MORAL CONCERN IN SOME OF THE LATER NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH

by Laraine Christiana O'Connell , B.A. Hons.

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, Potchefstroomse Universiteit vir Christelike Hol:!r Onderwys, in partial ful­ filment of the requirements for the degree of MAGISTER ARTIUM

Supervisor: Prof. W.J. de v. Prinsloo, M.A., B.Ed., D.Litt. 1983 CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Biographical Note •••••••• • .••... •.• ...• :. 1 1.2 Bibliographical Note •••• •..•..•. ..•...•• • 2 1. 3 Foreword .••••••••..••.••• •• ..• •-'• • . . . • • • . . 3 1.4 Iris Murdoch's place in the contemporary literary scene .. • • . . • • • . • . . • ...... • . . . . . • . 4 1 .4.1 The state of the contemporary novel . . • • . • • • • . . . . • . • • • . • . . . • . . . . . 4 1.4.2 The early post-war period...... 5 1.4.3 The 1950s 6 1 . 4.4 The 1960s ...... "' ...... 8 1 . 4 .5 The experimental potential of t he ' English novel . • • • . • . • • • . . • . . . . . • . • 10 ' 1.4.6 Realism and Fictionality •...•....• 15 1.4.7 Iris Murdoch's position...... 19 2 MORAL THEMES IN THE NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH 31 2. 1 Introduction...... 31 2. 2 Didacticism . . . . . • . . • • • • • • . . . . • ...... 31 2. 3. Reader Response . • ...... • . • . . • ...... 36 3 A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE CHOICE OF SPECIFIC WORKS 43 4 EVALUATION OF CHOSEN WORKS •• .•• • • •. • •• ••.•..... 49 4.1 The Time of the Angels .•..••.•..••...... 49 4 .2 Bruno's Dream •.....•..•••• •.•• . .. •. ••...• • 66 4. 3 A Word Child ...... • .. . . ·. • •...... 73 4.4 Henry and Cato ...... • . • • . . • . . . . • ...... • . 86 4.5 The Sea, the Sea ...•.....••.•..•.....•... • 95 5 EVALUATION: An attempt at an assessment of Iris Murdoch's contribution to the twentieth century novel in general and of her moral concerns in particular . • •••.•••.....••••.•• • • • ••... , . • . . . . . 105 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY ••• • •••.•..••••••••• o. o.. o...... 113 6.1 Primary Sources •..••••.•.....• ...... •...• 113 6.2 Secondary Sources 114 1 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 15 July 1919. She grew up in London and was educated at Froebel Education Institute, London, and at Badminton School, Bristol. She attended Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1942, and Newnham College, Cambridge (1947 - 48), where she was a Sarah Smithson Student in philosophy.

Her studies were interrupted by war work. She was assistant principal in the Treasury, London from 1942 to 1944, and administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in London, Belgium and Austria from 1944 to 1946.

She was elected Fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford in 1948 and named Honourable Fellow in 1963. She was lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, 1963- 67. She wa s the recipient of the Black Memorial Prize, and the Whitbread Literary Award in 1974. She also received the Booker prize for The Sea, the Sea.

She became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975.

She married the writer John Bayley in 1956, and lives in a village near Oxford. 2 1.2 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Iris Murdoch is an unusually prolific writer, and since 1954 has published no fewer than twenty-one novels of vary- ing quality. In 1953 she published a philosophical study of Sartre, Sartre : Romantic Rationalist. She has also published many philosophical articles and treatises, includ­ ing The Sovereignt y of Good, and The Fire and the Sun, the latter being primarily a study of Platonic concepts.

The fact that she has written so much has. led to a certain amount of preju~ice. Critics and reviewers tend to ques­ tion whether a novel ist can possibly publish so regularly, while maintaining a uniformly high standard. The novels she has written are, i n order of publication:

Under the Net 1954 The Flight from t he Enchanter 1956 The Sandcastle 1957 The Bell 1958 A Severed Head 1961 An Unofficial Rose 1962 The Unicorn 1963 The Italian Girl 1964 The Red and the Green 1965 The Time of the Angels 1966 The Nice and ' the Good 1968 Bruno's Dream 1969 A Fairly Honourable Defeat 1970 An Accidental Man 1971 The Black Prince 1973 The Sacred and Profane Love Machine 1974 A Word Child 1975 3 Henry and Cato 1976 The Sea, the Sea 1978 Nuns and Soldiers 1980 The Philosopher's Pupil 1982 She has also published a book of verse entitled A Year of the Birds (1978) .

1 • 3 FOREWORD

Iris Murdoch is concerned mainly with moral issues, reveal­ ing a preoccupation with ethics. Rubin Rabinovitz, an American critic of Murdoch's work, points out that her fic­ tional characters often find themselves in moral dilemmas that they are hard put to to solve, because they are be­ lievers in faulty ideologies (Stade, 1976:271).

Miss Murdoch has carved out a very important place for her­ self in contemporary literature, and her philosophical articles have been widely acclaimed.

In this dissertation I intend to illustrate the manner in which Iris Murdoch handles moral concern and how she expres­ ses it through character, particularly in her later novels. I consider her later novels to be more mature, and more concerned with moral issues than her earlier ones. Although The Time of the Angels and Bruno's Dream do not really be­ long, chronologically, to the group of later novels under discussion, they do thematically, and for that reason I have seen fit to include them. 4 1.4 IRIS MURDOCH'S PLACE IN THE CONTEMPORARY LITERARY SCENE

1.4.1 THE STATE OF THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

The contemporary literary scene in England is so diverse that it is difficult to characterize. There seems to be a tendency among crit ics to relegate all post-war fiction to one category, and to label i t "traditional", "unmodern", and "anti-experimental", implyi ng that the English novel is completely out of step with modern trends. David Lodge says that there appears to be a commitment to realism in England, and something amounting to prejudice against non­ realistic modes. He has reviewed the history of the novel in the twentieth century, and come to t he conclusion that "it is difficult to avoid associating the restoration of literary criticism with a perceptible decline in artistic achievement" (1971:7-8). Rabinovitz remarks that English novelists are afraid of stepping out of line, of committing a faux pas, and that this fear results in mediocre art. He makes the accu sation that all t oo often the novelist himself is a criti c and formulates theories which favour his type of novel (Lodge, 1971:8). Malcolm Bradbury gives .an ironical account of contemporary crit icism: "Two themes are prevalent in this criticism, the fir st being that the novel is dead ••• and the second that the novel is not dead but f led; i t is alive and well and l iving in America" (1973:167). Bradbury himself does not uncondition­ ally subscribe to this view. Scholes, again, believes that 5 the novel is c loser to disintegration than ever before (Lodge, 1971 :9).

According to contemporary criticism of the novel, mainly by American critics, it is only the English novel that has suf­ fered regression, "that bears the marks of exhaustion, of provincialism, of reaction against experiment, a reversion to an outworn materiality or a traditional r ealism in a time of significant generic revolution" (Bradbury, 1973:167). Nevertheless, the English have gone on writing novels, re­ verting, according to the critics, to eighteenth and nine­ teenth century traditions, and "the novel was dead in the lowest and dullest sense: it was simply uninteresting"

(Bradbury, 1973~170 ).

1.4.2 THE EARLY POST- WAR PERIOD

In most countries the Second World War seems to have consti­ tuted a watershed. This coincided with the emergence of a new group of writers into a strange new post-war world: in a world "with new problems, a period of great social solven­ cy, great human exposure, great cultural restructuring ••• the spirit of high formalism was hard to maintain in the presence of a changed experience and new political orders" (Bradbury, 1973:176). There was, in many different coun­ tries, a reappearance of certain constituents of the modern­ ist impulse: "its emphasi s on play and game, its stress on art as f orgery, its surreal and fabulous dimension" (Brad­ bury, 1977:10), The following arguments were once more 6 stressed: "the insubstantiality or corrupti bility of his­ tory; the problems of establishing solid character in a world in which humanism was threatened; ••• the idea of the novel as reali stic tale" (p. 10),

The existential novel emerged in France and Bradbury agrees that in England, after 1945, that is after the experimental stage which included writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, the novel showed every sign of re­ asserting its realistic potential , its concern with social and moral mores. This constituted a reaction against the pre-war moderni sm. The experimental novels were repudiated and the writers who made the first impact seemed "un-avant­ garde , indeed, anti-avant-garde" (1973:177). A particular kind of angry "social realism" seemed to have appeared in English fiction and this had a va st influence on subsequent c rit icism of the contemporary Engl i sh novel.

1.4.3 THE 1950S

It is true that a group of novels appeared in the 1950s which set the tone for the age, a sort of social protest f i ction, which includes works like William Cooper's Scenes from Provincial Li fe (1950), Angus Wilson ' s Hemlock and After (1951 ), John Wain' s Hurry on Down (1953), Kingsley Ami s ' Lucky Jim (1954), Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954), John Bra ine ' s Room a t the Top (1957), Allan Sillitoe's Saturday Ni ght and Sunday Morning (1 958), and David Storey's This Sporting Lif e (1961). Nearl y all these books were 7 first novels by new writers (Bradbury, 1973:177).

Although there was undoubtedly a liberal revival in the 1950s, it must be stressed that many of the best writers were not ~ntrinsically anti-experimental, although they were classified as such by critics who read them, resulting in a sort of aura of orthodoxy which seems, unjustly, to surround the post-war English novelist, for around this time there also appeared a good number of novels, of a de­ cidedly avant-garde style, mainly by writers who had begun writing before the Second World War. There is a remarkable contrast between these two groups: "Where the experimental writers wrote from an avant-garde place and from a posture inviting high inquiry into formal means, and sustained their force and authent'icity on that basis, the others were apt to employ a more commonplace rhetoric, to live with a known language rather than to make one" {p. 178).

Bergonzi distinguishes between "liberal" and "totalitarian" forms of the novel, but regards the second as the more im­ portant. He associates the change of the novel with the decline of liberalism in Western culture. The novel has traditionally had an association with liberalism and a con­ cern for character, people and their freedom of action in a probable world. In the modernist experiment he sees "the first imaginative responses to a changing world view which involves the death of liberalism" (Bradbury, 1973:172). He holds that the English novel does not follow the same de­ velopment. "Hence it has not spoken to the universally 8 anguished, depersonalized condition of modern man, and his harsh relations with modern realit y" (p. 172). The tendency of English fiction has been to reach back to the past, both in subject-matter and in technique. "The English novelist has reached back towards the humanization of art, that con­ sonance between the i ndividual and the circumstantial so­ cial web that textures nineteenth-century English fiction and gives special val ue to the notion of 'character' and that 'contingency' and 'opacity' of persons of which Iris Murdoch speaks in her essays" (p. 172).

It must be admitted t hat the novelists of the post-war generation had difficulty in defining their position within the novelistic tradi t ion. The major writers were slow to emerge with the result that some minor writers were afforded a measure of infl uence which was not really warranted {p. 170).

1.4.4 THE 19608

In the 1960s the mood began to change, "Formal an~ epis­ temological questions about the novel began to reassert thems elves; many of t he novelists who had begun writing ·after the war began to change their manner" (Bradbury, 1977: 10). A new form of novel appeared, "preoccupied with the status of i t s own fictionality, with the death of the cen­ tral subject, with the collapse of realism, the unreality of history and reportage, the failing power of story, and with the nature of i ts own text and the coming-into-exist- 9 ence of its own making" (Bradbury, 1982:16).

According to Bradbury, Spender saw twentieth century writ­ ing split between two traditions, the modern and the con­ temporary. The modern tradition, belonging to the pre-war period, the earlier part of the century, ~as past, and the contemporaries reigned. "The evidence for this was visible · in the fifties in reaction against Bloomsbury and like Amis in I Like it Here (1958), against both romanticism and modernism in favour of a comic empiricism" (Bradbury, 1973: 171).

There are, however, a number of novels which seem to fit between these two extremes. Some of them are Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), Nigel DennisY Cards of Identity (1955), Muriel Sparks's Memento Mori (1959), B.S. Johnson's Travelling People (1963) and Doris Lessing's The Habit of Loving (1957). "In these writers there is characteristic­ ally a mythical, religious, or comic grotesque bias, a dis­ position towards a romance-like form for the novel, or else an element of fantastic vigour thrusting towards, but not finally at this stage sustaining authority from, the exper­ imental spirit" (p. 178).

It should be clear that the picture of an "incorrigibly insular" England, resisting any form of change, in comparis­ on with life-giving fabulation in countries like France and America, does not tell the whole story. To classify all post-war English novels as a reversion to soci al realism 10 is a gross s i mplification, although the assessment persists in spite of a highl y varied and not at all depressing con­ temporary scene (p. 171). The realistic contemporary man­ ner is concerned with making over i nto literature "the new social attractions and viewpoints of post-war Britain, oft en from a lower middle-class, or working-class perspect­ ive." Then t here is t he more "visi onary" and "fantastic" manner, including writers like Beckett, Durrell, Murdoch and Muriel Spark (p. 177).

Apart from t he abovementioned suggestion that to label all post-war novels as social realism i s an over-simplifica­ tion, there is a certain amount of truth in Rabinovitz's finding that "the critical mood in England has produced a climate in which t raditional novels flourish, and anything out of the ordinary is given the label 'Experimental' and neglected" (Lodge, 1971:8).

Lodge says, however, that the consensus of literary opinion has been shaken up since 1960, and fabulation is not the only alternative to traditional realism (1971:9).

1.4.5 THE EXPERIMENTAL POTENTIAL OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Bradbury feels that despite the realistic bias of much con­ temporary literary reviewing in England, which has limited the fictional debat e, the experimental potential of the English novel has been greatl y emphasized by contemporary English novelists, and has markedly increased in the later 1960s and 1970s (1977:20). 11 Scholes and Kellogg point out that liter ary realism depicts the individual experience of the common phenomenal world. As the wri ter probes deeper into the subconscious in search of reali ty, the common perceptual world recedes and he finds himself· in a region of myths and dreams that demand "fictional" rather than "empirical" modes·to express them­ selves . If he tries to do justice to the phenomenal world he finds himself in competition with other media such.as tape and motion pictures, which can do this far more effect­ ively (Lodge, 1971:5). In his book, The Fabulators, Scholes says that realism exalts life and diminishes words, but when it comes to representing things, a picture is much more illuminating. In view of the competition, fiction should abandon its attempt to "represent reality" and·rely on the power of words to stimulate the imagination (Lodge, 1971:6). Scholes's book is largely an appreciative study of those narrative writers who have already recognized that realism is obsolete, and are exploring the purely fictional modes of allegory and romance. He calls this "fabulation". Lawrence Durrell, Iris Murdoch, John Hawkes, Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth are discussed (p. 6). He re­ gards Durrell's Alexandria Quartet as a ·sophisticated ex­ ploitation of the intricate intrigues and reversals of Alexandrian romance; and Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn as an elaborate and multi-faceted allegory worked out in terms of Gothic fiction, aqout the conflict of s ecular and religious attitudes. Hawkes, Vonnegut and Southern write a sort of surrealisti c picaresque. In Giles Goat-Boy Barth mixes 12 mythic, romantic and allegorical modes (p. 6).

