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.