Iris Murdoch and the Aesthetics of Masochism

‘Iris Murdoch and the Aesthetics of Masochism’

Bran Nicol

Journal of Modern Literature, 29:2, 2006. pp.148-65.

[author’s copy]

In her essay “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ ” Iris Murdoch writes that “[i]t is always a significant question to ask of any philosopher: what is he [sic] afraid of?” (Murdoch

1999a: 359). She is considering the difficulty “in philosophy to tell whether one is saying something reasonably public and objective, or whether one is merely erecting a barrier, special to one’s own temperament, against one’s own personal fears”

(Murdoch 1999a: 359). Her question suggests what we might regard as her own fear as a writer—and of fiction, not just philosophy: the sense that she might be fooling herself, presenting a piece of writing as objective or impersonal when it is, in fact, driven by her desire. Her main strategy for alleviating this fear is the theory of literary production she developed throughout her career.

What is distinctive about Murdoch’s theory of the novel is that it is also a theory of ethics. Like the good person, she maintained, a novelist should engage in the literary equivalent of ascesis, peeling away the egotistical layers of self which cling to her work to leave the representation of pure “reality”—or as close as one can get to it in art—in all its contingent glory. As she argues elsewhere in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’

” “[t]he chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one” (Murdoch 1999a: 347–8). The writer must resist the

1 temptation to give in to this fantasy by featuring herself in her work or imposing pre- existing schema or judgement upon it. Characters should develop “independently” of the author and each other, and not be subservient to the demands of the plot. “[T]he greatest art,” Murdoch says, “is ‘impersonal’ because it shows us the world, our world and not another one, with a clarity which startles and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all” (Murdoch 1999a: 352).

Murdoch’s official “ethics of impersonality” is reinforced at a more subtle level by the “epitextual” dimension of her work, which has the effect of underlining how faithful she was to her own theory. According to Gérard Genette, epitexts are those texts produced by authors, such as interviews, private letters and journals, etc., which do not occupy the same space as those in the main text (i.e. “peritexts,” such as title, dedication, preface, postscript, etc.), but which nevertheless function to delimit and direct the readings of it. When her most important interviews are considered together1 it is remarkable how consistent Murdoch remained in her “public” pronouncements.

More or less from the outset, she had developed a kind of “totalized” philosophy

(though she would have disliked such a label).

Murdoch’s epitexts also strengthen the sense of correspondence between theory and practice in a more subtle way by making it difficult to attempt any biographical reading of her fiction. Her essays and interviews seldom feature details about her life outside her “public” roles as writer and philosopher. Recently, however, this has changed, as a result of a series of biographical portraits2 published following her death. These suggest that Murdoch’s personal investment in her own fiction is much more complex than it once seemed. Previously she tended to be caricatured in public

2 as a private, puritanical individual, almost close to a saint, a portrait of the author that complemented her theory of authorship. Now, however, she has been transformed into a quite different figure: a complex, sexualized being, capable of cruelty and deception as much as kindness and intellectual seriousness. What is striking is the way this biographical material has transformed not simply our perception of Murdoch’s personality, but her writing. Murdoch has effectively been returned to her own fiction, where previously she seemed strangely absent from it. The impression that she maintained of a disciplined detachment from her own fiction now seems less persuasive.

One of the clearest examples of a correspondence between life and work is the significance of masochism in both. There are, of course, characters with overt masochistic sexual preferences (such as Martin Lynch-Gibbon in A Severed Head or

Blaise Gavender and Emily McHugh in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine). But

Murdoch’s novels also feature many other characters who exhibit, as critics have noted, a masochistic response to love. Carol Siegel has shown that Murdoch’s male heroes tend to experience love as something excessive and overwhelming that must be submitted to without volition (Siegel 95–103). Dorothy Winsor has noted how even those characters who selflessly devote themselves to others and would thus seem to approximate the Good, such as Harriet Gavender in The Sacred and Profane Love

Machine, exemplify “an oddly masochistic notion of goodness” (Winsor 401).

This tendency becomes even more notable when we consider Murdoch’s own, newly revealed, tendency towards masochism. The centrepiece of PeterConradi’s biography is the story, corroborated by extracts from her journals, of a sado-

3 masochistic affair Murdoch conducted in secret with the writer Elias Canetti. Conradi is careful to note that she “did not judge a proclivity for masochism harshly,” and that masochism “was only one part of her highly complex nature” (Conradi 2002: 358).

But this qualification is rather unconvincing if we consider Conradi’s remarks against the ideas of those who have attempted to theorize masochism.

In his 1924 essay “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (Freud 1984) Freud distinguished between three principal kinds of masochism: “erotogenic” (the deriving of sexual excitement from physical pain), “feminine” (the desire to be beaten), and

“moral” (where the superego “punishes” the ego). Theorists since (whom I will consider in more depth below) have followed Freud’s terminology by showing that masochism in its most familiar form as sexual fantasy and enactment is only one manifestation of more a fundamental or, to use Leo Bersani’s phrase, ontological type of masochism. In response to Conradi’s disclaimer, we could surmise that although masochism in its erotogenic form may have manifested itself only sporadically in

Murdoch’s life, the structure of masochism might well have determined many of the patterns in other aspects of her life and work: her dealings with others, the presentation of character or plot in her novels, and, most intriguingly, her literary theory. For the fact is that masochism plays a fundamental role in Murdoch’s theory of literary production, though this is not always obvious. As I will suggest in what follows, it is the issue around which some of the crucial tensions between her theory and her practice gather.

