same ambiguity is present at other moments

of Jake's projecting: while Jake is under the dream-like

enchantment of Hugo's movie studio, "Mars seemed under a

spell, a gliding dog whose jointed legs swung to and fro without touching the earth" (160); when Jake fears arrest,

Mars "licked me sympathetically behind the ear" (162);

and when Jake tumbles Hugo into the movie set temple, 53

"Mars clearly wasn’t quite sure what sort of attitude he ought to adopt towards him, and kept looking at me

for a cue. He growled softly every now and then as if to try to keep the situation under control without giving any serious offense" (163-164). The use of pathetic fallacy in connection with inanimate objects is rendered ambiguous not because we think that a bridge could actually "brood" but because the image itself has an assertive vigor which transcends the facts. The use of projection with Mars is rendered comically ambiguous in that we are not just sure what the facts are. Mars comes very close to being a person.

Jake's pretensions to romanticism usually result in comedy, quite often a comedy of self-parody. There is another category of Jakfe's psychic processes, however,;: which is second only to his aesthetic impulses in creat­ ing the comic world of Under the-Net. This category is not the infrequent lapses into sheer fantasy like the episode in which Jake imagines himself a successful script writer ("I lay on a striped divan beside a pale green telephone while princes of the film world poured fawning, supplication, and praise along the wire" [203-204]), but what might be called his pretensions to reason. Like

Sartre, Jake is a sort of romantic rationalist — but 54

without the nausea. The urge to analyze or explain by

reason is one of his strongest urges, and it is constantly

coming out in the most awkward of moments. Jake is very

much aware of and concerned for his own dignity. Because

his life is absurd it must be supplied with a rationale.

But since Jake knows that an absolute rationale is im­

possible all that can be supplied is a parody rationale —

if one cannot have reason in a serious way then one can

laugh at the lack of it. As with so many of Jake's

pretensions, his pretension to reason is conscious, and

he again uses it to detach himself from serious involve­ ment. Reason can be a way of making reality seem more meaningful and charged than it is, or a way of reducing

reality to manageable components, making it seem less meaningful than it is. Jake employs both methods. His pretensions to being a reasonable creature are most comic when he engages in overstatement using formal diction.

This can be seen in various instances, as when Jake is trying to decide to whom to send his letter and reflects,

"Dave said he already received more letters than he wanted and there was no sense in inviting yet more by pointless acts of correspondence" (114); or especially in the riot in Hugo's studio, much of which is related in inflated diction more appropriate to a commencement or a funeral 55

than a mob violence. Jake describes his scuffling with

people in the studio with stiff propriety: "It was

necessary more than once, in defense of our right to

proceed, to deal violently with some person or persons

who disputed this right" (165). The same arch pomposity

is applied to Mars's attack on a policeman.

He dashed at the nearest policeman and, seizing him by the shoulder, began to pull him vigorously into the open. This gesture, which I admit I may have misinterpreted, was certainly taken in bad part by the policeman, who seemed to imagine that Mars was attacking him, and fought back fiercely. I watched for a little while, until I began to be afraid that Mars might get hurt. Then I interfered and pulled him off, explaining to the policeman as I did so that, in my view, Mars's intentions had been kindly, and not, as the other thought, aggressive. The police­ man answered impolitely. (169-170)

Jake's concern for his own rectitude is apparent too in his frequent analyses of events happening to him. He has a very strong urge to explain things in such a way that they put him in the best light. Nonetheless, the usual result is parody face-saving, and the effect is comic.

Vie see this in Jake's ratiocination about the case of finding "hairpins" in London streets (99), and in his comments on the salubrity of "diaphragmatic breathings'.':

"I can recommend this as being harmless and conceivably beneficial, particularly for someone who is as suggestible as I am" (176). But the urge to explain and to give a dignified mein to what is absurd reaches its most comic nadir in Jake's thoughts while swimming naked in the Thames. 56

Swimming has natural affinities with judo. Both arts depend upon one's willingness to surrender a rigid and nervous attachment to the upright position. Both bring muscles into play throughout the whole body. Both demand, over an exceptionally wide area of bodily activity, the elimination of superfluous motion. Both ressemble the dynamism of water, which runs through many channels to find its own level. In fact, however, once one has learned to control one's body and overcome the primeval fear of falling which is so deep in the human consciousness, there are few physical arts and graces which are not thereby laid open to one, or at any rate made much easier of access. I am, for instance, a good dancer and a very creditable tennis player. If it were possible for anything to console me for my lack of height, these things would console me. (119)

Now here is a speech to warm the heart of many a physical education instructor who may be feeling neglected, and it almost seems rather earnest until we get to the final

"If." Then, looking back, we see that the whole passage is provisional. Jake is swimming naked in a river, and these earnest thoughts are to cover up that absurdity, to lift the mundanity of the activity above the mundane by some elevating serious thought on the subject of public health — or rather private health. Very late in the novel, in one of the key passages revealing the static nature of Jake's detachment, the same sort of pseudo­ ratiocination occurs while Jake is riding on a bus. This time, however, the boy scout calesthenics leader has become a decadent poet. SI

Events stream past us like these crowds, and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent forever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, life itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onwards with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live — a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop-chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came. So I reflected; and was reluctant to get off the bus. (275)

Here romanticism and reason merge in one vague conglomerate, complete with mixed metaphors. Here is the same Jake as at the beginning, a little more wistful, but just as isolated. And here too in the pretension to reason is the same comic error in thinking which Jake had earlier applied to hairpins and swimming, the same process which

Hugo had once stooped to in explaining rationally the

"honesty" of "Fireworks" (61). And because Jake never overcomes these comic tricks and pseudo-rational eleva­ tions, because he remains so very completely an isolated individual, an eccentric unformed artist, he retains a certain artificial unreality which makes our laughter slightly more at his expense than with him. Nonetheless, we do laugh. 58

It is important to remember that Under the Net is not a novel in which comedy is one element used along with other elements of equal importance but one in which comedy is the essence of the whole. Under the Net is a comedy, as Iris Murdoch herself pointed out when she said that "It plays with a philosophical idea,"^ and a reading of the novel should not fail to take into account that playfulness. It is one of A. S. Byatt's many

"uneasinesses" that she has failed to account for "what is in fact, amusing, light, and rapid," and while Byatt

"pleads in extenuation" that Under the Net is Murdoch's

"Most philosophic" novel (she says almost precisely the same thing about The Unicorn), it is nonetheless true that the philosophy in Under the Net is handled in a way unique in Murdoch's work — at one point, in Dave's working out logically the best way to blackmail Sammy and Sadie,

Murdoch even parodies philosophical dialectic (cf. 177-182).

Never again would Murdoch "play" with philosophy, and it cannot be insignificant that at least once in her work she did. If we tally up rather mathematically those episodes in the novel which are most serious and set them apart from those episodes which are most comic, we

1Cf. John O'London's, IV (1961), 498.

2Byatt, 39. 59 will see clearly Murdoch's intention. Only two chapters - and only parts of those two at that — are serious in tone and philosophical in content. The other eighteen chap­ ters are all comic. These two serious episodes are

Chapter Four (60-76), the recall of Jake's writing of

The Silencer based upon Hugo's ideas, and Chapter Fifteen

(especially 221 ff.), the search for Anna in Paris. There is something of a continuation of serious tone from

Chapter Fifteen into the beginning of Chapter Sixteen

(198fff.), but the emotional level during this period of Jake's life between the failure to find Anna and the decision to work is more neutral than moving. It is the diosesti.Jake comes to nausea, but once he starts work the former comic spirit revives. Even in Chapter Fifteen, in the romantic dream world of the search for Anna, Jake indulges his fondness for comedy — the joke of "Dido making for the cave" (216), and the rational explana­ tion of Anna's reflection in the water Jake has disturbed by throwing into it Hugo's rocket as "a sensible proof that moving water can render an impeccable reflection"

(215). Serious and beautiful as Chapter Sixteen is, it is still the best statement of Jake's central desire for detachment and distance (even from those he loves most) that we find in the novel. It is one of Murdoch's finest 60

artistic achievements, too, for the desire for distance

from the loved one is communicated only indirectly and

gradually. Jake first cries out to Anna when it is

impossible for Anna to hear, and then when he very easily

could catch up with her, he says, "It would do no harm to

find out where she was going" (216), and then proceeds

to follow her only at a distance, explaining carefully

that "I wanted to prolong the enchantment of these moments" (217) . Prolong them he certainly does until he

has only Anna's shoes left to hold. The real woman has

escaped him by his own desire to keep her at a distance,

and though he explains that "I would rather hold a woman

any day than her shoes," he is frank in adding that,

taking up the shoes, "nevertheless as my grip closed upon them I trembled" -(218) . Of course Jake would rather hold the woman, as we have just seen in his "falling upon" Magdalen, but in this scene where dream is more important than reality, Jake's pretension to the romantic, his desire for "enchanting" distance, wins out. There is something of a melancholy undertone to Jake's willful game of hide-and-seek with Anna, though it remains an undertone because of the beauty of imagery which over­ powers it, but it is to the credit of Jake's creator that she was able to communicate the importance of distance in determining Jake's actions without making it sentimental,, 61

The first of the more serious episodes is connected

with the central "philosophical idea" with which the

novel "plays," the image of the "net" which Jake puts in

the mouth of Hugo-Annandine in The Silencer. Speaking

very generally of "theorizing," Annandine says,

All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself, and this is unutterably particu­ lar. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we try, as it were, to crawl under the net. (91)

Or, to paraphrase another Murdoch statement of the same

idea, reality is more complex than our descriptions of

it make it seem, an idea central to all of Murdoch's novels both as theme and as aesthetic. The image of the net itself alludes externally to Wittgenstein who makes an equation between "network" and "patterning." It is the making and shattering of patterns which constitutes the sense in which the image is used in the novel. To be precise, it is not really possible to talk of the net as a symbol. It is an intellectual concept which is vague and abstract even in its one direct use in Annandine's speech in Under the Net. What is this "net" that one crawls under? One of the clearer images which comes to mind is a tennis net, but Wittgenstein talks of a "network" and that seems to be the sense in which Murdoch uses it.

But then, why "net" and not "network"? One thing is certain: the net may be present in the intellectual part of the mind, but it cannot be seen. It hence cannot be 62 a symbol, and must also be regarded as something of a philosopher’s intrusion into the world of character creat­ ing which is basically sensual. Nonetheless, the idea of "patterning" is an embryonic instance of Murdoch's use of diminishing symbolisms of the sort later seen in the bell, and as such is significant. Since Murdoch says that Under the Net "plays" with the idea, the net should — like the more peripheral parts of the novel — be oorSic, and it is, mostly because of the comic postures which Jake's reactions take to the shattering of his patterns. Not all Jake's reactions to the breakup of his patternings are comic. When he finds out that Sadie loves him and Anna does not, he describes his reaction through the use of the "bird" which is more of a concrete symbolism than the net itself and which is here curiously lacking in emotional impact. "A pattern in my mind was suddenly scattered, and the pieces of it went flying about me like birds;" (254) . These "birds" are related to the "birdies" who take over Hugo's apartment, as his ideas take over his life, and Jake does momentarily see, through the indirect means of the bird image, the freely contingent groupings which birds suggest and which here constitute an analogue of Murdoch's conception of contin­ gent reality. The moment is, however, intellectual, not 63 emotional, neither involving nor detaching. When Jake comes to see other patterns broken up, however, the usual effect is comedy. This is seen most clearly in

Jake's reaction to Breteuil's good novel, Nous les vainquens, a reaction which employs nearly every comic device for detachment Jake has used throughout the novel, the comic image, the too-dignified diction, the parody face-saving.

Against the serious reflections that Nous les vainquens represented for Jake "some monstrous reversal of the order of nature" (191) or "the changing of a fundamental category," (192) Jake comically imagines Breteuil "changing his spots" (191) and irrationally hallucinates, "Jean

Pierre had no right to turn himself surreptitiously into a good writer" (192) . But to see how the comic is here more important than the serious, these remarks must be seen in context.

Why should it matter to me so much that Jean Pierre had pulled it off? I went to a caf^ and ordered 'dognac. To say that I was jealous was to put it too simply. I felt an indignant horror as at some monstrous reversal of the order of nature: as a man might feel if his favourite opinion was suddenly controverted in detail by a chimpanzee. I had classed Jean Pierre once and for all. That he should secretly have been changing his spots, secretly improving his style, ennobling his thought, purify­ ing his emotions — all this was really too bad. In my imagination I was already lending the book every possible virtue,, and the more I did so the more I felt a mingled rage and distress which drove every other idea from my mind. I ordered another cognac. Jean Pierre had no right to turn himself 64

surreptitiously into a good writer. I felt that I had been the victim of an imposture, a swindle, For years I had worked with this man, using my know­ ledge and sensibility to turn his junk into the sweet English tongue; and now, without warning me, he sets up shop as a good writer. I pictured Jean Pierre, with his plump hands and his short grey hair. How could I introduce into this picture, which I had known so well for so long, the notion of a good novelist? It wrenched me, like the changing of a fundamental category. A man whom I had taken on as a business partner had turned out to be a rival in love. One thing was plain. Since it was now impossible to treat with Jean Pierre cynically, it was impossible to treat with him at all. Why should I waste time transcribing his writings instead of producing my own? I would never translate Nous les vainquens. Never, never never. (191-192jH

What we find here is another comic insistence on distance

from the complexity of reality, from involvement.

There is even a moment of uncharitable ugliness — of what relevance does Breteuil’s "plumpness" and "greyness" have to his abilities as a writer? Murdoch makes Jake go overboard here and place himself in a spiteful, envious position to make it plain that this shattered pattern does not lead Jake to a real confrontation with others but to a break, both from Breteuil and from Magdalen, Breteuil's agent.

Finally, there is the question of the ending of the novel, that "first day of the world" and "morning of the first day" (283): is that not evidence of a new deci­ sion on Jake's part to confront others as persons? It is, 65

but it is as yet only an unclear, nascent decision

relating mostly to animals rather than humans — wondering

if a housing advertisement "with no petty restrictions"

which Jake knows full well "refers to women" could be

"extended to dogs" (284) like Mars, and calling the

birth of the Siamese and tabby cats in a single birth

"one of the wonders of the world" (286) , the world of

animals, not persons. Persons like Sadie "will keep"

(282), while Jake has parted from Hugo vaguely wondering

if they are finished with one another. Doubtless in

Jake's admission of not being able to explain with his

hitherto all-knowing reason the mysteriousness of reality

in the Siamese-tabby birth is a promise that he is now

capable of real human involvements, but in the novel,

none of these involvements actually come off. Like the

endings of only a very few other Murdoch novels, the end

of Under the Net is a prelude to involvement of Murdoch's

real sort — with other persons as others. But it re­ mains only a prelude. At the very end of Under the Net, we do find ourselves laughing with Jake at "one of the wonders of the world," birth, an event as trite as the

phrase used to describe it though just as mysterious as

the trite phrase states, but nativity is not the journey

through life — that journey Murdoch has never presented. 6 6

It is a promising laugh we give with Jake at the end, but only for one line. It is a significant laugh, too, for Jake Donaghue is the only character before Martin

Lynch-Gibbon who has a chance for real involvement. It is significant further that Under the Net and A Severed

Head are the only two of Iris Murdoch's novels to date in which the comic is given precedence over all other elements. What Jake lacks at this stage in Murdoch's thinking is an Honor Klein. Instead, he ends up with the

Marvelous Mister Mars. As nearly human as a Murdoch dog can be, he can not really be as satisfactory as a real human. Mars, after all, is only an actor. CHAPTER III

THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER

While Under the Net is excellent Murdoch, it is not typical. It owes much of its aesthetic — the use of a single central consciousness, the picaresque plot as a series of absurd adventures, the verbal wit — to Raymond

Queneau, to whom Under the Net is dedicated, and Murdoch points this debt out directly by having Jake own a copy of Pierrot mon ami — and Beckett’s Murphy — (16) and indirectly through the M's in Mars's name. The use of the

M is a kind of initialling device which recalls with spell­ ing Oueneau's habit of playing with the various "canine" and "oak" connotations of his own name in the creation of characters' names. That Mars is a dog is of course a direct reference to Queneau. A list of other "M" characters who initial various novels would include Magdalen, Mischa, Marcia, the Mors, Michael Meade, Martin, "Maid" Marian, Max, the

Meechams, one of whom is named Mildred, Miranda, Maria

Magistretti, Millicent, Muriel and Marcus, as well as Nick's dog Murphy who also tempts one to recall Beckett.Thematic­ ally, Jake seems to owe some of his admirable lack of self-pity

■’•Cf. Jacques Guicharnaud, Raymond Queneau (New York & London, 1965), 10-11. Use of the signature in Murdoch may not end with initialling, but it had best be remembered that no one seems to have noticed any of the signatures in Queneau until he himself pointed them out. 68

and nausea to Pierrot, though Jake as a character is only

in the most general way indebted to Pierrot. The episode

in Chapter Sixteen and following of Jake's work in the

Corelli ward of the hospital recalls Murphy's work in the

Magdalen Mental Mercyseat which also seems to have played

some role in the triple use of M in the name of the Marvel­

ous Mister Mars and in the naming of Madge. Most of these

nods are recognitions of debts for aesthetic principles.

There is nothing of Murphy's black tragedy in Jake's comedy,

and there is the promise of real involvement with people

at the end of Under the Net which differs sharply from the

re-establishment of nearly the original psychological situ­

ation at the end of Pierrot. Jake has the possibility of becoming human, while neither Murphy nor Pierrot becomes more than a static symbolic surrogate for a person. The most important ideas of Under the Net are unmistakably

Murdoch's own, and she is indebted to neither Beckett nor

Queneau for them.

The Flight from the Enchanter, Murdoch's second novel, is, on the other hand, far more unmistakably the artist's own both in ideas and aesthetic. But while The Flight from the Enchanter is more typical, it is not so excellent. The use of a single narrator is not really typical of Murdoch though she has twice used it successfully in A Severed Head and of course in Under the Net and once not so successfully 69

in The Italian Girl. The Flight from the Enchanter uses

multiple interior monologue which the artist returns to in

six other novels and with which she seems to be most at

home. The number of monologuists in The Flight from the

Enchanter is significant because Murdoch has only once

again tried so many. There are seven, including the cen­

tral characters Annette, Rainborough, and Rosa, as well

as minor characters Peter, Nina, and Hunter; and we even

get a single one-chapter glimpse (in Chapter Two) into the

odd mind of Calvin Slick: "In Calvin's view a woman ought 2 to be the same colour all over" (20). The use of multi­ ple interior monologue tends to give to The Flight from the

Enchanter a richness and variety of point of view which is more appropriate to Murdoch's definition of reality as a complex of particulars than does the single narrator. We certainly would like to know some of Magdalen's side of the story, but as it is, we have to guess from Jake's hints.

Multiple interior monologue does, however, tend to give

Murdoch less space in which to develop the richness of individual characters, and when seven characters are pre­ sented from the inside out in a thirty-chapter novel, much human particularity must be sacrificed. Such a sacrifice

2 The Flight from the Enchanter (London, 1956). 70 is one of the problems of The Flight from the Enchanter.

It is an almost incredibly complicated and rich novel in thematic variation, aesthetic patternings, and number of characters. But real characters whose reality is defined by a multiplicity of personal details demand space in which to act, and in The Flight from the Enchanter, the stage on which persons appear is a very cramped arena. Murdoch has used as few as two interior monologuists in The Unicorn, three in The Bell, four in The Sandcastle and The Time of the Angels, and five in The Red and the Green. Even using as few as four, however, makes it necessary to slight cer­ tain persons — like Marcus, who is supposed to be a satire of some kind of mentality, but just what kind is not clear.

That stagy quality is something that no character in The

Flight from the Enchanter ever escapes, not even Rosa. None­ theless, the novel is by no means a complete failure and can perhaps best be described by Olga McDonald Meidner's often quoted phrase "a brilliant failure," if we emphasize the brilliancy.

The Flight from the Enchanter is also the one Murdoch novel which most obviously grows out of the impetus of other works of art. Under the Net is certainly a denial

o "Reviewer's Bane: A Study of Iris Murdoch's The Flight from the Enchanter," Essays in Criticism, XI (1961), 435. 71

of Murphy’s self-willed death and also of Pierrot's con­

scientious moral inertia’.. The Flight from the Enchanter

is dedicated to Elias Canetti, a translation of whose Crowds and Power Murdoch would later review,4 and the central theme

of the novel is hence announced in the dedication as the

power one being can have over another. The theme can also

be seen in Murdoch's terms as the misuse or perversion of

love. A. S. Byatt, though she does not mention Canetti,

has examined this theme fully in her study of Murdoch and

has excellently analyzed The Flight from the Enchanter as

displaying states of mind "closer to being degrees of en- 5 slavement than degrees of freedom." But while Canetti

studied rather active power figures (Hitler and the like),

Murdoch studies a rather passive power figure, as Byatt points out,6 and Mischa Fox is hence a qualification of

Canetti as Jake was a qualification of Murphy and Pierrot.

The Canetti review itself, it might be noted, contained a

list of questions which Murdoch would use to extend Canetti's

analysis, including several which had previously affected her creation of Mischa, especially her reflection that "Com­ mand has a sexual aspect which deserves analysis" along with

4"Mass, Might and Myth," Spectator, CCIX (1962), 337-338

5 Byatt, 41. 5Ibid., 43-44. 72 the significant parenthetical appendage "(This Hegel appreci ated. Dr Canetti is resolutely non-Hegelian."7) Murdoch's novels often have a quality of antithetical reaction about them; they do not so much use sources as they qualify them.

Murdoch's novels take part, that is, in an aesthetic human­ istic dialogue much like a philosophical or Hegelian dia­ lectic — Nausea (1938) as thesis (it was once antithesis) to Pierrot (1943) as antithesis, Pierrot as thesis to Under the Net (1954) as antithesis, and so on in the manner of most art. Many of the overtones of The Flight from the

Enchanter constitute such qualifications. The scene of

Rosa's first interview with Mrs. Wingfield (in Chapter Nine) with the mixup over champagne, tea, glasses, cups, and Mrs.

Wingfield's sanity recalls the dream-like nonsense world of Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party. But Mrs. Wingfield is a very sane mad hatter.

"Have some champagne." Rosa, who was poised be­ tween annoyance, amusement and despair, said "Thank you," and held out her glass. "Oh, you want some more, do you?" said Mrs. Wingfield, "Well, give me back the glass. You can drink it out of a cup. There's one left over there, I think, in the cab­ inet." (118)

Other elements in The Flight from the Enchanter recall other literary sources, usually only to qualify them. The style

7Spectator, 1962, 338. 73

of Rainborough's chapters recalls the irony of late eight­

eenth century novelists, especially Austen. There is even

an emphasis on economics in Murdoch's description of the

system of promotions and demotions in SELIB which recalls

Austen both in tone and theme. But money is not as impor­

tant here in this satire of Marx as it was in Austen.

Thus the staff of SELIB were kept in continual and irregular motion, jerking past each other like wooden horses racing at a fair, all involved in the movement, which though governed by mysterious forces continued to operate in the long run to the satisfaction of all, toward the upper ranges of the hierarchy and thè higher income levels. The only difficulty about this liberal, and on the whole uninvidious, system was that it was hard to see what would happen when all members of the staff had achieved the maximum promotion and, as it were, all pawns had become queens. This happy millennium, in which all differences would be forgotten and all officers would be united in blissful union at the highest salary range, though not unimaginably distant provided the present speed of promotions was maintained, had, however, not yet arrived; and meanwhile the happy ferment continued at all levels of the organization, providing continual employment for Establishments and for the rest of the staff a daily interest with which it was as well to provide them, since they certainly took none in their work. (91)

Also, the scene in which Annette Cockeyne decides to leave

school, steals the Browning and then returns it to Miss

Walpole, her headmistress, as a "gift" (13), recalls Becky

Sharp and the Dictionary; as Rosa Keepe's work in the factory recalls Simone Weil's own work in a factory during one of her vacations from teaching. Rosa once taught, too, but 74 p unsuccessfully. Other moments of literary recall in The

Flight from the Enchanter are not so effective: whenever

Calvin Blick appears, we are suddenly in the world of Ian

Fleming where evil men are recognizably evil because they are so ugly, and Calvin’s gadgety developing room in the labyrinthine cellar of Mischa's house with the lights pro­ grammed to burn in sequence only one minute each (170) is like the gimmick-laden houses in which we usually encounter

SPECTRE'S Number One. Calvin is a caricature of one dimen­ sion, and that dimension is ultimately false, even incredi­ ble. Names consciously draw out attention to literary, his­ torical, or mythological sources: Calvin, the Artemis,

Miss Walpole, whose school, we might note in regard to

Austen, teaches young girls to catch a husband "in one, or at most two, seasons" (7-8), and Rosa, who was named by her suffragette mother after Rosa Luxemburg (15). Most of these sources are clearly qualified by The Flight from the Enchanter

Rosa is clearly no feminist Rosa Luxemburg nor introspective

Simone Weil (Weil feared that work would make thought im­ possible, while Rosa wants work to dull her mind), Calvin is no spiritual John Calvin, Annette no intellectually sharp

8 x Cf. La condition ouvriere (Paris, 1951). Though Byatt omits mentioning the parallel between Weil's and Rosa's work, Byatt has done more than any other critic to point out Murdoch's debt to Weil. 75

Becky, and so on. Actually only one major literary re­

call of The Flight from the Enchanter is not in some way

a qualification of its source — that is Murdoch's recall

of Murdoch.