Scholes finds that t here is no longer any sense in main­ taining the synthesis of the emp i rical and fictional modes, and advocates a move towards the fictional which is his particular predilection. Lodge believes that this diagnosis is one-sided. There is no reason why the movement should not be in the opposite direction, toward the empirical nar- . rative, and.that, in fact, is what is happening (Lodge, 1971:9). Lodge believes that the novel ist today is stand­ ing at a c rossroads, at a compromise between fictional and empirical modes (p. 18). He says: "In the fifties there was a feeling that this was the main road, the central tradition of the English novel, coming down through the Victorians and the Edwardians, temporar ily diverted by modernist experimentalism, but subsequently restored (by Orwell, Isherwood, Greene, Waugh, Powell, Wilson, etc.) to its true course" (p . 18). He s ays that the wave of enthus­ iasm for the realist i·c novel of the fifties has abated be­ cause the novelty of the social experience that supported the fiction of that decade - the break-up of a bourgeois­ dominated class soci ety - has faded. Moreover, the moral theorizing behind. t he "movement" was very t hin (p. 18).

Realistic novels are sti ll being written, but as a result of the pressure of scepticism on the aesthetic and epistem­ ological premises of literary theory, most novelists in England are now at least considering the alternatives at the crossroads instead of marching confidently straight on. 13 One of these routes leads to t he non-fiction novel, and the other to what Scholes calls fabulation (p. 19).

Bradbury observes that curiosity about the fictional con­ stituents of the novel has developed in English fiction, among some of the best writers . The mo st/ important of these are Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, David Storey, B.S. Johnson, ·and John Fowles, "all of whom have speculated much about the value of realism, the relation­ ship of writer to text, the coerciveness of plot, the sub­ stance of character, the onerousness of form and endings" (Bradbury, 1977:18). It is clear that by the sixties much of the realistic emphasis in the novels of the fifties was beginning to fade, for similar reasons that affected the novelists in other countries. Wilson's novels probed the ways of pastiche and parody, Murdoch's became _a . mythic en­ quiry into the status of character, Muriel Sparks's middle work turned into an analysis of relationships. Neverthe­ less, "it is certainly possible to discern, in the English novel more than in the bulk of novels in France or the United States, an attempt to salvage a modern humanism, to maintain the idea of character against the swamping text; but a sense of inevitable pressures has promoted a strong experimental disposition" (p. 19). This is illustrated in Miss Murdoch's essay "Against Dryness" which was published in 1961. I t defends a modern contingency against the "dry" consolations of form, or an over-indulged absurdism. The essay also emphasizes that we are not isolated free choos- 14 ers, that we l ive i n a contingent uni verse, from which we urge order only through comprehension and love (Bradbury, 1977: 19).

Bergonzi suggests that it might be a desi rable state of affairs to maintain the values of humanism, but suspects that contemporary English fiction is somehow not in tune with the stylistic art of the t imes (Bradbury, 1973:173).

Bradbury believes that we live in an age in which fiction has become more provisi onal, anxious and self-questioning than it was a few yea rs ago. Many questi ons about the nature of fictional ity and its constituent parts, for example the role of plot and story, the nature of character, the relationship between realism and fantasy, have come to the forefront of attention. "Indeed , ideas about what the novel is, and what it might be, have shif ted so markedly in recent years that we might well j udge that a serious aest hetic shift is t aking place; that, i n fact, there are signs of a distinctive new era of style" (1977:8). To re­ tain perspective one should note that alt hough the present debate has intensif ied it is not new, for this is a subject that comes up f r om time to time as part of .t he development of the novel. Most· of the ques tions and issues go back to "the novel's full eme r gence as a form i n the seventeenth and ei~ h teenth centuri es when the novel was i ndeed novel, when it evolved as a distinct species and as a signi ficant social i nstitution, and when its nature was much considered" (p. 8). 15 1.4.6 REALISM AND FICTIONALITY

The polar distinctions on which the arguments are based are as old as the novel itself: "its propensity toward realism, social documentation and interrelation with historical events and movements" on the one hand, and "its propensity towards form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination" on the other (Bradbury, 1977:8). Bradbury goes on to ex­ plain that the novel has always had two reputations, one as "a relatively innocent affair, an instrument for expressing our pleasure in tale and our delight in social fact through the one literary language, prose, that we all speak and write, " and the other "as a complex verbal invention, in which the ambiguities of narrative, the complexities of structure-making, the problems of making a grammar for ex­ perience, the perplexities of creating a sense of truth from falsehood have been explored" (p. 8). Both reputations have been instrumental in shaping the novel into the various and complex form it is today, "highly implicated in history," yet tending towards self-examination. In some periods the one side of fiction has been emphasized, in some the other, "but in our century the process of oscillation has been very muc h sharper" (p. 8).

Bradbury delineates the scope of modern .aesthetic fiction: from the fictions of Borges, preoccupied with the status of imaginary acts and the relation between the orders of the.mind and the orders of the universe; through Nabokov's massive invention of fictional worlds which, though unhoused from reality, separated 16 from rooted l anguage, seen through mi rrors and shim­ mers, nonetheless afford butterfly glimpses of a sym­ bolist revelation; to Samuel Beckett's l inguistic minimal ism, his pHilosophi cal reduction of language to utt erance. I t ranges f rom the vestigial, comic characters of Thomas Pynchon or Wi lliam Gaddis, swgmped in a technological universe coded through with plots , yet experiencing entropy to t he strange tropisms of feeling that replace character in the anti-anthropomorphic universe of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Nathalie Sarraute, to the contingent, undefined characters of Iris Murdoch, who finally discover in the dances of love and power a certain self-defini­ tion (p . 13) .

The stylistic changes that have t aken place in recent years have thus not been limited to one country. They have taken place i n vari ous countries, against the background of various tradi tions and cultures . Novelists have become uneasy with the code of fictional expectati ons of the novel, and a re seeking t o remake its form by inqui ring into its essentials (p. 14) .

The c ode of fictional expectations comes f r om two main sources, one being "the realistic aesthetic s of the nine­ teenth-century novel, aest hetics whi ch emphasized the r efer- ential and histori cal expressiveness of fiction, and re- vealed themselve s in a working discourse of 1plot 1 and 'character' , " and the other is "t he modernist aesthetics of ·the earlier part of t hi s century, which emphasized the

for~al and symbolist resources of the novel, and expressed itself in a n aest het ics in whi ch 'pat ter n', 'form' and 17 'myth' assumed a paramount importance" (p. 14). To many novelists both these codes have become historical, and they are finding it necessary to redefine the fictional act. There has been a move away from the referential in the novel, as well as from formal organization, toward "the presentation of the lexical surface bf the text itself." A preoccupation with "the fictional process as a parody of form" can also be discerned (p. 14).

Bradbury believes that the thesis that the English novel has, since the war, taken a separate and s elf-isolating path is itself becoming a mystifying falsity. The presump­ tion that the apocalyptic American and the surrealist French novel contrast with realism which is English and un­ modern, compounds a number of confusions. Bradbury raises the question of whether realism is in fact an antithesis to experiment (1973:173). "For one thing, the idea of real­ ism as a formally uncomplex species of fiction is undergo­ ing, now, considerable disturbance, and rightly; we can see that in the developing discussion of nineteenth-c~ntury fiction •. For another, the notion of the English 'tradition' as somehow separate and distinct is also proving uneasy" (p. 175). He says that there are notable resemblances in the way in which Western novelists have attempted, in the post-war period, "to mediate between realistic or documen­ tary, and introverted fictional novels" (p. 175). The terms naturally shift - neither "reality" nor "fiction" has a static meaning. He i s convinced that English novelists 18 have been significant participants in the re-experiencing of fiction in the post-war peri od (p. 175). One has indeed only to inspect a sufficient range of works to see that in various forms mythi c, symbolist and grotesque styles of writing, which might be thought of as non-realist styles, have constantly been produced in post-war English fiction. In this it consorts with much that is happening abroad (p. 178 ). It is oft en too easily assumed that technical speculation is in abeyance in realist fiction; it has in fact become increasingly explic it ·and focused. In the past we have seen particular aesthetic preoccupations which have arisen from t ime to time f or a wide number of reasons, as a movement away from realist ic modes of representation, and it i s not an entirely incor rect assumption. "But, in some areas, as David Lodge pointed out, there has been a decided intensification of the realistic mode, making it articulate and systematic" (p. 179). Bradbury supposes that the changed post-war period has generated a period of "new realisms, new passions for the grotesque, new commit­ ments to the subjective, new disquiets about the writer's omniscience or his wisdom" (p. 180). He finds the present scene decidedly exciting, regarding the present stance of the novel not soi much a diachronic activity as a reflection of the time we live in (p. 180),

The problem is t hat the novelist tod~y faces a world that has lost a l l certai nty. There are no ready-made meanings a s background a s there were i n the eighteenth century. 19 Each novel is therefore a quest for meaning in uncharted terrain. Post-war women novelists are aware of the limita­ tions they are working in. They register the way in which the knowable world that .has sustained so much English fic­ tion, is disintegrating. All of them have the sense of being faced with rather abstract and primitive choices (Bradbury and Palmer, 1979:68). Doris Lessing, for instance, has come to believe that human beings have become more and. more isolated and egocentric, and are unconsciou7ly reach­ ing out for contact with other people (p. 54). It is the question about the nature of freedom, the definition of self, which gnaws away at the foundation of a tradition which depends on the limitation of choice.

1.4.7 IRIS MURDOCH'S POSITION

The question of where Iris Murdoch fits in now arises. When her first novel, Under the Net, appea.red in 1954 its excellence was immediately recognized, and it brought her to the attention of critics as "one of the most brilliant and certainly one of the most compellingly intelligent of our present-day English novelists" (Bradbury, 1973:231). She was hailed as belonging to the era of "angry young men". Scholes includes her in his list of "fabulators" for her book The Unicorn. Byatt is of the opinion that both Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson write in the English realist tradition. Their writing combines old realist morals and a new literary playfulness of which the reader needs to be aware (1976:35). Bradbury and Palmer,. t oo, are of the 20 opinion that her later novels are the result of an attempt, moral and formal, on the realism both she and John Bayley admire (1979:24) . I r is Murdoch in fact calls herself a realist, but in opposition to Byatt, claims to be in the opposite direction from Angus Wilson's. Levidova finds that Murdoch's work is in the mainstream of English literary tradition, and that Dickens, the Brontes, and perhaps Fielding, would have the right to be proud of their heir (Levidova, 1977:178). She is of the opinion that Miss Murdoch's novels display clearer l i nks with the past than with her contemporaries, although she shows some points of contact with Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. She feels that the monolithic nature of Miss Murdoch's work is least important . She is brought close to the literature of the past "by the romantic atmosphere of parts of her books, by her use of the grotesque and by the balancing on the border­ line of melodrama and the thriller" (p. 178).

Murdoch's work is a logical extension of the existing field and is histori cally embedded in English literary tradition . It is a simple matter to contrast her with earlier writers, and to trace similarities. John Holloway speaks of Joseph Conrad's "sense of life as a sustained struggle in moral terms: an issue between good and evil, in the fullest sense of these words, which individual men find they cannot evade" (1961:56). Iris Murdoch's work is similarly concerned with moral issues and the way men react to the moral situations they are confronted with. 21 Like Murdoch, Conrad is concerned with the exploration of moral values, although Murdoch does not state her moral criteria as explicitly as he does. Conrad's books are constructed in such a way that we are made aware of a moral pattern.

Hewitt says that "Conrad's concern is with a powerful sense of potential weakness and betrayal lurking under an appa­ rent confidence in an established code of behaviour and waiting for the right circumstances of stress to emerge, often with devastating power" (1975:129). This same moral theme is fundamental to Murdoch's work, but whereas Murdoch's is concerned with the resolving of moral problems arising from highly personal situations, Conrad's strength lies in his portrayal of the individual in relation to politics and public and professional duties. His interest lies in the interplay of groups.

Gillie points out that part of Dickens' power as a novelist is his capacity to make the reader feel an environment act­ ing upon him. This is also the case with Murdoch. On a more superficial level than with Conrad, there are many similarities to be traced in the novels of Dickens and Murdoch. They both possess an intimate knowledge of London, not only of its geography, but of its atmosphere. As is the case in Bleak House (Dickens), three of the five Mur­ doch novels discussed later are placed against the back­ ground of a London shrouded in a thick blanket of fog, or drenched in rain, the elements contributing significantly 22 to the atmosphere, and indeed being symbolic of the moral condition of the protagonists. As in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, the Thames plays a major symbolic role in Murdoch's novels. A further point of similarity between these two writers is their shared feeling for social varieties and gradations, and a f i ne sense of the comedy of human behav­ iour.

Miss Murdoch's unfor tunate classification a s an "angry young man" probably rested on a misconception that Under the Net is about an alienated young man. It is, in fact, "a quest into the nature of language and art, the relation between contingency and design, and the function of love and s i lence" (Bradbury, 1977:19). By the sixties her novels had become decidedly more mythic· than realistic, and Robert Scholes probably rightly identifies her as one of the modern fabulators. In her books questions of form and the reality of char acter play a central part (p. 19).

Neverthel ess, Miss Murdoch's novel s are totally modern, dealing with modern man and his peculiar social and ethical problems. Each of them contains responses to important pr oblems of the day. Her books are filled with modern people, intruded on by societ y, "with their tragi-comic rambling, their illusions, and their struggle with their destinies and with themselves" (Levidova, 1977:178). Levi­ dova says that one does not have t o share Murdoch's beliefs in order to respect and trust her as an artist who, while portraying all that is bad and mean in man, nevertheless 23 believes in his ability to strive for better things (p. 178).

Bradbury says that the expression of her brilliance has taken her into the production of a very distinctive version of the novel of sentiments. All her novels are love ro­ mances, but they are made distinctive by the fact that "the forces and powers displayed give rein to' metaphysical and emotional speculation of a decidedly unusual kind. In particular the notion of compel ling or transcendent power, a transmutation of the texture of the love emotion beyond selfishness or self-engrossedness into a mysterious appre­ hension of otherness, is obsessive.