To begin with, we should recognise that while Murdoch’s literary theory recalls a range of theories of authorship from romanticism (e.g. Schiller, Coleridge, Keats) to

4 modernism (Eliot and Joyce) and poststructuralism (Barthes, perhaps even Bakhtin), the body of thought it most resembles is psychoanalysis. Her theory of artistic production rests on a principle similar to the one which underpins much of Freud’s writings on aesthetics: art arises out of the effort to defuse our natural desires. It is important not to overplay this similarity, because for Freud art remains a disguised expression of selfish impulses no matter its quality, while for Murdoch, the better the art the further away it is from personal desire. Yet fundamentally Murdoch would seem to share Freud’s view that the seductions of the unconscious—the artist’s compulsions and fantasies—are never far away from artistic endeavour. To guard against this she endorses something like Freud’s notion of sublimation, a process by which, as she summarizes it herself in The Fire and the Sun, “[t]he destructive power of the neurosis is foiled by art; the art object expresses the neurotic conflict and defuses it” (Murdoch 1999c: 423).

The psychoanalytic dimension of Murdoch’s approach to the novel is suggested most clearly in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ ” her most sustained engagementwith Freud.

Here she expands on the rather general references to the dangers of “personal obsession” and “fantasy” in previous works (e.g. “The Sublime and the Beautiful

Revisited” and “Against Dryness”) and focuses on masochism in particular as a danger to artistic creation:

A chief enemy to [. . .] clarity of vision, whether in art or in morals, is the

system to which the technical name of sado-masochism has been given. It is the

peculiar subtlety of this system that, while constantly leading attention and

energy back into the self, it can produce, almost all the way as it were to the

5 summit, plausible imitations of what is good. Refined sado-masochism can ruin

art which is too good to be ruined by the cruder vulgarities of self-indulgence.

One’s self is interesting, so one’s motives are interesting, and the unworthiness

of one’s motives is interesting. (Murdoch 1999a: 355).

This passage is not far from depicting authorship as an inherently perverse activity: whenever an author aims at achieving “clarity of vision,” masochistic impulses are ready to derail the process. Artistic creation is presented here as nothing other than a struggle against masochism, the implication being that, if left to its own devices—without careful attention—art will naturally become an outlet for masochistic desire.

We might say then that Murdoch’s theory of the novel is founded upon a kind of aesthetic equivalent of Freud’s “primary masochism.” Masochism, Freud comes to realise in “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” is a “norm of behaviour” rather than a sexual perversion. This essay signifies an important moment of reconceptualization for Freud, as it overturned his longheld view (as expressed in earlier work like “Instincts and their Vissitudes” or “A Child is Being Beaten”) that sadism was the primary impulse in the psyche and masochism the result of this aggression subsequently being turned against the subject itself. Instead, influenced by his conceptualization of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1923),

Freud contends that there is in fact a primary masochism, a masochism which is the result of the death drive being directed towards oneself rather than towards an external object. The process by which sadistic impulses become directed inwards was what he

6 came to consider as secondary masochism. As Lacan was to summarize this reversal,

“sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism” (Lacan 1977:186).

Leo Bersani has usefully considered how primary masochism—or his critical revision of Freud’s theory—impacts upon aesthetic production. Because sexuality, in his view, is “that which is intolerable to the structured self”—a jouissance which

“shatters” the coherence of subjectivity—it is in fact nothing other than “a tautology for masochism” (Bersani 1986: 39), that is, a kind of pain that brings the pleasure of dissolution. Masochism is primary in this radical sense: rather than being a property of sexuality, it is in fact its defining feature, and subjectivity itself is constituted in order for sexuality to have a structure to blow apart. Bersani goes on to suggest that this inherent sexual masochism is what accounts for cultural sublimation. Masochism, in other words, is not only primary in determining sexuality and subjectivity, but has a foundational role in cultural production, too: “the taming of our sexuality perhaps depends, as I have been suggesting, on the cultural ‘assumption,’ or replay, of its masochistic nature” (Bersani 1986: 115). For Bersani the aesthetic is “a perpetuation and elaboration of masochistic sexual tensions” (Bersani 1986: 107).

Murdoch’s implicit belief in “primary masochism” is markedly different from both Freud’s and Bersani’s in a number of ways. Most obviously, she understands masochism not as a shattering of subjectivity, as Bersani does, but as a mechanism which sustains a particular egocentric view of oneself as coherent subject. When asked in an interview about Dorothy Winsor’s idea of her “masochistic notion of goodness” she replied: “I wouldn’t use the word masochistic. That suggests that there is something self-regarding in this pursuit. What is to be ‘destroyed’ is one’s egoism,

7 not oneself” (Heusel 2002: 200). Nevertheless, she shares with both the view that art is an attempt to deal with the effects of a particular libidinal energy which inevitably directs itself back towards the author. The difference is that where Bersani asserts the value of this kind of masochism as something which can “maintain the tensions of an eroticized, de-narrativized, and mobile consciousness” (Bersani 1986: 63–4),

Murdoch (like Freud in Bersani’s reading of him) would seem to equate masochism to a dangerously productive force which must be tamed.