The Flight from the Enchanter illustrates clearly a

truth about all Murdoch's novels: she has an infinite capa­

city for imaginative recreation, an ability to take basic­

ally the same ingredients and by varying slightly the pro­

portions of the mixture produce an entirely separate and

aesthetically unique book in each instance. Her novels all

tend to make the same points, as do her articles, but the

articles lack the inventive play of the novels and are

hence repetitious, sometimes even aesthetically dull. But

Murdoch has yet to produce an uninteresting novel, even

if the interesting part of the novel is only the most per­

ipheral aesthetic decoration. Many things in The Flight

from the Enchanter recall Under the Net: centrally, the

similarity of what James Gindin has called the "false gods"9 Hugo and Mischa, the similarity of what Byatt has called the "artificial women"!9 Magdalen anj Miss Casement, and so on; peripherally, in Annette's and Jake's perfect

g Postwar British Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), 188. 10Byatt, 54. 76

French, the use of fish imagery, the fondness for super­

fluity of detail. Even the chapter structure is identi­

cal. A Murdoch chapter comes in three parts: (1) a very

brief swatch of dialogue bridging from the last appearance

of the monologuist to the present appearance, including

some tantalizing suggestion that something has happened

in the meantime; (2) an expository description of the char­

acter's state of mind — the bulk of the chapter; and (3)

the actual action of the chapter. This structure is followed quite often throughout Murdoch, even in the first person narratives. But while Murdoch makes Hugo and Mischa simi­ lar, she distinguishes them quite clearly and makes each a separate character. The basis for the distinction is their dissimilar attitudes toward their power. While both use power, Hugo uses it for evil -9 Mischa feels that the greatest good is to protect people and animals by killing them, while Hugo uses the destructive power of explosives to help out in the home, the Domestic Detonators. Ultimate­ ly, however, The Flight from the Enchanter, for all its bril­ liant polish of style, its prolific inventiveness, its dens­ ity, is inferior to Under the Net, and it is inferior be­ cause it does try too much. The variety of style and imagery gives to the book a palimpsest quality which is sometimes more confusing than enriching, while the number of charac­ ters that Murdoch attempts to bring off renders even those 77

that receive the greatest attention incomplete, unfinished.

It has been said that the world of The Flight from the

Enchanter is a world of allegorical figures, and it might be added that in some cases characters are simply cartoons.

Many persons in the novel stand for something in a one­ dimensional way, and many are just caricatures of a very thin sort, especially Calvin, Marcia, Hunter, Miss Walpole,

Peter, Mrs. Wingfield, and even, to a degree, Annette.

There is also the fact that at the end of The Flight from the Enchanter Rosa has achieved no such promising aware­ ness of others as Jake has and that her rejection by Peter leaves her in a limbo which can hardly be described as an ending of a very satisfactory sort. The Flight from the

Enchanter, while it does clarify Murdoch's central themes, is a retreat philosophically. It is an argument without a conclusion, or rather an analytic exercise. It should be noted, however, that the cartoon as an art form in the hands of an artist, say, a Beerbohm or a Nast, can be quite a different thing from the cartoon of the comic-book trade, and that while Calvin, Hunter, Peter, and minor characters like Miss Walpole are very nearly nothing more than comic­ book figures, Rosa, Mischa, and Rainborough are cartoons created by a serious social-consciousness, especially Rain­ borough, Murdoch's rehearsal for Martin and Effingham. These 78

three, Rosa, Mischa, and Rainborough, are the main reasons

for emphasizing the brilliancy of The Flight from the

Enchanter.

But cartoon demands austerity of line, monochromatic

or black-white color tones, even flatness, and the world

of The Flight from the Enchanter, it is quite evident, is

anything but severely clean. It is littered, cluttered,

stuffed, and decorated with a vast superfluity of bric-a-

brac, personal collections of clothing, booksjewels,

even netsuke (207), and just junk. It is a world where a man can have "one blue eye and one brown eye" (85), where

a woman's foreign accent sounds "like green honey" (280),

where a young girl is always dashing about in a cloud of multi-colored, multi-fold skirts and petticoats, and where

a flower is not just any flower but a "dreamy wistaria" which

"had been growing for several score of years, extending its

knarled and golden-brown trunk in a series of grotesque and

romantic curves and lifting its dusty blue blossoms above

the herbaceous border" (127). Rooms are similarly full to

the brim with human effects. Most obviously, this clutter can be seen in Peter Saward's study which "must have con­

tained some three thousand volumes, of which at least a hundred were open, some lying horizontal, some at an angle of forty-five degrees, and others vertical, opened at a 79

favourite illustration and perched on top of bookshelves

or supported ingeniously by pieces of string'.' (23) and

which is further enclosed by a tree over one window, dark­

ening the room like "an underground cavern." Closeness

of atmosphere and multiplicity of details can also be seen

in Mischa's house, with its "stifling" (202) tapestries,

themselves heavily decorated, its collections of paper­

weights , Japanese clothes ornaments, plush carpets, and

tropical fish. But similar litter can be found in all the

rooms of the novel, the "cardboard boxes, piles of news­

paper and old numbers of the Artemis" (18) which are strewn

about Hunter's office, the "large, bright, untidy, over­

furnished drawing-room" (116) of Mrs. Wingfield, Miss Case­ ment's single room, "stuffy and overheated" (196), "whose

faded velvet curtains and plump shabby plush furniture exuded

a dusty smell which mingled with the smell of gas and face powder," the furniture itself being littered with under­ clothing and silk dresses," the bed with "small lacy items," and Miss Casement's dressing-table with "creams, powders, rouges, lipsticks, tonics, fresheners, varnishes, removers, cleaners and other kinds of cosmetics," all in the plural.

Even the house of the Lusiewicz brothers in Pimlico is littered, but this time junk is made to be orderly: the brothers "were pleased with their junk-filled room, which 80

they were able to rent for eight shillings a week, and whose bric-a-brac, once a senseless jumble, they soon set

in order, giving to each decrepit object a proper use and

significance" (49). This litter of detail has been described as a baroque element in the novel, but it has a more pre­ cise meaning in its suggestions of clotting seaminess. De­ tail in The Flight from the Enchanter is quite often repul­ sive, but Murdoch keeps presenting it with the unrelenting insistence that this junk is the stuff of reality. It may be a filthy complex of details that we see, but it is one which we must accept for its existence, its assertion of just being there, no matter how soiled or messy it may be.

The repulsiveness of detail is shown further in Mur­ doch's descriptions of hair and servants. There is of course Rosa's richly abundant black hair which sometimes hangs "in loops over her brow like a cloud of black thoughts" and is "wound upon her neck into a long heavy knot" (36), or in moments of emotion, frequently comes undone, especi­ ally at the ends of chapters (cf. 190 and 213). A sign of Rosa as life force, the hair is nonetheless "heavy," even coarse, in its reality. Hunter's ovm abundant hair, it might also be noted, is surely a sign of his blond, 81 colorless weakness.!! Far more repellent, however, are the

coiffures of Miss Casement, with her "abundance of dark hair

which, laid out by her hairdresser in regions like an elab­

orate garden, managed, in spite of the variety of curls,

rolls, fringes and pinnacles into which it was extended, to

remain always exquisitely tidy" (96), or that of Miss Foy with her "wig-like hair, which resembled the interior of

a mattress" (115). In many cases the very abundance or « plenitude of hair is repellent at the same time that it

asserts the life force, while in other instances, lack of hair can have amusingly repulsive effects on one's physi­ ognomy, as is the case in Rainborough's baldness: "He had lost his hair almost to the crown of his head, which gave him the appearance of having an enormous forehead which was divided into two halves, a lower half covered with deep wrinkles and an upper half which was smooth and shining" (29). At least two servants, one a secretary, are described in repulsive terms: Miss Glashan, Peter Saward's morbid landlady, who "would dart about the room silently with the dexterity of a cat and the dirt would vanish as

!!perhaps it was Hunter's hair along with his "'pretty boy'" (16) good looks which led Peter Wolfe to speak of Hunter's "nascent homosexuality." Cf. The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and Her Novels (Columbia, Missouri, 1966)’, p. 78. In fact, however, Murdoch strongly suggests something far different in Hunter's incestuous love of 82 completely as if she had swallowed it"(27), and Miss Case­ ment's typist, "a dowdy, fluffy girl, off whom pieces con­ tinually fell as off a moulting bird"(100). We certainly do not need any indication of a conscious attempt on Murdoch's part to make details rich, plentiful, superabundant — the details assert themselves. But at one point, when Rainborough reaches in his closet for a tablecloth to cover up Annette whose blouse he has torn off, he pulls out not just an ord­ inary linen tablecloth or even a damask cloth but a "velvet"

(146) cloth. In regard to the heady richness of details, it is important to remember that the style of The Flight from the Enchanter is the most mannered and rhetorically complicated in all of Murdoch. The complex style and detail work to assert the fullness and the real finite messiness of the world, and it creates an atmosphere in the setting of the novel which does more to prove the existence of others than the characters.

Yet the world of The Flight from the Enchanter is not the real world. The novel is not a mimetic reflection of the world but a self-contained symbolic representation of

Rosa which, incidentally, she returns. It is not consummated, as it would later be between Palmer Anderson and Honor Klein, but Hunter's sexual protectiveness of his sister, his imagining while Stefan is in the house, "footsteps coming from upstairs towards his sister's door" at least "A hundred times during every night" (249), is one of Hunter's strongest motivations. Without it he would not be able to function as he does. 83 it. This is clear in our reactions even to the various repellent details. Repel us they may, but we also laughl— real girls may be dowdy, even fluffy, but they seldom actu­ ally "moult." In some cases, the use of a certain comic image amuses us, detaches us from complete repulsion, and asserts the artificiality of the verbal medium. Detachment makes interpretation necessary, and it is significant that perhaps only Rosa in the novel comes close to involving us.

The world of the novel, for ^11 its resemblance to our own, is a unique world, and its people are symbolic. It is no mistake that The Flight from the Enchanter, next to The Bell, is Murdoch's most frequently interpreted novel. Neither was it a mistake on Murdoch's part to include such a vast plenitude of detail in a book where she also creates cari­ cature people: gadgetry has long been one of the essences of cartoon, the revelatory symbolic object that the charac­ ter in the portrait always carries as a sign of his fail­ ings, Annette's monochromatic complexion, Mischa's eyes,

Rosa's hair, the detail always given just the right amount of exaggeration to assert its presence as a sign — a sign to be read. If people in The Flight from the Enchanter are to be read in a certain way, the detailed world of the book must also be read.

Cartoon itself can be seen as an art medium in which symbolism is used for comedy. Cartoon is not the same thing 84 as satire, though the most effective kinds of cartoon usually

have a satiric edge. Cartoon employs laughter to criticize,

like satire, but it does not employ the double world of

irony. Signs in cartoon are often direct signs, not signs

for something else and opposite. Like satire, cartoon is

a medium of social commentary. Unlike satire, cartoon com­

municates directly by means of comic exaggeration, its most

essential tool. Murdoch uses cartoon in The Flight from the

Enchanter in this, its traditional sense — the sense in

which, in literature, cartoon as an art was perfected by

Dickens. The central allegory around which the cartoons

exist might be outlined as follows: Power, a man for whom

love is an "intolerable compassion" (226) which leads him to save people by killing them, has fallen in love with

Earth, his opposite, a woman for whom love is giving one­

self to others and who has a paradoxically equally strong desire not to (48). Earth rejects Power, but Power tries to overcome her rejection, first by silence, then by attack­ ing Earth's Weakness, her brother, whom she holds to herself

"obscenely near" (48). In an interlude, Power is offered love of Earth's sort by Youth, but he rejects it. In the meantime, however, Power's Henchman, who does most of the dirty work, has uncovered another of Earth's several weak­ nesses in an affair with two Animals who come from "earth"

(52) like herself. When the Animals get out of hhnd, however, 85 and attempt to supplant Weakness in Earth's affections,

Earth seeks Power's aid. Power gives his aid but retains his omniscience over Earth, loving her without giving up his control of her. In the end, Earth must leave Power be­ cause of his very control. Moral: power and love cannot be unified; or, power is not love. In the background and appearing to underscore the basic point are various victims of Power or, to contrast, persons free from Power: a refu­ gee, a scholar, a great beauty, an aged Liberal. Enslave­ ment in all cases in the novel is self-willed, though not always conscious. Power has become powerful because people have endowed him with power, have made him what he is — as he knows. This summary may serve to recall the philosophi cal allegory of ThecFlight from the Enchanter, but it is not meant to cover everything in the novel — the aged Liberal,

Mrs. Wingfield, is not just that, and her function as a cartoon in the novel relates more to her mask of insanity than to her Liberal beliefs. The allegory is implicit, ob­ liquely communicated, and not directly represented, and car­ toon is used to effect individual characterizations which may or may not function within the central allegory.

At the heart of the allegory is Power, Mischa Fox, who has been seen as an attempt on Murdoch's part to state the power theme through irony: the only glimpses we get 86

of Mischa in the novel are of his passivity, his love of

his childhood, of little animals, his luxury. He is often

being pictured sitting at the feet of someone whom he has

enchanted, Peter (223), even Rainborough (205), and when

we see him showing emotion, it is some obscure terror of

the ocean (217), but not of persons, or laughing with Rosa

(261) in a very human communion of feelings. Mischa's life

is quiet and rather genteel. His mansion in London is not

so much the museum that Londoners call it as the salon of

an aesthete, a house stuffed with a vast variety of objects

of art from a conglomerate of cultures and historical eras.

In other words, this placid, civilized man is anything but

what might be expected of a man whose name is on everyone's

lips in fear and awe. Mischa is anything but fearsome, awe

some — hence, irony. This reading, however, is posited

on the assumption that there is another Mischa (or two

Mischas to go along with the bichrome eyes), quite active, whom we do not see, that there is something going on behind

the tapestries which Murdoch keeps from us and which, if we just could catch a peek at, would explain all. Actually

there is no second or other Mischa; what we see is all, and

that is the chief point about Mischa as a character. He

is negation. The signs that surround him are of order, cap­ tivity, and art; the style of the tapestries itself is a 87

highly stylizedcand mannered emblematic style, and Mischa

himself is a person lacking in personality. He is the

first of Murdoch's dry men, and like certain novels to which

she objects, Mischa is a work of art of the most self-contained

solipsistic sort. His entire life aspires to the condition

of art, to form and control, and his personality is defined

by his success in that aspiration. He is a significantly

sexless being, denying Annette's offer of herself, and he is

a person who has suppressed his own essential violence to a

point where his control of his reactions is complete. Mischa

is sexually attractive to an extreme degree, and that attract­

iveness is the basis of his hold over Nina and Rosa and Annette

Like Gerald Scottow later, Mischa knows that he can control more by denying himself sexually than by giving, and we see

this in that moment when he is at the seashore with Annette

and "very gently stretched out one hand and drew a finger

down the outside contour of one breast" (215-216). The applying of the minimum of stimulus (not the whole palm, but "a finger") to the maximum of sexual excitation (Annette had before at the party given Mischa "without concealment a look of such yearning which made Rainborough turn away in embarrassment and surprise," [206]) heightens even more than before the sense of frustration and desire, makes desire ap­ proach the point of the neurotic, imprisons one. This act 88

of suppressed violence recalls certain art nouveau draw­

ings, especially the Beardsley drawing of Lysistrata touch­

ing with a languidly-poised and very thin wand an enormous

swollen structure to her left in the picture which is evi­

dently either a large but odd-shaped mushroom or a phallus.

Mischa is himself a sort of decadent artist, and it is his

life that is his art. And at the heart of that art-life

is an element which sets Mischa clearly apart as a charac­

ter and which recalls Sartre in a way which neither Hugo

does with his acceptance of contingency nor even Jake with his sense of humor. That is Mischa's "nausea" (226).

Nausea is itself an emotional reaction of a particu­ larly sickish-sweet kind to mutability, and we see this in

Mischa's killing of the kitten, "So poor and defenseless . .

That was the only way to help it, to save it" (225-226), and by extension, in his attempt to buy the Artemis. Mischa wants to seize the moment, to take the material fact out of time and preserve it from decay and change in its beauty and at the height of its most defenseless vitality; that desire to preserve is the reason for the "bronze fish" (224) which Mischa remembers "though you can't see it here" in the photo, and for the invariable juxtaposition of animal with human in the design of the "ivory figures" (202) on

Mischa's mantelpiece. But preservation for Mischa is a 89 denial of the life force, a perverted desire to embalm alive, and while Mischa himself is symbolically associated with the possession of a strong creative urge in that "His chest and shoulders were entirely covered with long black hair" (219), hair like Rosa's, that force never is able to assert itself. Even when Rosa comes to him at last for help, he answers with "the twist, the assertion of power" (263) which transforms "the structure of tenderness and delight" into "an altogether different thing." That "thing" is some­ thing of a transvaluation of values, killing becomes an act of love, control of another also becomes a similar sort of love, and so on. Mischa hence represents certain post-

Liberal tendencies, life as art, values as non-values, the aesthete, the Nietzschean will to power, tendencies which have extended far beyond late Victorian life and the art which mirrored it into our own times. Mischa is a thinly unreal, even glassy, person, and he is ultimately one­ dimensional. His great sympathies for animals, either for fish or for an “artificial animal" like Nina (82), are re­ pellent. When Mischa saves the "wood leopard" moth at

Rainborough's by "Very gently," in the same way in which he would later touch Annette's breast, "persuading the moth to walk off his hand onto a leSf" (145) , it is a curious but naturally pleasant relief that we feel when Rainborough, 90 after Mischa's departure, "grinds the moth under his heel"

(147). Somehow, that destruction is a denial of Mischa's loving destruction. Rainborough's act is sheer violence, not violence with a pretty name, and it is more acceptable as such than Mischa's lethal sympathy. And when Rosa tries to divert attention at Mischa's party by shattering the bowl of tropical fish, our sympathies do not go out to Mischa who receives the fish "like a priest" (212) and who becomes

"as white as paper, as if all the blood had left his body."

At perhaps no other point in the novel is Mischa's lack of human sympathy so utterly detestable as in this act of sav­ ing the fish. We have already heard Mischa's opinion of the way to control a woman, his belief that "The way to overcome Proteus was to hold on to him until he finally took on his real form. You must tire a woman out, even if it takes years. Then you will see what she is" (143), and we know how crudely petrifying this attitude is in relation to Rosa. Jake, it should be remembered, had shown a lack of contact with humans by loving Mars, a dog, but Jake's dog was nearly human and worthy of love because of his possible intelligence. But Mischa's love is for fish, and in the connotations of that image, in the slimy, musty-smelling scaliness which the fish is, the reader finds a raw affective repulsion which sets Mischa apart from us far more than Jake. 91

Mischa has an undeniable charm for the ladies of the novel, but for the reader, the fish-loving fox is almost totally repulsive.

Opposed to Mischa is Rosa, a more complex personality than Mischa, but also less mysterious, more ordinary. There are several ways of seeing Rosa: she is a sort of reluctant earth goddess, an unreflective Simone Weil, a detached Jake without a sense of humor; she is the first of Murdoch's plain beauties, marred physically and even somewhat coarse, but she is also the easiest person to like in the novel. She is, again in contrast to both Mischa and Jake, the very soul of simplicity. But perhaps the most revealing thing about this admirable woman relates to the theme of the nature of power: Rosa is among the most actively violent persons in the novel. We see her in at least four acts of violence: slapping Jan Lusiewicz; shattering the fish bowl at Mischa's; rolling about fighting with Annette; throwing Annette's clothes at her down the stairs and causing Annette to wrench her leg.

Much attention is given in the novel to the violence of the

Lusiewicz brothers, Jan's threat to kill Annette's brother, and Stefan's threat to kill Hunter along with the actual burning of Hunter's forelock (255), but it is significant that neither of the threats is carried out and that we find that Rosa could control Jan simply by slapping him, making 92

Jan become as "white" as Mischa had become before the fish

(163-164), dealing with violence in violent ways. (She may have intuited this from the story of the village schoolmis­ tress who brought on the sexual vendetta of the LusiewJ.cz brothers by striking them in school [72], but Rosa reacts to her just act of violence with "fear" and similar violence is not tried with Stefan, except by Mischa.) The Lusiewicz brothers are doubtless just as potentially violent as Mischa as we see in Stefan's "drawing one finger very gently down the side of Rosa's face" (56), in Mischa's own "very gentle" manner, when he first seduces her, and the brothers are also related to Mischa in the way in which their values have been transformed into opposites, in their loving their mother as

"our own earth" (52) but desiring to "do the dance of our land" on her, to make killing an act of love. Their house too, though it is filled with junk rather than objects of art, is as orderly as Mischa's (50). Actually, the threats are by no means idle: the mother does just disappear at the close of the novel (246-247). But the most violently active part of the Lusiewicz brothers is their sexuality,

Stefan's "making love savagely" (58) to Rosa, Jan's attack on Annette (163), and most of their threats are made for quite specific ends, Jan's desire for Annette's jewels,

Stefan's desire to be "master of the house" (254), to be a 93

power figure as Rosa had once but only momentarily been (49)

and as Mischa essentially is. While the Lusiewicz brothers

are potentially lethal and sexually violent, their violence

is used for expedient ends. In contrast, Rosa’s violence

is emotional, pure, in that she only commits violent acts

when someone fails in his responsibility to her, Annette's

appearing in Mischa's jacket (220), Jan's making a pass at

Annette, and the releasing of Rosa's jealousy of Annette

at the party, complete with the tearing open of a bodice:

"At that moment she could have killed Annette, tearing her

in two like a putty figure. Never had she experienced such

a profound satisfaction of anger and hatred" (212). Again,

as with Rainborough's crushing of the moth, it is a natural

relief that we feel at Rosa's simple violence: her motives

are clear, her affections are clear, and Annette's fascin­

ation for Mischa is an eminently sufficient cause for Rosa's

actions. Rosa is a kind of standard of truth in the novel.

When she falls in love sensually, she calls her love sensual

When she is jealous, she is frank about it. When she is

confused, she knows it. When she wields power, she calls

it power and finds it rather satisfying. Her actions have

an authority to them which sets her clearly apart f-rom the duplicity of the world she inhabits. Rosa is one of the

few Murdoch characters who almost invariably appears to be 94 in the right. She is also utterly devoid of a sense of humor. Vie see her laugh only seldom in the novel, once a

"profound laugh of relief and pleasure" (261) when she goes to seek Mischa's advice, but that laugh is not in­ volving — we feel as great a "rift" between Rosa and our­ selves as Rosa does with Mischa. Rosa's idea of a joke is almost as bland as Simone Weil's, as we see in her com­ ments on work: "She wanted now at last to make of it some­ thing simple, hygienic, stream-lined, unpretentious and dull. She had succeeded to the point of almost boring her­ self to death" (47), where the fact that the joke is lamely attempted with a cliche blunts any effect of illuminating wit. Rosa thinks of the Lusiewicz brothers as possessing a certain "humour" (54), though their idea of a joke is swapping insults about being "peasants" or "pigs" (55).

Yet while she lacks in brilliant wittiness of Jake's sort, neither is she in dead earnest. She is one of the few characters in the novel who does not have a philosophy of life, though she has one of work. She does believe that her life will never "consist of anything but a series of interludes" (47), but that leaves her in a completely open status. Rosa is dynamic, becoming, while Mischa, even

Annette, is static. It is Annette who consciously enrolls in the "School of Life" (7), but it is Rosa who learns the 95 most. She is a woman too with a rich sense of her own vitality, her hair, her occasional laugh, but she neither

causes comedy nor is comic. She is the essence of the ordinary, the earth itself. She is also, for all her rich earthliness, rather easy to forget. Later, in Honor Klein,

Murdoch would endow her female earth goddess with enough exoticism to make her an absorbing character in her own right. At the time of Rosa, however, these elements are left unexaggerated to emphasize Rosa as an ideal which is one because it is so ordinary. In a world of exaggerated caricatures, Rosa is the closest thing to reality.

Little in The Flight from the Enchanter is realistic.

The novel is the most wildly funny of Murdoch's books, though finally its comedy is by no means as humane as the comedy of Under the Net. Parody of Under the Net's sort can become sarcasm in The Flight from the Enchanter, and symbolic detail can become exaggerated sign. Yet it is the very cartoons themselves which make The Flight from the Enchanter so hilarious. Without them the allegory would be lifeless. This can be carried farther in that any comedy in the novel is peripheral to the central allegory.

The scene of the meeting of the Artemis shareholders which Byatt has called "brilliantly funny"!2 is incjeed related

12 Byatt, 42. 96 to the idea of freedom in that Calvin is done in by some­ thing free and outside his world that he can never hope to control, but the actual chapter is a tour-de-force set piece which can be read as a single unit quite complete and entertaining in itself. We do not need to know any more than the lady with the hearing aid who shouts, "I_ certainly don't know why I'm gathered here" (184), to feel the full hilarity of the scene. Other comic elements are similarly divisible from the allegory. Properly speaking,

Annette is not really comic after her first euphoric swing on the chandelier. Once she gets out into the School of

Life, her naivete is exasperating. We are even allowed to become quite alarmed at her attempted suicide, Murdoch never letting on until the very end if Annette is really dying of luminal or if she is just drunk, and when We find out that she has taken milk of magnesia instead of poison, we are more irritated than relieved. Yet Annette is at times used for comic punctuation, especially in her drunkenness at Mischa's party: "'What these,' said Annette, pointing to the ivory figures" (207); and "'You got real fish here,' said Annette, 'Let's see the real fish'" (208). It is hard to reconcile this stagy drunkenness with the serious en­ counter with Mischa just following, and that contrast shows how the comic has become for Murdoch in The Flight from the 97

Enchanter a separable, even artificial element which can

work only when more serious things are ignored. (It is only

one hop from the divisibility of the comic and the realistic

to the belief that life is a deadly earnest matter.) It

is at least true that Annette uses the trip to the fish bowl with Mischa to get him to touch her, as Rainborough sees (208), and the stagy quality of the drunkenness itself is a mere adjunct to the scene, an element used for ends other than comedy. Most of the actual comedy of The Flight from the Enchanter occurs when the central story is moment­ arily side-tracked, especially whenever John Rainborough is present.