A difficulty which is encountered i n most of Miss Murdoch's novels has to do with her idea of reality. Reality is a central preoccupation of her philosophical articles. In

"Against Dryness" she has offered a precis~ placing of the word "reality" in a phiiosophically and historically mean-' ingful context. Bradbury and Palmer compare her and B.S. Johnson. Johnson, too, is obsessed with truth-telling, but where Iris Murdoch's truth-telling involves the aban­ doning of solipsism, a recognit ion that r eality is other than ourselves, Johnson' s entai ls the abandoning of "sto­ ries" and reduces his subject-matter to a carefully con­ structed autobiography. Murdoch's is an Eliot-like ideal of the impersonal artist, a ret urn to the "hard idea of truth" as opposed to the facile idea of sincerity (Brad­ bury and Palmer, 1979:32). "Roquentin in La Nausee sees that there are 1 no stories' because what exists is formless; 24 Miss Murdoch says a r t is 'adventure stories', a necessary technique for discovering truth" (p. 32). Non-realistic autobiography and impersonal storytelling are exactly oppos ite solutions t o the problem of the nature of lies and the difficulty of truth. Miss Mur doch also says that "we no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realiti es which transcend him" (Bradbury, 1973: 234). The problem is that we no longer have a fixed value system, and morality means different things t o different people. The value system within which a work of art is judged.is inextricabl y linked with the value system of the one who judges. This is a field at present being explored in some dept h by Reception theoreticians.

Her first novel, Under the Net, contains elements of delibe­ rate parody and surreal joke. It is partly a philosophical game wi th Sart re and Wittgenstein. She has accused Sartre of be ing impatient with the stuff of human life and com­ plained that he "lacked an apprehension of the absurd, irreducible uniqueness of people, and of their relations with each other" (Sartre : Romantic Rationalist, 1953:75). · Critics have accused· Iris Murdoch of failures in density, and of triviality. This critici sm fails to realise that Under the Net is a fable about real ism, "a conceptual game about the need for concepts, language and emotional move­ ments of a new realism. It is not intended itself to be a densely realist work" (Bradbury and Palmer, 1979:24). 25 Many critics have voiced the view t hat Miss Murdoch is writ­ ing about the "wrong" sort of character, an "irrelevant" group of the upper bourgeoisie. In terms of her own moral­ ity there is no reason why she should not. Free and sepa­ rate persons can be studied in any social setting. Parttt of the readers' dissatisfaction is aesthetic, to do, per­ haps, with the tradition which was made by such a society for such a society, and helped create and perpetrate it. "These are the people of James's and Forster's fiction and this, perhaps, makes them feel artificial and unreal even where they are not" (p. 25).

Iris Murdoch has spelled out her views on the role of the novel in her various philosophical essays. In "Against Dryness," for example, she expresses the opinion that the novel should not be a philosophical fiction, instead "it should conjure up an exemplary chaos, a densely populated world that generates random couplings and partings, and lets in some of the unreasonable specificity that protects us against our easy abstractions" (1961:16-20). She argues that the inadequacy of language is only depressing for those who identify the written word with the nature and ext~nt of experience. "If you spread words like a thin synthetic plastic coating over things and refuse to believe that any­ thing escapes, then it is hardly surprising that you arrive at a Midas~like poverty. If, on the other hand, you admit that reality eludes words, then their shortcomings are an occasion for celebration, and novels can be made·out of their 26 unending approximations and wasteful clashes" (Bradbury and Palmer, 1979:69). She is both anti-utilitarian and anti­ idealist, and dislikes equally what she calls the "journal­ istic" and the "crystalline" fashions in modern fiction

(p. 69).

Todd points out that some of Miss Murdoch's theoretical be­ liefs are not always amply illustrated in her own works of fiction. She says that art must to some extent be false to reality, since t he form which distinguishes it as "art" is at variance with the irrelevance and contingency of life (1979:11). In a iming to depict life, art must lie to life whenever it imparts a sense of form where none is actually present (p. 12). She also says that somehow the power of irrelevance is celebrated within the art for m, but Bergonzi is of the opi nion that this theory is not pr oved in her

novels (p. 12).

According to Todd there seems t o be no reason to believe that the acknowledgment of a problem such as the falseness to life of representative art necessarily entails the solv­ ing of such a problem. It seems rather, particularly on the evidence of more recent novels , that what Iris Murdoch's readers are being offered is a novelistic meditation on the question of "form versus contingency". It is therefore pointless to pursue explicating central symbols in Iris Murdoch's novels, because they don't seem to be very seri­ ously deployed (pp. 12-13). 27 Bradbury summarises the ambiguity which characterizes Miss Murdoch's work: Miss Murdoch is a theoretical empiricist, and that is a strange thing to be, Her novels are in flight from concepts, and conceptualize the flight. Her drift is towards the grasping of the contingent, but this is done by way of a theory of very flexible· necessity, or growth into form. She is a critic at odds with the crystalline fiction of symbol and myth, above all the hard, dry modernist symbol whi ch 'has the unique­ ness and separateness of the individual, but ••• is a making sensible of the idea of individuality under the form of necessity, its contingency purged away' ('The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited'); yet the ele­ gant phrases, which are condemnatory, almost amount to the best possible account of her own disposition toward the symbolistic (Bradbury, 1973:235). Her anti-symbolist, realist theory is primarily concerned to protect the substance of indi viduality or character, both at the philosophical and at the imaginative level, in terms of a created human agent i n fiction.

The theories which she spells out in her philosophical es- says are very much an attack on the mode in which she most seems to write. "It is the life-giving framework .. of know­ able society, the substantial and natural ·istic idea of character, the weakening of the urgent emphatics of plot or myth, that she appeals to as the virtues of. a significant modern fiction; yet her own work typically veers back in the direct ion apparently condemned" (pp. 235:236).

Her ties to the nineteenth century tradition, so evident i n 28 the nostalgia with which she alludes to the "rich receding background" in "Against Dryness," of reality in Victorian novels, act as a welc ome reminder of unfreedom. The sense of such a pressure from elsewhere, f rom the past, seems a guarantee of belonging - not being shapelessly and point­ lessly "free". Though she doesn ' t exactly make an explicit statement, she seems to be in reacti on against the modern­ ist attitudes to literature which she characterized so well in her book on Sartre (Bradbury and Palmer, 1979:70).

Her connect ion with the "other-centred" model of fiction is clear. She calls Middlemarch "that brilliant study of being-for-others," (Sartre, p. 60) or again, "we need to return from the self -centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth" (Bradbury and Palmer, 1979: 171).

Her view of character i nvolves a · sharp distinction between "the Ordinary Language Man of linguistic empiricism, who surrenders to convent ion, and the Totalitarian Man of exist­ entialism, who surrenders to neurosis" (p. 172). In her sense of the term, .a character is an agent capable of ac­ knowledging the conti ngency around him. It does not mean a self-centred person, and it implies that an agent may become a character 'in the course of a novel, by developing from a state of self-centredness to one of other-centred- ness (p. 172).

By contrast, the most vivid modern fiction has been hostile 29 to such principles, such as the comic apocalyptic dimen­ sions of much American fiction and the dehumanized world of the nouveau roman. "In refusing to accede to the idea that reality has become apocalyptic and incredible, and the inde­ pendent self unprotectable, English writers have tended to evade new fictional possiblilities" (p . i73). Bradbury saY:s that in some writers elaborations of t echnique are aimed at "the reinforcement of truth, the assertion of exposure to familiar contingencies, and involve a heightened autobio­ graphical statement" (p. 179).

Bergonzi points out that we need to be reminded of the ir­ reducibility of the physical world over which we think to exert some control. "In her novels she recognizes a real.:.. ity that is outside of characters and cannot be deformed by them. He suggests that her interest in unlikely mechanical problems is possibly a playful acknowledgment of this at­ titude. "However symbolical her novels become - and they are full of intriguing objects and radiant artefacts - these physical realities are supposed in ·the last analysis to re­ main beyond interpretation" (Bergonzi, 1970:271).

What Miss Murdoch achieves in her novels is aesthetic joy and self-awareness. They have the capacity to say some­ thing which is humane and true "and they achieve this by a high sceptical caution about ·consoling us t oo easily in either area, be it that of art or truth" ( Bradbury, 1973: 239). 30 31 2 MORAL THEMES IN THE NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH

2.1 INTRODUCTION

It is clear, even from a superf icial reading of Iris Mur­ doch's novels, that she is preoccupied primarily with overtly moral themes. That she is justified in this, and that morality has a place in literature,..- cannot be denied, because morality exists; it is part and parcel of man's existence which is portrayed in literature. Baldanza quotes Iris Murdoch as saying t hat "art and morals are, with certain provisos, one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality" (1974:26), this last s tatement representing the central moral theme of Murdoch's novels. "For Murdoch, therefore, morality is love, t he realization of the opacity of persons, of their individuality, the admission that they exist other than in relation to oneself.

2.2 DIDACTICISM

The following statement by Hough cannot be substantiated in our contemporary society: "A moral theory of literature is without definite content unless it refers to a scheme of moral values existing outside it" (1966:30). The moral theorist addresses his criticism to an audience supposedly sharing his moral views. It is, however, important to remember that we live in an age of such divergent moral 32 norms that it is almost impossible to determine moral influ­ ence. As Kenneth Allsop says, "you have to decide about the importance of a novelist's conception of moral issues by relating them to those in which all of the Western World is involved you have to take int o account a universality that perhaps cannot be found here" (1964:210).

Iris Murdoch expresses very definite opinions on the moral influence of literature. Rabinovitz points out that for her the link between art and moralit y is subtle and meta­ physical: "A writer must love his characters and cause the reader to love and understand them t oo. A reader who has observed t his process in a novel will then be able to cul­ tivate an analogous apprehension of people in his daily life" (Stade, 1976:235). Cunneen supports t his rather naive view when she expresses the opinion that Iris Murdoch's moral purpose permeat es all of her published works, and re­ marks that in her lat er novels she has demonstrated her theory that literature can be our best moral teacher (1978: 2-3). This theory i s not adequately substantiated in Mur­ doch's work. Although moral concern is clearly discernible in her novels, she seldom descends to obtrusive didacticism. Her novels deal with morals but do not point a moral. She is clearly fascinated by the influence of morals on the lives of people, and she explores t his influence fully in her novels.

There are many arguments for didacticism. In his essay "The Humanist Critic" , Bush says that "the ultimate end is 33 that literature is ethical, that it makes us better" (Simon­ son, 1971:106). He feels that "unless literature is in its effect didactic, I do not know of any sufficient reason for its existence" (p. 106). This point of view is entirely unacceptable. Gardiner insists that irrespective of his personal convictions the honest critic must judge a book primarily on its literary merits, and only then on its doc­ trinal, historical or philosophical merits, where it is warranted by the subject matter. The novel's own intrinsic merit is what must be judged (1960:32 ) . Intrinsic merit depends on aspects like plot, character, language and themes, of which a moral theme is only one.

There are, however, sufficient grounds for a study of the effect of literature on morals and the effect of morality on literature when one has studied the moral theme in Mur-

doch 1 s n9vels. According to Rabinovitz she does not insist on an overt moral core in a work of art. "Too much empha-

sis on morality in art can lead to didactic art, and d~dac­ tic art, apart from being dull and uninspired, is art which begins with a pattern and does not represent a contingent view of reality (Stade, 1976:293). In her earlier philosoph- ical writing, Iris Murdoch discusses the effect ?f inject­ ing moral ideas into literature. She i nsi sts that a work need not be didactic because it is ethi cal. "Art and ethics have a similar basis, a 'loving' discovery of real­ ity; hence, art which is moral need not teach a lesson i f it discovers the underlying truth of things" (Stade, 1976: 34 328). The ethical in her work is a thematic concern and not a coercive str ategy.

Obvious morali zation is mostly inartistic and even offen­ sive. Grace says that when a work openly mo r alizes, it is

~nartistic because we hear the voice of the author, instead of its moralit y being indistinguishably fused into the work of art - the great artistic coherence. He concludes by pointing out that "art has a moral responsibility, but must exercise that responsi bility according to the nature of art" (p. 190). As All en Tate confirms, "specific moral problems" are the subject matter of literature, but the purpose of literature is not to point a moral (Simonson, 1971:33).

To D.H. Lawrence the novel seemed the best medium :for the cultivation of moral awareness. In his essay, "Morality and the Novel ", he says that if a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships may consist in.

In "The Novelist as Moralist", Derwent May dismisses a cer­ tain type of novel as a "moral stor y" because for all its moral claims, it fails to create these attitudes in its readers: "This i9 t he 'moral' novel that tries to seduce or frighten us into ways the author thinks desirable for us or the world or him, by telling a story in which the 'wrong' by his lights all come to a sorry end and the 'good' conclude in prosperity" (Kumar and McKean, 1968:179). 35 Apart from the fact that this is not true to life, May sug­ gests that "if we draw a parallel between ourselves and the characters as we are supposed to do, the attitude we are likely to find ourselves in will not be either of the moral ones ••• but the unmistakably amoral one, 'I had better not do anything like that or I shall pay for it"' (p. 179).

Matthew Arnold too had very definit e ideas about the moral influence of literature. He believed that literature irre­ vocably changes everything that happens afterwards. Imagin­ ative bounds are not final, they are capable of expansion, and at each expansion the previous moral assumptions give way (Simonson, 1971:55).

Holland says that our own associations are transformed when we read a work of fiction, the transformation occurring during and immediately after reading, giving us the feeling that we have mastered something. He then asks the ques­ tion whether these short-term effects result in permanent change in _character, or an improvement in our humanity., From a purely psychological point of view he finds this highly unlikely for character is formed largely in the oedipal and pre-oedipal stages. "By the time we get round to reading books we bring to them a rather firmly struc­ tured personality" (1968:334). He continues: "The best information we have suggests that we should make no claim of a long-term effect for literature. At most, literature may open for u s some flexibility of mind s_o that growth from it, and other kinds of experience, remains possible" 36 (p. 430). Having accepted the moral and social limitations of literature, we can now accept literature, "not for what we wish i t were but for the one thing we can be certain it is - a source of rich and special pleasures, good in them­ selves, needing and perhaps having no further justifica­ tion" (p. 340).