In practice, Murdoch’s efforts to temper her own tendency towards masochism while writing fiction resemble Freud’s third category of masochism in “The

Economics of Masochism,” that of “moral masochism.” Moral masochism, he argues, is the result of the ego’s efforts to commandeer unruly libidinal impulses to ensure the resolution of the Oedipus complex. But this means that the energy from the id asserts itself elsewhere, in the formation of an overbearing superego. Murdoch’s portrait of the author, constantly subject to masochistic impulses, is the equivalent of the ego in

Freud’s structure, while the ethical ideal of impersonality, a safeguard against this process, figures as a version of the superego. Her two characteristic writing “selves,” novelist and philosopher, function in her work like the ego and the superego in the psyche. That is, her philosophical self advances an “official” theory of authorship (in her non-fiction writings—interviews, philosophy and literary criticism) which involves laying down injunctions, prohibitions and codes of behaviour. With all the characteristic rhetoric of the superego, this persona reminds Murdoch that the good author keeps herself out of her work, strives to create characters who are not indulgent versions of herself, and avoids imposing consoling patterns. The authorial self which

8 actually writes the fiction is analogous to the ego, trying to steer a course between the demands of the superego and the desires of the unconscious.

The key to Murdoch’s appropriation of masochism in her theory is one of its fundamental characteristics, what we might call the element of masquerade. Theorists of masochism (such as Freud, Reik and Deleuze) have noted its “theatrical” quality.

Part of this is its curious potential to appear as something other than it is, especially as its “opposite,” sadism. Freud’s famous discussion of the beating fantasy in his essay

“A Child is Being Beaten,” for example, shows how the fantasy originally appears to be sadistic, but that this masks its fundamental masochistic nature.3 Murdoch’s notion of masochism turns on the idea that masochism, like a great actor, is capable of seducing those who witness its performance into believing that it is in fact something other than it is. If masochism is removed from a purely sexual context and “refined”

(sublimated) into morality or art, she argues, it can present itself as something virtuous

—i.e. telling the truth about the reality of the world around us—when in fact it is driven by a secret egotism which invests personal emotional energy in what it depicts.

Depicting suffering is really a way of feeding a dangerous interest in one’s own self: of gaining pleasure from enduring apparent unpleasure.4

Support for this account of masochism as masquerade can be found in a theory which departs further from the psychoanalytic paradigm, Gilles Deleuze’s, as outlined in “Coldness and Cruelty.” Central to his essay is the insistence that we should be wary of the automatic pairing together of sadism and masochism, as “their processes and formations are entirely different” (Deleuze 46). Deleuze argues that masochism presents itself as passive suffering when in fact it has engineered its own passivity

9 through busy preparatory activity. Because masochism typically operates according to a contract, often drawn up explicitly, which persuades the torturer to act in a certain way, the result is that the masochist “appears to be held by real chains, but in fact he is bound by his word alone” (Deleuze 75). Thus the secret pleasure of the masochist derives not from being severely punished by an external agency, but by fashioning one’s own punishment by moulding this agency oneself. Masochism is not a matter of laying oneself open to the will of another, but of willing that other into being.

The peculiar capacity of masochism to appear as something other than it is seems to me illuminating in relation to one of the most distinctive features of

Murdoch’s fiction, the distribution of power amongst her characters. Her fictional world is dominated by a series of “enchanter-figures” who rule over others like cruel tyrants, punishing them emotionally, often enjoying them sexually. It is natural to characterize these characters as sadistic, especially as they exhibit something of the distinctive sadistic coldness in their disregard for the feelings of others. But what makes them powerful is the way that others enable them to remain powerful. Deleuze argues that what distinguishes masochism from sadism is not material or moral qualities but formal ones. It is not the content of masochistic activities that is important (neither the particular means of visiting pain, beatings or piercings, whatever, nor the guilt-feelings Freud was preoccupied with in his consideration of masochism) but the particular context that the subject sets up and the role s/he plays in the narrative. A sadist might appear in the masochistic universe, but he is only a sadist from the perspective of the masochist. A “proper” sadist is not what a masochist requires, for integral to the masochistic structure is the need to mould a torturer

10 through persuasion, usually through the contract. This suggests a way of understanding Murdoch’s masochistic characters—the women who imagine they are in love with a powerful enchanter and surrender themselves to him abjectly and the men who are willing to become their slaves (e.g. Tommy or Arthur in A Word Child,

Morgan in A Fairly Honourable Defeat)—who often offer themselves completely and explicitly to their imagined tormentors: “Julius, I could be your slave”; “I don’t want a slave,” “I would do anything you wanted, perform any penance” [Murdoch 1972:

142–3]). Murdoch’s stories, in other words, present the enchanters from the overall perspective of the masochist rather than the sadist.

Masochistic masquerade features more profoundly in another typical feature of

Murdoch’s fiction, its depiction of characters who endure suffering which actually they secretly desire and prolong. One of the most interesting examples of this is

Murdoch’s 1958 novel The Bell. A reading of this novel shows the capacity for self- deception which is typical of Murdoch’s characters in a way which supports her understanding of masochistic masquerade in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good.’”