Rainborough's very relationship to the central allegory is curiously vague: to be precise, Rainborough performs no function in the main plot whatsoever. He is the close friend of Mischa Fox, or so everybody believes, but Mischa never uses him or seems to care for him except as someone to have around listening to his ideas, a relationship which

Mischa holds in a similar way with Peter Saward. About the only actual function which Rainborough has in the Rosa- I Mischa plot is that his professional position in SELIB makes it possible for Hunter to get his weapon against the Lusiewicz brothers which, significantly, Hunter does not use. We are constantly being led to believe that Mischa is going to do 98

something with Rainborough or to him, but none of these

threatened involvements in Mischa's life ever comes off.

Mischa visits Rainborough for no apparent reason, invites

him to his party for no reason except for the idle fun

of embarrassing him with Miss Casement, and sits at Rain-

borough's feet only to have Rainborough call him familiarly

"You old rogue!' (205), a chumminess no other person in

the novel would dare attempt. Rainborough seems to be

free from Mischa's more intense enchanting powers: he is

piqued when Mischa visits Peter before visiting himself,

but he does not idealize Mischa like Peter, who calls Mischa

an oriental sage. He is blunt, even rude, with Mischa and

always, even when he admits to a certain fear, detached from

Mischa: "'Why are you talking this rubbish, Mischa,'" Rain­

borough asks while Mischa explains his theories of women,

"'and making me talk it too?'" (144) And in his private

thoughts about Mischa, Rainborough is free from complete

enslavement: "Mischa's voice continued monotonously like

the pale dreaming voice of a priest. Is he mocking me,

Rainborough asked himself, or is he mad, perhaps? Then

he remembered how often he had wondered in this way incon­

clusively about Mischa in the past" (143). Not even the

enchanting, hypnotic voice completely involves Rainborough, and he retains a certain distance from Mischa throughout

the novel. 99

This distance is very important, for Rainborough is

the only one of the most extensively-developed main charac­

ters who is himself comic. He is related to the central

theme of the novel as a contrast in comic terms to the seri­

ous power struggle which Mischa. and Rosa symbolize. Rain­

borough has his own Miss Casement who is an "artificial"

woman (97) to contrast to Mischa’s Rosa and her natural­

ness, and the positions of enchanter and enslaved are

ironically reversed in Murdoch's placing the official boss

in the role of slave to the official underling, complete with Miss Casement's eventual takeover of Rainborough's

own office. But though Murdoch takes quite seriously the

theme of power when she treats it in terms of Mischa, she

finds the behavior of Rainborough consistently comic, a

fact which is odd when we remember that Rainborough actually

suffers more of a defeat and reversal of fortunes than any other person in the novel except Mina — a loss of position and the destruction of a part of the symbolic garden behind his family home. Yet he is absurdly comic, a fact which is even more amazing when we remember the similarity between

Rainborough, Martin, and Effingham. In Martin, lack of moral focus is treated as a fatal deficiency; in Rainborough, a similar lack is simply a part of his character. In Effing­ ham, an egoistic failing for female flesh is very nearly 100 sexually disgusting; in Rainborough, the feeling of wanting to kiss Marcia or being "weak in the knees" (233) before

Miss Casement's red M.G. (sexual desire as fetish) is some­ thing of a peripheral joke. The very fact that Rainborough occupies the role of interior monologuist in nearly seven chapters while Rosa and Annette occupy similar positions in a little less than eight apiece is also surprising —

Rainborough is even made to be the interior monologuist for

Mischa's party. Yet he is not a neutral consciousness but makes judgements on what he sees, and he is very much of a person in his own right. The most revealing fact about

Rainborough, however, and the clearest explanation for the fact of hi© overdevelopment and his comedy relates to Mur­ doch's attitude toward him; unlike Martin and Effingham,

Rainborough is not brutally satirized — Murdoch, as yet, has not formed a clear, solid opinion about Rainborough's type. That is what frees him to be real.

Rainborough is a type, the first of Murdoch's men who seem framed for abject adulation of some rather ordinary female whom they have transformed by fantasy into something unreal. For Rainborough, this woman is Rosa with whom he

"would have liked to play the role of being unhappily in love" (32), a role which is "a combination of security, yearning and rapture,V and in which any possibility "That 101

Rosa could ever have returned his love did not enter his

head." Rainborough knows, however, quite consciously that

"In such a role he would have felt merely ridiculous" (32-

33) in addition to knowing that it is merely a "role," a consciousness denied Martin prostrated before Honor Klein and Effingham kneeling before Hannah Crean-Smith. Abject

love is, for Murdoch, very close to psychic aberration, and this is underscored in Rainborough's fetish about fe­ male cosmetics: he had "become a connoisseur in such matters as perfume, lipstick, shoes, stockings, bracelets, ear-rings and nail varnish" (97) , as Martin would later be "driven mad" (11) by the stockings he buys for Georgie.

And Rainborough, like Martin, is lacking in morality. But while Martin is actively out of practice in moral matters,

Rainborough1s moral stalemate is very clearly conscious to him: "In moral matters, as in intellectual matters,

Rainborough took the view that to be mature was to realize that most human effort inevitably ends in mediocrity and that all our admirations lead us at the last to the dreary knowledge that, such as we are, we ourselves represent the elite. The dreariness of this knowledge is only diminished by the fact that it is, after all, knowledge" (131). This is related to Martin's dismissal of God: "Roughly, I cannot imagine any omnipotent sentient being sufficiently cruel to 102 create the world we inhabit" (18), but while Martin's rational dismissal is very much a focal part of his char­ acter, the lack of moral focus in Rainborough is a side issue, one which is never clearly emphasized in Murdoch's treatment of his actions. As with Jake, Rainborough's failings are rendered less earnest, less horrendous, than the failings of later Murdoch characters, by the combination of acceptance and humor which marks Rainborough's conscious­ ness of his flaws. Everyone tells Martin that he has a sense of humor, but we are only convinced all the more that, if he does, he misuses it. Effingham, quite simply, does not have a sense of humor and comedy is always at his ex­ pense. But Rainborough, free from entanglement in the

Rosa-Mischa struggle, is allowed a space in which to exist which Murdoch allows him to occupy without utter condemnation

Murdoch employs irony always with Rainborough, but it is not often the cutting sarcasm with which she dissects Effingham.

Murdoch also indulges a quite peripheral interest in the workings of SELIB which is a sort of ancillary entertainment in itself, and she further justly perceives Rainborough by giving him a freedom to talk back which keeps him comic in­ stead of spineless or sniveling: "'Do you often do this?'"

Annette asks when he thrusts his hand into her blouse, and he replies, "'About once in ten years'" (137). "'My little 103

girl will be all right,'" Marcia tells him, and he thinks,

"To hell with your little girl" (278) . Rainborough is

sometimes described in terms of amusingly inappropriate

religious imagery. Again, when he takes Annette's hand,

"Rainborough, with the patient gentlfe air of the man who

raises his head to say 'Here endeth the first lesson',

lifted his ga2e" (136), and the moment is deflated quite happily of any deadly seriousness.

In The Flight from the Enchanter Murdoch had not yet made up her mind about Rainborough's type of weakness.

She seems to be most dissatisfied with him and at the same time most amused in the extreme way in which he reacts to sexual desire, as is suggested in his percep­ tion that "Marcia swam before his eyes, strangely disin­ tegrated into hair and hands and lips" (279) after his confession and as is more clearly evident earlier in the anticlimatic list of Rosa's good qualities, "her sulky pessimism, her sarcasm, even her rudeness and her ex­ tremely long black hair" (33). Fetishist or not, it is the flesh which constitutes Rainborough's focal weakness, and sexual failings are always for Murdoch more forgiveable, or more comic, than ontological ones. Rainborough does not make of Rosa a unicorn Hannah — the potential to do so is there, but it is only nascent. Nor does Rainborough have 104

the sort of legal ties with a family which Martin has —

he has no wife to be unfaithful to and is, in his own world,

just as much his own prime mover as Jake. Similar to Jake

too is the fact that Rainborough's failings are only for

the moment comic to Murdoch. Irony can very easily give way to satire, and Rainborough represents only a tentative

comic moment in Murdoch's development. If Rainborough had actually given Mischa the information that the Lusiewicz brothers were born on the wrong side of the FPE line, if we saw him in the actual act of taking out the file and aiding the fox, Murdoch might not have found him at all funny. Neither might we. '05

CHAPTER IV

THE SANDCASTLE

Both The Flight from the Enchanter and Murdoch's third novel, The Sandcastle, represent extreme divergences from the ideal synthesis between myth and reality which the artist says she works toward. Each goes too far in one direction: The Flight from the Enchanter, with its overly dramatistic situations and symbolic characters, goes too far in the direction of myth; and The Sandcastle, the blandest of Murdoch's aesthetic statements to date, goes too far in the direction of reality •— or rather, as it is in The Sandcastle, banality. Each is a failure, but while The Flight from the Enchanter is at least an attempt at symbolism, The Sandcastle is a mere failure, a novel which tempts one "to write much less about it"l than any other Murdoch novel. At least, of all Murdoch's novels, The Sandcastle is the easiest and directest statement of her ideas, as well as the most unfortunate revelation of her failings, and its directly stated philosophical ideas require little explanatory analysis. Even the most unreflective of readings cannot miss the fact that, what with all the "prosing on" (209) of Mor's WEA class, the Revvy Evvy's sermon, and Bledyard's advice to Mor, the novel is about morality, responsibi­ lity to others (cf. 216), "kicking over the traces" of

’’‘Byatt, 61. 106

convention (55), and, parenthetically, art. Like many

Murdoch sermonizers of course, few of those in The

Sandcastle actually practice what they preach, possibly

Bledyard, but not Evvy and certainly not Mor. The

Sandcastle's obviousness is not, however, its only weak­

ness. The baldness of statement is accompanied by a

failing which can only work to ruin the best efforts of

the novelist of characters in his attempt to perceive

others with justice and tolerance. The Sandcastle betrays

all-too-often evaluative attitudes toward characters

which can only be seen as Murdoch's own. Such too-evident

authorial judging, along with the almost unrelieved

banality, works to make The Sandcastle fail.

The banality of The Sandcastle has often been noted,

but it has seldom been noted that Iris Murdoch, the

brilliant stylist of The Flight from the Enchanter, works

toward that tone of banality consciously. The Sandcastle

is a novel where human personality is presented as a

totally understandable, non-mysterious transparency, where any possibility of drama is robbed of its effect

by the dullness of the characters or by author's tricks,

and where style consciously uses but does not parody the

triteness^ of the best-seller hack. The Sandcastle is an

odd aesthetic occurrence, a novel which fails because it

succeeds. It is no mistake that the most frequent words 1G7

in the novel are "dreary," "gloomy," "boring," and

"familiar," for Murdoch intended things to turn out that

way. This working toward the unrelieved tedium of the

banal can be seen on almost every page of the novel,

with the episode of Donald's attempt to climb the school

tower being a happily dramatic exception, though nearly

the only exception. The novel can almost always be

described in terms of what it lacks: it lacks imagery

until about Chapter Nine when love dawns rather tritely

on Mor with the imagery following being mostly hackneyed

or overstated; it also lacks depth of characterization —

indeed, except for Nan, none of the major characters is

anything but a static, narrowly-defined single dimension of minimal humanity. This is particularly true of Rain

Carter and Mor.

Rain Carter represents for Murdoch a denial of the more bohemian aspects of the artist. If Rain actually existed, she would be a rare phenomenon indeed in twentieth century art, a creative personality who works within society — though she definitely has talent, her very profession, portrait painting, is a conservative art now very much rearguard. Rain has only a few of the wild mannerisms which we have come to associate with the artist, her hugging of trees (35) and her urgent desire to swim, but she controls such transcendental enthusiasms around most 108

people, and no one in the novel seems to find her parti­

cularly unacceptable socially. She is what is known to

the Establishment as a fashionable painter, and her

Riley is proof of her financial success. There is hence a basic contradiction in her character: she is both an artist, and an ordinary human being at the same time; and while she is fascinating to Mor, she strikes us as being just as "prim" (28) as her speech. Rain is in many ways the soul of conventionality: she accepts Mor's postponement of the consummation of their love in a way which runs counter to most other Murdoch characters, and she is even reticent about speaking of the matter in a way which seems somewhat priggish. "'Mor,' she said,

'you're sure you don't mind my staying and not —'" (182).

Rain is called a "little puritan" (31) by Demoyte and is seen at one point by Mor as a "Victorian little girl"

(157), and neither epithet seems in any way ironic. As for actual sexual excitation, about as close as Rain comes is a little harmless necking with Mor. Her exper­ ience in love is very limited since she gave up the only boyfriend she has had at her father's request, and the rather sweet way in which she reacts to the pass Demoyte makes at her seems artlessly naive. Artless too is her posing in bare shoulders for Bledyard's class, and even the swim in the river is not particularly sexually 109 exciting — Mor is much more disturbed by seeing her bare knee once she has put her clothes back on. At every turn Murdoch emphasizes Rain’s ordinariness. Rain is a fine artist, but she seems to be totally lacking in the ability to articulate her artistic principles — none of her statements on art, or on anything else for that matter, is particularly memorable; and the one aphorism v/hich she seems to be attached to is her father's dictum about "serious paint" (106). She is ordinary too in her clothing and often appears in very stylish clothes.

The only time we see her in anything unconventional, in her appearance in trousers for the walk with Mor about the school, she immediately regrets her clothing when she sees Mor's disapproval. Rain was raised in

France, quite the racy place to Nan, but Rain assures us that her life there was quiet and rather dull. It is not really so very odd that we tend to believe her.

In a way, Rain gets what she deserves in Mor, certainly one of the few instances of a non-creation in all Murdoch.

Mor lives in what Demoyte calls a "monochrome world"

(115) and seems to have been intended to fit that cate­ gory of weak, spineless, convention-strapped individuals who are known rather accurately under the colloquial labèl

"worms." But it is difficult even to see Mor as that kind of creation because his interior monologue (sixteen- 110

and-a-half of twenty chapters — far too many) is made

up of so very much hack writing. This bad style can be seen

especially in Moriss thoughts about Rain after his

"decision" to leave Nan, and in the very scene of his discovery of his love for Rain.

Mor stood there, arrested by some obscure feeling of pleasure, and somehow in the quietness of the morning he apprehended that there were many many things to be glad about. He waited. Then from the very depths of his being the knowledge came to him suddenly and with devestating certainty. He was in love with Miss Carter. He stood there looking at the dusty ground and the thought that had taken shape shook him so that he nearly fell. He took a step forward. He was in love. (150))

Well, at least he does manage to keep upright, but the proliferation of cliche and hackneyed gesture in the passage is enough to knock the reader right off his feet.

A similar stylistic deadness is evident in Mor's fantasy about what life with Rain will be like in the future.

Mor saw the years ahead. The room was full of pictures of himself and Rain. Himself reading upon the terrace at evening, working in the drawing-room in the noon light, walking in the wilderness between the dusty leaves of the bushes where there was no path. Rain, slowly losing her boyish looks, the tense and precious simplicity of her childhood changing into the serenity of middle age, and so picture behind picture away into the farthest future. Rain with her brush in hand, looking through a thousand canvases toward the end of life. (244)

It is hard to decide which is worst here, the mawkish deadness of the pattern of life imagined; or the absurdity of the final detail — that is a long time to hold a Ill

brush and promises at least a good case of hand-cramp;

or the sentimentality. Even when Mor attempts an image

it is either flat or too obvious: "He would be sitting

in the same room as Rain, and as Bledyard talked he could

think about her, and see again the extraordinary and

moving images of the previous day which still hovered

for him about her head, like a cloud of angels surrounding

the madonna" (247). This image does point out the

fantasy which attends Mor's perception of Rain; we are

even intended to wonder if Mor has actually seen a "madonna,"

since so few of us get to, but the image is so crudely

direct that it is hardly an image at all. The same

direct flatness is apparent in other Mor fantasies about

Rain: "It seemed to Mor as if she glowed in the twilight

and came towards him carried by a gentle but infinitely powerful wind" (250), an image strongly suggesting Rain

as a glow-worm or a lightning bug; and "He had never known before what it was to converse with someone, reading their eyes the whole time. Angels must know each other this way, without a barrier" (280). Murdoch is consciously trying to underscore not just Mor as fantasy-bound but

Mor as mundane even in fantasy. This leads Murdoch to write many of Mor's scenes in a style which is what we usually expect from the lady novelist, literature's most 112

prolific hack, the living counterpart of Beckett's Lucky.

"How could you want to see me?" Mor says to Rain when

she reveals her love, but since both are just about

equals in dullness, one can easily see why she would

and cannot quite accept either the sincerity of the

emotion or even the authenticity of the person uttering

the statement. And we are by no means in any way sur­

prised, pleasantly or unpleasantly, when Rain and Mor

talk about their actions as those of "mad people," com­

plete with Mor running about "like a mad thing" (185).

Murdoch does not make one say to another "I love you so

madly!" but she comes very near, to such triteness, even

in some of the images associated with Mor's most extreme

feelings. In contrast to Jake's brilliant images of his

feelings — the rearing wildcat, and so on — Mor's

strike us as being overstatements but not comic: when

Donald is stranded on the tower ledge, Mor is made to

think, "The agony of the fear nearly broke his body in two" (259) ; while at one point, when Rain appears at the cricket match, "Mor looked at her, and he felt as if an enormous vehicle had driven straight through him, leaving a blank hole to the edges of which he still raggedly adhered" (163) , which cannot but cause us to wonder how

Mor can be driven through and then stick to himself as to 113 something else at the same time. These images are too obtrusively trite to be unconscious, to be the momentary slips of the stylist of The Flight from the Enchanter and

The Bell; they are also too too serious to be parody —

Mor is simply too involved in his perception of Rain to be comic. Mor is intended to utter these cliches straight forwardly, and Murdoch seems to find them usable for plain, declarative ends in Mor's instance. Yet though

Mor is not approved of, neither is he satirized, and it is perhaps a revealing that there is a certain drabness to Murdoch's description of Mor throughout (he only comes alive really before his classes, but that vitality only makes his behavior outside the classroom all the more incredible). Mor is made to be indifferent to the color­ ful beauty of Rain's picture; it seems "sombre" (171) to him the first time he sees it, while Mor's habitual mode of thought is "sadness" (cff 289), melancholy, a fixation apparent even at the presentation dinner — Mor is not even delighted at Mrs. Prewett's appearance. We remember that Mor thinks that Evvy has turned the dinner following the House Match into an event reaching "an unprecedented degree of dreariness" (160), but the phrase more accurately is a reflexive description of Mor’s own character. The Sandcastle is, however, a novel in praise of thfe ordinary, and that praise is both one of 114

the reasons for the failure of the novel (since the

meaning of "ordinary" which Murdoch displays is not the

rich meaning of a complex of particulars 'she usually

uses but one which defines the ordinary in terms of

literary cliches and stereotype), and also the reason

for Mor's dullness as a person. Mor is a denial of

drama, fantasy, and wit; he was created by toning down or

cutting away the very literary brilliancies which had

distinguished earlier Murdoch persons, a sapping tech­

nique which can be seen in a comparison of Rainborough's

going "weak in the knees" before Miss Casement's M.G. with

Mor's attitude toward Rain's Riley, his mere "desultory

admiration" (70) . There is also another de-intensifica-

tion in the contrast between Annette's jewels which sym­

bolize the sturdy but cold beauty of her youth and which

she is attached to passionately, even in the act of

throwing them away, and Tim Burke's jewelry business, al­ most an avocation, which seems to reflect little about his personality, except his fondness for pleasing Nan and Donald with friendly gifts. There is yet another contrast between Mischa's neurotic concern for protect­

ing animals and Felicity's teary concern for the butter­

fly which flew outto sea probably to die (231) and the

fish stranded on the shore (232) but which Felicity

"wasn't brave enough" to save. 115

But we see Murdoch working to blunt the dramatic

possibilities of the story throughout The Sandcastle.

In style, there is much repetition of statements about

the repetitive pattern of life with Nan and of Tim's role

in that life: "She always said this," Mor thinks several

times in Chapter One; and later, "Tim always said this"

(61). Even the actions of Donald and Felicity are blunted as either delightful children's games or as magic by being prefaced with the tired reflections, "This was a familiar routine" (138), and "This was an ancient ritual"

(145), the latter just before the tears of blood rite.

Buildings, like those of St. Bride's, are only functionally named: one structure is "rather gracelessly called Main

School" (40), another is called "Library," and so on, all drably unimaginative in design. Human activity is confined within a narrow, repetitive pattern, and we are made aware of its dreariness at every turn. No action is ever allowed to be really dramatic or to seem more than banal. When Nan returns to find Rain with Mor's head in her lap, the potentially melodramatic confronta­ tion is rendered an anticlim2x by Murdoch's making the

"woodlander" (89), "gypsy" (139), "woodcutter" (184), or whatever he is (Murdoch gives him no less than these three names) appear first — by chance — before Nan.

Once he has gone, our fear of a wife's return has already 116

been dissipated by the appearance of the woodcutter, and

we accept Nan’s appearance with relief. Having been

scared once needlessly, we are happy to see Nan back.

Nan's return after the woodcutter is a sort of reverse

trick in that most authors would try to play up the

confrontation of wife and beloved whereas Murdoch under­

plays it, or tries tox It is a trick nonetheless — what are the odds against the woodcutter chancing on

that one particular doorbell to lean against? One would

conjecture that the odds against run rather high. They

are also probably rather high against Nan's picking that particular night to arrive, but the trick quite slickly keeps us from immediately concerning ourselves with those odds. In the peculiarly deedramatized world of

The Sandcastle, where even the "pungent and obscene" (132) drawings in Donald's room are properly covered over, we could do with some relief from the all-too-successful portrayal of the tedium vitae, a rape or a laugh, maybe.

God knows, The Sandcastlescould use some comedy.

That is not to say that the novel does not have any comedy. It does — the best parts of the novel. But comic elements are for the most part comic relief, comedy divisi­ ble from the central story, and none of the main characters really has a sense of humor, certainly not sarcastic Nan, 117 and certainly not Rain, who seems to be amused only at

Bledyard’s odd physical mannerisms. Rain never attempts

a joke, and the only major figure who does is Demoyte.

(Mor is comic once with his WEA class when they do not get

a point: "I've failed again, Mor thought, with the feel­

ing of one who has brought the horse round the field a

second time only for it to shy once more at the jump" [55] ,

But that is only once.) Much of Demoyte's comedy, however,

is not solely caused by himself. Demoyte is aided in his

comedy by his loud-voiced housekeeper, Miss Handforth, and

in some scenes there is little distinction between the two

as comic figures. We see this in the scene where Demoyte

gives in to Rain's desire to paint him in a "frayed corduroy

coat" and a "bow tie."

This particular capitulation had taken place the previous morning after breakfast when Rain had said sharply, "Don't think me eccentric, Mr Demoyte, but these are the clothes I want to paint you in" — and had laid the very garments on the chair beside him. Demoyte had made no comment, but had gone at once in quest of Miss Handforth to tell her exactly what he thought of this betrayal. Handy had informed him that needless to say she knew hoth- - ing about it and surely he knew her better than to imagine she would give information to that imp or make free with her employer's clothing. Demoyte had pondered the outrage for a short while, made a mental note to give Mor a rocket when he next saw him, changed into the clothes in question and felt immensely better and more comfortable. (104)

Miss Handforth is comic in her own right, however, and in other scenes, the caricature heavy-handed, not-so-handy 118

"Handy" is used by Murdoch for comic punctuation. When

Nan is late for Demoyte's dinner, Handy asks, "'Well,

what am I to do about the dinner? Spoil it by over-cooking

or let it get cold. I don't mind which it is, but just let

me know'" (28). And at the end of the dinner, Handy is

again used for comic punctuation when she interrupts the

boredom that has set in with coffee with the desire to re­

move the coffee tray. "'Come and drink your coffee, or

Handy will remove it. You know she only allows seven

minutes for coffee,'" Demoyte tells Mor (32); and soon

after that, Handy does indeed appear, asking, "'Can I

take it now? or have I spoken out of turn'" (33). Some­

times it is the loudness of Handy's voice conveyed through

imagery which is used for comedy. When Mor is prowling

about Demoyte's house in a romantic enchantment about Rain,

the mood is comically interrupted by Handy's appearance at

a window instead of Rain: "'Why, it's Mr Mor!’ said Miss

Handforth in her sonorous voice, scattering the moonlight

night about her in fragments"(124). But though Miss Hand-

forth is an attempt on Murdoch's part at a comic carica­

ture servant of the sort which Shakespeare had a genius

for, Handy is not sharply enough realized. We are told

that her voice is loud; but like Rain's accent which was

supposed to be able to give "significance" to the judge­ ment "rotten" (83) that the meaning of the word did not 119 convey, we cannot hear it, and the promise of comedy in her remarks is not always borne out in the dialogue.

At one point, this failure on Murdoch's part to fully realize Handy is clearly shown in the scene of the actual dinner at Demoyte's. Murdoch tells us, "As Nan had pre­ dicted, no place had been set this evening for Miss Hand- forth. This person towered over the table, often leaning upon it as she made a remark, sneezing from time to time, and breathing down the ladies' necks" (30). But it is unfortunately a fact that Murdoch includes no actual remark of Handy's, and that during the scene when Evvy is "summed up" by Rain (31), Miss Handforth is not once mentioned, though she is supposed to be "towering" over the proceed­ ings. The scene reads almost as if Murdoch had forgotten

Handy's presence.

There is no consistently successful comic figure in the novel, but the closest to utter comedy is the Reverend

Everard, the first of Murdoch's comic clergymen, a man whom 2 Byatt calls "a figure of fun" and whose name has been short ened by his students rather appropriately to the diminutive for Evelina, "Evvy." Evvy is a comic caricature clergyman,

2Byatt, 65. 120 and as such is by no means original y- the type is at least as old as Parson Adams. He is described as "a sort of fiction" (73) by Mor, but he is as sincere a Christian as

James Tayper Pace, though he is also as feminine as Pace is masculine. His behavior, like that of Parson Adams, is bumblingly well-intentioned, and he is summed up rather neatly by Hensman, the physical education director at St.