Hough points out that "no novel worth the name can be pared down to a structure of moral significances" (1963:5). The moral critic does not tell us much about the essential na­ ture of the novel. When Leavis admires Emma of Jane Austen in "moral" terms, he is not telli ng us anything more than i s explicit in the novel itself. Hough says that Leavis i s not as a rule doing any moral exploration. "He is the ordina ry kind of public moralist, making propaganda for a set of community values" (1963:53). As such he may have an important task to carry out, but an educational task rather than a literary one.

The i mplied author shapes the opinion of t he reader by en­ c ouraging specifi c attitudes: sympathy for this or con­ demnation of t hat charact er or idea. This i s not didacti­ c i s m, but the relati onship bet ween implied author and ·r eceptive reader which gives substance to the text.

2 . 3 READER RESPONSE

This l eads to an a spect of literary criticis m that has re­ ceived much attention of late: Reception Aesthetics. Alt hough the theory has only r ecently been formulated by 37 critics like Iser, Tompkins and Fish, reader response has been touched on intuitively by various critics in the past. It is raised by Murray (1977). He says that discussion of the function of the moral element in fiction has been il­ luminating. "What has been lacking is an interest in the moral element in fiction which will help· t o ~how how a novelist's moral sense of his subject together with how he thinks that sense will be understood by the public, deter­ mines the way in which he employs 'technique'" (p. 250).

The idea of reader response is also suggested by T.S. Eliot when he says that the author of a work of imagination is attempting to affect us as human beings, consciously and unconsciously, and we are being influenced whether we in­ tend to be or not (Scott, 1963:48). He warns that even the effect of better writers in an age like ours may be degrad­ ing to some readers, because what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do. "It may be only what people are capable of having done to them. People exercise an unconscious selection, in being influenced" (p. 51).

Fish makes some interesting remarks in his book Is there a

Text in this Class? (1980). In the preface h~ replies to his own question. If by text is meant "an entity which always remains the same from one moment to the next" then the answer must be negative. "But there is a text in this and every class if one means by text the structure of meanings that is obvious and escapable from the perspective 38 of whatever interpretive assumptions happen to be in force" (p. viii).

Marianne de Jong, in discussing Iser 1 s theories, says that what the t ext is, depends on the reader. There is no com- plete object called a literary work, that i s merely the text. Only on being read and experienced i n relation to previous experiences and emotions does it become a work of literature (1983:22). The reader' s response will of neces­ sity be subjective, but according to Iser subjectivity is a factor in the experiencing of literature. J oan Hambidge comes to the conc·lus ion that the literary text is an arte- fact which becomes an aesthetic object through the reader's act of perception (1983:81),

The following is a brief statement of Fish 's initial prin- ciple: I challenged the self-sufficiency of the text by pointing out t hat its (apparently) spatial form belied the temporal dimension in which its meanin_gs were ac­ tualized , and I argued that it was the developing shape of that actualization, rather than the static shape of the pr inted page, t hat should be the object of critical description. In short, I substituted the structure of the reader's experience for the formal structures of' the text on the grounds that while the latter were the more visible, they acquired signific­ ance only in the context of the former (1980:4). He forestalls the cri ticism that dependence on reader re- sponse would be givi ng up the possibi lity of saying any­ thing m•?aningful about literature, because of the infinite 39 variety of responses, by pointing out that there is a level of experience that all readers share, providing a fair amount of common ground for meaningful response (p. 4).

Fish's view of the importance of the reader is supported by Purves: "The reader is marked by a curi ous combination of detachment and engagement. The detachment emerges from a sense that the text inhabits a shadow world brought into reality only by the reader's consciousness. The engage­ ment emerges from the aesthetic surrender to the text in all its subtlety and complexity" (1980:229).

This emergence of reader response criticism cons titutes an attack on formalism. The reader, and not "the word on the page", has become the ' field of investigation. "This crit- icism • •• is characterized by the phenomenological assump­ tion that the subject and object of knowledge are simul­ taneously interdependent" (Greenfield, 1983:122). Green­ field briefly justifies thi s approach: "To consider the text without the reader, or to consider the reader and ~he text as finished or formed before their 'encounter', is in this view to misrecognise both entit ies and to miss the work of reading which brings both into being" (p. 122).

Fish gives a closer and more radical definition bf this approach: "Whatever the size of the unit j~entence, para­ graph, nove:!], the focus of the method remains the reader's experience of it, and the mechanism of the method is the magic question, 'What does this [word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter, novel] do? 111 (Greenfield, 1983:123). 40 Greenfield emphasizes that this a nalysis does not ignore the internal features and relationships of a text, but de­ nies t he ir autonomy and the primacy of t heir logic (p. 123). "The syntactological relationships of a sentence will not then determine its meaning, as in a formalist analysis: meaning becomes inst ead an event, the dynamic unfolding of r elations in an exchange between (amongst other things) these differentiated st ructures and 'the mental life of the reader'" (p. 123). Fish defines this "mental life": ."It i s the formulation of complete thoughts, the perform­ ing and regretting of acts of judgment, the f ollowing and making of logical sequences" (Greenfield, 1983:123). Green­ field emphasizes t hat this mental life is an endless process of "becoming", "in which each experience adds to and shifts the ama lgam of responses to the next linguistic experience. The conditi ons of this 'becoming' are the phenomenological concept s of space and t ime, the space and time of the sub­ ject moving in l anguage" (p. 123 ) .

Reception aesthetics being a relatively new field, there is constant development , and even at this early stage various directions of development are discernible. It will prob­ ably be found in time t hat the ove r l apping areas of read­ ers' experience are far greater· than one would perhaps expect, and that reader r esponse might, on closer examina­ tion, reveal an amazing mea sure of correl ation. The major­ ity of readers will probably respond simi larly to a given text so that there may eventually be sufficient grounds 41 for returning to a qualified belief that "text" is not devoid of independent existence.

Nevertheless, a novelist's appeal, and t hat of Iris Mur­ doch, depends on reader response, from readers who, al­ though they may not share her moral views, share her moral concern and appreciate her illuminating treatment of this theme. 42 43 3 A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE CHOICE OF SPECIFIC WORKS

The novels I have chosen for discussion are the following: The Time of the Angels (1966) Bruno's Dream (1969) A Word Child (1975) Henry and Cato (1976) The Sea, the Sea (1978) With the exception of The Time of the Angels, relatively little has been written about these later novels, in com­ parison with the earlier ones.

Levidova points out that Murdoch is convinced that "in a world that has lost the idea of God, man is left with one main support in his struggle against his own egoistic and destructive tendencies and that support is an ideal of good, truth and beauty, unattainable and never fully com­ prehended, that is not attached to any practical aim or profit" ( 1977:174). Another important belief of Murdoch's is that a grasp of the otherness, the opaqueness of the individual, and the ability to see beyond oneself, leads to the understanding that is the essence of genuine and active love . I believe that these two ideas are ably il­ lustrated in the chosen novels. 11 [Her] concern i.s with ordinary people caught up in a moral conflict but trying to improve the quality of their inner lives. These are no heroes, for only in tragedy can heroes exist" (Schneider- meyer, 1974:145). 44 Schneidermeyer also points out that the theme of moral suf­ fering pervades all Iris Murdoch's novels, and this is particularly t rue of the later novels. "Moral pain is cha racterized by its capacity to awaken the soul. Extern­ al suffering, because it consumes the self, cannot be the test of courage in the way that inner or moral suffering can Suffering can purify only if the sufferer and the one who inflicts suffering are one, that is only if one suffers from his own conscience" (p. 53).

The Time of the Angels is a di squieting book, powerful with its images of darkness. It presents a curious inver­ sion of community, and contains the recurring Murdochean theme of the struggle of love against the many guises of evil in everyday life (Sullivan, 1977-78:560). It concen­ trates on the mostly incestuous relationships within this one isolated ingrown household. Carel's plight is another version of the self-involvement which Miss Murdoch abhors (Stade, 1976:315). This novel dramatizes the consequences of solipsism: "the psychological and sexual enslavement of oneself and others through fantasy, delusion, self-ab­ negation, and power" {Sullivan, 1977-78:561). Sullivan says that this novel is about "t he power of the demon to c ontaminate himself and others the enchanter manipu- lates the fantasies of victims who need a dominating figure to provide metaphysical meaning and dynamic tension to their otherwise vague drifting lives" (p. 565). The plot centres on Carel 's attempt to maintain his hold over his . 45 family, Muriel and Pattie's attempts to break loose from his evil hold, and the pitiable struggles of various kinds of good against Father Carel's dynamic evil (p . 566). Every one of the characters in this novel is morally in­ volved. Carel represents the evil against which the others suffer. He is the external agent who cause s moral suffer- ing.

Iris Murdoch is opposed to Heidegger because she believes that his continuance in the Nietzschean t radition of nihil­ ism poses a threat to any system of ethics based on the idea of goodness. "Heidegger 1 s idea of nothingness intro­ duces a moral vacuum from which Carel never emerges Heidegger' s phenomenology does not offer a positive expres­ sion of the idea of being, but begins i nstead with negative ideas like nothingness and death ••• the human Dasein [the being-there quality of every existent thing] confronted with its own eventual non-being in death, must respond to its own inner voice which constantly underlines its fin!- tude" (Stade, 1976:315).

Perhaps this theory of Heidegger's is the source of the despair characterizing so many modern novels: the absence of any transcendental Being, man having to turn qack upon himself, and finding there nothi ng but his own limited existence. If there is one thing that has remained un­ changed throughout the ages, from paganis m through Christ­ ianity to existentialism and beyond, it is the indisputable, deep basic need of man for some t hing beyond himself to be- 46 lieve in. Without i t, life l oses its meaning and a bottom­ less. void opens at his feet. In Carel's case the need for some reconstructed value leads to self-deific ation, which is probably his greatest sin. His evil sprea ds until the entire household is corrupted (Stade, 1976:315). The vic­ tims of Car el's evil are his daughter Muriel, his niece Elizabeth who later turns out to be hi s daughter, a colour­ ed servant Patti e, and an indirect victim, a refugee, Eu­ gene.

In contrast to The Time of the Angels, there is little in Bruno's Dream that i s positively evil. It is concerned rather with ordinary people and their all too human fail­ ings. Although it deals with death, spanning the last days of a very old man, i t is by no means a depressing novel. Its chief merit is t he way in which Miss Murdoch illustrates the counterpoint of farce and tragedy, puzzlement and sud­ den comprehension t hat makes up the sum of man's life and death. Bruno, confi ned to his room and eventually to his bed, has t o make his peace with all his follies and errors. He is assisted into acceptance and peace by the love of a woman who has herself had to undergo moral suffering and an extension of the sel f to incl ude an awareness of others, in order to be able to give Bruno t he love he thought he would never again arouse i n a woman.

A Word Child has both tragic power and moral force. It can be regarded as "an equivalent of Plato's pilgrimage from appearance :t; o reality" (Cunneen, 1978: 57). It deals 47 with one man's problems, and "reveals t he emergence of i ts violent lower-class scholar-protagonist from repetitive, compulsive behaviour into the freedom of a mature loving relationship" (p. 148). It describes Hilary Burde 1 s moral progress from a life which is only superficially ordered and regulated, to an eventual possibility' of peace. In this novel Miss Murdoch succeeds to an outstanding degree in conveying with absolute understanding and compassion Hilary's tortuous mind, his strange compulsions and his own particular moral battle. His tragedy is that he realizes that it would need God to remove his sin, but has denied His existence.

In spite of the serious moral issues involved, Henry and Cato is essentially a lighthearted novel with infectious humour bubbling over in the most unexpected quarters. The two young men, Henry and Cato, are, each in his own way, involved in a quest for identity. As Prescott says, "Henry and Cato are two young men separately bent on destroying their lives in the naive hope that by renouncing what they have they will find freedom. What they find, of course, is their own monstrous egoism, which very nearly destroys everyone around them" (1977:45).

Charles Willowby, in The Sea, the Sea, is another of I ris

Murdoch's solipsist~c protagonists, but not evil like Carel in The Time of the Angels or as benighted as Hil ary in A Word Child. The essential Murdochean themes are present in this novel: a preoccupation with love; the 48" importance of "attention"; the necessity of other-centred­ ness for the expression of true morality. Charles has to come to terms with unfulfilled dreams, unrequited love, and like Hilar y, wit h the knowledge that he does not repre­ sent all things to all people. Like Hilary, Charles is something of a "word child". "The culture of the self is challenged for each of them, by the not so safely buried past. It woul d be impossible to mistake the neurotic recessiveness of Hilary Burde 1 s refl ections for the grand­ iloquent self-esteem of Charles Arrowby's, ••• but their first~person narratives anatomize personalities and pre­ dicaments that have much in common . In Charles, as in Hilary, literariness expresses sens i tivity, aridity, in­ security" (Gribble, 1979:36). 49 4 EVALUATION OF CHOSEN WORKS

4 .1 THE TIME OF THE ANGELS

A.S. Byatt calls The Time of the Angels "a fantasy of the spiritual life" (1976:27). Carel terms himself "a priest of no god" and Byatt says that he sets out to destroy the last vestiges of religion that are still left over in a world that is increasingly denying the existence of God. Byatt says that he tries to be "good f or nothing", and that Iris Murdoch also claims that that is all that is morally possible in a world where God i s dead, and "Good" is only an indefinable sense of direction. Byatt 1 s inter­ pretati on of the words "good for nothing" in Iris Murdoch's essay "On 1God 1 and 'Good"' seems to me to miss thei r pre­ cise meaning. I understand them to mean that one is moral ­ ly "good" only if one is "good f or nothing", that is, ex­ pecting no reward, getting nothing in return for being good.

Baldanza points out that the heart of the novel is a version of the "God is Dead" philosophy presented by the blasphem­ ously eccentric priest (1974:131). Father Carel spells this philosophy out to his brother immediat ely after having been caught naked in bed with his daughter, and this great­ ly emphasizes his amorality.

Carel, like his creator, is aware that at human level life is continge~t, subject to chance and necessity without form, without consolation (Byatt, 1976:27). Byatt poi nts 50 out that, there being no consolation, Carel creates for himself a Nietzschean drama in which he is the lonely, defiant hero. "He commits incest with his daughter out of a complusion which might be part ~£ a Gothic novel, or might be related to Ni etzsche's description of Oedipus as thB man who had seen the secret of life, 1 the horror of nature', the reality of death and the meaninglessness of existence and who t hus knew that all was permitted because all was equally valuable 19r worthles~" (Byatt, 1976:27). Ca r el believes that "good" cannot exist because good is unitary, while man's only experience is of multiplicity and fragmentation. "Evil is the only principle to which man 's experience testifies, a nameless impalpabie malaise" (Baldanza, 1974:131 ).