The Bell is the first of Murdoch’s novels to make use of the audacious grand flourish of plotting which characterises later novels such as An Accidental Man (1970) and A Word Child (1975), where a shocking event that happened in the past comes to happen again, as if predetermined. After a scandalous affair with one of his pupils, former schoolteacher Michael Meade is attempting to rebuild his life as leader of an

Anglican lay community in Imber Court in Oxfordshire. But having apparently freed himself from the scandal of his past, he does exactly the same thing again. He impulsively kisses Toby, a young man who is visiting Imber before going to

11 university. As befits a novel so concerned with religion, this is the most obvious of a number of “falls.” It is Michael’s second fall from grace, while Toby is brutally propelled from the innocent world of childhood to the ambivalent world of adult sexual desire. What is more, Nick Fawley, the subject of Michael’s first indiscretion, who has turned up at Imber working as a groundsman, figures (as his surname suggests) as a kind of fallen angel, once innocent and beautiful, now exiled into an contemptuous alcoholic hell. His brooding presence on the margins heralds the dramatic climax to the plot, when he commits suicide.

Michael’s “fall” casts doubt on what he had been determined to regard as his redemption after the scandal of his previous career. The lessons he believes he has learned after the initial scandal are most clearly expressed in a sermon he gives to the assembled community. Where his colleague, James Tayper Pace, has, in a previous sermon, defined goodness as a matter of adhering to rules, a kind of Kantian categorical imperative which requires working “from outside inwards” (Murdoch

1999d: 132), Michael argues goodness is the result of knowing oneself, acting from

“inside outwards” (Murdoch 1999d: 204). What is valuable is “exploring one’s personality and estimating the consequences rather than austerely following the rules”

(Murdoch 1999d: 205). Thus Michael implicitly endorses Milton’s argument in his

Areopagitica speech of 1644, which James had quoted from disapprovingly, that knowledge of good requires a knowledge of evil: both are inseparable and can only be distinguished through an understanding of each. But this is problematic because “the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned” (Milton 1973: 14–15).

12 Just as evil can appear as good, so solipsism can masquerade as altruism. The irony about Michael’s sermon is that he clearly does not know himself. As we see time and again in Murdoch, it is easier when placed in a troubling situation to succumb to a “mythological feeling of destiny,” as she herself put it (Bradbury 1976): that is, to interpret our experiences in terms of a narrative imposed by some external force and to act subsequently in a way which conforms to its apparent logic. This is a very real danger to Michael, who tends to interpret his life in religious terms. When the Abbess of Imber first outlines her vision of how the establishment of a religious retreat can help assuage the prevailing modern spiritual “sickness,” Michael instantly recognises himself in her words, hearing in them precisely the kind of summons he has always been expecting: “It was an aspect of Michael’s belief in God, and one which although he knew it to be dangerous he could never altogether reject, that he expected the emergence in his life of patterns and signs. He had always felt himself to be a man with a definite destiny, a man waiting for a call” (Murdoch 1999d: 82).

Michael’s way of coping with traumatic events is by appeal to religious narratives. As he prepares to put the scandal surrounding Nick behind him and start a new career at Imber, he reflects that “the catastrophe which destroyed his first attempt

[to become a priest] had been designed to humble him” (Murdoch 1999d: 108). And when Nick unexpectedly reappears in Michael’s life at Imber he is sure that “Nick had been brought back to him, surely by no accident” (Murdoch 1999d: 114). It is therefore a natural response during the events of the second crisis, his desire for Toby and Nick’s subsequent death, to interpret both occurences as somehow predetermined.

One of his immediate responses to Nick’s suicide is to think that by killing himself

13 Nick must have hit upon a more elaborate form of revenge than simply seducing

Toby: “Instead, Nick had forced Toby to play exactly the part which Nick himself had played thirteen years earlier” (Murdoch 1999d: 295). The reader knows this is unlikely, having been party to the rather awkward, distanced relationship that Nick and Toby have in fact had.

This is where we can appreciate the fact that the apparently neat binaristic philosophical symmetry of The Bell, exemplified by James’s and Michael’s carefully placed sermons, is in fact offset by a later third “sermon,” which is what a drunken

Nick calls a bitter and ironic statement, far removed from the measured rhetoric of

James’s and Michael’s speeches, that he delivers to Toby shortly before his suicide.

He begins by presenting Imber as a world where innocence has been lost, something which certainly applies to Toby’s recent experience there. He suggests that there is something masochistic about religion, as sinning enables the sinner to gain the exquisite jouissance of repentence and confession. Although Nick is, as Toby protests,

“raving,” his point seems to be that Michael’s apology to Toby and the anguished monologue of repentence he is running through in his mind (which we can vouch for, having just read it) provide him with a masochistic kind of pleasure. As a counterpoint to the two previous sermons, Nick suggests that besides renouncing the personality and adhering to the law of God, or interpreting the law of God according to a detailed knowledge of the limits of one’s personality, there is a third position: the spiritual masquerade which pretends to look at the self unflinchingly but in doing so only submits to another form of self-deception, one that substitutes forbidden pleasure for a secret enjoyment sanctioned by the church.