Bride's who also has a flair for interior decoration:

"'You know Evvy's motto — if a thing's worth doing it's worth just blundering through somehow'" (285). And while

Murdoch does overplay her treatment of Evvy at times, as in her too-obvious description of him as he tastes the sherry making a face "like a choirboy acting a french roue in a parish play" (287), for the most part he is more con­ sistently comic than anyone else in the novel. Like many of Murdoch's best comic creations, however, Evvy is both to be laughed with and at — in equal proportions. There is a certain tone of satire of this headmaster almost totally without social graces, and it is a satire which is underscored in Demoyte's persistence in calling his successor "'poor Evvy'" (20). Murdoch uses authorial irony in describing Evvy's actions. At the dinner of cold cuts and salads which frugal bachelor Evvy serves to Rain, the clergyman is even implied to be stupid: "Evvy, whose 121

ability to think of only one thing at a time made him far

from ideal as a Headmaster, having satisfied himself that

each of his guests had a plate of food and a glass of water

addressed himself to conversation" (72) , and reversing the

joke later "Evvy had taken advantage of this shift in con­

versational burden to rise and remove the plates" (74),

Perhaps the most comic and the most satiric of Evvy's mo­ ments, however, occurs, as we would expect, in the pulpit.

He has "taken it into his head" to preach on what he calls

"popular sayings": "'It's an ill wind that blows nobody good,'" "'Too many cooks spoil the broth,'" "'You may lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink,'" and es­ pecially "'God helps those who help themselves.'"

Evvy had started, as usual, with a little joke. When he had been a child, he explained, he had understood the phrase "help themselves' in the sense of the colloquial invitation "Help your­ self!" and so had thought that the saying meant that God helped thieves or people who just took . what they wanted. Evvy explained this point ra­ ther elaborately. (206)

This sermon states a recurring Murdoch theme, love as a knowledge of the source of moral action, but serious though the theme is elsewhere in Murdoch, it is not allowed to be serious for long in Evvy's sermon — the scene ends with

Evvy beginning the closing prayer and then lapsing into an incoherent, even infantile, babble': "'And now to God 122

the Father, God the Son, and God the bla bla bla bla . .

(209). Mor himself is not amused,4 he takes Evvyjs sermon

seriously when it relates to his situation, even with its

mixed metaphors and hackneyed phrasing, but he is other—

wise bored. It is of course because he is so self-centered

that he cannot be amused, but if he were capable of detach­

ment from himself, he could not fail to find Evvy entertain­

ing. As a creation, Evvy recalls the brilliant caricatures

of The Flight from the Enchanter and foreshadows the Bishop of The Bell. Evvy is, like Bledyard, one of the most success

ful minor characters in The Sandcastle — that is unfortun­ ately not saying very much.

Bledyard as a being is, properly speaking, not comic, at least not in the same way as Evvy. Bledyard has the finest mind of all the persons in The Sandcastle, and his ideas, both on art and about "respect for reality" (216), are closely related to Murdoch’s own. Bledyard is the first of Murdoch's flawed spokesmen of the sort who will later recur in the Reverend Swann. Physically, Bledyard is a joke, odd looking, curiously placid, preoccupied; but when he speaks, his words are compelling, truthful. Nonetheless, there is the joke side to the man, his comic flaw. This flaw is not only his "impediment impediment" (77) in speak­ ing, but his bodily carriage. Again and again Murdoch pre­ cedes some of the most serious of Bledyard's statements with 123

comic descriptions of his personal mannerisms. Before

expounding his theory of art at the Revvy Evvy's luncheon,

Bledyard is described almost as physically handicapped:

"Bledyard sat as usual quite at his ease in saying nothing, moving his large head to and fro, as if he had just had

it fixed on and was trying to see if it was firm" (72).

This joke, partly sick and partly nonsense, creates in us

the expectation that Bledyard's talk will be just as twisted as his movements. When he starts talking sense, Murdoch,

sense, we begin to wonder if we are intended to pay any attention to the speech mannerism or only to what is said.

In later scenes the same device is used of prefacing a serious statement with comic, even cruel, descriptions of

Bledyard's behavior. By the time of the lecture, when we have come to accept Bledyard as the only intelligent being in the novel other than Demoyte, who himself knows how

Rain values Bledyard's opinion more than any other (171), the same comic description of Bledyard's behavior is still used. Before the lecture, Bledyard "leaned there, looking into the pullulating crowd of boys, his face twisted into a sort of bland and pensive expression, as if he were re­ hearsing what he were about to say and finding it extremely interesting" (252); also, "He looked completely unruffled and reminded Mor suddenly of a representation of a pilgrim, 124

leaning on his staff, patient and full of hope" (253).

And just before the lecture ends with the discovery of the

boys on the tower, we are told, "He spoke throughout with

total solemnity and with the slow deliberation of one

announcing a declaration of war or the death of royalty"

(254). There is more in these moments than just the inter­

nal thoughts of Mor, and while we do not have authorial

didacticism here, we do have authorial irony. It is Mur­

doch just as much as much as Mor who is laughing at Bled­ yard. The manner of that laughter is both cruel and satir­

ic, though Murdoch keeps Bledyard from being sentimentally pathetic by giving him an indestructible aplomb. But what are we to make of an author who laught at an embodiment of some of his own beliefs? Perhaps the hilarity of the lec­ ture is only meant to heighten by contrast the tension of the tower climb which follows it in the second half of the

At some points in the novel, Murdoch is present in a way she had never been in her first two novels. One of her authorial intrusions recalls in style and tone the eight­ eenth century travelogue; "By this time they were deep in the ragged coniferous Surrey landscape which lies between the fanned-out lines of the great main roads out of London: the region where the escaping Londoner, alone of city-dwellers to use the word in quite this way, says a little doubtfully, 'Nov; at last we are in the country1 “ (86). Another intrusion concerns the day on which the St.Bride's boys depart for vacation: "On this day all feuds were forgotten, and the most puny and unpopular boy in the form would get a warm unanimous shout of farewell, heartening and misleading to 125

same chapter; or perhaps the lecture should not be laughed

at — are physical disabilities really so amusing? But

Murdoch does succeed in making us laugh, and she must have

a reason for such laughter. The Elizabethans, as we know,

laughed at various kinds of deformity, but sometimes only because the deformed person was of the genus idiot savant or wise fool, and that seems to be what Murdoch is at least attempting with Bledyard and her other flawed spokesmen.

We did not have to hear Jake talk about Hugo long before we knew that Hugo's ideas were the serious center of the comic storm of Jake's life — we are told of Hugo, after all, in one of the only two serious tonal sections of

Under the Net. In The Sandcastle, Bledyard is approached in a different way: his oddity and eccentricity set him apart from caricatures like Evvy, Handy, and ordinary types like Mor and Rain; and Murdoch tries to draw attention to the serious justness of what Bledyard says by making it conspicuous through comedy. This can be seen in the events following the appearance of the frog's digestive tract on

his parents, especially if the latter arrived to fetch him in the latest Bentley or the oldest Rolls" (276). Such authorial intrusions would be used most effectively later in The Bell where they would be used to detach the reader from the action and cause him to reflect on what he has seen. 126 the screen instead of one of Bledyard's "noble portraits"

(255). When the right slide is shown, "one of the later self-portraits of Rembrandt," Bledyard states one of the ideas which Murdoch insists on as a chief require­ ment of art: "'if we ask what relates the painter to the sitter, if we ask what the painter is after, it is difficult to avoid answering — truth.'" It is no sur­ prise to find that, following Bledyard's statement,

"The audience was now totally silent," with Bledyard

"seeming for a moment to have forgotten where he was."

It takes a color photo of the Queen and the National

Anthem to break the serious spell, but in that moment of silence, Murdoch's intention — at least — is clear.

Physically, Bledyard may be ludicrous, but there is really no reason why we should expect the wise man to be beautiful — Mor can laugh at Bledyard, and we too with

Mor; but ultimately Bledyard is right. In the ordinary world of The Sandcastle, Bledyard is the only thing allowed to be extraordinary. The technique that created him, like that that created Evvy, is a carryover from

The Flight from the Enchanter, and he would probably be more acceptable to the persons of that novel than to the narrow minds of The Sandcastle who laugh at mannerism and eccentricity. Yet it is still true that

Murdoch herself is laughing at rather than with Bledyard 127 beyond his role as a wise fool, and that the artist's failure to perceive without too clearly judging asserts

Murdoch's presence in the novel in the negative sense of directing our ppinions rather than letting us judge for ourselves, and makes of Bledyard a lesser being than he might otherwise be. Murdoch laughs at him herself as something out of the ordinary, and for the moment that ordinariness is seen in terms of banal social convention.

For an author like Iris Murdoch, who defines reality as seeing the full particularity and complexity of the world in its non-totalitarian contingency, there can be no more fatal position from which to attempt to create characters — in The Sandcastle, Murdoch very nearly surrenders to Babbitt. Also, in Nan Mor, she very nearly surrenders to amazonism.

Nan is, like Bledyard, both a success and a failure.

Nan is one of two characters in the novel who come to a realized awareness of what Mor only abstractly senses:

"Nothing is more educational, in the end, that the mode of being of other people" (68). This idea, as clear a statement as can be found in The Sandcastle of the basic aesthetic principle governing the construction of many

Murdoch novels as educations of the being, can only apply in The Sandcastle to Rain and Nan. Mor himself falls 128

almost completely to realize Nan or Rain; for Rain is

just as much a "child" (214) as Bledyard calls her, and

Mor fails to see how much of Rain’s love for him is a desire for a father surrogate — the fact that she is only very recently bereaved serves to heighten her need.

Rain and Nan do achieve awareness, however, but their awarenesses are not identical. Rain is forced to see that she is destroying the reality of Mor's life, but we see her awareness only through her own verbal descrip­ tion, much of it metaphoric, while Nan's inner thoughts are graphically realistic in presentation. Taking up the "sandcastle" image Rain had earlier used to sym­ bolize the "dryness" (73) of her life, its signifying nothing, Rain tells Mor that their love too had been without reality or substance: "'It's all dry sand running through the fingers'" (304). Nan, in contrast, first tells Mor "'How little I knew you!'" (201) when she returns from Tim Burke's, and then later, in a scene set near the sea with its associations of wetness, Nan begins slowly to understand Mor as she has never done before.

Her imaginings, however, are realistically oriented (the first picture we get of Nan in the scene shows her with her feet in the ocean water) and contrast to Rain's poeticizing. 129

In those few days she thought about him more in­ tensely than she had ever done since she had first been in love with him. His face haunted her. One vision of it especially she had, seeing it as she had so often seen it in the early mornings beside her, in the days when they had shared a bed, when she had woken first, the tired unshaven sleeping face of a man. She began to miss him. She began, though she did not let this become clear to her­ self, to desire him. (228)

Murdoch here emphasizes the fact that the very reality of Nan's imaginings of Mor lead her, not to repulsion, but to "desire," We soon find Nan in a state of "fear"

(228), a state which recurs just before her speech at the presentation dinner (296), and she realizes very clearly, "It came to her as a real possibility that she might lose her husband" (229) . And while Nan had at first been impressed with her own handling of Mor, her dominance of a "pattern of argument" that "had been reassuringly familiar" (226), she soon grows as a person beyond that control to an awareness of Mor — while, at first, she recalls only "her own powerful and vigorous attack" (227); later, "Bill's words" are remembered more

"sharply" (229). There is much pathos too in Nan's coming apart after discovering Rain and Mor together: the ludi­ crous scene of Tim's crawling over her, Nan's climbing through the window, her vomiting from her first taste of whiskey. Not even Mor's propelling Nan through the window makes her action comic — pushed to such extremities, 130

she is even pitiable. In this move of Nan's toward a

new, more realistic grasp of her marriage, Murdoch attempts

to show Nan's superiority as a moral being over either

Mor or Rain. Sarcastic though Nan may be, proud of her power over her husband, she is still capable of spiritual growth, and Murdoch does her best to make that potential

admirable, though Murdoch partially fails in that attempt by limiting Nan to one-and-a-half chapters of interior monologue. The failure to realize Nan fully is not, however, just a matter of wrong focus, though Nan cer­ tainly needs more interior monologue than Murdoch allows her if she is to become lifelike enough. The problem with Nan, as it is with Bledyard, is that Murdoch's attitude toward her is too obvious, too clearly a stated part of the novel.

It is a problem in unrealistic exaggeration, a be­ lief that Nan, the strong female, for all her failings, is better in her strength than Mor or Tim, the weak males, or even Rain, the weak female and lover of beauty: Nan is strength, but all strength — even in her pitiable moments there is something of a facing up to matters which comes through; Mor and Tim Burke are, on the other hand, all weakness, and there is a paralleling of Mor's standing before Nan, "pawing with his foot and looking down" (201), with Tim at the end of the novel, called 131 by Nan into the kitchen but "unable to meet her eye"

(318). In the ludicrous scene of Tim's crawling on Nan, she clearly is "aware that Tim was at a loss. He did not know what to do" (194); and, strong female that she is,

"Nan hated it when other people did not know how to con­ duct themselves." At one point in the same scene with

Tim, he seems almost infantile: "'Dear, I've so often wanted to tell you things . . . Things about Ireland, about when I was a child here, things I couldn't tell to anybody else'" (196). When Nan's world has fallen apart about her, Tim, we are to note, wants to tell her about his childhood. Mor is no stronger, for he is just as

"'unutterably Spineless and dreary'" (203) as Nan tells him he is. Ultimately, his failure to stay with Rain and persuade her of his determination is a major aid in Rain's departure. Demoyte, who has seen Rain go, tells Mor bluntly that fate had nothing to do with it: "'You have made your own future'" (312), he tells Mor, and we realize that it was made mainly out of weakness of character. It must be remembered, however, that the world of The Sandcastle purports to be the ordinary world, and that in the ordinary world weakness and strength are seldom so total, so exaggerated, so monochromatic as 132

they appear in the novel. The persons of The Sandcastle,

with the partial exception of Bledyard, are not only

not eccentric — they are not even free. Each repre­

sens a single psychic category, and behavior is hence

predestined from the beginning. Murdoch's own attitude

is, however, a much more important matter than even

thinness of characters, and it is a sad reflection of

The Sandcastle as a novel that in too many cases Mur­ doch's opinion of the people she creates is all too clearly evident. The world of The Sandcastle is an odd one. It

is a world where the conventionally enslaved are valued more than the eccentrically free, where the only person who seems to question the "rightness" (318) of the conventional status quo is a teenager still in the magic and games stage, where the non-dramatic is seen as a literary value, and where the most successful characters are a caricature clergyman and a flop-haired genius with a speech defect. There is a lesson there somewhere. CHAPTER V

THE BELL

By the time Iris Murdoch reached the writing of The

Bell, her playfulness had become almost completely played out. There is in The Bell very little fun just for fun's sake, though there had been much in Under the Net and The

Flight from the Enchanter. There are in The Bell certainly moments of tangential comedy, Patchway's tanned bald spot

(201), Michael's eyes set too close together (37), Murphy's eyelashes (57), but there is much less than Murdoch had earlier entertained herself with. In the two other novels most like The Bell in theme and setting, The Unicorn and

The Time of the Angels, comedy of the funereal sort nearly disappears or, as is more often the case, appears as satire or sarcasm — Effie is satirized more thoroughly than any other character in Murdoch, with the possible exception of

Randall, and The Time of the Angels, while it does contain the hilarious memoir of Pattie's mother — "Miss O'Driscoll distinctly remembered a Jamaican" (21), is a parody of the conventions of Gothic romance of the most sardonic, even violent sort. These three novels, coming chronologically at the end of Murdoch's first comedy phase — The Bell is 134

succeeded by a two-year gap which Murdoch spent polemic!z-

ing and lecturing — and in her most earnestly philosophi­

cal phase, demonstrate clearly the tendency that her work has taken: in Under the Net, Jake the uninvolved and the aware remains just that, not entirely through his own doing, since Hugo and Anna are partly responsible for his detach­ ment, Anna unknowingly, and Jake remains basically content, amusing in his detachment. Murdoch continued to insist that detachment could work and was comic as a conscious adjust­ ment to reality, until The Unicorn when she insisted on

Marian's assumption of universal "guilt" .(149 and 173), vague though it might be. (Martin is offered a real involve ment by Honor, but the outcome is a matter of taking one's chances. We are not told how the risk comes out.) From

Marian onward, Murdoch's tone rises sharply: involvement, acceptance of the real, is absolutely essential, and those who fail to accept must suffer a total reorganization of personality. Hence, the transformation of Muriel from the same kind of semi-detached, shapeless being vaguely impelled toward aesthetic pursuits which Murdoch had earlier repre­ sented in Jake, Annette, Dora, and Marian to the same "demon in torment" (cf. 173, 211, 235) that her father Carel Fisher had been represents not only a shift in tone from comedy to more serious realism but a shift in thought. By The Time of the Angels, Murdoch had come to feel the insistence of 135 grasping the truth of reality: though liar Leo escapes,

or at least disappears, Muriel, who contains more potential

for moral growth anyway, remains imprisoned to the invalid

Elizabeth seemingly for life. Like Jake, Muriel feels that she does not want regular work and also feels that she may possibly be aesthetically inclined, though also like Jake she is content to let things ride along by themselves and work themselves out. Unlike Jake, Muriel's final aware­ ness is tragically moving — her guilt at having destroyed her own world, especially Pattie and Muriel's father, though also Eugene, is very authentic, and we do not laugh. But

Jake, the clearest statement of Murdoch's early thought, is in his last scenes comic — he is the same old Jake as at the beginning, riding around on the top of a bus, solv­ ing questions about the nature of reality, the human will.

In Jake, Murdoch created a character whose lack of involve­ ment was comic; in Muriel, a similar lack leads to tragedy.

The tone of Muriel's tragedy, however, is high-pitched, even shrill. Earlier in Murdoch's work, in Michael Meade, tragic awareness was more controlled, more effective. In­ deed, The Bell is a midway work in Murdoch's art in several senses, at least one of which is thht The Bell is a book in which detachment, or failure to accept the truth of one's own and others' reality, is both comic, as it is with Dora, and tragic — Michael. 136

A. S. Byatt has spoken of Michael's tragedy, and she connects it, mainly, with his religion. Drawing upon Mur­ doch's definition of tragedy as "leaving us in eternal doubt," giving us a sense that the world contains "no pre-fabricated harmonies," and making us aware of an "indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others," Byatt cites Michael's final awareness that "there is a God, but I do not believe in him" as a "tragic freedom which is the acceptance of the incomplete."! On Murdoch's grounds at least, this sort of reverse despair is certainly tragic. But Michael's particu­ lar problem relates to Nick Fawley and hence the emotional peak of Michael's tragic awareness comes, not just in re­ lation to his religion only, but more specifically in his seeing that "Nick had needed love, and he ought to have given him what he had to offer, without fears of its imperfection"

(311), an insight raised almost single-handedly to the level of tragic purgation when Michael sees what he ought to have done in love through religious imagery.

Michael had concerned himself with keeping his own hands clean, his own future secure, when instead he should have opened his heart: should impetuously and devotedly and beyond all reason have broken the alabaster cruse of very costly ointment. (311)

!Byatt, 102-104. 137

This image precedes Michael's conclusion about God, but

comparatively the image is the emotional climax of MiGhael'£

final thoughts, the all-too-belated insight which can now

do neither Michael nor Nick any more good than the Abbess

can. It is an insight too that comes as a carefully con­

structed rhetorical period which possesses a stylistic sub­

limity that often marks Murdoch's most important statements.

Throughput- The Bell, love and religion are inseparably

intermixed, a point made very forcibly when the Abbess, of­

ficially the second highest-ranking religious of the novel,

tells Michael that "All our failures are ultimately fail­

ures in love" (237). It is Michael's failure in the re­

ligion of love which, on more traditionally established

grounds than Murdoch's definition of tragedy, leads him to

a tragic waste of his "costly ointment." Murdoch succeeds

in keeping Michael's love for Nich from being disgusting,

not by the omission of details, but by focusing on the in­

variable wrongness of Michael's thinking — he builds up

a frustrated tension in the reader, as he does in Nick,

which makes one want too to force Michael to see the truth -

and our final feeling is that Michael has wasted his best

in lying to himself about Nick. The Bell is not the tragedy

of Nick Fawley, however, for Nick, for all his misery, is

not entirely worthy of Michael's love — that only increases

Michael's tragedy by so much more. 138

Tragedies in Murdoch occur only to particular persons in particular situations. Hence, it is untenable to assert that Michael's failure is a "failure to accept a human truth, 2 that is, heterosexual love," when homosexual love is just as obviously, to Michael, Nick, and even James Tayper Pace

(133), a "human truth." It is also untenable, in a perversely reasoned way, to believe that NifckAs suicide is above re­ venge, that Nick "renounces his flawed love in the interest of a nobler goal," performs a "magnanimous act,"3 when an important impulse of Nick's actions — forcing Toby to con­ fess, sabotaging the bell, killing himself — is that same homosexual attachment to Michael from which these acts are supposed to free Michael. It has even been asserted, by many critics, that Michael will marry Catherine, for whose

"welfare" he feels "responsible" (311), as he had earlier dreamed of being responsible for Nick's (104-105). That there is not the slightest suggestion of even a nascent mutual love between Michael and Catherine, let alone marri­ age, rules out the possibility of Michael's assuming hetero­ sexuality — at least legally. That he sees that his "tastes would almost undoubtedly remain with him" (101) also suggests

2Wolfe, 135.

3ibid., 125. 139 something less than marriage. To desire Michael other than he is constitutes both a whitewash of his character, a hetero sexual's belief that homosexuals have somehow gone wrong and must be saved, and a misreading of Murdoch, who would insist that to deny the homosexuality in the situation or to wish the particular element to be changed which disting­ uishes a situation as that situation is to falsify reality.

Nick does not "free" Catherine and Michael "to encounter 4 each other with a fresh maturity of vision," nor does

Murdoch suggest very much about any sequel to the events of the novel. In the context of the novel, Nick's acts against Michael are motivated by the same impulse which had earlier moved him when he was Michael's student: Nick uses love as power, and that use is basically more of a perversion in Murdoch, as we see clearly in later charac­ ters like Father Carel and, especially, Gerald Scottow, than homosexuality.

In any sexual terms, Nick is the violently destructive lover, the man whose instincts for self-laceration and the inflicting of pain on others always win out over his very real desire to affirm, accept, love. In literary terms,

Nick is a black satirist, and as such he represents a major

4Wolfe, 125. 140

statement in Murdoch's thought about satiric tendencies.

Nick satirizes everything: the sermons^are "spouting"

(141); Michael is "the great man himself" (54), "the big

chief (208), "our virtuous leader" (261); one of the novel's

central themes, the revelation of Dame Julian, becomes "'All

shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of bloody

things shall be well'" (209); Catherine is "my sainted sis­

ter" (55); Dora is "the erring wife" (55), "our delightful

penitent" (261), Toby's "female sweetheart" (261), a "bloody

bitch" (261); and in the scene in the Lodge when Nick paro­

dies the sermons of Michael and James, including their theme

of truth-telling, Nick clearly shows his inability to direct­

ly accept. In Nick's "church" (261) and "confessional" (262),

rhetorical eloquence is sardonically parodied, a direct con­

trast to the plainer straightforward style of James and

Michael.

Let us embrace our sin, beloved, and fall to couple with it upon the ground. Let us overcome our shame and turn our sorrow into joy, proclaiming our ill- deeds, kneeling and prostrating ourselves in the dust, and calling out for judgement, ravished, re­ pentant, redeemed. (260)

It is clear from the sexual imagery of this passage, as it

is also clear from the epithets which Nick applies to Dora,

that the image sharpest in Nick's mind relates to the young

"pretty" (260) Toby possibly establishing with Michael or anyone what Nick could not. Nick is just as jealous of 141

Michael, hates as much the idea of Michael's possible in­

fidelity, as Michael fears. There is no questioning Nick's

love for Michael; it is intense and consistent. But because

Michael wrongly interprets Nick's advances as a desire for

"protection" of a spiritual rather than a physical sort and

because also Nick is utterly unable to approach Michael

directly — the style of Nick's speech being evidence of

that inability — the two cannot see each other as they

really are until it is too late. Nick realizes himself that

Michael is a person for whom the religious possesses reality, but he realizes that only when he has decided to destroy

Michael for a second time. There is no better description of what Nick does to Michael than Nick's own accusation that Toby is "busy destroying a man's faith, undermining his life, preparing his ruin" (261) — it is a self-accusation

Nick uses love, then, as power; it is not entirely either his or Michael's fault that he does so, but it is the fault, if fault can be spoken of in the singular, of the complex conjunction of the two persons. Nick's love, frustrated indeed by Michael's faulty vision, has its own destructive element to contend with. Michael, frustrated too in his love for Nick, thinks only of trying to help Nick. Nick thinks all too easily of destroying, and any nobility his personality might potentially possess, any possibility for 142

"moral progress,"5 is negated in Nick's capacity to tear

down, expose, kill. Nick represents a rejection on Mur­

doch's part of the tendency to satirize, for satire works

against affirmation and love. To love, Murdoch insists,

one must grasp the being of even those whom one does not

entirely approve of and tolerate that otherness. Nick, who

cannot tolerate the spirituality of Michael, could only

very perversely be endowed with a spiritual motive of his

own in his final act. Nick's suicide is not a noble sacri­

fice, but the inevitable result of his being: having des­

troyed all that he loves other than himself in the world,

he now turns self against self. Nick's suicide is the final

result of destruction, self-destruction. Satire, says Mur­

doch through Nick, is fatal comedy, and we laugh at it at

our own expense.

The tragedy of Michael is the heart of The Bell.