Baldanza explains Carel's conception of God, or rather, of no God: "God, who would also have been unitary if He could have been conceived to have existed, is now divided up into His thoughts, which are partial, fragmented obsessions, imaged as angels; they are the only spiritual entities with whom me n can communicate, and those who communicate wi th angels are lost " (1974:131).

Rabinovitz points out that in this novel Miss Murdoch has returned to the theme which occupied her in The Bell and other earlier novels , and that is "the probl em of ethical behaviour as it i s i nfluenced by modern reli gious and philo­ sophical ideas" (Stade, 1976:313). The two ethical altern­ atives offered in the novel are Satanism, represented by 51 Carel, and weak atheistic humanism, represented by Marcus. Norah's morality is based on a belief in decency, in ordi­ nary rules of human behaviour.

Carel is fascinated with the dark side of German existen­ tialism, particularly with the works of Nietzsche and Hei- · degger. In one of her philosophical papers Murdoch refers to this aspect of existentialism as· positively Luc~ferian, wondering whether Heidegger is not Lucifer in person. Sein und Zeit lies open on Carel's desk, indicating that it is often read - Sullivan in fact refers to it as his bible - and ironically, after their move to London, when the house is still in disorder, Pattie trips over the same book and kicks it petulantly out of the way, symbolizing the action which is to come (Stade, 1976:313).

In the first pages the idea of solipsism or self-centred­ ness is introduced when Pattie has instructions to turn everyone away. This gives us the first intimation of Carel's retreat into himself, drawing his family around him like a cloak of isolation, a cocoon of which he is the corrupt centre.

The theme of darkness is a plack thread running through the novel. The fog-induced darkness suggests the unnatural isolation to which the inhabitants of the house are subject­ ed. As Sullivan says, "The darkness of this fog multiplies as it penetrates the house, unnerving its inhabitants and merging with the darkness of Carel's cassock, Carel's black 52 ma sses, black humour, and blackness of being" (1977-78:566). The following words suggest the awful blackness of fear and uncertainty, the horrifying nothingness into which Carel's obsession with Nietzschean existentialism has pre­ cipitated him: "Suppose the truth were awful, suppose it was just a black pit, or like birds huddl ed in the dust in a dark cupboard?" (The Time of the Angels, p. 163). ·

The entire vicinity, and Carel's parsonage itself, suggest the moral wasteland which he and his victims inhabit. He has been appoi nted rector of a non-existent church. Every­ thing around the rectory has been demolished. The adjacent building has been sliced away, leaving a blank concrete surface. The tract of land denuded of buildings resembles a bomb site. Carel's isolation in the darkness of his being and the enf orced isolation of his household corres­ pond to the setting of the rectory shrouded in fog: "Ever since their arri val the fog had enclosed them, and she [Pattie] still had very litt le conception of the exterior of the rectory. I t seemed r ather to have no exterior ••• to have absorbed all other space into its substance" (The

Ti me of the Ang~ls, p. 21 ) ·. Sullivan gives a good descrip­ tion of the situation: "The incestuous household t hat lives within a dark ruined rectory far from London, sur­ rounded by fog and by wastel and, suggests metaphorically the perils of intellectual, spiritual and emotional solip­ sism ••• unhealthy love that is immured, sealed-up, is a form of self-love or incest and can result in unexpected 53 disaster" (Sullivan, 1977:562).

The paper darts are a bizarre touch, indicating Carel's ma i ntained moral assault on Pattie. He is her master, "tall and dense in his black cassock as a tower of dark­ ness" (The Time of the Angels, p. 33). The underground rumbling beneath them suggests the underworld which Carel is coming more and more to represent, When he makes love to Pattie again after a long time, he destroys her budding friendship with Eugene - the only vestige of normality in Pattie's abnormal life - and binds her to him as surely as if he had used chains.

Why does Carel eventually commit suicide? He has built his earthly kingdom around the little household, forcing them farther and farther into self-centred isolation. In London, in the bombed-out rectory with the fog pressing in, making itself felt even inside the house, the feeling of isolation is heightened. At the same time there is an increased on­ slaught from outside, an onslaught by varying degrees of morality on the unmitigated evil which is Carel. There is Marcus representing atheistic humanism; Norah Shadox­ Brown standing for a common-sense goodness, for ordinary decency; Anthea who has been appointed by the Bishop to evaluate Carel 1 s psychological condition, and at the same 1 time a reminder of the past when she caused trouble among the brothers. Then there is Eugene who constitutes a threat because he has made Pattie .aware of the existence of a l ife where people may love innocently. Muriel is becom- 54 ing more and more uneasy as Carel's increased demands of isolation seem to close around her, and even Elizabeth seems to be receding into passivity. She no longer reads and seldom converses, being 11 switched-off" more often than eve'r before. At the climax of the story nearly all these op- posing forces are present. Leo, Eugene's son, is with Mu- ' riel in the linen closet when she spies on Elizabeth and dis covers the full extent of Carel's depravity; Marcus is' unaccountably present, having simply walked in, intending to see Elizabeth. Pattie is also there, agitatedly trying' to remove him. When Carel receives Pattie's note, he knows that Muriel knows . The cocoon that has s o laboriously been spun has broken open, revealing the corruption withi"n. With his anti-Maria gone, it is time to be "judged quite automatically out of the great power of the universe. That will be its last mercy" (The Time of the Angels, p. 166).

S~llivan suggests that Carel is Iris Murdoch's modern Faust who signals the end of a humane intellectual and ethical tradition (1977-78:566). Father Carel, enshrined in his tower of darkness, embodies the nihilism and interiority of his time. "The sense of the ending of an age and of a dy­ ing mythology is reinforced by the use of decaying charac­ ters whose loneli ness is accentuated by t heir dark, ruined settings and by an oppressive atmosphere of terror, melan­ choly and evil. Within the rectory live the ruins of a diseased age - grotesque parodies of family, of religion, of s~xual i ty, and of love" (p. 566). 55 To Marcus Carel has always been the father-figure, the source of power and of fear. Carel's incestuous relation­ ship with Elizabeth is weakly echoed in Marcus' love for her. She has become more to him than a niece of whom he is co-guardian. She has become a source of light, a prom­ ise of something in reserve. He is headmaster of a school and has taken a term's leave in order to write a book, a philosophical treatise upon morality in a secular age, provisionally entitled "Morality in a World without God". His purpose is what he proposes to call "the demythologiz­ ing of morals". "Compared with this, the demythologizing ,of religion upon which the theologians were so cheerfully and thoughtlessly engaged, was a matter of comparatively little moment ••• A religion without God, evolving sore­ lentlessly out of the theological logic of the centuries, represented nothing in itself but the half-conscious real­ ization 'that the era of superstition was over. It was its too poss'ible consequence, a morality wi thout God, which was the really serious danger" (The Time of the Angels, p. 68) •. He expresses the opinion that clever young people, as soon as they start to reflect about morals, develop a sort of sophisticated immoralism. l.ike all Murdoch 1 s characters who attempt to superimpose morali~, Marcus is portrayed as a weak man, incapable of combating the evil in Carel. Rabinovitz suggests that "perhaps Marcus' mistake in the novel was his attempt to be friendly toward his brother; because of Carel's evil, Mar- 56 cus should have t r eated him as a foe" (Stade, 1976:316). I ris Murdoch bears this out when she writes that the truly good is not a friendly tyrant to the bad, but its deadly foe (p. 316). "At first he [Marcus] bel i eve s that the idea of moral goodness need not be regarded as a metaphysical concept, but later he comes to feel that perfection implies the idea of absolute values and moves toward a belief in metaphysics along Pl atonic line s " (Stade, 1976:315-316). At t he climax of the novel Marcus wonders whether love is the one absolute metaphysical concept which can provide a basis for an ethical system (p. 316).

Marcus' moral weakness is visi ble in his treatment of Leo. At school Leo elicit ed a sadistic response f rom Marcus over which the latter had little control. The r e is more than a suggestion of homosexuality in hi s involvement with Leo, and he a llows t he boy to exploit him t ime and again, to Leo's detriment .

In spite of the dar k, pessimistic atmosphere of this book, Iris Murdoch cannot resist the light, comic touch, and one of the comi c episodes is Marcus ' entry into the rectory through the coal hole, emerging i nto the house, black wit h coal dust, dUring an electrical power failure.

Marcus i s a self-confessed athei st, but the dismay he expe­ riences when he reali zes that Ca r el does not believe, is almost comical . It raises the question of whether he has really exami ned hi s true feelings on t hi s subject, whether 57 he is indeed an unbeliever as he professes to be. He is shocked beyond comprehension by the obscenity of Carel's gesture of holding out a carrot to him in the dark instead of the warm hand he expects. The final irony is that the lights go on the moment he has left the house. It is sym­ bolical of their benighted condition, of the lack of real communication between them, that the entire dialogue takes place in the dark.

Following hard upon this experience is the meeting with the Anglican Bishop. The picture Iris Murdoch paints of the Bishop is almost the most horrifying of all. He has lost his faith every bit as much as Carel has, but clothes this in elegant phrases and rhetorical questions , playing down the need for· a personal Saviour, evading direct answers . Carel, on the other hand, does not only theorize, but practises what he preaches (Stade, 1976:313). And what he practisep and preaches are the worst s ins: pride, slavery, incest, and eventually suicide.

The Bishop is pompous and verbose. Ma rcus i s like a child confronted with something beyond his comprehension, with something that. is threatening to destroy the foundation and fabric of his world: "But what is it that he believes? That still matters, doesn't it?" The Bishop' s reply is a masterpiece of dissemblance: "Well, yes and no" (p. 89). He evades Norah's question. He is in fact denying that Jesus Christ is relevant, suggesting that He is part of an outdated myth: "Much of the symbolism of theology which 58 was an aid to understanding in earlier and simpler times is, in this scientific age, simply a barrier to belief. It has become something positively misleading. Our symbolism must change. This af ter all is not hing new, it is a neces­ sity which the church has always understood. God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same" (p. 90) . But if Jesus Christ is being denied there doesn't seem to be much of the truth of the church left . Marcus' reaction to this declaration reveals the insinceri ty of his beliefs. He does not believe, but it is necessary to his peace of mind that other people should beli eve . In order to indulge in the luxury of playing wilh t he idea of there being no God, he needs the security of a world controlled by God. "He wanted the ol d structure to conti nue there beside him, near by, something he could occasionally reach out and touch with hi s hand. But now it seemed that behind the scenes it was all be ing unobtrusi vely dismantled. That they should be deciding that God was not a person, that they should be quietly demot i ng Jesus Chri st, this made him feel almost frightened" (p. 91). Marcus is now com­ pletely disorientated ; his world is crumbling about him. The ship's siren booming on the river and the foggy dark, emphasize his isolation. Behind the Bishop ' s evasive re­ plies he has sensed a void, a dar k seething mass without any intelligible principle of organization. His world is going wrong, he is frightened because he does not hear from Elizabeth . She, the thought of whom has ?lways been 59 a brightness in his life, seems to have been tainted by some malignant force.

When Carel, on Marcus' next visit to the rectory, spells out his conviction that God does not exist, Marcus wants to cry, "like a banished Adam" (p. 166). He has perhaps seen a vision of the Chaos and Old Night that has driven Carel mad. Carel has dealt a deathblow to all Marcus' favourite theories, has removed the solid earth of convic­ tion from beneath his feet, and left him suspended in a

void.

The blow Carel strikes him is probably meant to shock Mar­ cus out of his emotional need of physical contact, but succeeds only in engendering in Marcus the mystic feeling that somehow he has been made to exist (p. 182). Now he realises how much he loves Carel.

In the last pages of the book it seems that Marcus, though he has come close to the understanding of love, will not develop the idea to its logical conclusion. He abandons the book he is writing, intending to think about the philos­ ophical questions involved at a later date, but he will probably never return to them. Carel's influence on Mar­ cus is morally debilitating. He was intimidated into all but relinAuishing his guardianship of Elizabeth by being made to feel an unwelcome visitor when they used to live in the country, and now that they have moved to the city, he is denied all contact. Marcus had a comfortable niche 60 a comfortable morality, but Carel has destroyed his peace of mi nd and his theories to such an extent that he has abandoned his book.

Pattie and Muriel are enemies, but they are the two mem­ bers of the household who attempt to break loose from Ca­ rel ' s evil power. Only Patt ie succeeds. Pattie i s depict­ ed with sympathy and clarity. Byatt says that her actions are "almost entirely part of Car el's religi o-sexual myth. She has to be the Black Madonna to bal ance the Whi te Vir­ gin Princess, his incestuously seduced daughter, Elizabeth" ( Byatt, 1976:33).

Pattie's weird world depends on the solid simplicity of its surroundings for some semblance of realit y . This world has disintegrated with their move to London. Where her world was previously bound by fami liar shops, familiar people, a whole reassuring domain, it is now bound by fog - nothingness - and she is delivered to the unmitigated weirdness of Carel and t he situation he has built a round himself. Existence depends on being known and valued. Without appreciation and acceptance , one's existence crum­ bles and disintegrates. Her i solati on agit ates her .

I n spite of her promise, Pattie can eventually not stay. Carel ' s betrayal is too much. She is unable to stay and be his and Elizabeth's servant. For the first time in her life she acts resolutely and leaves pr eci pitately. She is not able to be what Carel wants of her . She is human, not 61 divine. She is no longer his anti-Mari a, and he can no longer be her redeemer. Neither can she take his sins upon her and make him free. Carel's moral influence on her is profound. When she joined their household she was a passive waif, to whom love was unknown. Carel awakened her by paying attention to her, by touching her and making her aware of her body. The happiness he engendered in her came to an abrupt end when he took her to his bed and the rest of the family shunned her. She still experienced a different species of joy, arising from the knowledge that he loved her, but she was never happy again. He promised to marry her, but changed his mind after his wife's death, and Pattie was ridden with guilt. She often thought of leaving but seemed powerless to move. Although he no longer made love to her she was in a certain sense still his mistress. There was still contact, a kind of electric communication between them. He would caress her casually in passing.

Her relationship with Eugene is completely different. For the first time she seems to be experiencing a normal friend- ship, but Carel puts an end to it, emphasizing the fact that she belongs to him by claiming her again after a long time.

Carel has taken the place of God in her life, and he ac­ cepts her worship in his self-deification. When he cate- 1 chizes her, he is perhaps preparing her for the knowledge of his incestuous relationship with Elizabeth, but what he 62 expects of her is too much . She cannot be his black god­ dess, with Eli zabeth his swa.n princess. When she breaks the chains of his capitivity he commits suicide. Breaking away from his evi l has given Pattie the chance of a new life, a life of service.