14 The dangers are apparent in the way Michael has chosen to interpret his original “fall,” his relationship with Nick. When initially considering whether to try to become a priest, he is worried that his homosexuality is likely fatally to compromise his religious ambitions. He resolves the dilemma by deciding that “in some curious way the emotion which fed both arose deeply from the same source” (Murdoch

1999d: 100). This enables him to give up sexual desire and redirect its energy into his religion. But in the midst of the crisis caused by his relationship with Nick, he begins to look at this from the opposite perspective. Rather than his religious impulses being tarnished by his sexual desire, surely his sexuality could be purified by its proximity to noble spiritual impulses. “Vaguely Michael had visions of himself as the boy’s spiritual guardian, his passion slowly transformed into a lofty and more selfless attachment” (Murdoch 1999d: 105). On one level, of course, a serious debate is being conducted here about the Platonic theory of low and high Eros—or to put it in

Freudian terms, sublimation. But on another level (and the choice of word “vaguely” is the clue) it suggests the dangers of using a mythical or theoretical framework to make sense of experience. There is something here reminsicent of Death in Venice, in which an older man also justifies his pursuit of a younger one by invoking Platonic philosophy.

Michael Levenson has argued that The Bell can be illuminated by comparison with an early essay of Murdoch’s, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” which argues how “parables and stories” can function as “moral guides” to an incomprehensible world. The last line of the novel, Levenson suggests—“Tonight she would be telling the whole story to Sally” (Murdoch 1999d: 316)—indicates that Dora Greenfield,

15 another of the central characters, has “gained” a past which enables her to have a future. She “anticipates an act of memory, and she does so by preparing to tell a story, the ‘whole story’ ” (Levenson 577). This is persuasive, when we consider that the other main characters also do something similar. Toby is clearly affected by Michael’s advances, as because of them he has “received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure” (Murdoch 1999d: 160).

Immature for his age, Toby has had a rude awakening. Yet because his inexperience is often referred to by the narrator (e.g. Murdoch 1999d: 161), the suggestion is that this apparently traumatic event is really just part of gaining maturity. Toby slips out of the novel after being advised to leave Imber by an over-cautious James and is not mentioned again until he sends Michael a letter, once he has begun life at Oxford.

Michael is relieved to discern from it that Toby has apparently suffered neither from guilt nor anxiety, nor is he especially curious about Imber: “He was in a new and wonderful world, and already Imber had become a story” (Murdoch 1999d: 305).

Even Michael is able to recognise eventually that Nick “needed love, and he

[Michael] ought to have given him what he had to offer, without fears about its imperfection” (Murdoch 1999d: 307). He is able to understand that “[t]he pattern which he had seen in his life had existed only in his own romantic imagination. At the human level there was no pattern” (Murdoch 1999d: 308). He has assumed responsibility for the narrative which he had previously treated as being constructed by external forces. The implication is that imposing a narrative on one’s experience, composed with sufficient detachment and without conforming to pre-existing

16 conventions (such as the religious ones so central to The Bell or, we might add, psychoanalytic or historiographic ones), is a valuable moral activity.

Yet Michael’s experiences for most of the novel indicate that The Bell is more deeply concerned with the dangers of narrative, the way that random or simple causal occurrences can be perceived as part of a grandiose sequence of meaningful events,

“patterns and signs” by which the perceiver can inflate his or her sense of self- importance. Although the end of the novel shows that narrative can be written from the “inside outwards,” made personal, it has also suggested throughout that there is the danger that it can be the opposite. Worse, there is the possibility that narrative is constructed from a position where the inside is mistaken for the outside, as Michael is tempted to do for much of the novel. This is a particular problem for those of a masochistic disposition, like Michael.

The relationship of narrative to masochism is considered by Bersani in his tentative construction of an “aesthetics of masochism” in The Freudian Body. As a force synonymous with the shattering force of sexuality, masochism for Bersani is naturally “nonnarrative” (Bersani 1986: 113), for narrative—or at least traditional realist narrative—“fixes” the reader’s desire by attaching it to particular scenarios or images rather than allowing it to flow into displaced and indeterminate spaces. Freud himself is guilty of divesting masochism of its properly erotic quality through

“narrativization” (as Bersani contends he does with all sexuality) by incorporating it into a teleological account of infantile sexual development (Bersani 64). In Murdoch’s thought it seems that masochism and narrative are intertwined in a different way. The

Bell implies that narrative has a fundamentally masochistic component in so far as it

17 feeds impulses towards self-deception and self-aggrandizement. In doing so it would suggest, contra Bersani, that in realist narrative—and The Bell is a deliberately

“traditional” one in Bersani’s terms, as it was Murdoch’s first successful attempt to replicate the kind of realism produced by key influences like George Eliot and James

—positions are not as fixed as it might seem.5

No matter how casual, chronological and generic traditional narrative might be, it also depends upon interpretation, as the sequence of events it details has been ordered and presented by the narrator—and must be received (re-ordered and interpreted) by the reader. The “same” story—or, more specifically, the precise role of particular participants in the story—can of course be interpreted in different ways.

This fact is central to The Bell, even though it is not one of Murdoch’s fictions (like, for example, The Black Prince or The Sea, the Sea) which builds a self-conscious concern with narration into the story itself. Michael is perhaps the principal character, but the whole narrative is not just focalized through his consciousness but through those of the two other main characters too, Toby and Dora. By the end it is clear that each has interpreted the same story in different ways: Toby has learned a lesson which is crucial to becoming an adult, while Dora has been able to come to terms with her general inability to engage fully with life as a result of her troublesome marriage.