Surrounding him, however, are other characters of a far

less tragic, relatively more comic nature. In many of the minor characters of the novel, comedy is a result of Mur­

doch's choice of detail — The Bell is a novel which quite

evidently delights its creator, and Murdoch is constantly

showing her delight in her delineation of the beings of other?. Father Bob Joyce, whose name is a parody of the

5Wolfe, 129. 143

dignity of the cloth, reveals his vapid religiosity in

his instantaneous production of a proverb to suit the oc­

casion of the return of Dora's shoes: "There is more re­

joicing over what is lost and found than over what has

never gone astray" (39), an injunction rendered doubly

inappropriate by its unfortunate reference to Dora's return

to Paul. And James Tayper Pace, whose religiosity is in

many ways clearer to himself and certainly just as sincere

as Michael's, even makes a slip or two in phraseology! In

his sermon, he says, "if I may put it so," the Imber Court

community members are "camp followers or fellow-travellers

of holiness" (137). The Bishop, who is a comic character

despite the fact that he is a thoroughly worldly clergyman,

is mildly debunked when, during the preliminary baptism of

the new bell, "the wind tore at the Bishop's cassock, re­

vealing a pair of smart black trousers underneath" (254). -

During the same ceremony Dora, Paul, and Noel are engaged

in a slapstick struggle to possess Dora's letter to Toby, but "The Bishop with unfaltering voice looked down benign­

ly, observing the byplay with the letter. He had seen odder things" (254). Murdoch's delight in these gushingly inar­ ticulate or imperturbable clergymen makes them seem all the more alive, all the better as creations, especially the Bishop. 144

Even the Abbess is made to employ an unfortunate image when

she speaks of talking to Michael "when this hurly-burly's

done" (257), a phrase not quite general enough in usage to

escape its most famous association with the Macbeth witches.

Mother Clare, too, like all the religious people in The Bell,

is gently satirized for rescuing Catherine naked to the

waist first by the newspaper which calls her "an acquatic

nun" (287) and then by Dora-Murdoch, the speaker is not

supposed to be entirely clear, who admiringly calls Mother

Clare "the intrepid and amphibious nun" (307). Many of

the lay persons of the book are similarly described in

comic terms: Mrs. Mark, whose legs, Dora notes in passing?,■

are "shaggy" (37), is comic in her juxtaposition of the prac­

tical with the spiritual. Leading Dora about on the tour

of Imber, Mrs. Mark says,

But just as we think the sinner better than he is when we imagine that suffering ennobles him, so we do less than justice to the saint when we think that his sacrifices grieve him in the way they would grieve us. Indian file here, I think. (69)

Doing justice fully to the saint might well describe Murdoch's attitude toward the religious persons of The Bell, who are more justly perceived than many of Murdoch's secular char­ acters. Failing to do justice to the saint also informs

Murdoch's dissatisfaction with Noel Spens who reveals the dryness of his thinking in his hurried shouting after Dora's 145

taxi, "'Don't forget! No God!'" (170) These instances

are, however, only the passing comic touches which remind

us of the presence of the absurd everywhere. Had Murdoch

chosen to satirize openly in The Bell, as she did not, she

could have made the novel a consistent satire. To see how

easily Murdoch can satirize, we need only remember a char­

acter who is the most minor person in the book, a train

porter. Murdoch creates him in a one-sentence flash, and

he never reappears. "'Close all the doors, please,' shouted

the Porter, who had once been as far as Paddington" (287) .

If we knew more about the detailed fullness of that life which had never gone beyond Paddington, satire would be im­ possible. The character would cease to be the type of the brutish provincial and become more complex — a human being, that is. Those characters that we do learn about fully

in the novel do become human persons, especially Dora, whose name and personality all too easily tempt one to call her (and dismiss her thereby) "dumb Dora."

That Dora is brought to life as a character is nothing short of astonishing, for she has working against her the one factor which usually makes the creation of living characters impossible, her total disorganization of being. Yet it is this very lack of focus of being which Murdoch has so convincingly portrayed as Dora's character, for Dora is one of those persons omnipresent, 146

yet lacking in personal presence, causing events, often

comic, to happen yet remaining detached from them, ob­

serving and experiencing and even being at a distance

from life which is never, even after the most violent of

shocks, bridged. ;Dora experiences life at a distance

just beyond the reaches of her understanding; she is not

unintelligent nor unreflective but just lacking in a

distinct drive to analyze. The strongest of her urges

is a desire for a being of her own, a desire thwarted

by her consciousness of it. She approaches living

like an actor; we first see her playing "the role" of

an "art student" (7), then we see her married to Paul,

setting about the "business" (8) of being happy, and even

after her arrival at Imber and her settling on the one

project which seems to excite her, the "miracle" of the

bell, Dora sees her actions from an actor's distance:

"In this holy community she would play the witch" (200).

She is unsuccessful in all these roles, for she lacks

that cohesiveness of being which real people have, that

raptness of attention whichhMurdoch, taking her concept

from Simone Weil, calls the basis of morality. Dora's

actions are without moral basis: "At last," she remembers when recalling her leaving Paul, "obeying that conception of fatality which served her instead of a moral sense, she

left him" (12) . Dora describes her own psychological 147 state as "solipsistic melancholy" (184), a state she escapes only once, before the "real" pictures in the

National Gallery (191-192).

Yet Murdoch chose this disorganized being to frame the events of the novel: Dora is the first person we meet, we first see Imber Court through her eyes, and she is the last person we see at the close of the novel.

And Murdoch gave to Dora a greater quantity of attention than to either of the other two interior monologuists: we see the events of eleven chapters through Dora's eyes, five-and-a-half through Toby's, and only eight-and-a- half through the tragic eyes of Michael. Dora is the cause of many of the comic debacles of the novel, the double loss of Paul's suitcase and manuscripts (25, 75), and Noel's untimely arrival at Imber (245 ff.), but she remains outside of the comedy as she remains outside most of the serious events. Comedy happens around her but not to her. We even see the most important and comic scene of the novel, the ceremonies of the bell and the events following, through Dora's sleep-ridden eyes

(Chapter Twenty-three): we are made to stand apart from the crowd, detached with Dora on the terrace, and we are reminded that Dora "scarcely knew why she felt it so important to be present" (272), an expression which is bound to cause us to wonder if our presence is 148

"important" either. And to increase our distance from

the fun, we are told that the narration is based upon

a past recollection, that all that Dora tells had been

"said later" (277). Dora is even at first detached from

Catherine's attempt at suicide, as is clear from what

Dora recalled: "Dora said later that if it had not been

for the violent shove she would not have paid attention

and not started to wonder" (277). This detachment from

Catherine is earlier evident when Dora first learns of

Catherine's becoming a nun, when she sees Catherine "under

the net" (73) over the apricots which symbolizes the

automatic categorization of Catherine as an innocent by

the Imber community members. Her reaction, "compounded

perhaps of pity and of some terror," is not so much a

sense of Catherine's tragedy, but a sense of Dora's own

loss, "as if something within herself were menaced with

destruction." Dora feels that Catherine's beauty will be wasted if she becomes a nun, but she sees that waste only as if it were her own beauty, rather than Catherine's

Though she desires her own intense experiences, she

always leaves a gap between the experience and herself.

She glories in her superior, detaching knowledge of the recovery of the bell, looking upon the preparations for 149

the ceremonies "as Elijah must have felt watching the

efforts of the prophets of Baal" (244). When Dora

first learns of Toby’s discovery of the old bell, her

inability to decide just what to do is comic, even childish: "She clutched her discovery as an Arab boy might clutch a papyrus. What it was she did not know, but she was determined to sell it dear" (198-199).

Dora is a person for whom reality is not other persons but paintings of persons and telling "the whole story to Sally" (320), her friend in Bath. Dora has learned a little in the novel — how to swim, for instance, though that turns out to be "natural" (303) — but she has learned nothing about other people, as is clear in her kissing

Michael. "Anyway," she thinks, "the kiss had gone off all right" (318), but in a sense this kiss, delivered as an act which has a "right" and wrong way about it, has not "gone off" at all. Dora has no real knowledge of what Michael is or has been or will be. Dora is detached from people, and she is one of the last Murdoch characters who will be allowed to get away with it.

Dora's detachment, then, is comic, but only mildly so. She is by no means the source of hilarity which

Jake and Annette often were. Dora is a transitional figure in Murdoch's treatment of detachment: the human­ ity of Jake and the minimal reality of Annette exist 150 sometimes as separable parts of their characters; both were created both as indulgences of the comedy of the exotic absurd and as attempts at full human characteri­ zation. Dora is seldom herself mirth-provoking -- she is more often just provoking, even irritating. In Dora, however, Murdoch treated her comic disorganization as a failing which, most importantly, was forgiveable. But there is a good portion of ambiguous vagueness even in

Murdoch’s conception of Dora: for the moment, in The

Bell, Dora's sort of shapelessness works, as a device for filtering narration through a neutral consciousness, and as a creation of a person. But by the time of Dora,

Murdoch had begun to find detachment less comic than before. Characters of Dora's sort would soon become for

Murdoch possible sources of tragedy, and even in The Bell,

Dora is the source of less personal comedy than many other figures, especially Toby Gashe.

If we recall The Bell as delightful in its comic parts, it is through no agency of Michael, whose self- deception is exasperating, nor very often of Dora, who is really too far "past her prime" (7) to be in possession of the sort of innocence she quite authentically does possess. The reason why Toby can delight us is that he has a good reason for his innocence: he is young. His ignorance is acceptable, even involving, because it is 151

the innocence which time imposes, and when Toby is given

the first shock to that innocence from that reality which

is Michael Meade, he reacts in a manner consistent, not

just with the structure of his own psyche, as Dora would,

but with a psychological muddle easily identifiable as growing out of the concept of general Human Nature. In

Toby, Murdoch has made use of the old, by now abandoned, doctrine of Human Nature to a degree seldom employed in her novels (Toby as a type never recurs), and it is

significant that, minor character though he is, Toby is one of the fullest, most accurate realizations of The

Bell. Toby’s being very nearly is Boyhood.

That Toby is meant to be seen as a general repre­ sentative of youth or innocence is underscored by Dora's first perception of him: he is "confident, unmarked, and ■ glowing with health, his riches still in store"

(19); he is "Toby Roundhead" (20), so obviously the very figure of his class that his head is geometrically shaped to expresssit; and when Dora catches his eye, he

"looked quickly away" and began "to blush" (20). Dora even sees Toby as so ideally constructed that he is like a work of art. Coming upon him swimming naked, "a memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature" (77). Michael, too, sees 152

Toby as almost edenic, "a graceful thoughtless animal, without self-knowledge, without sin" (98) . He is a child and remains so, even after Michael's kiss, as is apparent from the nun's excusing his excursion onto the Abbey grounds with the statement,"'Besides, we have a special rule which says that children can sometimes come into the enclosure,1" (181). Once installed at Oxford, indeed, the events at Imber have become for him as much a "story"

(369) as they will become for Dora. Throughout the novel,

Toby's feelings, for all their "extremity" (256), remain comically naive: he is a boy and has a boy's curious but unsophisticated reactions, and since the only persons he momentarily gives pain to are far stronger than he, he escapes from his experiences touched but not seriously damaged. Again and again in describing Toby's percep­ tions, Murdoch succeeds in conveying without adult condescension the amusing and almost invariable incom­ pleteness of Toby's analyses. Toby's conception of Imber is from the outset made up of glittering cliches from sermons about frugal utopias; he knows only the idealized cliches of "some exceedingly close-knit complex of human brotherhood into which he would snugly fit, humble and industrious, edified and strengthened for his life ahead by the company and example of unworldly persons" (47). He 153 has a boy's reaction to everything: when he gets in a boat, he wants "desperately to be allowed to row" (51-52), though Michael's parental permission is not granted; when he sees Nick's bloodshot alcoholic's eyes, he makes the best of all possible interpretations of them, saying they are "red-rimmed and watery, as if from much laugh­ ing" (54). The world is enchanted for him simply be­ cause it exists and he is young, and to enter the lake is to go "through the looking-glass" (146 and 177). The world above the lake throbs with beauty. It is also asexual.

Many novels about innocence often contain long and detailed descriptions of first sexual encounters. It is significant that, as innocent as Toby is sexually,

Murdoch's interests are not in sex just for its own sake, but in sex as an introduction to the complexity which is reality. Toby does not sexually awaken in the novel — he does not even cease to be a virgin. What sex does for Toby is to open up the world to him, show him how very complicated and various it really is. Toby tells us directly that he does not know much about sexu­ ality, but Murdoch suggests this more subtly throughout, especially in Toby's "cuddling the furry beast" Murphy, where "The sensation of the hot soft living fur against his skin was strange and exciting" (146). Toby does not 154

identify the excitement as sexual, however, any more than

he sees his overflowing feelings about the world in general

as having a sexual origin. And when, after Michael's

kiss, he wonders if he is attracted to women, Murdoch

shows how naive are even his first glimmering impulses by the use of comic overstatement.

He pondered for a while rather generally upon the conception of Woman. A shapely yet maternal being arose before him. Shyly he began to unclothe her. And as he contemplated the vision, slyly observing his own reactions, he gradually became aware that this immense incarnation of femininity was taking on the features of Dora Greenfield. (175)

Even his thoughts on the subject are modest: he imagines

"shyly" and "slyly," while Dora is further described as

"well rounded, buxom, you might say" (175). You might say also that the topic of his pondering has not often come to mind. That it has not is important also in

Toby's reaction to Michael. He is disgusted and repelled, curious too, but most importantly on the brink of a discovery of the world, that place where "the complexi­ ties began in earnest" (163). Murdoch's conception of the world as being other people informs the most "humane" of Toby's perceptions: "What was it like," Toby asks himself, "to be Michael?" At this point in his thinking,

Toby, the most naive of the three monologuists, is the nearest to Murdoch's central insistence on knowing the 155

world by knowing others, grapping their beings as different

from our own. No other character in The Bell comes this

close to reality: Michael comes to know Nick's reality

but too late; Dora never is so bothered. Toby, that

"naturally truthful boy" (257), unformed, unsophisti­

cated, edenic in his ignorance, comes closer to the heart

of Iris Murdoch than any other character in The Bell, no

matter how knowing that other may seem. Perhaps it is

only as a child like Toby that one can enter into the

complexity of reality.

That Toby does not completely enter in, however, is

demonstrated at various points in the novel by a variety

of devices, one of the most important of which is the

repetitive use of "rebarbative," that word "which Toby

had recently learnt at school and could not now conceive

of doing without" (48). This repetitive motif, which was never intended to be the "joke" that many have seen

it, represents the boyish delight which Toby takes in

things unusual, outside his London world. The word's meaning is pejorative, but Toby uses the word more often

struck by its exotic sound — he misuses it, that is,

and the word becomes a sign of his ignorance. Toby first misuses the word, after applying it to Paul Greenfield in defining it, to describe his swimming towel, "rebarbative by now with the mud of frequent swims" (141). He next applies the word to the lake and, "a sort of rebarbative 156 bog" (145), and in both these usages, Toby's vague association of "rébarbative" with water and dirt is amus­ ing as a forced grammatical juxtaposition. The third occurrence, however, could not have been intended to be amusing at all, for the word is used to describe Michael's kiss, which "constituted an adventure, though a somewhat rebarbative one" (163), and it occurs just before Toby's pondering over the puzzle of Michael's being, the most serious of Toby's thoughts. The intensive use of the word breaks into the seriousness of the passage, and makes its presence known. It works as a reminder that we are attending to the thoughts of a young boy and that any­ thing that goes into those thoughts must be taken pro­ visionally. If Toby's innocence had passed away, he would know better than to misuse the word in the wrong context.

But he does not, his innocence is intact, and the word remains as a sign of the continuation of the state of his former being into the new world of which he has had a brief glimpse. In Toby's final utterance of the word, in relation to the bell, some of the former amusing quality of the misusage has returned, but there is a new almost tired quality to Toby's thinking: "he wished heartily that he had never discovered the rebarbative thing at all" (258). The tiredness of tone suggests that Toby will soon be able to conceive of doing without the word. 157

In The Bell itself, however, the word is not done without, and it remains a detaching reminder of Toby's boy's mind.

There are many devices which Murdoch employs to force the reader to become detached from the story, but one of the most effective is her use of authorial irony, em­ ployed in The Bell more extensively than anywhere else in her first three books. Jacques Souvage has said that

"with her, as we know, the omniscient narrator's viewpoint is able at any moment to shade off into that of a given character,"9 and it should be added that quite often

Murdoch's narration works the other way around, a move from character to omniscient narrator. She employs strict didacticism in The Bell without trying to disguise it as interior monologue. She warns Michael that "Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed" (76). Stepping completely out of Toby's mind for a moment, she reflects at length on contingency.

Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection. (161)

And in an early didacticism on "youth" as a "marvelous garment" (19), the movement from Dora's interior mono­ logue to Murdoch and back again is one seamless whole.

^English Studies, 1962, 89. 158

Youth is a marvellous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is yet a more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity, when, as in her own case, one ceases to be une jeune fille un peu folle, and becomes merely a woman, worst of all,a wife.

This didacticism might well be a parody didacticism, since Dora herself is in may ways as young as the "youth" she reflects on, Toby. (The passage is also further evidence that Toby is to be taken as a general represen­ tative of youth.) Most of Murdoch's authorial intrusions in The Bell are comic; it is chiefly through the use of authorial irony that the reader is constantly reminded that judgement of the events is possible, necessary, and solicited. A non-conversation between Toby and Nick is given the coda, "It could not have been said to have been a successful conversation" (142), and the "human body II is comically exposed as inferior to the dog's in its inability to lie upon its front when Murdoch comments,

"Our awkward frames deny us the relaxed pose of the re­ cumbent dog" (146). We are introduced early to these intrusive comments, and we come to expect them to occur regularly and to be comic. In later portions of the novel, authorial irony punctuates some of the most impor­ tant scens. Dora in the National Gallery is made to think of "the eternal springtime of the air-donditioned rooms" 159

(191), and Toby, or Murdoch, commenting on the plan to

raise the bell, says, "It was a tall order" (213).

When news-reporter Noel Spens unexpectedly arrives to

cover the bell ceremonies at Imber, Dora’s frantically

comic enlisting of Michael’s aid is juxtaposed with a

cool reflection from Murdoch.

"Someone I used to know has turned up to write about the bell. But when Paul finds out he’s here he'll tear the place up. You must go and tell him not to." This seemed to state the case. (248)

And at the height of the collapse of the actual cere­ monies, fohen the bell has fallen into the lake and dis­

appeared, Murdoch dryly comments, "Those who had come for

a show were getting their money's worth" (277). In the

richly various world of The Bell, even Iris Murdoch is

a participating presence. From most of the characters, however, participation retains for Murdoch an element of

ironic detachment, a delight at or acceptance of the othernesses she creates. When in other works she herself becomes emotionally involved, drops the device of authorial

irony, and starts believing too earnestly in the reality of her own creations, the results are not always as

successful as in The Bell, the best of her work to date. CHAPTER VI

A SEVERED HEAD

Up to The Bell, if Iris Murdoch failed in the creation of characters, she failed because she did not love her persons enough. The Abbess’s belief that "All our fail­ ures are ultimately failures in love" applies to Murdoch as author just as much as to the persons acting in her novels. Since love itself is in Murdoch both a matter of detachment and involvement in that one recognizes the separate existence of others but at the same time accepts that separateness, love can almost be equated with comedy.

Comedy, which is mainly a release of pleasurable emotions but a release from emotional involvement, is essential to love since it aids in letting us see the difference between ourselves and others without letting us take isolating re­ fuge in the distance. We love the other because of his otherness; we see the distance between ourselves and others but accept it. This delicate synthesis makes it necessary for the lover to purge from himself the tendency to judge absolutely. Murdoch has made much of the tolerance of the artist (she calls it "invisibility"), but that tolerant love is not a complete absence of author (this is clear in the 161 creation of Mor), but a balance between involvement and detachment. Mor fails not because he is not realized as the ordinary man he was intended to be (he is that), but because the novel does not emphasize enough Moris separate­ ness as a person. The Sandcastle suggests that Mor is an everyman, and everyman is not a unique complex of particu­ lars but the figurehead for a type. Mor does not seem distinct enough. Significantly too, Mor has no sense of humor and is almost never himself comic — if we could just find something in him to love, he might become a human being, separate, but real. Or, to paraphrase the Abbess, all Mur­ doch's failures are failures in comedy — at least, up to

The Bell.

A Severed Head, as:.A. S. Byatt has shown, marks Mur­ doch's "almost joyful release into the more formal, more conceptual framework of myth,"! and while at the time Byatt wrote, it seemed that Murdoch would thereafter alternate between a myth novel and an attempt at the naturalistic novel of characters (the mythic A Severed Head, followed by the naturalistic An Unofficial Rose, then the myth The

Unicorn), it is now clear that Murdoch's surrender to myth has been total. (Even the historical family chronicle The

’’-Byatt, 146. 162

Red and the Green has its extractable myth.) From A Severed

Head on, though Murdoch would seldom be didactically present

as she was in The Bell, she would care less about muting

her own attitude toward characters: certain characters,

seen by Murdoch as morally wrong, would be represented open­

ly as in the wrong; satire, earlier seen by Murdoch as a

failure in love, would become a viable artistic mode; the

novelistic world itself, seen by Murdoch at one time as a

cluttered analogue of the complexity of personality, would

become severely clean, swept up artistically, tidy; the

number of persons, running up as high as the thirties in

each of the first four novels, would be tightly limited to

a half dozen or so; the very form of the novel itself would become almost always the series of shocking dramatistic

revelations which we have come to see as Murdoch's habitual

sardonic version of the comedy of manners. With A Severed

Head, Murdoch discovered that the scandal novel could be used to heighten the reader's interest in philosophy. With the exception of An Unofficial Rose,' all her novels since

A Severed Head have done just that, used the scandal novel to communicate an ontology. (Of course the possibility of using revelation as a means to showing the complexity of the world is by no means absent even from The Bell, though the revelations of The Bell are not as scandalous as those 163

of A Severed Head — far from it — but that later Murdoch

persons have more of a dual function, both as mythic fig­

ures and as humans, and that the mythic side is allowed a

presence which was usually, except in The Flight from the

Enchanter, only suggested in the first four novels. Neither

is it true that comedy disappears after The Bell (it never

disappears), but it changes. A Severed Head is still one

of Murdoch's two most comic novels, but A Severed Head is

a far different comedy from Under the Net. It is at once more flashingly brilliant and more mature.

A Severed Head is about conventions, or about the ten­

sion between the civilized part of man and the instinctive,

primitive part. Man, the novel suggests, has an almost

desperate need to feel that he is in control of himself which is almost always being controverted by the upheavals of the assertive instinct. Ultimately, those upheavals show us more real bases for moral action than convention.

Civilization in the novel is identified with reason, calm­ ness, social manners; and its religious shaman is the arche­ typal twentieth century tribal shaman, the analyst (Palmer

Anderson). Primitivism is identified with violence, truth, the natural, sexual love; and its black earth goddess, repre­ senting the instincts conventions suppress, is an offspring of the two most oppressed people of the twentieth century, 164 the German Jews, and the Scots — she (Honor Klein) is, like her brother, both primitive and civilized, as her vo­ cation as a professional anthropologist also shows. (A

Severed Head is not a novel in praise of unbridled instinct.)

Civilization and primitivism are actually offsprings them­ selves of the same source (their Scottish mother), and are attracted to one another — indeed bound together in a mutual love. And just as civilization is sexually attract­ ive because of vhis .clean good looks, his half-sister is sexually attractive because of her coarseguglihess, her oily black hair, her "tawny" breasts. Much is made of their nationalities: civilized Palmer is "Danish-American" like the furniture, his chief colors are grey and "cream" (132), both signs of weakness, and as an American, Palmer makes a religion of the self; primitive Honor is Jewish, her chief color other than black is the sallow of her skin, and as a

Jew she makes her own religion of familial and interpersonal relationships. Mutual attraction is very strong in both

(in Honor it accounts for some of her actions in a way her mythic function can only partially explain), but nonetheless both are attracted to others, Palmer to the artificial so­ ciety beauty Antonia, and Honor to Martin, the man who has learned the truth about her, has torn aside the veil and seen her in the instinctual act of loving her brother. Both 165

figureheads are worshipped for the ideas they stand for,

and in Martin's case, a ripeness for moral growth of Mur­

doch's sort is demonstrated by one man's attraction, basic­

ally sexual, to both primitive and civilized figureheads.

Ambiguities otherwise abound in the relationships between

these brother-sister symbols, but it is important to note

that male-female characteristics are present in both —

Palmer's effete silk dressing gown with his disturbingly

naked male presence underneath; Honor's heavy mannish

stockings and the suggestion of woman's leg above. Of the

two figureheads, only Palmer is new in Murdoch. Honor,

like Geòrgie Hands, earlier appeared as a part of Rosa

Keepe, just as other characters in A Severed Head reappear

from former incarnations -- Rainborough becoming Martin;

Marcia losing her chic as Antonia; the artist figure, possib

ly Bledyard, appearing as Alexander; conventional Rain put­

ting down her brushes to appear as conventional Rosemary.

Yet, no matter how provisionally successful the ancestors were, each of the characters in A Severed Head is perfectly

focused, and this is largely a result of Murdoch's choice of first-person narration and the person chosen to fill that role, Martin Lynch-Gibbon.