Muriel, too, i s i sol ating herself, refusing to see anyone. Influenced by Carel, she and Elizabeth lead a completely unpatural life, closeted in one room, seeing no-one, even cooking for themselves.

In spite of her father's insistence she refuses to call him by his christi an name, until it breaks out when he is in danger of being caught by Marcus. This indicates that her awareness of him onl y breaks out into full recognition when she discovers his incestuous relationship with Eliza­ beth, and leads to the recognition of her love for him when she finds him unconscious, after taking her tablets. It is ironic t hat she should provide the means for his sui­ cide.

Carel's moral influence on her, too, has been great, engen­ dering early feelings of hate for Pattie, whom she holds responsible for her mother's death. Their isolated, self­ centred life gives rise to all kinds of perversities. Her feelingG towar ds Elizabeth, with whom she is unnaturally cooped up, are decidedly lesbian, symbolized by her sick fascination with the surgical corset Elizabeth is said to wear. At the age of twenty- four she feels old and full of 63 regrets, mainly for the ordinary, innocent life which she has never experienced.

Elizabeth, the household's "kernel of innocence", is the ruling power. She keeps her door locked, summoning Muriel by bell. She is retreating into herself, becoming more and more passive, refusing any real contact. Muriel feels that Elizabeth should be released from the web that Carel seems to be weaving around her, and this leads to her plan to introduce Leo to her, and eventually to knowledge of her and Carel's incest.

In Muriel's life, too., the fog has become a factor: "a hushed, lifted finger, imposing silence" (p. 58). She re­ cognizes its symbolisrri: "Curling, creeping, moving and yet still, always receding and yet always present, everywhere and yet nowhere, imposing silence, imposing breathless anxious attention, it seemed to symbolize everything which at this time she feared" (p. 58). Fear seems to have c;rept even into the long philosophical poem she is writing.

Her moral uncertainty is symbolized by the precarious way she follows to the river with Leo, over slippery, muddy ground, between slimy walls, to reach the river over which the fog is only slightly less dense, the river perhaps sug­ gesting a way out of the benighted condition in which she finds herself, an intimation of freedom elswhere.

Muriel and Elizabeth regard themselves as theoretical im­ moralists, living an ordered, ascetic life, but believing 64 that everything is permitted. They convinced one another that there is no God, and then dropped the matter. There is an artificiality about this theory of immorality. Eliza­ bet h appears to have applied it, of which the paradox of this pale lily-like girl smoking thick brown cigars is sym­ bolic . "Her diseased body encased in a surgical corset, her ins istence on staying within 'the dark, unvisited ca­ vernlike envi ronment' and her s elf-imprisonment behind locked doors that admit others only at t he summons of a bell, are all facets of her increasingly inhuman behaviour. Ca­ rel has infected her with his inwardness and solipsistic fantasies (Sullivan, 1977-78:567). Muriel has not applied this t heory. Proof of her essential morality is her reac­ tion to Leo's theft of the icon, and her intense shock at finding out about Elizabeth and Car el. She is very much like Marcus, in not really believing that everything is permitted. Muriel f alls in love with Eugene for his bles­ sed ordinariness, yet ironically, Eugene too is isolated, .taking refuge in hi s Russian identity, which enables him to feel superior t o the English, among whom he does not really belong.

In the st udy with Carel breat hing his last, Muriel takes the greatest moral decision of her life, to allow Carel to die as he has chosen. There, faced with death, she acknow­ ledges her love for her father, adding yet another dimen­ sion to the emotiona l and mo ral tangle of this household. She also recognises her previous ly unidentified jealousy of 65 Elizabeth, who had always been between Muriel and her Fa­ ther. Muriel's love might have saved him, but like his love, hers was "immured, sealed up" and like Marcus' love, released too late. In his death Carel has committed his final diabolical act: he has riveted Muriel and Elizabeth together, committing Elizabeth to her care . Yet, the fog has cleared, symbolizing new hope after Carel's death.

Elizabe,th never comes alive in the story - probably she is not meant to. She is portrayed in terms which make her seem more like an animated doll, or a statue. Her face is long and pale, her hair pale gold with a metallic sheen. "Her ·beauty ••• glowed with the soft chill of a wax effigy" (p. 93). She is cold and loveless yet cherished like a priceless jewel by those around her.

Eugene lives in a room like a warm concrete box, indicating his comfortable isolation from reality, from the English world. His icon is the focus of light in his life, the Blessed Trinity leaning their gentle melancholy faces anx- - iously toward each other. To Eugene ,the icon is a blank image of goodness, but without personality. Eugene fails morally because he is unable to break out of his self-cen­ tredness sufficiently to forgive and accept Pattie. Neither is he capable of understanding and accepting his son's dif­ ference, the fact that he does not feel himself Russian. In Iris Murdoch's novels rooms and houses function metaphor- ically to define the relationships within them (Sullivan, 1977-78:559). "Carel's bombed-out rectory, his dark base- 66 ment and Elizabeth's sequestered room whose mirrored L­ shaped nook conceals the incestuous secret of the house­ hold, are enclosures that reflect ailments of interiority as manifested in the character of their occupants and in the nature of their spell-bound, erotic, and frequently in­ cestuous relationships" (p. 559). The mirror also repre­ sents both the limitations of vision and the distortions of perception.

A feature of this novel is the love Carel inspires in so many people - his brother, his wife and hi s brother's wife, his two daughters, Pattie, even Anthea who returns to the rectory to weep over his death. This suggests the power and also the attraction of evil on the one hand, but also illustrates how ineffectual love is that i s turned in upon itself and prevented from flowering and becoming a saving power.

Baldanza concludes: "Power and the marvel of power, chance and the terror of chance dominate the persons of this book, who are caught in an unrelieved, dour, frightening, sicken­ ing version of the triumph of evil" (1974:131).

4 . 2 BRUNO ' S DREAM

Despite the fact t hat Bruno's Dream is about a man's death, this is no tragedy but a story with an essentially moral theme, expl oring t he way in which a dying man experiences his attempts to come to terms with t he moral errors he has made in his life, errors mainly due to his failure to love. 67 Schneidermeyer reminds us that according to Aristotle, tragedy shows men better and more grand than they are. "In the world which Murdoch creates there are no deeds larger than life, no persons of impressive stature, thus no puri­ fying moments of pity or terror excited by a hero's 'flaw' which leads to fatal error" (1974:145). Bruno is no hero. He is just a frail old man, mulling over his sins, suffer­ ing pangs of self-reproach, and occasionally wallowing in self-pity. His dream is that he might be reconciled with his son, that his son should forgive the hard words_ spoken, that he should understand that Bruno was not the only one responsible for the estrangement between them, and thus lessen his load of guilt. As Schneidermeyer points out, "the relief from moral problems is a common theme running through Murdoch's novels" (p. 91). Nigel's letter to Dan­ by conveys the recurring Murdochean theme: "How very often ••• does one love alone in solipsism, in vain incapsulation, while concealment feeds upon the substance of the heart" (Bruno's Dream, p. 248).

The first sentence of the novel suggests its theme: "Bruno was waking up," (p. 7) also to the knowledge that he needs to be "reconciled. He realizes how little he has attained in his life. He never went into zoology as he had wanted to. His projected books never progressed beyond articles, he never went to Russia to take up the invitation of his Russian entomologist friend, and he was the one to termi­ nate the correspondence. He had been a disappointment to 68 his wife, been found out in the only affair he ever had, and had failed to go to his wife when she called to him on her deathbed. The word "cowering" (p. 7) suggests his life-long shrinking from moral obl igations, that has led to his being a fail ure.

He had become estranged from his son because he hadn't wanted a coloured daughter-in-law. He felt that it was unfair that he had been made to bear the moral burden of his care­ less talk of "coffee-coloured grandchildren" for all those years. If they had only reasoned with him or let him see the girl, he would have capitulated. His reaction had been instinctive, and Miles had hi gh-mi ndedly refused to see him again. Both of them, being so thoughtless and self-centred, had made understanding and forgiveness impossible. Neither Bruno nor any member of his family was capable of sufficient love to encompass and make all owance for one another's frailties. Even now, when Miles comes to see him, he re­ fuses to listen to Bruno. Lisa, however, allows him to un­ burden himself to her, and their talks bring a measure of p aace and acceptance, The dingy tenor of his life is sug­ gested by Murdoch's description of the part of London where Bruno now lives with Danby, t he "graceless light upon sin­ ful London," and "the grimy r i nged towers of Lots Road power station" (p. 7 ) . The dinginess and neglect suggested by the descripti on of his room serve a simi lar purpose.

With uncanny perception Miss Murdoch conveys the emotions of this old man, his awareness of physical decay, and the 69 way his thoughts wander, recalling snatches of his life. She conveys his fear of the long night, and his fear of being alone, the red dressing-gown coming to symbolize his increasingly limited movement. On his deathbed he becomes aware of how few feople he had loved, and how selfishly he had loved them. His greatest regret is that he had been unable to bring himself to go to Janie when she was dying because he had been afraid she would curse him. Now at the end, he realises that all the things one chased after are pointless. All that matters is to be kind and good. He knows now for certain that Janie must have realised this too when she was dying. He knows now that she had not want­ ed to curse him, she had wanted to forgive him; and on that knowledge he is at last able to attain peace.

Murdoch's theory of the immorality of self-involvement is once more illustrated. Bruno's neglected room is the moral wasteland i~ which he finds himself, often at night calling in vain for Nigel, feeling himself deserted and being ip­ capable of doing anything about it.

Danby, Nigel, Lisa, and Diana all undergo changes for the better in the course of the novel, and these changes are all brought about by love, by the expansion of the self to in­ clude others, which is Murdoch's conception of morality. Danby is a hedonist, casually attentive and kind to Bruno, amiably drunken, and has conveniently taken Adelaide the maid to bed. Just as casually he starts a flirtati on with Diana. When he falls in love with Lisa, it changes his 70 life completely, stripping it of all trivialities. Loving Lisa as he had loved Gwen, his first wife, awakens Danby out of his hedonistic solipsism, and makes him aware of someone besides hi mself. In Murdoch's terminology, he has progressed f r om an agent to a character, in his progress from self-centredness.

Nigel the nurse, who probably takes drugs and is so good with Bruno, goes away so that the great love he feels for Danby will not become a destroyer, and he goes to India to devote himself to a life of service to others. Nigel is the agent who provokes reactions. ~e peeps and eavesdrops and follows people. He tells tales and neglects his duties, but also has uncanny insight. He reaches Diana in her ex­ tremity, stopping her from committing suicide, teaching her to forgive Miles and reassuring her that she need not fear that Miles wil l continually be thinking about Lisa, because he is incapable of truly seeing anyone but himself. Lisa, denying herself the love of Miles for the sake of Diana, finds a great er love with Danby. She is totally other-centred, and is initially the only one capable of seeing beyond Bruno' s repulsive appearance and discerning the moral conflict and remorse being suffered by the old man.

The one person in t he novel who does not change at all·, is Miles. He begins as a self-centred egoist, and ends that way. He has deified his first wife, Parvati, and allowed his second wife, Diana, to love and pamper him, to create 71 a shrine in which he can await the return of the mu s e that seems to have deserted him. When he falls in love with Lisa, he convinces himself of the possibility of keeping both Lisa and Diana, and when Lisa leaves, suppos edly for India, he prepares to deify her as well. Lisa shocks him out of this fantasy by going to Danby, whom Miles despises .

Miles is incapable of communicating with Bruno, becaus e he is essentially solipsistic and incapable of conce iving of the reality of anyone else. He is as trapped in his own web of selfish isolation as Bruno is in his web of guilt, waiting for death. He avoids all contact, afraid of a llow­ ing himself to be distracted from his purpos e, which is to ·await the inspiration to write great poetry. He cannot imagine Bruno 1 s having any feelings at all. He cannot hide his shock at Bruno 1 s appearance and is incapable of having a meaningful conversation with him. Miles suffers, but the suffering does not change him. His suffering i s caused by Bruno and Lisa, who have intruded into his thoughts, dis­ tracting him from his poetic preoccupation. The s ight of Danby talking to Lisa shocks him into awareness of his love for her. Even then he is so involved with his own emotions that he does not consider Lisa 1 s feelings. When·all the up­ heaval has passed, he will settle down to writing poetry again, with Diana there to cushion him against reality. He ·ends as he began, entirely selfish and s olips istic , a moral failure. Once more Murdoch 1 s theory of t he immorality of solipsism is illustrated. 72 Of all the characters Diana, per haps, suffers most and un­ dergoes the greatest change. She is a slightly bored mid­ dle-aged woman, capable of flirting "i nnocently" with Dan­ by. She does not really want an affai r, but merely an ex­ citing, romantic friendship. She has to come to terms with being overshadowed by Lisa, whom she has a l ways regarded as a bird with a broken wing. Miles fall s in love with Lisa,

Danby f~lls in love with Lisa, and she is good with Bruno. Lisa goes away and Miles stays with Di ana, but she has to live with the idea of being second-best, not only to Parva­ ti, but to Lisa.

Diana experiences Murdoch's projected moral change most perfectly when she is able to carry out Nigel's exhortation: "Relax: let them walk on you. Love them. Let love like a huge vault open out overhead" (p. 269). When Diana sur­ renders herself to this love wit hout self-i nterest, being "good for nothing", she finds that all bitterness has de­ parted, and that she is filled with love for the dying old man, a love which is perfect because i t is entirely other­ centred, expecting nothing in return.

The river is a symbol of cleansing. When Danby swims the Thames after the farcical duel, he feels that all his sins have been forgiven. Bruno's stamp col lecti on symbolizes his attachment to possessions. Although he is nearly nine­ ty years of age, he finds himself thinking of ways to evade death duties rather than of death. When the flooding river destroys his stamps, he is finally severed from his posses- 73 sions and .never again asks for them. He finally drifts in­ to peace, eased by the unselfish mercy of a woman's love, ' such as he never thought to have again.