Another way of understanding the implications of masquerade in masochism is to say that masochism problematizes the act of interpretation, for it complicates notions of intention and the will.6 It is no accident that masochism has been the subject of such a diverse range of attempts at classification, not just in the clinical field (by psychoanalytic theorists and by the American Psychiatric Association7) but

18 by theorists of literature and film (see Siegel 1–7). Masochism shares its ability to simultaneously generate and confound interpretative endeavour with the work of art, which by definition encourages a multiplicity of interpretations. There is no doubt that this capacity enriches the experience of reading and analysing artistic works like The

Bell that focus on masochistic masquerade. But it also points to a problem with appropriating the structure of masochism into a theory of artistic production, such as

Murdoch’s, which depends upon dividing works of art into ethical categories.

Murdoch’s comments on art in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’ ” imply that one can distinguish between good art and bad art on the basis of the degree to which an author invests at a fantasmatic level in their work. But this is problematic given the deceptive—and self- deceptive—capacity of masochism which she describes.

The difficulties are clearly suggested in one of Murdoch’s later studies of the masochistic sensibility, The Black Prince (1973). This novel tells the story of Bradley

Pearson, an elderly artist who falls in love with Julian Baffin, the daughter of his friend and literary rival Arnold Baffin, and ends up framed for his murder. It is presented as a series of embedded narratives in the manner of Nabokov’s Pale Fire,

Bradley’s own narrative bookended by a series of deconstructive prefaces and postscripts supposedly written by other characters. Each of these functions as a kind of apologia for its narrator, justifying his or her actions in the main story in such a way that casts serious doubt on the motivations behind Bradley’s account and its veracity.

As such, The Black Prince is Murdoch’s most radically experimental, metafictional text.

19 At the heart of the novel is a scene in which Bradley gives Julian a comical erotically-charged “tutorial” on Hamlet. This provides the clearest illustration of Carol

Siegel’s theory (though she does not consider this novel) of the tendency of

Murdoch’s heroes to experience love as passionate surrender (Siegel 95–103), for once Julian has left the tutorial, Bradley ends up prostrate on the floor, shattered by the experience he has just undergone. The tutorial itself consists mainly of a lengthy discussion on masochism and art which relates not only to The Black Prince as a whole but to Murdoch’s consideration of masochism in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good.’ ”

Bradley argues that Shakespeare dares to make his own crisis of identity into the central issue in Hamlet and thus reveals himself to be the “king of masochists”

(Murdoch 1975: 199). Through Hamlet he puts on display his own suffering—the trauma of his Oedipal conflict, his melancholia and misogyny, but most of all the problem of being a writer, of being “made of words” (Murdoch 1975: 199). Hamlet is a daring piece of literary exhibitionism, Bradley thinks, because Shakespeare turns his personal desires and obsessions into beautiful, memorable language, “so public that it can be mumbled by a child” (Murdoch 1975: 200). This language represents him, puts his very character on public display: “Words are Hamlet’s being as they were

Shakespeare’s” (Murdoch 1975: 199). How, Bradley wonders, does Shakespeare dare to do it? “How can it not bring down on his head a punishment which is as much more exquisite than that of ordinary writers as the god whom he worships is above the god whom they worship?” (Murdoch 1975: 199).

From the reference to Hamlet as “the god’s flayed victim dancing the dance of creation,” it seems clear that the god Bradley envisages as Shakespeare’s is also the

20 god whom he feels is his own: Apollo. Throughout the novel Bradley’s meditations on art are addressed to the mysterious “editor” Loxias (who writes the first preface and the last postscript) whose name is one of the epithets used for Apollo, god of art, leader of the muses (Conradi 1989: 185). This indicates that the novel, like many of

Murdoch’s, is informed by the myth of Apollo and Marysas, which is commonly seen as being about artistic hubris and a particularly literal form of ascesis. Apollo punishes

Marsyas for daring to compete with the gods in the performance of his art (music), just as in Hamlet Shakespeare risks showing excessive pride and incurring the wrath of the gods by putting himself and his genius on display so daringly.

A.S. Byatt and Richard Todd have both already considered The Black Prince in terms of Murdoch’s understanding of masochism, pointing out that Bradley Pearson derives pleasure from the humiliation and punishment he suffers in his story (Byatt

271; Todd 29–30). Bradley Pearson serves as a perfect exemplification of the kind of ingenious artist who presents his story as a tale of purification when in fact it is driven by the jouissance he derives from the idea of suffering. This is intensified by the fact that the novel is narrated retrospectively in the first person, for as author of his own narrative it is Bradley who has chosen to present himself in this way, wallowing in his own humiliation.8 Byatt and Todd note rightly that the novel illustrates Murdoch’s argument in “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts” that “[m]asochism is the artist’s greatest and most subtle enemy” (Murdoch 1999e: 371). More precisely, as

Todd suggests, Bradley’s idiosyncratic reading of Hamlet illuminates Murdoch’s mysterious comment at the end of her earlier essay, “Against Dryness,” that despite

Shakespeare’s special talent for creating properly “impersonal” art, “even Hamlet

21 looks second-rate compared with Lear” (Murdoch 1999f: 295). The difference, as she was later to elaborate in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, is that Hamlet conforms to the Aristotelian “tragic ideal” and provides a sense of catharsis which “redeems” the tragic events of the play. King Lear, however, gives us, in the death of Cordelia, the

“absolute cancellation” of this idea. There is no reason for Cordelia’s death (i.e. it is unnecessary for the unfolding of the plot) other than to cancel out Lear’s masochistic

(in Murdoch’s terms) vision of blissful reunion with Cordelia: “We two alone shall sing like birds i’ the cage” (Murdoch 1992: 119–23).