Martin illustrates as well as Palmer or Honor one of the best things about A Severed Head, the way in which 166

characters both function within a mythic framework and at

the same time exist in their own right. Of course we see

this richness too in the ambiguity of Honor’s motives for

telling Palmer and Antonia about Georgie and in her intro­

duction of Alexander to Georgie: such violence is "neces­

sary" '(81) , Honor tells Martin; but how much of that neces

sity is psychologically absolute, something that the being

demands, mythic; and how much is simply Honor's own ego­

istic rationalizationffor freeing Palmer from Antonia so

he will return to Honor? Actually, we are not meant to make a choice of one or the other — Honor is motivated by the two as a single motive, and she is both symbol and human being at the same time. Martin himself, as a sym­ bol, represents two psychological categories which are usually thought to be diametrically opposed. Martin is

intimately acquainted with what is called worldly know­

ledge; he is a hedonist of sorts, an agnostic, the possess or of a mistress, a connoisseur of wine. But Martin is also innocent, as we are several times told; seemingly, he knows his world of Hereford Square and controls it; actually, he knows nothing at all about any of the persons closest to him (with the possible exception of Rosemary), not Antonia nor Georgie nor Alexander certainly, and he is at first blind to almost everything going on about him.

(Martin does know, in his office, Mytten and the Lesbian 167

secretaries rather better than other people, but it is

characteristic of Murdoch men to be successful in their

businesses and in quite a mess in their private lives.

That duality was the case with Mor and becomes true later of Effingham Cooper.) Martin's worldly innocence is, how­ ever, important as a key to his mythic import. What passes in the world for worldly knowledge is itself, A Severed

Head suggests, mere convention, not full reality. The possessor of worldly knowledge of Martin's sort is him­ self a slave to codified modes of behavior which are only seemingly outside society, and it is here significant that

Martin's life with Georgie is just as routine and ordered as his life with Antonia. Martin is attracted to Georgie because she is Antonia's opposite, but she is not really free, nor self-assertive, nor dynamic; Georgie is just another alternative, another set within convention. Such things as free love, worldly knowledge, the man of the world, and so on, are all misnamed, Murdoch suggests.

Mere flouting of conventions will not absolutely make a love "free" nor make one "know the world" unless flouting of conventions leads to a true knowledge of persons within a situation whose essence is its particularity. Martin does not know the particulars- of his situation, and though the conventional world would call him knowledgeable, he is 168 nearly edenic in his innocence — looking back as he be­ gins to write his story, Martin speaks of his first state as."the old innocent world" (16) and, later, of himself and Georgie as "two children in a wood" (239)’. A Severed

Head is the rites of passage of Martin's particular inno­ cence .

Like the other major figures of A Severed Head, though,

Martin has a human side to keep his mythic significance from turning the novel into an allegory. Martin is made to undergo a whole series of revelations about his private life, the final, most unbearable of which is Antonia's revelation of her long-standing affair with Martin's broth­ er; but just when it appears that Martin has at last seen the reality of his life, just when it seems he has stopped creating for himself a world of fantasy, we find him writ­ ing a letter to Georgie Hands, "with the hope of more" (239) than just a re-meeting after all the psychological carnage is over.

I write this almost without hope of salvage, and yet I have to write) for I feel as if we had been actors in a play, and there must be some exchange between us for the drama to be complete. This seems a cold way to greet you, but I must be honest and confess to you how stunned and how half alive I at this moment fefel. I must see you, do you understand, even if it is only to find out certain things uncertainty about which torments me; and yet with the hope, when we look on each other again in the solitude which this carnage has cre­ ated, of more than that. Will you at least try, 169

my Georgie, my old friend? If I don't hear any­ thing from you to the contrary I will ring you up next week. We did really love each other, Georgie, didn't we? Didii't we? In the name of that reality —

Martin even speaks here of the "reality" of his and Georgie's

love although we had earlier seen him realize that their

love had not been real. This letter, usually ignored in most analyses of the novel which emphasize the growth of Martin's knowledge,2 is very important; for despite the tired quality of its "cold" tone, a tone which we note

Martin is well aware of, and despite even the repetitive protesting too much of the final "Didn't we? Didn't we?" the letter is still there, in existence, and must be some­ how explained. Also, the writing of the letter occurs in

Chapter Twenty-nine, not more than a few hours before the final, possibly real, encounter with Honor. How complete is Martin's knowledge if, in a sort of eleventh hour dil­ emma, he turns back, no matter how coldly, to a former situ­ ation? Again, however, as with Honor's motives, no pat ans­ wer is possible. It is very human to try to cover all

2A1so ignored, incidentally, is the ambiguity of Honor' final state. To show how Martin has changed, his statement that Honor's "demon splendour" had been "quenched" (245) leav ing only the real woman behind often appears in conspicuous positions in Martin's-growth analyses. Little attention, if any, is given to Martin's later awareness, equally sincere, that Honor's "demon" was "awake again" (250). From this oversight, not even so careful a reader as Byatt escapes. 170

possibilities of a situation, and that practicality seems

to be all that need be read into Martin's writing of the

letter. As Honor tells Martin at the end, he must "take

his chances" (252) with her, and the presence of the last

letter to Georgie makes it impossible for us to say that

Martin's education has completely taken and that, of course,

he will definitely be fulfilled somehow in his relationship

to Honor. We just do not know for sure how much his experi­

ences have altered his awareness — he has changed, but there

it is, that last unregenerate letter.

We see this same ambiguity between the function of the

human and the larger mythic in other events of the novel,

especially in the scene in Palmer's cellar when Martin fights with Honor. Metaphysically, Martin's tussling with Honor

is supposed to be the unleashing of the violent powers which,

from the very beginning, Honor sees in Martin. But the un­

leashing is aided by the fact that Martin is drunk, and it is puzzling when we try to see the fight with Honor as yet another step in Martin's growth to find him admitting an almost complete lack of will or self-assertion in the act.

He says, "The only thing I regretted, paradoxically, was that I had not been sober, although of course if I had been sober the scene would not have occurred" (151). Again, how much weight are we to give to such a purely artificial cause? 171

Martin suggests the liquor had, temporarily, freed the im­

pulses within him, but when he comes to write the three

letters to Honor to explain the nature of his act, its truth,

he eventually sends one of the least truthful of the three —

he has not yet been brought to true relations with others,

unleased violence or not. This event and many others in

A Severed Head make it impossible to speak with complete assurance of the extent of Martin's growth. Again, as with

Jake, there is a promise of real involvement at the end of the nove; unlike Jake, Martin has a human to become in­ volved with, but whether or not he is in fact actually psychologically capable of such reality is left in mys­ terious doubt. (Palmer, incidentally, writes his own dual­ ly significant letter to Martin after the final breakup with

Antonia; and as with Martin's and Honor's actions, the question of his motive is unresolvable. Palmer's letter is infuriating in its mouthing of analystis formulas, but one statement is significant, for more reasons than the fact that it is one of Palmer's infrequent attempts at imagery; "Let the dignity of silence cover like the sea an enterprise which partook of madness to an extent to which I think even you never realised" (238). What motivates this letter, now that keeping the knowledge of Palmer's incest with Honor from Antonia no longer matters? Palmer 172

says the letter is "a final and authoritative farewell,"

but he sounds as if he is trying to persuade himself as

well as Martin. The letter even suggests an attachment on

Palmer's part to Martin a little like Martin's own to Pal­

mer, and that attachment may even be a subconscious motive

of Palmer's. That there is no one way to read Palmer's

or any of the letters in A Severed Head keeps them all

multiply significant.) Committing words to paper is,

in A Severed Head, almost as chancey as human relationships

The Comparison with Jake is important for several

reasons, one of which is that it shows rather clearly

how Murdoch works as an artist. It is her invariable practice to use first person narration in those novels where she portrays the chance for real involvement. It might seem that firsttperson narration is used to heighten the truth of what is related, but in fact first person is not as reliable as third person because Jake, Martin, and Edmund are all aware that they speak to an audience.

Third person interior monologue, on the other hand, is the thought process presented without the monologuist knowing that he has an audience, and the monologuist does not play to that audience as Jake or Martin does. In

Murdoch's first person narratives, there is often a problem of time. The events of the novel, we are often told, are being recalled, but it is hard to decide whether or not a given image or feeling or piece of dialogue occurred itself in the past with the events; 173 whether such utterances are present tense recollections of the past and hence are colored, untrue; or whether they are just analogizing for literary effect. These problems in placing the time of a given statement fre­ quently crop up in Jake's thoughts, but Murdoch had by no means completely cleared the matter up by Martin's time. For the most part, Martin tries to recreate his past feelings exactly, but it somewhat odd to find Martin perceiving Honor's god-like powers before she actually displays them, though calling her "black and untouchable"

(81) is a good deal more subtly subconscious as a descrip­ tion than Martin's later epithets. Many of Martin's stylistic devices are honest recurrences of earlier

Murdoch devices — Martin is an excellent verbal crafs- man, unlike Jake and his hit-or-miss spontaneity. Martin, like Jake, has his romantic tendencies and at least something of a rather dry sense of humor, though neither tendency is as flamboyantly cast about as in Under the Net

Martin is hypersensitive to other people, at least physically, and this can be seen in a couple of instances, usually scenes with Honor. When Honor demonstrates the severing of the napkin with the samurai sword, Martin touches the blade as the sword rests in Honor's lap, and it feels "as if it were charged with electricity" (122). 174

Later, when Honor and Martin find Georgie unconscious

from the overdose of sleeping pills, another strangely more-than-physical communication passes between the

two, this time through Georgie's inert thigh. The se­ cond "electrical circuit" (216), which Martin connects with the first consciously, occurs just before the final breakup with Georgie and serves thus both a narrative and a mythic function: the "electricity" Martin feels in both cases is the literal shock of his recognition of

Honor's moral disapprobation, and in both cases the sensory perception of extrasensory moral data leads

Martin to draw back and judge himself. There is a some­ what comic variation of this tendency in Martin's per­ ceptions of the changing shades of Antonia's hair from gold to grey (when whe returns to him) and back to gold

(cf. 191 and 230). Such changing of hair color follows closely changes in Martin's own attitude toward Antonia and is hence a nicely-controlled symbolic rendering of

Jake's habit of psychic projection. The whole tone of

Martin's style is far more controlled than Jake's --

Martin is more mature, not just in years but also in self-knowledge. Martin uses imagery lavishly, but his images are often dry, intellectualized; most of the epi­ thets about Honor as a "remote and self-absorbed deity"

(116), a "Spanish religious painting" (137), or even the 175

wonderful image of her in bed as a "ship's figurehead"

(159), are not emotional, either in effect or meaning,

and are emblematic as intellectual signs. Not all of

Martin's images are unemotional, and his late statement,

"I felt like an empty vessel that is struck again and

again" (234) , is as effectively kinetic as the best of

Jake's. Nonetheless, Martin is not a would-be poet, and most of his images tend to be unemotional — in one attempt at a more poetic image, indeed, Martin even has a "fountain" spewing "tar" (102), a surrealistic image, perhaps, but a forced one even so.

Other revealing contrasts between Jake and Martin include their tendencies to romanticize places. But while Jake's romanticizing of Paris had in it at least a partial suggestion of parody, Martin's perception of

Rembers, his family home, is so consciously obvious a process of imagination that it seems utterly sincere.

Rembers, Martin muses, "is in my thought of it perpe­ tually clouded over with a romantic, almost a medieval, haze. It ought most probably to be surrounded by a thick forest of twining roses, like the castle of the sleeping beauty" (40). Again, as with Martin's intel­ lectual images, the process of romanticizing is here changed from the emotional to the signific in effect 176

because of the consciousness Martin has of the act of

analogizing as an act. Martin describes the way Rembers

"ought to be." He knows full well what it is. The same

non-literary approach to nature is seen in Martin's perception of London, Martin's "dear city" (148) as it was Jake's. Significantly, Martin perceives London while walking on the Victoria Embankment, the same location of Jake's earlier discovery of Mars's warm vitality—

Martin himself discovers there his love for Honor Klein

(152-153), though she is not quite so handy at the moment of his discovery as Mars's furry belly. Martin recalls,

London was misty, with a golden sun-pierced mist in which buildings hung as insubstantial soaring presences. The beautiful dear city, muted and softened, half concealed in floating and slightly shifting clouds, seemed a city in the air, out­ lined in blurred dashes of grey and brown. I walked, inevitably, to the river. As I turned onto Victoria Embankment I saw that the tide was in, and upon the surface of the fast-flowing water itself there played a warm light, turning its muddy hue to an old gilt, as if some pure part of the sunlight had escaped to play here under the great vault of the mist. (148)

The beauty of this passage, at once quieter and graver in tone than anything in Under the Net, results partially from the naturalness of the language, the almost Words­ worthian use of the simplest sibilants and onomatopoeia, and partially from the sincerity of the emotion. One feels, at times, that Jake's dissatisfaction with London is due to his own inability to make literary products 177

out of it — there is nothing wrong with London, only with the Londoner. But even in one of Martin's most complicated dilemmas, in the rumination preceding the discovery of his love for . Honor, he — not bothered by the need to be literary for a profession — perceives the beauty of the scene around him without falsifying it.

Indeed, the whole scene of Martin's rumination underplays effectively, as Mor in The Sandcastle had not success­ fully underplayed a similar situation, the discovery of

Martin's love. At the end of the chapter, we are obliquely told that "it began to dawn on" Martin "what the nature of his ailment was" (53), and while we easily see what the ailment might be, we are not really exactly certain.

When Martin states it directly, the love is placed in a qualifying clause, as if the idea had already been known and were no matter of doubt: "When the idea had come to me that I was desperately, irrevocably, agoniz­ ingly in love with Honor Klein it had seemed at first to shed a great light" (154). The compliment to the reader's intelligence in Martin's taking it for granted that his love of Honor is an established fact works to keep the reader emotionally calm-. It is actually a preposterous thing this man is proposing, a love for that oily-skinned ugly woman who has betrayed him twice and 178

with whom he has recently wrestled, almost man to man;

but Martin's calm, his acceptance of the love as a fact,

convinces us that it is a fact — if he had not been -

so controlled, so civilized, throughout, we might think

his underplaying was a trick (a sign that his love for;

Honor was false).

The relative plainness of imagery, the emblematic

quality, is important in showing Martin's potential for

moral growth. When things have definite meanings and

one grasps those meanings clearly (even if after a

certain time has elapsed), then one will not remain in

the state of romantic abjection for long. Martin has

romantic tendencies, but he does not fall for them, as

is clear in the perception of Rembers. Most of Martin's

images are mythological or natural, and none of them is

metaphysical. Actually, Martin's imagination is drawn

to things as things, and this habitual mode of thought

is shown best in Martin's fixation on Honor's "tawny

breasts" (159). After his first glimpse of them, Martin

recalls the image to mind no less that four times (cf.

163, 171, 176 and 222). In all cases the image of the

"dark" breasts, "dark" like Honor's gods (81), is asso­

ciated with a "fact" (cf. 222) which Martin must absorb

in order to accept Honor. The fact of incest is what he must overcome, and the breasts become both a source of 179

sexual excitation to Martin and a source of fear — they

represent the Medusa dilemma (cf. 169-170 and 192) which

is at the heart of Martin's problem and which is symbolized

several times in the novel by the severed head imagery,

much of it associated with Honor. Martin is a would-be

historian, and his imagination works best on facts. As

is the case with so many aspects of A Severed Head, the

facts are both themselves and symbolic at the same time.

Through Martin, Murdoch suggests that only those with a

natural grasp for facts can be freed to know reality.

All the rest are enslaved — naturally.

Another important contrast between Martin and Jake

must not, however, be overlooked. Martin, unlike Jake,

does not just pretend to reason; he is a rational being,

an essence resulting not only from the difference between

Jake's and Martin's social stations and ages, but also

from the fact that Martin's reasoning is tied to given

situations and to given persons (yet another indication

of his potential for moral growth of Murdoch's sort).

Martin uses the same formality of diction as Jake for

comic overstatement, but our laughter at Martin's pom­

posity is thoughtful, rooted in a meaning that the

overstatement itself seeks to illuminate in the event described. Much of Martin's overstated diction concerns

Antonia and always shows his distance from her, his 180

awareness that she is playing a role. We see this in

Martin's statement, "She came and fell on her knees in

front of me, clasping my legs, and the great crystalline

tears she used began to pout again? (181), which occurs

after Martin has struck Palmer and thereby gained Antonia's

momentary abject love (Antonia's going on her knees is

a less abject parallel to Martin's own later prostration

before Honor). Earlier, when Georgie meets Antonia, the

overstated diction results from Martin's own sarcastic

use of Palmer's jargon. At the end of the disastrous

interview, with Antonia having broken down weeping, Martin

says, "I led Georgie out, leaving Palmer to use whatever were not-/ the most up-to-date psychological methods for dealing with hysterical women"(112). Such instances of

Martin using comedy for detachment are rare, at least rarer than in Under the Net, but they always serve to punctuate the meaning of the novel. That Martin's sense of humor is given free rein only in a very few instances reflects the general seriousness of Murdoch's intentions.

At one point, it might be noted, Martin's reasonable demeanor is even shown crumbling: having brought Georgie to Hereford Square, Martin panics when he hears a key in the lock and orders Georgie out — in the following civilized manner, "'Go at once, damn you'" (91). The treatment of Georgie puts Martin in a bad light 181

(obviously, the man is a cad) until Murdoch causes

Georgie to turn around and somehow not have the necessary

taxi fare. "'I haven't any money'" (91), Georgie says,

and now the tables are rather trickily turned — Georgie

is a sniveller. If Martin has a bad moment when not

just his tendency to fantasize Honor is in question but also the very virtues of his being, it is in this scene.

(The question of Murdoch's making Georgie lack the necessary cash and thus, but being a whiner herself,

save Martin from appearing utterly despicable is another matter altogether.) Indeed, the facts about Martin revealed in this scene cause, us to wonder about many of his qualities, one of which is that famous sense of humor everyone tells him he possesses. A Severed Head is a comic novel, but none of the characters is himself comic.

The only really witty statement in the novel is uttered by — of all people — Honor Klein when at long last she tells Martin what he should have been told long since: when Martin pleads with Honor to accept him, Honor says,

"'whatever would you do with me if you had me?'" (226), an idea with which we can readily agree. There is wit in the dialogue, but it is double-edged. "'Wonderful stuff, flesh’” (16), Martin tells Georgie — a comic statement perhaps, but also a little crude, repulsive. 182

A Severed Head is, on a high level, a situation comedy.

It is a series of shocking revelations rendered comic by the civil demeanor of the actors. It is a novel of much violence and strict economy of means, and it is a comedy used to communicate an earnestly serious onto­ logy. A Severed Head illustrates Murdoch's habitual use of comedy in her later novels: the characters of the novel are all, including the narrator, uninvolving; and comedy is used in nearly all cases to effect that detachment, to make intellectual analysis necessary.

By placing the comedy in the situations rather than in the persons, however, Iris Murdoch drew judgement to human actions, rather than human essences, and — at the same time — allowed the persons she portrayed a scope within which to grow and dynamically change.

All of the comic actions serve to underscore the basic theme that it is extremely absurd to try to act reasonably or civilized when events call for moral indignation, violence. The events of the novel thus fall into two categories, serious confrontations and absurd passing fancies. All of the serious episodes involve Honor Klein, and it is important to note that no scene in which she takes part is allowed to be funny — even in the scuffle in the cellar, it is clear that some­ thing meaningfully significant is going on, not just 183

something slapstick. (We might note too that the scuffle

is dryly unemotional, like many of the serious scenes

in the novel.) It is interesting too how close to being

utterly preposterous Honor as a character is allowed to

go: seldom has a woman in fiction who is as heterosexually

attractive as Honor been made to act so very much like

a Lesbian, aggressive male variety. Yet Murdoch in no

way attempts to mute or balance out the mannish qualities

of Honor, and Martin's admiration for Honor does not

seem particularly misplaced -- or some strangely perverse

form of bisexuality. Byatt noted this "preposterous

quality" in the love affair (and in a footnoted contra-

diction of her text), but she seems to feel that the

grotesqueness was "intended to be funny." As evidence,

Byatt refers specifically to the scene with the samurai

sword, which we can rather easily grant to be anything

but funny, adding that "the mood is hard to place."

Actually, if the testimony of reviewers is to be trusted,

the mood is easy to place: the samurai sword rite

scene is, to quote Byatt herself, a "set-piece," and

as a set-piece, it is chillingly hypnotic. One sentence

should suffice to show this: "For a moment or two she

lifted the sword, moving it as if it had become very heavy, and cooled her forehead on the blade, turning her head slowly against it with a caressing motion" (121).

3 Byatt, 119. 184

Honor is made so utterly different, so nearly prepos­

terous, to heighten our sense of her as other. But her

exotic propensities, her oriental ideas and primitivistic knowledge, are not really preposterous in a way that would cause comedy. Honor is preposterous in the way religious heroes are preposterous — she is a woman of multiple oddities (occidentally odd, that is), and a woman utterly without affectation. Another reason why

Honor is not comic relates to one of her other most important qualities, the ready violence which exists in her near enough to the surface to be sensed by almost everyone. Rosa, we remember, had been violent herself, but she did not know, except intuitively, how to use violence. Honor Klein knows full well the value of violence — she might have had an affair with the likes of the Lusiewicz brothers, but if they had failed in their responsibility to her, she would have known how to deal with them and would not have hesitated to so deal.

Honor is violent, but it is interesting to note that we often see her standing motionless, even without speaking.

In contrast, Rosa, who was always becoming undone, both on the outside of her head (that long hair) and inside, seems almost frenetic; and of course the difference in composure suggests a difference in being — Rosa had not known herself and for all her frankness, was usually in 185

an emotional muddle; Honor knows herself thoroughly, and

her outer calm is not a sign of a dispassionate being underneath but of the self-possession which comes with

self-knowledge. Martin is well aware of Honor's immense self-possession (it may be a motive for his love), and relates his awareness to us when Honor first sees her brother-lover with his new mistress, the replacement for

Honor herself. And while the taboo of Honor's and

Palmer's incest might be sufficient reason for Honor's not making a scene, yet Martin sees something more than face-saving in the way Honor first goes up to Palmer and

Antonia: "she appeared to me for a second like some insolent and powerful captain, returning booted and spurred from a field of triumph, the dust of battle yet upon him, confronting the sovereign powers which he was now ready if need be to bend to his will" (72) . The suggestions here of a masculine demigod returning to assert his rights are strongly reminiscent of a Ulyssean homecoming, but in A Severed Head the scene is oddly anticlimactic. It ends only with the act of Honor's return; unlike so many other scenes in the novel, there is no shock or revelation, and the final glimpse shows the four characters, Palmer, Antonia, Martin, and Honor, assuming positions in a cosily warm familial tableau. 186

The scene is thus distinguished by what does not happen

rather than by what happend. It strongly suggests that

Honor Klein, of all the persons in the novel, is in

complete control of herself. If one is a standard of

truth and the soul of naturalness at the same time, one

can say generally funny things, as Honor does, but one will never be comic.

None of the other characters are humanely comic,

and this holds true even of two characters who often

say things that cause us to smile, Antonia and Palmer.

In Antonia's case, her failure to be comic results from

the tendency of her remarks to be reflexively critical.

Antonia is a more realistic version of Marcia Cockeyne

(Antonia's buying three hats at one point is a wonder­ fully human symbol for the restoration of her love for

Alexander); but Marcia, for all her monochromatic exaggera tion as a character, was at times hilariously funny.

In the scene when Marcia makes Rainborough confess, Marcia at one point, the very embodiment of a worldly knowledge so omniscient as to be incredible, decides to save

Rainborough from Miss Casement by flying him out of the country. "'We will book you a ticket by telephone,'"

Marcia says; then she reflects, "'For what do you keep a telephone?'" (279). We are not really meant to list all the practical uses to which that handy modern device 187

could more purposefully be put than to book airplane

tickets, but the point of the joke, and its relation to

Antonia, is that it is a piece of completely peripheral

nonsense. The comedy occurs without any damage to

Marcia's character; she says that nonsensical, even stupid,

thing, but we do not think the less of her for it.

Antonia, in contrast, does not so slickly escape, and

at the very moment when Antonia tries to treat things

most lightly, in the late scene when she tells Martin

about her affair with Alexander, her failing is given a

name. Martin reacts violently to the news, in a way Z^ntonia

is surprised by, and when he asks her how she thought he

could have been able to "tolerate" (231) an affair between

his wife and brother, Antonia inanely replies, "'Well, you

tolerated Anderson so well .... That was one thing that

made me feel you must have known, you must have understood

about Alexander.'" The reference to Palmer is so blithe

a moral blindness to the parallel that it makes us wince

rather than laugh. Martin, rather bluntly, tells Antonia,

"'You are stupid,'" and that seems something of an under­

statement. Throughout the novel, Antonia has remained blind

to reality — she fails to see Martin's dissatisfaction with

Alexander until Martin tells her point blank, but she had

even failed to see his earlier dissatisfaction with Palmer - 188

in both cases, she coats over the reality with the womanly

compliment that she knows Martin would understand. In

many ways, Antonia comes out knowing nothing. (One wonders

if Marcia would have seemed so vapid if she, like Antonia,

had been vitally bound up in the action of her novel. Her

saving of Rainborough, at least, is only an expedient and

not a very lasting one at that — he will, after all, have

to come back.)

Palmer Anderson is a much more significant figure in

the progress of Iris Murdoch's changing uses of comedy.

Palmer is the first figure, along with Martin, to be openly

satirized. Murdoch had earlier used satire — once to show

a failing in Nick Pawley, once to laugh at Bledyard, and

once, in the form of irony, to make Rainborough comic. But

with Palmer we have the sense of a thoroughgoing authorial

disapproval as we have found it in no instance before A

Severed Head (Martin is of course not in any way so complete­

ly rejected). Palmer is always explaining the truth to oth­

ers, and he never appears to be in the right. Many of his

statements come from that exasperating mixture of secular­

ized religion and science which we have come to know as the

stereotype of psychoanalysis. Words and phrases like "gener­ osity," "bestowing gifts," "blessings," and much (cf. 100), words that at one time were theological in denotation and are now subsumed into a purely secular science, stud Palmer's 189

speech like old cobbles caught in new tar. Palmer's phrases

rub off on others, especially the always pliant Antonia,

and we are not amused to learn (in the third chapter) that

Antonia's second-chapter analysis of her relationship with

Martin (a mother-son arrangement) was mouthed, word for word,

from Palmer (cf. 33, 34, and then 37). What is really de­

plored in Palmer, however, is his pretense to knowledge.