4.3 A WORD CHILD

Hilary Burde is another of Miss Murdoch's solipsistic pro­ tagonists who have to learn that other people are individu­ als, that they have personal identity. As Rabinovitz says, "too much self-examination can end in total preoccupation with oneself •••• Moral excellence and love come with the observation of others, moral shallowness and neurosis a re the result of self-attention" (Stade, 1976:6). Byatt des­ cribes him as "a character created by education, a man made civilized by learning grammar and language to a level of high proficiency, a man of clear mind on a l i mited front, and violent and ill-comprehended passions. His story, though dramatic, is cleverly related to the story of Pete r Pan, a recurrent preoccupation" (1976: 33). Schneidermeyer has perceptive things to say about the type of protagonist Hilary is: "On one hand the sufferer from moral guilt has a natural desire to be free; on the other he, by thinking and meditation, continues to accept and to deep~n his suf­ fering" (1974:53-54). She also says that it would be im­ possible to submit to the bitterness of self-inflicted suf­ fering caused by attachment which one felt to be worthless. "Also it presumes a relationship .between suffering and some fault, since one cannot deliver himself from his past, no matter how great his r emorse, unless he has a clear 74 image of the past a s evil and a desire for t he . ~uture to be different" (p . 54). She says that moral suffering can only occur if one wants to become a dif ferent kind of person. "It cannot be the experience of either an evil person or one who can somehow ignore his faults or excuse himself" (p. 54). This explains why Carel i n The Time of the An­ gels is not really capabl e of moral suffering or of remorse. Hilary's suffering, up to the point where the novel takes up the s t ory, has not assisted his moral progress, but has become "obsessive, paralyzing and dehumanizing" (Schneider­ meyer, 1974: 54).

Murdoch's idea of community is realized in morality, self­ lessness and love, i n contact with others. Cunneen points out that in Murdoch's eyes the main object blocking clear perception is the i ndividual's egoistic drives and fantas­ ies , and his pilgri mage in understanding from appearance to reality "unites intellectual and moral discipline in the task of coming t o see reality as it is" (1978:2)

Wall poi nts out Mi s s Murdoch ' s f inesse in structuring the novel: "With a f i ne formal logic, the reader is not allow­ ed to learn everything about the narrator's past until his present is fully e l aborated: what unde rmines Hilary' s status quo is what has led him to establish it" (Wall, 1975: lf 16). A particular effect i s gained by the first person narrative, a device which, like in real l ife, places the onus on the observer ( the reader) t o judge the validity of the narrator's point of view. For example , Hilary proves 75 to be mistaken in his self-image and in his evaluation of the responses of the other people in his life. The reader becomes aware of this long before Hilary does, adding a further dimension of irony to the novel.

In the first pages of the novel Hilary is typified by his surroundings. The rubbish chute is jammed, the flat is smelly. The unmade bed and the familiar "badger" smell of his room suggest animality. His flat is a lair, a hide­ away, not a home. He seems part of the debris washed up by his ruined life, surrounded by ruins: a drunken sus­ pended schoolmaster, a feckless unemployed young man and his drop-out friends. Hilary himself relates his flat to his life: "I instinctively denigrate my flat: it was doubtless my own life which was small and nasty" (A Word Child, p. 2). He cannot bear to be surrounded by anything suggesting homeliness, as it would be too poignant a re­ minder of his past.

Sullivan points out that Iris Murdoch's isolated characters long to be part of a familial, social, or national group. At the same time "they are solipsists who rely chiefly on will, ego and power in order to manipulate the behaviour of others according to their own systems and beliefs" (1977- 78:557). This is exactly what Hilary does. He regulates everything and everyone about him. Christopher has to obey rules. Hilary smashes the telephone when he finds out that Christopher has been making long-distance calls, contrary · to the rule. 76 His social life is carefully regulat ed. He has "days", re­ gular routine taking t he place of reality, acting as an anaesthetic, deadeni ng him to emotion, making decisions un­ necessary. Each "day" calls for a different set of atti­ tudes, and the fixed routine is a substit ute for thinking. He is merely drifting on the surface of reality: "Your exercise of free choice is a prodigious stirrer up of your reflection. The patterned sa meness of the days of the week gave a comforting sense of absolute subjection to history and time, perhaps a comforting sense of mortality" (A Word Child, p. 27) . He lives in other people's lives, having none of his own. Only that which is familiar, which pre­ sents no new adjustment, is acceptable. "Hilary's is a grotesque parody of order and lucidity, with deprivation and retreat as its essential premises" (Wall, 1974:416). His job i s part of the essential routine: "If .I had ever finished I would have felt in danger of going mad. I some­ times had nightmares i n which I had no more 'cases', my in­ tray was empty, and as I had no more work to do, I was there under false pretences" (p. 30). Wi t hin his tight, regulated l ittle wo rld Hilary feels safe "for the walls are high and firm enough to discourage escape, either into the past or the ki nd of present t hat might remind him of the past" (Egremont, 1975:61 ). He seems incapable of taking action. What eventually happens to him, happens in spite of his pas ­ s.ivity . He t hreatens t o leave Tommy, but doesn't. He threatens t o go away from Clifford , but returns. He threat­ ens to resi gn, but takes very long to get round to it. 77 Hilary, the dominating figure, is utterly selfish, incapable of conceiving of the existence of other individuals. He is immensely critical of other people, including Crystal, whom he professes to love as if she were part of himself. That is, in fact, the only way in which he can love her. His love is totally solipsistic. He never wonders how she spends her time, except in relation to himself. He never _gets round to educating her, refuses to let her have a ddg, denies her the comfort of television in her lonely exist­ ence. He finds her unattractive, and thinks and speaks of her in derogatory terms. His evaluation does not seem de­ pendable, because she makes sufficient impression on Gunnar for him to want to see her again. Clifford finds her very sweet, and when Hilary insults her in Arthur's presence Arthur, usually so meek and mild, actually throws him out. His love for her is purely self-indulgent. He seems in­ capable of realising that people exist outside his own con- ' sciousness. He is convinced that Tommy and Crystal never have confidential chats, because they would be too afraid of him. He believes that all they have in common is their love for .him.

Hilary is a bully, given to violence. He was aw~re at an early age that he was unlovable. He has aware of himself having been maimed by injustice, the greatest of which was the deliberate separation from Crystal. His violence is as much a part of his character as his inability to repent. He is sorry for being rough with Tommy, but is immediately offend- 78 ed when she shows him the bruises he left on her arms. Early in his life t he feeling of excellence was inextric­ ably involved in t he idea of beating someone.

Hilary displays a t endency to play down those who fill his daily life: he has few good things to say about the Im­ piatts, in spite of admi t t ing to liking them; his descrip­ tion of Arthur suggests that he belongs to some lower order of existence, yet Arthur was a strength to his mother, he is a refuge t o a number of junkies, and he has.the strength of character to stand up to Hilary for the woman he loves. Even Hilary's self-image is poor. He describes himself as ugly and repulsive , in spite of which he is befriended by Gunnar a nd loved by Anne, Kitty, Tommy, Crystal, and Clif­ ford.

Hilary is another example of Iris Murdoch's belief that love. is attention , and that we have a moral obligation to attend to those we profess t o love. He himself suffered from lack of attention, but his inattention to others signifies his own lack of love. He refuses to listen although Arthur obviously wants to talk to him. Tommy's let ter is the usual rigmarole" (p . 15), hardly read before being destroyed. Mr Osmand and Crystal saved him, because they were the only two who gave him their attention. Mr Osmand opened his eyes to the power of knowledge: "I discovered words and words were my salvation. I wa s not, except in some very broken down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child" (p. 21). He has substituted words for 79 religion: "Grammar books were my books of prayer. Looking up worlis in the dictionary was for me an image of goodness. The endless task of learning new words was for me an image of life" (p. 22).

As in her other novels, Iris Murdoch uses the weather and

surroundings a~ symbols, illustrating people's attitudes to life. An important feature of Hilary's life is the London Underground Circle line. A ride on this line is his favourite therapy. Something of the desolation of his life is conveyed by this endless circuit: "Sometimes I rode the whole Circle (just under an hour) before deciding whether to have my evening drink at Liverpool Street or at Sloane Square. I was not the only Circle rider. There were others, especially in winter. Homeless people, lonely people, alcoholics, people on drugs; people in despair. We recognized each other. It was a fit place for me, I was indeed an Undergrounder" ( p. 38) • In some way it seemed

/ to be his natural home. As in The Time of the Angels, a large part of the action of this novel takes place in a London deadened and shrouded by a cold persistent yellow fog, symbolizing Hilary's emotional condi ton, sunk in a fog of never-ending despair. ·Whenever he meets Biscuit, however, the fog itself is transformed into something bright.

Hilary is haunted by his past: "I felt something out of the darkness grab at me, an old, old thing" (p. 15). He un- consciously squeezes a whole tube of shaving cream into the 80 basin while thinking about the past. He is like Bunyan's Christian, bowed down under the weight of his sin, and un­ able to cast it off. He is always aware of having sinned, of needing salvation.

In spi te of his aversion to change, Hilary i s cheered and refreshed by the appearance of Biscuit. She introduces the theme of appearance and reality. She is an enigma; she looks like a n oriental beauty, an Indian pri ncess. She says she was born in Benares, but turns out to be a London­ born lady's maid. He welcomes her appearance as a bright, innocent surprise, but she is the prologue to yet another traumatic experience in his life.

Crystal represents Hilary's better self , the kernel of in­ nocence that he seems to have lost. He clings to the thought of her vi rgini t y, resisting the thought of her mar­ riage to Arthur, thrusting away the knowledge that she wants a child. His concern is not for her, but for his own need. Although he wants her to be saved, not damned with him, he cannot let her go. Wi th the knowledge that she is not a virgin after all, his reliance and dependence on her crum- ble. I t is ironic t hat for Clifford, too, the idea of Crystal's virginity is like a t alisman, a living proof that humanity is not t otally depraved. When Hilary tells Clifford that she had lost her virginity to Gunnar years before, he soon commits sui cide.

Perhaps because of t heir deprived childhood, both Hilary 81

and Crystal are incapable of resisting anyone who blesses them with attention. Crystal falls in love with Gunnar, and later with Clifford, because they were kind to her, Mr Osmand changed the whole course of Hilary's life because he looked at him and saw him. The next person was Anne: " ••• those shining clever gentle eyes somehow, and from the very first moment, looked right into my soul and I felt my­

self ~ for the first time in my life" (p. 116). His reaction to her was typically selfish, and it resulted in her death and his ruin. For the same reason he has no re­ sistance against Lady Kitty. The fiasco with Anne crushed him morally, He lost his moral self-respect, and with it his ability to control his life, Schneidermeyer points out Murdoch's conviction that man must believe that his life is significant, if he is to live with dignity. He must be able to devote himself to an ideal if he is to find contentment. Idealistic faith is necessary to morality (1974:5). This is what Hilary has lost and what has led to the recessive life he leads, a life devoid of dignity.

He recognizes the reason for there being no redemption for ·· ' · him: what he feels is not repentance, but resentment. He suffers intensely, but what he feels is anger that he should have been so unlucky, rather than remorse for t he s orrow he has caused. To me, the full horror of his deed i s conveyed by the laconic information: "'I'ristram committed suicide at the age of 16" (p. 128).

When Gunnar enters Hila ry's life once more, Clifford offers 82 him sound moral advice , and t hat i s that he should not run away again, but remain in the office to afford both himself and Gunnar t he opportunity of coming to terms with the tra­ gedy.

Gunnar's reappearance opens the old wounds, but also brings i i about greater awareness i n Hilary. He becomes aware of . ;j Gunnar's existence , and of Crystal' s lonelines s. When he confides in Arthur , Ar thur shows surprising i nsight and offers Hila ry roughly the sa me moral advice as Clifford does.

The advent of Lady Kitt y throws him totally out of gear. Once again he is confront ed wi th someone who attends to him, and his response is total. He even does the unheard of thing of breaking his routine. "I now had a task, I was like a knight with a quest. I needed my chastity now, I needed my aloneness; and it s eemed to me with a quickening amazement that I had kept myself for just this time" (p. 200). He is i ncapable of t hinking logically. Kitty seems almost like a deity t o him, instead of the rather silly woman she actually i s .

Although Hi l ary does not believe in God, and ridicules Chri sti an principl e s , he i s very much aware of sin, of s omething for which he must ·atone . "If only I could sepa­ rate out that awful mixture of s in and pain, if I could only even for a short t ime, even for a moment, suffer pure­ ly, without the burden of r e s entment and s elf-degradati on 83 to which I had deliberately condemned myself, there might be place for a miracle" (p. 201). I doubt whether one can really believe in sin on one hand and deny the existence of God on the other; for the one surely implies the other.

Hilary refuses to be realistic about Lady Kitty. He won't believe that she is a flirt as Clifford says. He ignores Crystal's plea for him not to see Lady Kitty again. Mur­ doch has captured the essence of the exhilaration of love which lifts one into the clouds at one moment and dashes one into the depths of despair the next. Kitty has sudden­ ly made everything seem possible - even his pipedream of educating Crystal and taking her to Venice. She represents an escape -out of the slough of despond in which he has spent the past twenty years. "He has come to realize that to be violent towards himself for his own guilt is as childish as to be violent towards the world for its guilt towards him. H~ has tried to shackle accident and bolt up change. What he has to reconcile himself to is not some consoling myth of retribution or even forgiveness: he has rather to humble himself before contingency, which moves in mysterious ways even though not providentially directed. He has also to accept that the will to happiness in others is legitimate" (Wall, 1975:416).

But now, in spite of the new-found hope brought into his life by Lady Kitty, his known world seems to be collapsing about him, his self-delusion fading. It is a shock for Hilary fo find out that he is not the centre of everyone's 84

universe, and he clings to his "days", to his routine, clinging to sanity. He is distressed out of all proportion to find out that Crystal is not a virgin af ter all; that she has broken with Arthur, not for hi s sake as he had thought , but because of Gunnar, because she couldn't tell Arthur. When Gunnar visits her, they look out once or ·twice t o s ee whether Hilary has come as he threatened, and then forget about him. He expected her to be beside her­ self wit h anxiety.

Murdoch applies the s ame strategy here as she does in many of her novels, using a relatively minor character to convey­ her moral bel iefs. She has Arthur say to Hilary: "All right, I don't believe in God either. But I think one should try to stick to simplicity and truth. There may be no God, but there is decency and - and ther e's truth and trying to stay t here, I mean to- stay in it, in its sort of light, and trying to do a good thing and to hold onto what you know to be a good thing· even if i t seems stupid when you come to do i t" (p. 280). This is basically what Marcus and Norah stand for in The Time of the Angels, and Ni gel, at the end of Bruno's Dream. By his affairs with Anne and Lady Kitty, by his destru·ctive self-interest, Hilary has overstepped the boundaries of decency and denied the su­ premacy of "good".