But what makes The Black Prince’s concern with masochism especially complex is the fact that the idea of masquerade figures as part of its structure rather than just being treated thematically. Because of the novel’s self-reflexivity, which makes Bradley’s comments about his art reflect equally on the novel in which he appears (e.g. when he describes Hamlet as “a supreme creative feat, a work endlessly reflecting on itself, not discursively, but in its very substance, a Chinese box of words . . .” or says that Shakespeare “is speaking as few artists can speak, in the first person and yet at the pinnacle of artifice” [Murdoch 1975: 199]), it means that

Murdoch herself is indulging in a form of masquerade, allowing one of her fictional characters to speak directly for her. This applies at a direct level, in fact, as The Black

Prince is a novel in which Murdoch flirts continuously with appearing in her own fiction, “dividing herself” into both its principal authors, Bradley and Arnold (Conradi

1989 3–4). As the prolific writer of bestselling intellectual romances Arnold represents the public version of her authorial persona, while Bradley figures as her

22 more puritanical serious side (the one closest—in tandem of course with Loxias—to her philosophical superego).

The reflexive logic which operates throughout Bradley’s discourse in the novel naturally functions in his discussion of masochism too. What he says about

Shakespeare, in other words, not only applies to himself but to Iris Murdoch.

Shakespeare “is at his most cryptic when he is talking about himself” (Murdoch 1975:

198), says Bradley. The artist “appears, however much he may imagine that he hides, in the revealed extension of his work” (Murdoch 1975: 12). The implication of the tutorial section is that in The Black Prince Murdoch is performing an act just as daring, just as exhibitionist as Shakespeare’s in Hamlet. Furthermore it implies that it is just as masochistic, too, because at all points it directs its energies back into the self of its author. In writing a novel which revolves around the difficulty of writing impersonally Murdoch is dwelling as openly as she dare on her own fears as an artist.

For it is striking how far The Black Prince is from her own “ethics of impersonality.”

Her unprecedented act of literary exhibitionism in this novel contravenes most of the injunctions of her literary superego: it is exquisitely patterned; the hero is manifested as a—heavily disguised—version of herself who regards all other characters in terms of how they relate to himself rather than as separate individuals. Just as Shakespeare risks hubris by putting himself on a par with the gods, so does The Black Prince contradict Murdoch’s ethics of literary production by unmasking her as the supremely transcendent author, organizing tyrannically all the points of view in the text, rather than letting the characters exist freely as separate beings. The radical implication is that if this applies to The Black Prince, the same can be said of her other novels, even

23 the less experimental ones where she assumes a position of “impersonality” with regard to her fictional world and its inhabitants.

A convoluted text like The Black Prince creates a similar sense of indeterminacy to the masochistic masquerade. Though we identify with Bradley

Pearson—just as we do with Hamlet—we cannot be absolutely sure in the end if his version of events is correct. We cannot be certain which, if any, of the interpretations of his narrative offered by the other members of the cast in their postscripts is the correct one. In this sense, Murdoch has managed to keep her distance from her characters, as she always intended: the novel does not suggest which view she endorses. Yet, crucially, this sense of indeterminacy prevails when it comes to the question of masochism and the novel. For at the end it is unclear whether the narrative

Bradley produces is the outcome of having been led from his ordeal to some greater apprehension of reality, or whether it is merely an example of the “refined” sado- masochism which can masquerade as good art. In this novel, one never can tell: all the acts of criticism it contains—from Bradley’s partial reviews of Arnold’s novels to the postscripts analysing his own narrative—contain insights, “truths,” but which are skewed by desire. This aspect of the novel, Murdoch’s most sustained practical enquiry into the theory and practice of authorship, complicates her literary theory.

How can we tell whether any good work of art is really a good work of art or one that is only pretending to be one?

The Black Prince thus opens up a contradiction at the heart of Murdoch’s ethics of impersonality. We could quite easily regard her efforts to avoid masochism as in fact masking a deeper—more refined—masochism of her own. In “The Sovereignty of

24 Good Over Other Concepts,” Murdoch writes that consciousness “is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain” (Murdoch 1999e: 364). Yet doesn’t it follow that Murdoch’s ethics urge us to face this pain and, moreover, derive some pleasure—the pleasure of moral rectitude—from it? As Nick Fawley suggests in

The Bell, there is of course strong masochistic potential in ascesis. Theorists of masochism such as Theodor Reik (1957) and Kaja Silverman (1992) have explored the masochistic dimension of Christianity. Religious ritual enables the individual to assuage guilt and enjoy life by undergoing a process of self-sacrifice, by, as Silverman puts it, “remak[ing] him or herself according to the model of the suffering Christ”

(Silverman 1992: 199). To an extent, authorship is another example of moral masochism as it is about choosing to put oneself through a difficult, painful experience, and deriving enjoyment from this. Murdoch’s writing is not obviously the product of suffering or pain in the way that, say, Kafka’s is, but it is clear that, at least, it requires a kind of self-sacrifice. Whether or not one would go as far as saying that this means denying her own special gifts as a novelist—in other words, choosing to limit her natural aptitude for plotting and creating totalizing pattern in order to stay true to her theory of the novel—one has to acknowledge the sheer discipline involved in staying true to her ideal. We could perhaps go further and suggest that Murdoch’s theory turns on the idea of submission: the artist remains passive in order to let the world in all its contingent reality pass through her into her work.