It has seldom been noted, but Palmer is just as much running

about from person to person, trying to find some undefined

fulfillment, as Martin or Antonia or anyone in A Severed

Head. He seems cool and detached and self-possessed, but

these qualities only seem to be failings in him. He is un­

touched by the moral significance of his love affair with

Honor and seems only worried that he may lose Antonia if

she finds out. His mind is full of dead language, and we can but wonder what drew the clear-minded Honor to him in the first place — maybe she was drawn more to Palmer as an idea of incest, rather than to Palmer as a person. All of Palmer's statements are, beyond being just exasperating, satirically reflexive. One of the first things we see him do is to perform linguistically what the psychologists call a reinforcement, and the act is as much a display of weak lack of assurance as the sort of act we more traditionally know as protesting too much. "'We are civilized people,'" 190

Palmer tells Martin, and then — repeating the words like a chant or spell — he adds, "'We must try to be lucid and very honest. We are civilized and intelligent people'"

(35). From that moment on, all of Palmer's statements are provisional, colored by this doubt of that first, debili­ tating repetition. And in Palmer's most grave moment, when he talks to Martin after Martin sees him with Honor, when he is "stripped" (162) as he had never been before, he still manages to confuse the issue enough, after much character­ istic talk about the necessity of "clarity" and "understand­ ing one another" (163) , to persuade Martin that Antonia should not be told. At one point, Palmer even invokes the question of Martin as an "adulterer" (164-1652 in order to make Martin forget the taboo horror he feels against Palmer's incest. Palmer reminds Martin of a lesser evil and thus keeps his mind off the greater (Martin's self-centeredness helps). The one thing that Palmer is unable to do is to think of his own moral responsibilities. He is always tell­ ing others about theirs, but he never suffers a single moment of moral self-reflection. Even when Palmer speaks the truth to Martin, when he tells him his marriage is over (it is) and that he is an adulterer (he is that too), we still sense a dissatisfaction with the man on the part of Palmer's imagery, as when he speaks of Antonia's psyche as "shipwrecked" (163); 191

and sometimes, Murdoch's judgement comes through by her making Palmer stick to his role as analyst until he seems

like an automaton. The latter can be seen in the last

interview between Martin and Palmer? Palmer advises Martin,

"'You should take this opportunity to part'" from Antonia, and then adds too quickly, "'I speak quite disinterestedly, of course'" (205). At that moment, with Honor returned to

Palmer, the analyst does speak disinterestedly; and the dis­ satisfaction we feel results from our awareness that Palmer in fact should not be "disinterested." He vowed loving

Antonia only, and thus he is merely shirking involvement or moral responsibility by not being interested in the breakup of Martin's marriage. Murdoch does not give Palmer

Anderson one single positive quality, and it is because of the totality of the negative portrait, because Palmer can­ not open his mouth without condemning himself ever that we come to feel that here, for the first time in her work, Iris

Murdoch has felt free to judge. It is paradoxical, though, that this first satire should appear in a first person narra tive, but Palmer Anderson is a classic case of the criminal who unwittingly shovels out his own grave.

Real comedy in A Severed Head is to be found in situ­ ations, not in personalities, and there is certainly much of it in the novel, brilliantly funny comedy. (So funny 192 is the comedy that the novel can be and often is read as literate pornography.) But it is comedy which can and should be interpreted. Ultimately, the comic actions of A Severed

Head are rich analogues of the themes of the novel; philoso­ phy is not played with in the novel, as it had been in Under the Met; the play itself becomes a part of the philosophy, and just as it is used to cause us to judge what, we are wit­ nessing in the action, so also does comedy itself become judged by the author and the reader. The use of comedy can be illustrated in numerous instances, but perhaps only one or two need be analyzed to show the general pattern. Enough has been written by others about the famous scenes of the novel, especially the scene of Martin serving wine to his wife and her lover while the couple are in bed, and enough has been said about the details of these imaginatively brilli­ ant big scenes to underscore their merging of abstract idea and comic action — to see this, one need only remember cer­ tain reviewers carrying on at length about the Freudian sig­ nificances (multiple, supposedly, but somehow all Oedipal) of

Martin's staining Palmer’s carpet. What needs to be pointed out relates to Murdoch's tendency in The Flight from the En­ chanter and The Sandcastle to make a distinction between the comic and the real, a distinction which it is quite evident is artificial and false. It may seem that Murdoch's empha­ sizing comic actions over comic personalities in A Severed 193

Head is but a further step in the direction of a complete

severing of the comic from the real — comedy would then be mereiliterary dressing, an effect of the real that can

and should be stripped away. To answer the question, we might turn to the scene of Martin's second act of violence, the ’’fight" (179) with Palmer. First of all, the scene uses juxtaposition of the sort earlier used when Jake was eaves­ dropping on Sammy and Sadie and being taken for an escaped madman by the neighbors •— at the same time. In A Severed

Head, Martin and Antonia are watching the movers bringing the furniture to Lowndes Square in one of those incessant movings about of household effects which are among the peripheral comic events of the novel; and while they are doing so, Palmer arrives. The movers are easily forgotten in the one-blow struggle between husband and lover, and when they turn up for payment, Martin comically asks the man he has just beaten (once) for the necessary cash. The thematic significance of moral irresponsibility is here clear, as in Georgie's earlier request for money ifctwas not, and there is even a distinct suggestion of Palmer paying Martin for the violence which has Freudian overtones. (The pres­ ence of the movers is of course worked into the symbolic fabric of the whole novel, and they are quite naturally present in this scene. Throughout, the movers symbolize 194

the radical changes going on in the inner lives of the char­

acters.) A second quality must also be noted in this scene,

however, before the question of the divisibility of the comic

from the real can be answered, and that is the deadness of

language. We remember the act of the money exchange as comic, but when we re-read the passage that describes it, we are

struck by its workhorse plainness — can this, we say, be what brought on the laughter?

Antonia said from outside, "The men are going. Could you pass me some money? I haven't enough." I found a few shillings in the pocket of my jacket, and said to Palmer, "Could you lend me five bob, by any chance?" He put the whisky down and, handkerchief still to eye, fished inside his coat. He gave me the silver and I passed it all through the door to Antonia. I could hear the men departing. I wanted Palmer out of the house. (180)

There is no wit here, no parody, no verbal play, no really dramatistic indication that here we are in the presence of comedy; there is only the colloquial expression "fishing for': and a triple repetition of simple sentence structure at the end, each sentence beginning with "I," with the pattern never being once varied. What do we laugh at, then; and where can we locate the cause of the comedy? We seem to laugh at the idea as represented in the action, an idea which the persons taking part in the scene with such dull seriousness never let enter their heads. We are in the pres­ ence of authentic intellectual comedy. 195

That is to say that in A Severed Head, Murdoch succeeds

in keeping the comic a natural part of the real by making

comedy an intellectual reaction within the audience. Comedy

being an audience reaction, the highest degree which that

reaction can achieve is to cause intellectual reflection.

Hilarious as slapstick is, it cannot be as tenacious psycho­

logically as intellectual comedy because it has no capacity

for causing self-reflection in the audience or — ultimately

and most importantly — self-recognition. A Severed Head

is not usually thought to be Iris Murdoch's most successful

novel, at least by professional critics, but it is undeni­

ably Murdoch's most popular. One explanation of this popu­

larity might well be Murdoch's success in locating comedy within situations which require audience reaction, and that we the audience become involved ourselves, not with charac­ ters, but as a judge of the actions. Martin's role in this effect is important, too, for he was perfectly chosen for the task — ultimately, he becomes clear-sighted enough to be trusted. But, as we know, it takes two people to make a story, the storyteller and the listener. The storyteller must be a person of some intelligence and not a little act­ ing ability. He must also respect the intelligence of his audience and attend as well to that audience's desire to be amused — storytelling, that is, sounds a great deal like what Murdoch calls love. CHAPTER VII

THE LATER NOVELS

CONCLUSION

For the novels of Iris Murdoch which have followed

A Severed Head, the creation of Palmer Anderson was a por­ tent of things to come. Murdoch's quite evident authorial hatred of Palmer is only rpeated again and again in the creation of later characters — with one difference. Palmer was a minor character, and he never got in the way of the ultimate sense we achieve of Martin Lynch-Gibbon as a rich and various human being. In the later novels, there is hardly a character who escapes Murdoch's acid dislike (Mil­ dred Meecham and Alice LeJour do, but only partially), and all of these hated personalities are major characters, cen­ ters of the action. As with Palmer, however, Murdoch has been very seldom didactically present as judge of these later characters. Instead, each (again like Palmer) is allowed to dig his own grave, and each is presented in one sense and one only — he is a thoroughly negative person, spine­ less, obtuse, weak-willed, even vegetative. Few later per­ sons have much to engage our sympathy and admiration; almost none has anything that might be called a human strength. 197

None has a positive side. Even character types who recur

in the novels from An Unofficial Rose on from earlier novels have lost important qualities as personalities, and it is in general true that few later incarnations are as well- rounded (and none is as alive) as earlier counterparts.

Murdoch is indeed almost absent from these later novels

(though she had so effectively been present in The Bell), but complete absence can be just as damning in the attempt to bring forth living characters as too open didacticism.

Abstention may be valid legally as an expression of view­ point, but it is seldom a sign of assent or even tolerant neutrality.

Before looking briefly at each of these later novels, however, it is important to see just what has happened to

Murdoch's later authorial ironies, her actual openly-stated didacticisms. Few though they are, they illustrate vividly the nature of Murdoch's later perception of her characters.

Here, for example, is a fairly mild instance, Randall Pero- nett having second thoughts about life with Lindsay:

In now possessing Lindsay Randall experienced, though very rarely and for a second at a time, the touch of disappointment analogous to that of the girl who de­ sires the priest in his soutane, but wants him no more when he has broken his vows to become, less ceremoniously, available. (310)

This soft of irony might well fit in with the tolerant comedy of any of Murdoch's earlier novels, but such balance is not 198

typical of the later works. More typical and more frequent

is the sort of slash Murdoch aims at Randall's father Hugh

as the elder Peronett announces his love of Emma Sands to

Mildred" "'I have fallen in love,' he repeated solemnly,

absorbed in the majesty of his own fate" (186) . One can

search the length and breadth of Iris Murdoch's early novels

and nowhere, not even in The Sandcastle, turn up a judgement

as vicious and debilitating as that, but it is by no means

the most brutal of Murdoch's later didacticisms. Setting

aside the complex case of what Murdoch does to Effingham

Cooper for the moment, we find her most savage cut of any

in her work in her remark following Gerald Scottow's dis­ missal of Pip LeJour from Gaze Castle — and Hannah Crean-

Smith's presence: "It was the defeat of a man by a beast"

(256). There is something truly lacking in these flashes:

it is almost as if Murdoch had ceased to see the fiction of

her characters and had begun to believe in them as tangible.

If we compare these vicious comments with some of those not vicious in The Bell, the blighting inhumanity of the later didacticisms is abundantly obvious — consider, say, Mur­ doch's comment on the plunging of the bell into the lake at the height of the consecration ceremonies, where the opinion that "Those who had come for a show were getting their money's worth" (277) is coolly understated. There are few such effective understatements in the later novels, 199

and some later didacticisms are not even sharply articulated.

Remembering from The Bell the delightful deflation of Mur­ doch's "It could scarcely have been said to have been a suc­ cessful conversation" (142) appended to one of Toby's non­ talks with Nick, it is disheartening to see what has happened to such comments in later Murdoch novels — say, in An Un­ official Rose, in the scene of Felix Meecham's declaration of love for Ann Peronett.

Ann thought, I must gather my wits. Something is going to happen. Something is happening. "Oh, Ann •—" «[Felix] said. He put the brandy down on the floor. It was a declaration of love. Ann sat quite rigid for a moment. Then she turned her face full to his and they looked stead­ ily into each other's eyes. Such gazing is crucial; and Ann did not even see the barrier until she had sped far beyond it. Nothing now, between them, could ever be the same again. "Well —" she said, and looked away. Her cheeks were burning, her throat was painfully constricted, and she shivered with something which was like terror. Felix leaned back inahis chair, stretching out his long legs, rotating his brandy and looking at the ceiling. He said "Mmm." It was scarcely an eloquent scene, but much happened in those min­ utes. (238-239)1

At best the first two-thirds of this scene (through the comma

1 Surely this scene is not among those comprising what Byatt has praised as the "extremely well-imagined, beauti­ fully detailed, truly felt inarticulate relationships be­ tween Felix and Ann" (202) . 200

in the last line to be precise) is a parody of the stereo­

type inarticulate declaration of the pulp novel. But our

laughter is suddenly undermined in the last sentence when

Murdoch, after quite subtly showing her detachment by say­

ing "It was scarcely an eloquent scene" (we long to repeat

emphatically the "scarcely" after her), adds the serious defense of the scene "but much happened in those minutes."

That reflection casts Felix and Ann back into the realm of

stereotype, for it would seem obvious from (we note) Mur­ doch's own direct statements that the stereotype situation

is to be taken seriously — it only appears to be parody

(from the author's point of view, that is). We seem to be dealing with a case where we the readers know more than the author, for Murdoch first appears to be refusing to parody an eminently parodyable situation and then, in the same breath reversing herself, insisting that we take the resulting stereotype as something more than what it is.

That is certainly something of a wrench in logic, not to overlook the problem in aesthetics. One thing is clear: lifelike characters are not merecrepetitions of stereo­ types, and Ann and Felix never quite escape enough!to exist on their own. Clear also is the fact that no later didacticism of Murdoch's which is potentially comic is al­ lowed to stand on its own without the addition, in all 201

cases as in the Felix-Ann example, of a serious qualifi­

cation. Murdoch appears intent on convincing us of the

seriousness, even the earnestness, of her purposes, and she

has lost almost completely that use of the "delighted imag-

ination which A. S. Byatt has so accurately seen as func­

tioning in Murdoch's creation of her earlier characters.

Murdoch's people are all, even the later ones, potentially

comic (potentially human, that is); she saw that clearly

and revelled in it in her creation of Jake, Dora, and Mar­

tin, and some of her later persons are comic almost in

spite of Murdoch. Nonetheless, most of the later persons

are not fully realized; they remain negative presences,

vague, shadowy, monochromatic, usually repulsive — at

least, from An Unofficial Rose to The Time of the Angels.

It would perhaps be easier to make out a case in

favor of the novel Murdoch wrote just after A Severed Head,

An Unofficial Rose, if it were discussed in terms of

philosophy rather than as a novel, for there is hardly

a major topic of interest to Iris Murdoch the philosopher which does not come in for some discussion in that sixth

novel — death, freedom, strength, conventions, love,

religion, romanticism, marriage, power, the demonic,

sex, nationality, art (name it, it is probably there). The

central conflict of the novel is very old in tradition,

2Byatt, 204. 202 for the novel portrays the tension between the imminence of death and carpe diem which is much older indeed than its most famous statement in English poetry, Herrick's

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." That famous "rose" poem casts some light on the central meaning of Murdoch's novel, for both Hugh Peronett and his son Randall, rose growers by profession, are attempting to gather for themselves the quite non-professional roses of pleasure.

Hugh by attempting to resurrect a love affair he had dropped in his long-since-past youth, Randall by abandon­ ing the rose industry, the less than ideal family business symbolic of his drab life with his wife Ann, for what is to Randall the goddess-like Lindsay Rirnmer, a veritable

"Aphrodite Anadyomene" (307) . The presence of death is everywhere, in the imagery, in Hugh's age (he sees at one point a "death's head" [21] reflected in a mirror instead of his own face) and in the symbolism of the dead

Steve; also, the novel begins with the funeral of Hugh's wife Fanny. Everything in the novel, especially the characters, has the static quality of the living dead, and the one and only violent action of the novel, Miranda's willful jumping out of a tree, ends in a protracted convalesence, with Miranda stretched out in almost regal motionlessness on a chaise. It is very nearly true that 203 in the usual sense of "action," nothing happens in An

Unofficial Rose. People gather about an open grave,

Hugh meditates (without grief, though), but that is all.

Hugh visits Emma, Emma visits Ann; Miranda is visited in secret by her runaway father — all talk, talk, talk; nothing happens. No one gains any insight into the truth of his condition; no one morally grows. People change partners, lose partners, refuse partners; but by the end of the novel, nothing has really changed.

Another of the premises of the novel only serves to reinforce the generally static atmosphere: all the characters are either in their sixties, forties, or teens, but no group acts its age. Each group aets opposite to what is conventionally appropriate, the elderly like teenagers (Hugh is too old, biologically at least, to be so taken with Emma), the teenagers like middle-aged, world-weary adults (can Penn be believable in his fetish for Miranda's knees [89], a psychic aberration about on the same level of Hugh's decadent pleasure in kissing

Emma's "nicotine" fingers [114]?). The static atmosphere is only heightened by our sensing that for Iris Murdoch, in An Unofficial Rose, time and age, two of the most basic elements in Human Nature, have no reality. We are told the ages of characters, but those ages are not a real 204

part of the novel's action. Ultimately, most of the

characters seem to be about the same age — middle age,

mostly. All act and talk on the same age level, and it

is revealing to find Penn mouthing a concept of love which

could just as easily have come from the mouth of Martin

Lynch-Gibbon or Hugo Belfounder — or Iris Murdoch:

"The next morning, to which he woke with an undifferen­

tiated sense of bliss, produced however as it wore on

a state of mind somewhat less solipsistic" (244) . Who

is speaking here, Penn Graham, that simple Australian

farmboy, or some philosophically-inclined intruder?

An Unofficial Rose is thus a talk novel, just barely on the literary side of propaganda, and its

characters are thin and static. Nonetheless they are not all equals in strength, and the amazonism which was one of the most debilitating elements in The Sandcastle is central in An Unofficial Rose to the meaning of the novel. Every female in An Unofficial Rose is stronger than the males who desire her — Ann stronger than Felix,

Emma than Hugh, Lindsay than Randall, Miranda than Penn, and of course Mildred than "Humpo" or Hugh. Every man is utterly abject, and the one action which is most character istic of the males of the novel is their going down on their knees before some female. But while in A Severed

Head Murdoch had insisted thàt Honor order Martin up, 205

the artist seems quite resigned to leave Penn on the

floor before Miranda — and to let Lindsay undress

Randall and even wait for his momentary impotence to pass. From these abject stances no male is allowed to rise, and it is significant that Randall's last thoughts in the novel are of his eventual return to long-suffering wife Ann, a defeat reminiscent of Bill Mor's earlier tail-between-legs return to his own strong wife Nan in

The Sandcastle. Every male in An Unofficial Rose fails to achieve the woman he desires, or bungles the having of her if he suceeds. Indeed, it is hard to tell the males from the females in the novel — there are times when boyish Lindsay seems more of a man than Randall

(her Lesbian relationship with Emma helps), and even

Ann seems braver, in her own bovinely devoted way, than soldier Felix.

Characters are thus all negatives, and An Unofficial

Rose is a retreat philosophically and morally — A

Severed Head did present only the "chance" for growth at the end, but at least the chance was there. No such growth can be found in An Unofficial Rose, and most of 3 the characters remain stereotypes or incredible. It is easy to list the stereotypes: Ann the patient adoring wife, Randall the sower of a wild oat (much of his imagery

□ It would seem worth noting, however, that these classifications refer only to characters who appear in the action proper, and that Penn's father, several 206

even casts him as an "actor"), Lindsay the sex goddess,

"Humpo" the queer, Felix the good soldier devoted to ’the

Brigade and the Queen" (160) complete with exotic mistress

in faraway land right out of Somerset Maugham, Swann the modern (ineffective) secularized clergyman. The incred­

ible characters include Penn, who is supposed to be simple

and sophisticated at the same time, and Miranda, Byatt's "extraordinarily tiresome"4 child, a girl who has achieved

the truly remarkable feat of attaining bitch-hood at the tender age of thirteen. Miranda controls the actions of an entire family, ultimately lying to keep her mother from marrying Felix because Miranda herself is in love with the man. Shocking these actions are, unusual too, but they are not believeable.

Murdoch's seventh novel The Unicorn is a far richer book than An Unofficial Rose — and a far more successful one. The first point which must be noted about The Unicorn is that it might easily have been a comedy. All the

thousand miles from England and appearing only through the very indirect means of his wife's letters to her father, has a greater richness of personality than the persons of the action. The same applies later in The Time of the Angels to Pattie O'Driscoll's wayward mother, who makes a memorable two-page appearance and then disappears, without the consolation for the reader of the intermittent reappearances she is said to make in Pattie's life 4Byatt, 125. 207

potential is there, but Murdoch never quite succeeds in

bringing it together into one consistent tonal whole.

Indeed, the novel never establishes any tone for very

long; there are several tones all going at the same

time. The comic tone is, however, abundantly evidenced;

Iris. Murdoch's imagination is repeatedly attracted to

the comic detail, and even in the most dramatic of

scenes, the absurd is not be to denied. Most of these comic details are sardonically satiric. Before Effingham

Cooper and Alice LeJour at long last make love, Murdoch has Alice "put her hands in her pockets" (218-219) and then lie down -- in a slimy pool. At the very end also, with the dead bodies of Hannah, Gerald, and Peter being observed (is there not something unavoidably comic in the body pile-up which parodies tragedy?) by a morbidly fascinated Effingham, Effie's feelings are not those of intense grief but of a macabre ghoulism: he wants to see how one of the bodies is "maimed or disfigured"

(296) — Peter's, not Hannah's. These sardonic details recur often and remind us that the events at Gaze Castle are, after all, perfectly preposterous and unrealistic and that the persons involved are themselves so fantastic as to achieve mythic status. But if in A Severed Head the mythic side of the characters was held in balance 208

with the human, in The Unicorn the mythic triumphs:

each character represents a differing degree of innocence

(the "unicorn" virginity of the title) or knowledge

'(usually demonic) , with Denis being the only literal

virgin of the book and Gerald Scottow being the most

demonic (he controls until his death most of the actions

of others, usually because his power over them is a result

of his sexual attractiveness). Other characters come

between the two extreme poles of virginity and demonism

with Hannah Crean-Smith being somewhere in the middle.

Some have called The Unicorn Hannah's tragedy (an over­

statement, if nothing more), but to say that, we must

make of Hannah the very fantasized creature which she

seems to those innocents, Effingham, Denis, and Marian

(Violet too, though she is not innocent) and which we

come to learn she is not. Hannah is a static creature,

and underneath all the fantasies others have about her

she is nothing more than a weak-willed adulteress, propped

up in her weakness by whiskey and the abject adulation of

other people. To make of Hannah anything more, to make

of her a great soul or an exemplary sufferer, is to make

the same effor of falling under a spell of self-enchant­ ment which the novel attempts to make impossible. Ulti­ mately, we are intended to see Hannah as a'rather vacuous 209

nonentity about as solid in personality as her teacher,

"Maid" Marian, the palest of pale copies of Dora Greenfield

Marian herself is an interesting development: she is at the very center of the action; it is through her eyes that we see more than half of the events of the novel; her involvement supposedly brings to her a burden of guilt like that of the other characters involved; and yet she is so shapeless of being that she is ultimately unbelieveable. Or to put the matter as simply as possible,

Murdoch treats Marian more seriously than she deserves:

Marian has none of Dora's mindless vital strength, and it is significant that, after the departure of Denis, i Marian passes out of the center of the action and that the center shifts to the only fully realized creation in the book, Effingham Cooper. The last glimpse we get of

Marian is from a distance, through Effingham's eyes, as she takes her place in a "second-class compartment" (311) on Effie's train. Guilt or no, Marian has already begun to fade as a person, and it is more true than clever to say that in Iris Murdoch's work Marian remains a second- class character all along — the only, first-class figure in The Unicorn is Effingham Cooper.

"Darling Effie" was created, however, strictly for satiric purposes. It is now clear in The Unicorn that the type of man Murdoch found so comic (and human) in 210

John Rainborough is a type she cannot endure. Effie is, unlike Rainborough, deeply involved in the action of his novel, and yet his ego is untouchable — he never learns a thing, morally, and we always see him from a distance, out of a sense of our own superiority. Murdoch treats him with consistent irony, some of it openly didactic, some of it sardonic self-reflexive satire. Effie can hardly open his mouth, for example, without unconsciously revealing himself as weak, vain, and self-centered. He rejects the ontological proof of God with bluster: "'God is because I desire him?'" he asks philosopher Max LeJour.

"'I'm damned, if I'll stand for that'" (109). He reacts to having his life saved with a melodrama so terse as to seem insincere: "'Denis, what can I say. Thank you'"

(192). And when Effie stoops to criticism of others, he displays a vulgarity of temperament which is quite at odds with his elegant, man-of-the-world demeanor: Alice

LeJour's excess bulk is caused by her gardening, by "All that stooping with feet wide apart," while her "domestic activities" are a kind of "elephantine play" (83).

Sardonic self-reflexion may be present here, but it is nonetheless true that Effie is also made to undergo something very like the education in reality which

Murdoch usually reserves, in her later novels, only for her most serious creations. Effie is even brought close 211

to the point of death and is shown having what would

appear to be an insight into the nature of "love" in

a scene when he is caught in a swamp bog, being gradually

pulled under. Yet Effie's concept of love is by no means

Iris Murdoch's, and her purposes in the scene of Effie's

illumination are intended to be ironic — Effie is made

to undergo an awareness which is far more of a Wagnerian

liebestod than an introduction to Murdoch's belief in the

complexity of human interrelationships. After discover­

ing "All that was not himself," Effie goes on to define

J: love."

