Narrative Techniques in the Novels of Iris Murdoch

NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES IN THE NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH By Roslyn Lee Sulcas University of Cape Town A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Cape Town, in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. Cape Town: September 1988. The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town CONTENTS Page Abstract .......................................... i Acknowledgements .................................. ii Editions Used ..................................... iii Preface ........................................... iv CHAPTER ONE ....•............••...•.•..•........... 1 CHAPTER TWO ...........•.•..•.•......•.••.......... 2 2 CHAPTER THREE •...•.....•.•...•••.•.••.•........•..• 6 6 CHAPTER FOUR ..•...•.•••..••...••.••..•••.•.•••.•.. 11 3 CONCLUSION ..........•.•........•..•...•.....•.•... 148 Select Bibliography ............................... 154 .... i ABSTRACT In this thesis I have departed from the prevalent critical concentration on the affiliations between Murdoch's fiction and philosophy, and have attempted to explore the relationship between her narrative techniques and the conventions of realism. In doing so, I use the narrative theory of Dorrit Cohn, who proposes that novelists concerned to render a sense of "reality" are also those who construct the most elaborate and artificial fictive worlds and characters. I propose that Murdoch's "real-isation" of her fictional world incorporates the problems of access to, and representation of the real. This links her to two ostensibly antithetical traditions: that of British realism (within which she would place herself), and also a fictional mode consonant with the poststructuralist writing that focuses on such problems. An examination of the early novels in terms of the correlation between "realism" and technical sophistication implied by Cohn reveals a division of narrative purpose that Murdoch has herself described in the early part of her career as an alternation between "open" and "closed" novels. I suggest in the thesis that these two fictional modes are deliberate choices of style on Murdoch's part, rather than a "failed" realism, and that their different readerly rewards are compounded by the successful merging of these competing .views of the real in the later novels. My narratological emphasis in this dissertation indicates also the ways in which Murdoch's fiction incorporates the comedic, the romantic and the gothic into a framework of orthodox verisimilitude, utilising the clashes between these genres to foreground the difficulties of a unified view. This is particularly successful in the first-person novels, where the overt problematising of self-representation paradoxically feeds into our sense of their "realism". ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Human Sciences Research Council and the University of Cape Town for financial assistance that has helped to make this research and writing possible. My supervisor, Dr Gail Fincham, not only offered unfailing insight and perceptive advice, but was consistently encouraging and enthusiastic about this project; any failings are all my own. For their advice and help, I would like to thank Eduard Fagan, Patrick Fish and Sue Joubert; for book- hunting in London, Lundi Swain. Michael Gresty's encouragement and help sustained me through the final year, as did the consistent good cheer of my siblings and Carol Sulcas. Most importantly, thanks are due to my parents, without whose support, both emotional and material, I could not have written this thesis. I would like to express my gratitude also to Dame Iris Murdoch, who agreed to an informal interview, and answered my queries with great kindness and patience. **** iii EDITIONS USED An Accidental Man. Triad/Panther: London 1979. The Bell. T_riad/Panther: London 1976. The Black Prince. Chatto and Windus: London 1974. A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Penguin: Harmondsworth 1972. The Good Apprentice. Chatto and Windus: London 1985. Nuns and Soldiers. Penguin: Harmondsworth 1981. The Philospher's Pupil. Penguin: Harmondsworth 1984. The Sea, The Sea. Triad/Granada: London 1980. The Unicorn. Chatto and Windus: London 1963. Under the Net. Penguin: Harmondsworth 1960. **** L --· 172 W' b:N:rMte:iSS t , . iv PREFACE This thesis aims to consider the technical strategies that underlie Iris Murdoch's commitment to the traditional realist novel and simultaneous awareness of the difficulty of representing, or gaining access to, the "real". In the introductory chapter I discuss Murdoch's relationship to both the realist tradition and the poststructuralist critique of that tradition, and place her writings in their context of post-war literary trends in England and France. I also outline the development of narrative theory as a branch of fictional poetics, and consider the utility of its insights for a study of the particular components and effects of Murdoch's work. In Chapter Two, using Dorrit Cohn's theoretical categories, I look at two early third-person novels, The Bell and The Unicorn, as examples of Murdoch's employment of both realist and romance conventions; an alternation of styles evident in her early work and which, I argue, are successfully combined in the later novel, An Accidental Man. In Chapter Three I again use Cohn's categories to discuss first-person narration in Under the Net and The Black Prince, and propose that this mode offers Murdoch a means of reconciling the tensions between competing views of reality. This brings me to a detailed study of The Sea, The Sea in Chapter Four, where I move from a technically specific discussion of Murdoch's fictional strategies to the broader questions of formal organisation and genre. In conclusion, I briefly consider Murdoch's most recent work, and relate its developments to my earlier discussions. ; L V "Only art explains, and that cannot itself be explained." (Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince) CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION In the period since the publication of her first novel, Under the Net, in 1954, Iris Murdoch has emerged as one of the most important and productive English novelists of her generation as well as a leading moral philosopher and the author of a number of influential articles on contemporary fiction. In both her novels and her critical writings she has attempted to grapple with the difficulties and potentialities of contemporary fiction, emphasising her intention to write as a realist in an identifiable tradition of English and European fiction, while acknowledging the virtual impossibility of doing so in an age of aesthetic and epistemological uncertainty. Critical response to this dually- focused enterprise has been understandably schizophrenic from the start: "Under the Net is a winner", wrote Kingsley Amis, reviewing the novel in 1954, while The New Statesman dismissed the same novel as "cafe writing"., Subsequent readers, alienated by Murdoch's middle-class milieux and proliferation of civil servants have demonstrated marked hostility at this recalcitrantly old-fashioned subject matter at an historical moment of deep scepticism about social continuity and the possibility of its literary representation. On the other hand, the puzzling texture and exotic patterning of the novels has led to cries of betrayal from reviewers who value what Bernard Bergonzi has called "the English Quoted by McEwan, Neil, The Survival of the Novel. Macmillan: London 1981, 38. 2 Ideology"; 2 a sense of English literary culture as untheoretical and of the nineteenth century realist text as a literary paradigm for the contemporary novel. That Murdoch's consistently stated desire to write within a realist tradition3 is not an argument for a return to the nineteenth century, but for a literature that is nourished by its ancestry, is a distinction largely ignored by both of these captious groupings, who have equally plundered her theoretical writing for handy critical ammunition. The impulse behind nineteenth-century realism was the attentive perception and depiction of the history of characters and milieux: original polemical statements of realism fought hard to assert that the realist writer was merely a scribe for society; that the author's production was a mirror of life reflecting "the blue of the skies and the mire of the road below". 4 Murdoch's sense of an artistic tradition of realism, within which she would hope to situate her own work, is clearly broader than the particular historical developments peculiar to the novel and would include Shakespeare and great artists of every period who have attempted to render a sense of "reality" rather than a mimetic realism. This reality, or 2 Bergonzi, Bernard, The Situation of the Novel. Macmillan: - London 1970, 60. 3 see Rose, W.K., "Iris Murdoch, Informally", London Magazine, 8(June 1968), 59-73; Bellamy, Michael 0., "An Interview with Iris Murdoch", Contemporary Literature, XXVIII, no.2, 129-140; Haffenden, John, Novelists in Interview. Methuen: London and new York 1985, 191-209. 4 Quoted in the Introduction to Stendhal, Scarlet and Black. Penguin: Harmonsworth 1981, 11. L 3 "true" perception of the world, is a development of Platonic thought and is fundamentally alien to a conventional literary realism in its acknowledgement

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