The problem with Murdoch’s theory of art is precisely the fact that it is also a theory of ethics. It is never simply a question of “the novel” with Murdoch; it is

25 always “the good novel” or “the bad novel,” terms that are almost always relative and dependent on context (and Murdoch’s discussions of literature rarely give detailed examples). When it comes to art it is not possible, even if we decide it is desirable, to assess value by applying rules “from outside inwards” (to use the terms of James

Tayper Pace in The Bell), especially if they are rules which appeal to psychopathological criteria. Murdoch’s decision to co-opt the structure of masochism into her ethics of literary production is perhaps an implicit admission of her own ultimate fear as a philosopher. As she goes on to say in the passage from “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’ ” with which I began this essay, her impersonal language barely disguising its personal significance:

Of course one is afraid that the attempt to be good may turn out to be

meaningless, or at best something vague and not very important, [. . .] or that

the very greatness of great art may be an ephemeral illusion. (Murdoch 1999a

1. The publication of Gillian Dooley’s book From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2003) means we can now do this.

2. John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998) Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories (1999), and The Widower’s House (2002); Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: Harper Collins, 2001); A. N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her (London: Hutchison, 2003).

3. Freud separates the fantasy into a sequence of three clear phases or “scenes”: “my father is beating the child”; “I am being beaten by my father”; “A child is being beaten.” Although the enjoyment gained from each of these seems would seem on the surface to be sadistic, Freud argues that the fantasy is in fact masochistic, because the first sadistic element of the fantasy—“my father is beating the child whom I hate”—is

26 the product of an earlier phase of sexual development (the sadistic-anal stage) which has become repressed through guilt as the child moves into the phallic stage. This repression through guilt actually “transforms the sadism of this stage into masochism, which is passive and again in a certain sense narcissistic” (Freud 1993: 181).

4. It is worth pointing out that Murdoch here is surely referring only to masochism rather than sadism, even though she uses the term “sadomasochism.” Her insights do not seem to apply to sadism, which is purely, overtly egotistical in her terms, compared to masochism, which has the capacity to give the illusion of being something other than it is.

5. It should be noted that Bersani and Ulysses Dutoit (Bersani and Dutoit) also see “sadomasochistic” ritual, as opposed to the productive masochism they champion, as an archetypal “narrative” phenomenon because it fixes its participants into positions. See Caserio for a discussion which engages with their theory to explore the productive masochism of non-realist postmodern narrative.

6. This is clear when we consider legal attempts to interpret cases involving masochism, such as the infamous “Spanner” case in 1993 in Britain. Operation Spanner was a police investigation, begun in 1987, which resulted in a group of men being charged with the murder of a teenage rent-boy. The men successfully argued in court that the death was the result of a sado-masochistic act which had gone tragically wrong. Can someone be guilty of perpetrating violence on a person, if prior consent has been given via a contract? More recently a similar question was raised in the trial of Arwin Meiwes in 2004 in Germany, who killed and ate Bernd Jürgen Brandes as part of a sado-masochistic ritual. The prosecution were unable to convince the jury that the case was one of murder because the victim had clearly given his consent.

7. Carol Siegel notes that the American Psychiatric Association preferred the term “self-defeating personality disorder” to “masochism” in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM-III-R) because of the diagnostic difficulties of the original terms.

8. Important here, too, is the way Loxias figures as a version of the superego in Freud’s theory of “moral masochism” and therefore as the counterpart of what I have described as the superegoic element of Murdoch’s aesthetic. In “The Economic Problem of Masochism” Freud insists the superego is never impersonal. It begins as introjected imagos of the parents, but progressively gives way to a succession of authority figures. “The last figure in the series that began with the parents is the dark power of Destiny which only the fewest of us are able to look upon as impersonal” (Freud 1984: 423). Immediately before the Hamlet tutorial Bradley feels “the hand of destiny” (Murdoch 1975: 193) upon him and it is reasonable to assume that the shadowy figure of Loxias is linked to his sense of fate and impending judgement. Throughout he is aware of Loxias watching his every move and registering his every thought: e.g. “My friend Loxias has taught me the absolute spiritual necessity of silence” (Murdoch 1975: 187). While Loxias seems to the reader much less severe and

27 less demonstrative than Bradley makes him out to be—indeed his characteristic move is to refrain from judging—it seems that Bradley’s masochism has characterized him as severe. So on one level Loxias’s modest claims that he is simply an editor, a rather shabby “impresario” figure, are to be taken as true. To Bradley however, he the superegoic agent of destiny.

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