This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death. He looked and knew, with a clarity which was one with the increasing light, that with the death of the self the world becomes quite automatically the object of a perfect love. He clung to the words "quite automatically" and murmured them to himself as a charm. (189)

There is no mistaking the flat, quiet lack of exaggeration

in this passage until the last sentence, but there Murdoch quite clearly indicates that Effie has not seen truth of her sort, and that he is merely under yet another enchantment, the confused equation of love with death.

Surely we are not to argue that that believer in the living, separate, solid personality, Iris Murdoch, sub­ scribes to a belief in the death of the self. The essentially ironic intention of the passage becomes 212

definitely clear, though, when Denis and the donkey

start to haul Effie out of his predicament (can only one

ass save another?), and in the scene which follows with

Effie stretched out on his back raving incoherently,

surrounded by Hannah, Marian, and Alice, the women become

truly unreal "angels." "Their handsome faces," Effie dreams tritely, "lit with tenderness and love, hovered over him angel-like" (193). And later, he dreams, "The three were a radiant globe out of which light streamed forth" (like an electric lamp?), and he offers them an explanation for his raving: "'I think it is love which happens automatically when love is death,'" to which redundancy Alice fittingly replies, "'I think you're sozzled, Effie'" (194). Alice has a certain point there beyond the tact that Effie is being plied with Hannah's whiskey, for Effie is soon shown in the comic guise of the sentimental drunkard. Directly, Effie tells the three women, "'With so much good will between us, why aren't we perfect with each other? What stops .us being?

We can't make the whole world into a republic of love, but we can make a little corner of our own,'" and fdftlows these maudlin platonic sentiments with some beery advice, first to Hannah. "'You and Alice . . . You both love me.

Well, you ought to love each other too. And, Marian,

I love you of course. Love is so easy, it's practically 213

necessary1" (196). In preparation for these remarks,

however, Murdoch has already shown Effie's essential

egocentrism — the continuation of his old.self — in

his thoughts before speaking to Hannah and Marian.

He loved Hannah. But did he not in loving her love the others too? How beautifully they were now drawn together in spiritual amity, in a lovely configuration by their joint concern for him, and what a perfect object of love they made, they- loving- him, together. So love, making an unchecked circuit, returned to himself. (195-196)

This seems to be something of a faulty circuit which

begins and ends, as it always has and always does with

Effie, in one's self. Effingham Cooper is indeed related

to Martin Lynch-Gibbon and John Rainborough through

similarity of personality, but he is by no means meant

to represent a person with the possible growth of Martin's kind and extent. Effie represents a failing, and Murdoch treats him with consistent irony throughout the novel.

In fact, it should be noted above all else that when

Effie's "old unregenerate beingwwas with him-again," it comes not at the end of the novel, not even after the brief affair with Alice, but as soon as he is free from the swamp (cf. 190). It has already been suggested that

Murdoch signals the comic absurdity of Effie's affair with Alice by having them make love in a slimy pool and my making Alice "put her hands in her pockets" (218-219), but we might reinforce the point by noticing that Alice's 214 gesture is surely a comic contrast to Denis's more moving cry in a similar context (vzhen he loses his uni­ corn virginity, symbolic and physical, with Marian),

"'Ah, but we are faithless, faithless'" (231), a state­ ment whose overtones suggest no less a meaning than the state of the modern world, a time without faith. Effie's little fling with Alice has no such significance; it is comic ~~ like all of Effie's encounters. And it is just because Effie is satirized thoroughly and consistently to the end of the novel, and just because he never achieves an awareness of his own absurdity, that he ultimately does not involve us enough to seem completely human.

He remains something other, something we can laugh at but seldom with. As a device of satire, Effie may be a successful literary construction, but as a realistic character, he falls short — he never is made to involve us enough so that we love him. "Darling Effie" is Martin

Lynch-Gibbon without the humanity.

There is nothing even approaching Effie in Murdoch's three novels after The Unicorn, but the dehumanizing satiric attitude continues to obtrude, more and more bitter in each successive novel. It is one of the chief reasons for the failure of Murdoch's eighth novel The

Italian Girl, a novel which should have occupied a position of central importance in Iris Murdoch's work. 215

The potential importance of the novel is that in The

Italian Girl Murdoch attempted to portray an actual and

complete growth from self-centered isolation to other-

centered love as she had shown it nowhere else so fully

in any other novel. Edmund Narraway, the puritanical

narrator of the novel, achieves an awareness of a clarity

which Martin and Jake could only hope for, and the arti­

culate spelling out of the particulars of that awareness

frees Edmund to assume a new, real relationship with the

mysteriously passive dark beauty (dark like Honor Klein),

the Italian girl Maria Magistretti. Edmund comes to see

all quite clearly.

What was the value, what had been the value of my long meditation? I had had no power here to heal the ills of others, I had merely discovered my own. I had thought to have passed beyond life, but now it seemed to me that I had simply evaded it. I had not passed beyond anything; I was a false religious, a frightened man. (212)5

Certainly Jake and Martin might envy the depth of these

conclusions (Michael Meade came to the same conclusions, we remember, but too late), but the problem is that nothing convinces us that Edmund is capable of such

intellection. It is not, however, a matter of what

Edmund is as a person but what he lacks that makes his capacities doubtful. Edmund has none of the reason, none of the warmth, none of the humor of a Jake or Martin

$The Italian Girl. London, 1964. 216

and the one idea which recurs most often in his reac­

tions to other people is "disgust," Edmund's key word.

There are no grounds in the novel to justify Edmund's

final awareness; he is constantly running away from

encounters, and he at no point prepares us for the growth he undergoes. Edmund is a dry man in Murdoch's sense; the novel does attempt to show how that dryness can be turned into love, but even with Edmund tallying off the hot Italian cities he will visit with Maria after the novel's close, "Genova, Pisa, Livorno, Grosseto,

Civitavecchia, Roma" (214) , we are not really convinced that the drought is over. Also we do not really care, since Edmund has made no attempt to engage our sympathies before — his disgust at the complexities of the lives of other people only serves to make us disgusted with his disgust, and it is significant that the end of the novel portrays the breakup of the Narraway family, the persons, messily--■human or not, to whom he owes most responsibility

It is not certainnif Edmund takes on any new life with the taking on of a mistress. Maria herself has none of

Honor's articulateness.

Murdoch's ninth novel The Red and the Green would seem to offer the artist a unique opportunity to illus­ trate her most important themes. The rich world of reality is constantly being oversimplified, codified, 217 too-precisely described, Murdoch again asserts, and who has oversimplified reality more than the historian?

What better way, then, to affirm the existence of a various reality than to show how an important historical event, say, the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916, was brought about not by vague, diffuse, abstract causes but by the minutiae of day-to-day interpersonal relation­ ships. And Murdoch was not without a model for such a novel since her favorite novelist Tolstoy had already gone about as far as one could with the idea in War and

Peace. But there was a potential danger in the idea which even Tolstoy had not completely solved: discussing historical data was well nigh unavoidable in a historical novel, and an artist was likely to get carried away by his interest in history and forget about what was after all his primary function, the creation of characters.

Unfortunately, The Red and the Green does not escape the danger, and it is larded from end to end with drab historical discussions which have about the same relation­ ship to the central plot as the talks of Levin about land reform and the emancipation of the peasants do to the

Anna-Vronsky plot of Anna Karenina. Even if these dia­ lectics were removed, however, what characters would remain in The Red and the Green would in no way be as fully realized as Anna or Vronsky (or even Levin). Again 218

characters are presented as negatives, but in The Red

and the Green comment from Murdoch is often more openly

satirical than in The Italian Girl. The weakness of

Andrew Chase-White, the too-perfect young British officer

who bears a close resemblance to Felix Meecham, is shown

in many ways but most evidently in his thoughts on the

possibility of having sexual intercourse with his fiancee

Frances: "Whenever he imagined himself doing that to 6 Frances he felt appalled incredulity" (28) . The weak-

willed sham religionist "Barney" (for Barnabas) Drumm

is more neatly rapiered in Murdoch's description of his

concept of religion: "he fdllowed, as it were at a dis­

tance, the yearly cycle of the Church, the pilgrimage of

Christ from birth to death. Even now He was drawing

near to Calvary. He was riding upon an ass into

Jerusalem to die" (113). These are rather pretentious

sentiments for a man whose biggest problem is a passion

for a loose woman, Lady Millicent Kinnard, and who conceives of the Roman Church chiefly as a "machine"

(cf. 113) which can somehow restore his lost innocence.

Andrew's "Aunt Millie," Lady Kinnard, is perhaps the most intriguing of the persons of the novel, but she is finally just as amoral as Hannah Crean-Smith. Millie offers herself on successive days to at least two young men

^The Red and the Green. London, 1965. 219

though she has already accepted a marriage proposal

from yet another, older man — all along maintaining open house to religionist Barney. When it is revealed

late in the novel, after Millie has tried to seduce

Andrew (he botches the job), that Millie had in the past had an affair with Andrew's father, her half-brother, the news is not so much a surprise as the last straw. Millie is a nymphomaniac, and the poetic justice meted out to her at the end seems not entirely untenable — the end of all Millie’s desperate need to be told she is desir­ able must be unhappy isolation when time has made her no longer attractive. She survives while all the men she lured on die — most of them young and violently.

Somehow she is to blame since she set loose the frictions which alienated the men from each other to begin with.

Nonetheless, the fact that Murdoch felt free to dole out sentence on a character is significant of her new atti­ tude toward her creations: the presence of the "Epilogue" at the close of The Red and the Green — the only such epilogue in her work — shows clearly that literary creations can be judged morally, just like human beings.

Indeed, the judgement seems more important than the humanity.

If all the persons of The Red and the Green represent negative failings unredeemed by positive human values, the persons of Murdoch's tenth novel The Time of the Angels 220 hardly seem like people at all. They are vague shadows, reminiscent of other Murdoch characters and — most sig­ nificantly — of the literary creations of other writers.

The Time of the Angels imitates art, not life. Specifi­ cally, it imitates the conventions of several Romantic works, Faust, The Cenci, Manfred. The Faustian figure in the novel is Father Carel Fisher who has abandoned his religion for meditative isolation in an upper room of a ruined Rectory house where the sunlight is kept out by heavy drapes and where the only things that intrude into the darkness are the music of Tschaikovsky, Sein und

Zeit, and the love of a Jamaican-Irish, mentally-retarded maid, Pattie O'Driscoll -- not to overlook the incestuous love of Carel's invalid daughter Elizabeth. Father

Carel is clearly a demon, and he is opposed in the novel by another of those literal virgins like the one in The

Unicorn, his daughter Muriel. The novel relates Muriel's education into the hell of her father's life and ideas, and like Marian of The Unicorn Muriel is finally involved herself in the guilt of her father's life. Muriel does, however, lose more than Marian, for at the end of the novel her father's suicide binds Muriel to caring for

Elizabeth for life, a life which is over before it has a chance to begin (Muriel remains a virgin but still must suffer as if she were not). 221

The tone of The Time of the ¿Angels is sardonic, the most bitterly so of any Murdoch novel. It is consistent

throughout, but perhaps reaches its most imaginatively-

rendered peak in the scene in which Care'" -'J . v

Marcus attempts to enter the Rectory. Marcus is another of Murdoch's weak men; he has scholarly pretentions and recalls vaguely religionist Barney. The state of Mur­ doch's mind is revealed, however, more in Marcus than in

Barney, for Marcus is legally the only man who could free Elizabeth and Muriel from the life their father has imposed on them. Yet Murdoch creates in Marcus a man slack of intellect and more likely to allow himself to be swayed by a lust for a young boy than able to stand up to his brother. This weakness is shown best in the confrontation between the brothers, a study in dark and light: having been refused entrace to the Rectory, Marcus enters through the cellar where, simultaneously, the electric lights fail and Marcus is covered with black soot; in this double layer of darkness Marcus makes his way to his brother's room where Carel, sitting half- naked in the dark, proceeds to defeat Marcus's seemingly enlightened arguments; the scene ends with Carel striking

Marcus and dismissing him — as the lights come back on. 222

Evidently Murdoch chose to create Marcus as a weaker

man than Carel, but she also does not approve of the

thinking of Father Carel. Carel lives in an ego-

centered world where everything, and especially other

people, exists for his use, and the pity we might feel

for him in his darkest moment, when Pattie leaves him

and he commits suicide, is turned into hate when we

realize what effect his death will have on Muriel’s life.

Why are the weak of The Time of the Angels so very weak,

the strong so very strong? What has happened to that

loving tolerance which was so effectively lavished on human failings and virtues in Murdoch’s early novels?

What has happened to the balance between a Hugo and a

Jake, an Honor and a Martin? And why has Murdoch come to hate almost all the central creations of her art?

Answers to these questions can only be conjectures, but it is clear that Murdoch has lost something important perhaps even the former vigor andccomplexity of the very concept of love the novels seek to embody. Or maybe the tolerant comic tone has not been lost after all —

The Nice and the Good contains some hopeful signs.

Certainly The Nice and the Good is, if considered in the light of other novels of 1967, "an unimportant work,"'’ as one critic put it; the novel has many of the

7 Cf. The New York Review of Books, X (April 11, 1968), 36. 223 defects of The Sandcastle, though none of The Sandcastle1 amazonism, and its prose style is just as hackneyed as

Murdoch's third novel. But the mere fact that it is a comedy and that the highjinks going on in Dorset and

London are allowed to be presented as comic is not with­ out importance as far as Iris Murdoch the artist is con­ cerned. The light tone of The Nice and the Good is a sharp veering off from the black tone of The Time of the

Angels, and while the persons of The Nice and the Good are by no means as memorable as Jake or Dora or Martin or Michael or Honor, nonetheless they are individuals, and they do not even pretend to be mythic in signifi­ cance. The love-making of Kate Gray and her "perfect 8 sphere" (7) of a husband Octavian is surely more tolerantly comic than what Murdoch did to Randall with

Lindsay -- the Grays are as punctual as Big Ben. "'Are you ready, darling?'" Octavian asks, and Kate replies,

"'Ready, sweetheart!'" The novel ends too with a whole series of sexual couplings, some passionate, some comic, and the only figure who ends unhappily is the homosexual

Theo — the rest are all paired off happily in the manner of Shakespeare's comedies, especially A Midsummer Night's

Dream to which The Nice and the Good specifically but a little too hopefully compares itself. Is this a sign of

8 The Nice and the Good. London, 1967. 224 things to come? For a novelist capable of producing

The Bell, we would be more than just hoping if we answered in the affirmative, for The Bell comes closer to achieving the resurrection of the novel of characters than any other novel of recent years. Central to its success is the close similarity between Murdoch's concept of love and high comedy which forms the most basic assumption upon which this entire study has been founded, and it

'would - be well to conclude with a summary of that idea.

Love and comedy, the merging of the ethics of love with the aesthetics of tolerant comedy — that is the equation which is the cornerstone of the storyteller's art, and it is the equation which is most essential to

Iris Murdoch's attempt to resurrect the novel of characters

At the center of both concepts is a tension. Murdoch's concept of love —to repeat is basically a dichotomy calling for the lover to (1) recognize the otherness of the other and thereby see the distance between his own per­ sonality and that of his beloved and (2) accept the differ­ ence as unalterable reality without trying to change the personality of the beloved to suit himself. One hence both sees a distance and accepts it at the same time, a concept which might well serve for a definition of

"tolerance," the chief requirement Murdoch has called for in the "great" novelist of Tolstoy's sort. 225

It is not difficult to explain how very like

comedy of the humane sort Murdoch's concept of love is,

for comedy both creates a distance between characters

and readers and, at the same time, transcends it. Two

simultaneous reactions in an audience make up behavior

which we call comic: (1) laughing at (to use the most

familiar traditional terms), or emotional release, the

reader's recognition that he is superior to the characters

against whom he releases his emotions; and (2) laughing

with, empathetic involvement, the reader's upsurge of

fellow feeling, his recognition that, unlike himself

though the characters represented may be, even inferior

to himself, yet for all their failings they are still

human beings, like himself in possessing a similar Human

Nature. In some kinds of comedy, and in particular in

satire, laughing at predominates in our feelings over

laughing with, and yet it is certainly tenable to argue that in the highest comedic art, we the audience are just as involved as not. Surely it is one of the happy essences of that sort of high comedy that it allows us to be reconciled to our failings as human beings without

loss to us of, say, life or limb (as in the ultimate case of tragedy). In satire of the biting, sardonic sort, however, the final effect is to make us less and

less able to accept our very human failings — we become 226

alienated, to use a modern word in an older sense, from

ourselves as what we really are, human beings, and start

dreaming of ourselves as what we are not, fleshless

spirits, platonic essences, even perfectable. High

comedy is the art of reconciliation. Satire is the art

of alienation, the comic mode in which we see ourselves

distorted and exaggerated out of proportion to what we

know our failings actually to be. Satire is often seen

as the art of reason and balance, and yet, by its very

essence, its use of the weapons of the reductio ad absurdum

and other devices long, long known as logical fallacies,

it is really more of an art of unreason, the aesthetic mode which gives back the world and ourselves not as they really are but as we or the creating artists, to be precise — would like them to be.

Taking all of this into consideration, this study has been arguing two things: (1) an artist can only create realistic, convincingly human characters in a comic mode where their beings have a scope within which to freely exhibit themselves as they fully are; and (2)

Iris Murdoch's increasingly satiric tone in her later novels, from An Unofficial Rose to The Time of the Angels, works against her desire to create characters, though the return to more tolerant comedy in The Nice and the Good 227 shows a hopeful sign that she may yet succeed in creating the great novel of characters so many have thought her capable of. She has very nearly succeeded once already in The Bell, a book which would be a fitting basis for any first-rank artist's reputation. CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frank Baldanza, Jr. "Iris Murdoch and the Theory of Per­ sonality," Criticism, VII (1965), 176-189.

John Bayley. The Character of Love, A Study in the Litera­ ture of Personality. New York, 1963.

Malcolm Bradbury. "Iris Murdoch's Under the Net," The Critical Quarterly, IV (Springs 3T962) , 47-54.

Bernard Brugiere. "L'univers romanesque d'lris Murdoch," Mercure de France, CCCLII (1964), 699-711.

A. S. Byatt. Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch. London, 1965.

Alasdair Clayre. "Common Cause: A Garden in the Clearing," Times Literary Supplement (August 7, 1959), xxx-xxxi.

Bernard F. Dick. "The Novels of Iris Murdoch: Formula for Enchantment," Bucknell Review, XIV (1966), 66-81.

Marvin Felheim. "Symbolic Characterization in the Novels of Iris Murdoch," University of Texas Studies in Literature and Languages, II "(Summer, I9 60) , 189-197.

G. S. Fraser. "Iris Murdoch: The Solidity of the Normal," International Literary Annual, II (1959), 37-54.

Albert Gerard. "Iris Murdoch," Le Revue Nouvelle, XXXIX (1964), 633-640.

James Gindin. "Images of Illusion in the Work of Iris Mur­ doch, " University of Texas Studies in Literature and Languages, II (Summer, 19607"^ 180-188 .

James Hall. "Blurring the Will: The Growth of Iris Murdoch," Journal of English Literary History, XXXII (1965), 256- 273.

William Hall. "'The Third Way'" The Novels of Iris Murdoch," Dalhousie Review, XLVI (1966), 306-318. 229

Ruth Heyd. "An Interview with Iris Murdoch," University of Windsor Review, I (1965), 138-143.

Frederick J. Hoffman. "Iris Murdoch: The Reality of Per­ sons," Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, VII (1964), 48-57.

R. J. Kaufmann. "The Progress of Iris Murdoch," The Nation, CLXXXVIII (1959), 255-256.

Frank Kermode. "The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists," Partisan Review, XXX (Spring, 1963), 61-82.

Hena Maes-Jelinek. "A House for Free Characters: The Novels of Iris Murdoch," Revue des Langues Vivantes, XXIX (1963), 45-69.

Graham Martin. "Iris Murdoch and the Symbolist Novel," British Journal of Aesthetics, V (1965), 296-300.

Bernard McCabe. "Guises of Love," Commonweal, LXXXIII (1965), 270-273.

Olga McDonald Meidner. "The Progress of Iris Murdoch," English Studies in Africs, IV (1961), 17-38.

______. "Reviewer:'suBane: A Study of Iris Murdoch's The Flight from the Enchanter," Essays in Criticism, XI (1961), 435-4377

Rene Micha. "Les romans a machines d'lris Murdoch," Critique, CLV (1960), 291-300.

Iris Murdoch. "Against Dryness, A Polemical Sketch," Encounter XVI (January 1961), 16-20.

______. The Bell. London, 1958.

. "The Existentialist Hero," The Listener, XLIII (1950), 523-524.

______. The Flight from the Enchanter. London, 1956. 230

Iris Murdoch. "Hegel in Modern Dress," The New Statesman and Nation, LIII (1957), 675-676.

______. "A House of Theory," Partisan Review, XXVI (Winter, 1959), 17-31.

. "The Idea of Perfection," The Yale Review, LIII (1964), 342-380.

______. The Italian Girl. London, 1964.

______"Knowing the Void," Spectator, CXCVII (1956), 613-614.

. "Mass, Might and Myth," Spectator, CCIX (1962), 337-338.

______. "Metaphysics and Ethics," in D. F. Pears, ed., The Nature of Metaphysics (London, 1957), 99-123.

______. "Nostalgia for the Particular," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LII (London, 1952)", 243- 260.

. "The Novelist as Metaphysician," The Listener, XLIII (1950), 473-476.

______. The Red and the Green. London, 1965.

______. The Sandcastle. London, 1957.

Sartre, Romantic Rationalist. New Haven, Connecticut, 1953.

______. A Severed Head. London, 1961.

. "The Sublime and the Good," The Chicago Re- view, XIII (Autumn, 1959), 42-55.

______. "T. S. Eliot as a Moralist," in Neville Bray- brooke, ed., T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birthday (New York, 1958), 152-160.

. The Time of the Angels. London, 1966. 231

Iris Murdoch. Under the Net. London, 1954.

The Unicorn. London, 1963.

An Unofficial Rose. London, 1962.

______. "Vision and Choice in Morality," Aristotelian Society: Dreams and Self-Knowledge, Supplementary Volume XXX (London, 1956), 32-58.

William Van O'Conner. "Iris Murdoch: The Formal and the Contingent," Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, III (Winter-Spring, 19607”, 34-46.

Kevin O'Sullivan. "Iris Murdoch and the Image of Liberal Man," Yale Literary Magazine, CXXXI (1962), 27-36.

Jacques Souvage. "The Novels of Iris Murdoch," Studia Ger­ manics Gandensia, IV (1962), 225-252.

______. "Symbol as Narrative Device: An Interprets- ti'on of Iris Murdoch's The Bell," English Studies, XLIII (1962), 81-96.

______. "The Unresolved Tension: An Interpretation of Iris Murdoch's Under the Net," Revue des Langues Vivantes, XXVI (1960), 420-430.

Stephen Wall. "The Bell in The Bell," Essays in Criticism, XIII (1963), 265-273.

George Whiteside. "The Novels of Iris Murdoch," Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, VII (1964), 27-47.

Peter Wolfe. The Disciplined Heart: The Novels of Iris Murdoch. Columbia, Missouri, 1966.

______. "Philosophical Themes in the Novels of Iris Murdoch," Dissertation Abstracts, XXVI (1965), 3357- 3358 (Wise onsin). COMEDY AND THE EARLY

NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH

Larry Rockefeller

An Abstract of a Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1968

Approved by

Adviser Department of English Z-

ROCKEFELLER, LARRY, 14.A. (Ph.D.), August, 1968. English

Comedy and the Early Novels of Iris Murdoch. (231pp.) No.

Faculty Adviser: Frank Baldanza, Jr.

Why has Iris Murdoch failed in her attempt to resurrect the novel of characters? That is the question which has per­ plexed so many readers who find in her novels significant statements about the human condition rendered by a talent equalled only by a handful of other writers of our time, and it is the question which this study tries to answer.

In general, the implicit argument underlying the study is tripartite: (1) only comedy of a kind which resembles closely Murdoch's conception of love will allow a novelist to detach himself enough from his characters to give them a tolerant scope within which to humanly exist; (2) Murdoch has succeeded in maintaining that balanced synthesis between acceptance and judgement only in her earliest work and only with complete success in The Bell; and (3) the increasingly bitter tone of her satire — not to mention just the mere fact of her use of satire as a mode for character creation -- has, in her most recent work, blighted the vitality of her characters by too strictly limiting them to usually negative meanings. Close analysis has been made, hence, of the ways in which comic devices affect us as readers in our perception 3

of Murdoch's persons. Analysis has also focused upon char­ acters — or rather upon the verbal fabric which creates them — and not on plot or even meaning. Both successful and unsuccessful characters have been analyzed in the hope of showing how the biting variety of comedy, satire in par­ ticular, is inimical to the creation of characters intended to be realistic. For, as Murdoch has argued, the bad con­ temporary novelist robs a rich reality of the very variety which is its essence — he oversimplifies, saps, dehydrates,

In her own less successful characters, Murdoch has herself fallen into just that dehydrating error. In her best work, however, in that work where comedy is used as a mode of tolerance in character creation, Iris Murdoch has convinc­ ingly shown that the world which so many other novelists have seen as a dry wasteland peopled by a hollow race of living dead men is in fact so varied in multiplicity of particulars and so complicated in moral inter-relationships that any attempt to oversimplify it is little short of simple-minded. Murdoch's use of bitterly sardonic satire from An Unofficial Rose on has drained many of her later works of just that thing which she seems most set on most clearly portraying — human character. The recent appear­ ance of The Nice and the Good, however, seems to mark a re­ birth of interest on Murdoch's part in more humane modes 4

of comic perception, and the study ends with a comparison of that work with some of Murdoch's lesser, more negating recent works. It should, of course, be noted that there may be other reasons for Murdoch's failure to resurrect the novel of characters, but the increasing bitterness of her comic outlook — what amounts to a souring, actually — is the most important factor involved. Or, to phrase the idea perhaps a little more simply: more and more bitter — and less and less human; that is Iris Murdoch's main problem.