Then Tommy leaves him, intending to marry someone else; Clifford commits sui cide when his disi l lusionment with Crystal snaps his last thread of hope for humanity; Mr 85 Osmand commits suicide after finding his star pupil in a drugged stupor. Hilary is slowly being brought to under­ standing of himself and his true motives: "Repentance, penance, redemptive suffering? Nothing of the sort. I had destroyed my chances in life and destroyed Crystal's hap­ piness out of sheer pique, out of the spiteful envious violence which was still in me. It was burning the orphan­ age down all over again, only now there was no one to stop the work of destruction. I had spoilt my talents and had made myself a slave, not because I sincerely regretted what I had done, but because I ferociously resented the ill-luck which had prevented me from getting away with it" (p. 381). Schneidermeyer says of Michael in The Bell which might equally apply to Hilary: "Only one so self-absorbed could repeat his exact sin, and under the same circumstances, only to suffer all over again the agony ••• " (1974:63).

After Kitty's death he finally sees that their love wa s like his old violence, another attempt to make the world yield, while ignoring what is real. This wisdom has been achieved at real cost. The fall into the river which costs Kitty her life, is symbolic of a measure of cleansing that Hilary has undergone. He emerges from this catastrophe as if he had never been present. His name is not mentioned anywhere, and he is left to mourn her death, and particular­ ly Clifford's.

Perhaps it is too optimistic to say that the novel ends on a note of hope, but the suggestion is there that there 86 might just be a lif e of ordinariness for Crystal with Ar- thur, and for Hilary with Tommy. Hilary has indeed gone through deep waters t o the wisdom of settling for Tommy. Once he has come to terms with his own weakness, and accep­ ted the right to happiness of other people besides himself, he is on the road to redemption.

4.4 HENRY AND CATO

Each of the characters in this novel is guilty of self­ centredness, each l iving in his small, isolated wordld, wrapped in a cocoon of solipsism, incapable of conceiving of the reality of anyone else. Henry is cherishing his mediocrit y, r esisting the i dea of becoming a property man; Cato is absor bed i n his crisis of faith; Colette is com­ pletely self-centred in her pursui t of Henry; John is incapable of seeing any point of view but his own; Gerda is absorbed in her sorrow for Sandy; Lucius is so intro­ verted that he mistook· his imaginary pr oposal to Gerda after her husband's death for the real thing. Each of them is then precipitated into a moral cris is and Miss Murdoch allows us to follow their tortuous journeys to what she regards as the greatest morality, the realization of others, the ability to recognise their opaque individuality. The charact ers move towa rds this ideal at varying speeds and with varying degrees of success.

Cato, who has landed himself in an emotional c risis, has a poor self-image: "Oh, how stupid I am,' he said t o him- 87 self, using words which he had used ever so often since he was a child" {Henry and Cato, p. 9). Cato's headquarters, a now defunct mission, is located in a slum area, in a single surviving row of houses, surrounded by a wasteland where the other houses have already been pulled down, and this row is due to be demolished soon. This situation is a favourite symbol of Miss Murdoch's which she also uses in The Time of the Angels, suggesting the moral destitution that has crept into Cato's life. Above the wasteland a kestrel is circling, symbolizing the departure of the Holy Ghost from his life. At one stage Cato watches the kestrel dive and catch a small helpless creature in its talons.· One senses that Cato feels that he is similarly helpless against the moral onslaught. Perhaps he feels that it is the Holy Ghost that has debilitated him and left him desti­ tute.

Murdoch uses interiors to symbolize a moral condition. Ca­ to's dwelling place, dirty, damp, and crawling with insects, is as muddled as his emotions. His cassock, symbol of his office, is filthy and smelly. Even in her most serious

moments, as here where she is describing Cato 1 s degenera­ tion, Iris Murdoch cannot resist protraying the essential comedy of man's baser existence: the pink transparent beetles having a mass meeting in the far corner of the kit­ chen, the pink transparency of the beetles suggesting some­ thing of the bloodless insubstantiality of his faith and his moral weakness. 88 Murdoch's description of Cato' s conversion, as well as of the loss of his faith, is understanding and compassionate. Although she has declared t hat she herself does not believe in the existence of God, she r ecognizes that people do have

r eligious experiences, and her depiction of Cato 1 s plight i s sens iti ve and totally devoid of mockery. As suddenly and" inexplicably as the presence of God had come to him and he had been converted, just as suddenly he has become aware of a void, of the absence of God. Perhaps it is the trans- · i tion tha t brought this about, from an intellectual theolo­ gical cir cle of c onversations and theories, to .a slum area among people so destitute that they are devoid of faith, of ,; hope, or any desire for Christi anity, where his gospel cal­ ling i s r educed t o welfare work, side by side with atheist­ i c welfare workers. He i s shocked by the "wilfulness of vice a s a part of everyday life, and the way in which des­ pair and vice were one" (p. 38). His loss of faith occur­ r ing s imul taneously wit h his infatuation with Beautiful Joe, is more t han he can handle, and he flounders in a morass of indecision.

Joe 's f lat t ery binds him: "You're the only one who has ever cared for me . Fathe r , you're the only one who can really see me at all " (p. 46). He is unable to res ist t he feeling of being needed, which i s intensified because gene­ r a lly he is not needed. Ironically enough, he suspects that Joe is not serious . He wrestles with t he concept of his love for the boy. He had never thought of himself as 89 homosexual. He doesn't disapprove of homosexuality in principle, yet "some deep craving for order forbids it" (p. 71). Then, in addition, there is the knowledge of his vow of chastity, and the conviction that his ability to .help Joe depends on his concealing his emotion. The very fact of his being in a position of trust, as a priest, makes it impossible for him to surrender to his desire.

When Cato lays down his priesthood to devote his love to Joe, he loses Joe at the same time. If Cato is incapable of seeing Joe as he really is, the same applies to Joe. He is incapable of discerning the real Cato - -he doesn't even know his name. He is "Father", in his cassock, some abstract conception of good. When Cato relinquishes his cassock the magic is lost, and he becomes merely "a queer in a cord coat" in Joe's estimation, a poor figure to be exploited, not loved. Joe is also one of the many Murdoch­ ean characters who believe by proxy - he can carry on his life of depravity, even to the extent of deliberately tan­ talizing Cato by only just withholding his surrender to him, as long as he can depend on Cato's goodness, on his believ­ ing in God.

Joe is the evil agent in this novel, not powerfully dominat­ ing as Carel in The Time of the Angels is, but evil, none­ theless. He has no desire to change and seems incapable of

moral suffering. Perhaps it is the qual ity of Cato 1 s love that is at fault. "The truly good is not a friendly tyrant to the bad, but its deadly foe" (Rabinovitz, 1976:316). 90 Because of his infatuation .Cato is unable to contain Joe's almost playful brand of evil. Their conversations become emotional sparring matches, somehow controlled by Joe. Joe is obviously aware of Cato's love for him, and seems to take a diabolical delight in leading him on. Cato submits to Joe's violence, he writes the letters and quakes with fear of the knife. Were he to have stood up to Joe before, he would not have to kill him when he assaults Colette. He now has to live with the knowledge that had he called Joe 1 s bluff earlier, had he not so cravenly submitted, the whole drama would never have occurred. He had allowed Joe to take control of the situation, had indeed allowed him to take the place of Jesus Christ in his life. Joe's deprav­ ity seems to increase in direct proportion to his loss of respect for Cato.

While Cato is confined in the dark air-raid shelter, he is convinced that there is no way out. When he hears Colette's screams, however, he is precipitated out of his apathetic concern for himself, of his fear of the "gang", and breaks his way out. Breaking out and killing Joe is symbolic of destroying the hold of evil on him. Although he will have a long and lonely battle to cast off his feelings of guilt, the crucifix suggests that there will eventually be redemp­ tion for him. In spite of his loss of faith the crucifix comforts him and accompanies him, consolingly, on his jour­ ney into a new life.

Brendan represents a safe harbour to Cato, and it is to him 91 that Cato flees from time to time. He wants Cato to stop seeing Joe. Brendan knows that it is not concern for Joe's soul that binds Cato to him, but the fact that he cannot forgo the pleasure of seeing him. It is a dream that he will be able to help him, it is merely a pretext to justify himself and to give his love for Joe an aura of innocence.

· In the end Brendan leaves Cato, leaves the country, promis­ ing to pray for him every day, but refusing any further personal contact. Perhaps, loving Cato, he has also reach­ ed the end of his tether, and has demonstrated the alterna­ tive action to Cato. He leaves Cato his Spanish crucifix. As Cato too leaves, walking towards his new· life outside the church, the crucifix banging against his thigh suggests that he will come to terms with a new concept of religion that will somehow be inextricably united with the old. The crucifix is a symbol of the triumph of morality. Murdoch does not denounce homosexuality. She recognises its exist­ ence as a fairly common deviation from "accepted" norms, treating it with tolerance, ·not with approval. Brendan' s gift of the crucifix symboli zes his triumph over his homo­ sexual attraction to Cato, and simultaneously symbolizes his continuing love for Cato and his sustained prayers for his well-being. To Cato the crucifix will represent a link with his erstwhile belief in the existence of a loving God, a reminder of Brendan's strength, and therefore it should be a source of strength for himself.

Henry is leading a dull life as an incompetent teacher when 92 we meet him, being indulged by his equally incompetent American friends, Russ and Bella. He too has a poor self­ image, · believing himself incapable of being happy. The news of Sandy's deat h jerks him out of his existence and

precipitates him back into the scene of his unhappy child- : ~ r:

hood when he was always in Sandy 1 s shadow, ridiculed by his :a. father 11nd ignored by his mother. His joy at Sandy's death · . , knows no bounds. Sandy symbolizes all the r epression he ·' ;

suffered as a child. ·;f j

His feelings about art suggest his deliberate alienation from the milieu in which he grew up. He hates all the "' "grand stuff", but i s writing a book on Max Beckmann, who .;

appeals to him. Beckmann 1 s art has reached "the end of it •• i all when yawning turns to screaming" (p. 7l1), suggesting the existentialist belief in the destruction of meaning, and with it of moral ity.

Murdoch uses an amusing.technique to introduce Henry as he sees himself: "awakening Henry"; "private Henry"; "alien­ ated Henry"; "lost Henry"; "refugee Henry" ; "timid Henry"; "escaping Henry"; "inferior Henry"; "tactless Henry". This technique succeeds in conveying Henry's preoccupation with himself and his own emotions.

Henry has what he imagines to be a moral impulse to rid hims elf of property, but it is all tied up with the immoral 'impulse of repaying his mother for her lack of love. He has no compunction about casting her and Lucius out. This 93 decision is part of his search for identity. He is aware of the blow he has dealt his mother, and this is the begin­ ning of his awareness of others.

Never explicitly stated but undeniably present, is Henry's unacknowledged love for the place of his birth. This is revealed in Murdoch's descriptions of his observation of the Hall, the garden, the surroundings as seen through Henry's eyes. The almost tender descriptions of springtime beauty reveal his love.

Henry is full of contradictory, half-realised impulses. Like Marcus in The Time of the Angels, he is an atheist, but finds it comforting to think that there are people who believe in God, and he is distressed by the thought of Cato•s giving up the priesthood. It leaves him with a curiously deep sense of personal loss. I find it interest­ ing that Iris Murdoch, while professing not to believe in God, describes people's loss of faith as the loss of some­ thing of infinite value.

His meeting with Stephanie is another step toward his event­ ual coming to terms with himself. For a while he seems to have been taken over by Sandy. Having been the puny one all his life, he feels that he now has someone in his power, and Stephanie's instant submission fills him with a tenderness and sense of responsibility entirely absent from his relations with other people in the past. In her sim­ plicity she removes the resentment and malice he has al­ ways felt towards Sandy. Ironically,· his new-found respon- 94 sibility is based on a lie, while her original attraction for him lay i n her seeming trut hfulness. However, even when she turns out to be disappointingly preoccupied with possessions and shopping, and admits that she never was Sandy's mistress, he does not cast her off but retains his sense of responsibility toward her, making provision for her even after she has left hi m.

The change i n He nry comes.when he and his mother have thei~ first ever real conversation with each other, a moment of true communication, and they become aware of each other as indivi dual beings , each with his own sorrow, each having to come to terms with it in his own way. For the first time he reveals his chi l dhood suffering and resentment, and real­ izes how his hosti l ity had hurt her. Gerda reveals that Sandy had understood her relationship with her husband, the preservation of whi ch had absorbed all her energy, as Henry, demanding child that he had been, had never understood. m1en his childhood falls into perspective , it is no longer imperative for Henry to shake off his past, but he can settle down to conventionally marrying "the girl next door" in the local church, running his estate, and being happy for the f i rst time in his life .

~ereas i n The Time of the Angels and A Word Child the weather is used negatively, and the characters move in thick cold fog , suggesting their moral benightedness, in Henry and Cato it has an ent irely different significance. The gentle spring rains and t he softly glowing skie s and clouds suggest 95 that happiness is there, simply waiting for people to make it their own.

In this novel, which is a peculiar mixture of light-hearted comedy and deeply serious moral problems, Murdoch succeeds once more in confirming her idea of morality, by illustrat­ ing the necessity of living outwards, of taking other people into consideration, of accepting the opacity of in­ 'dividuals, of recognizing their existence in their own right.

Inwardness and isolation are the source of moral downfall. Cato isolates himself in his tumble-down headquarters and

~ttempts .to draw Joe into his capsule of isolation. When the novel ends he has not yet broken out of his i s olation, but his walking forward into a new future with the crucifix banging against his thigh, is at least a symbol of the first cracks in his capsule.

In Henry's case it is the i ncapability of communication that shackles him. Only when he can break out of his iso­ lation, first as a result of his concern for Stephanie and ' finally as a result of his long overdue communication with his mother, is he able to open out.

4.5 THE · SEA, THE SEA

Byatt•s summary of the plot of this novel is the following: "It concerns the tempest of passions aroused by Charles Arrowby, a retired actor, playwright and director, who has retired, not like Prospera to perfect his magic arts, but 96 to bury them and end his l i fe in meditation" (1978:9). This conveys none of t he moving power of this novel, however. In spite of Charl es's monstrous selfishness, Murdoch suc­ ceeds in maintaining the reader's sympathy for this agein~ man, battling to come t o terms with himself, his lost love, and hi s insane jealousy·. It is about the conflict of sac- rifice and egoism, a serious exploration of a man's essen­ t ially moral battle to make his peace with his environment, 1 and the people in his life.

First-person narrative is of necessity more biased than that of the omniscient narrator because one's vi ew of oneself is seldom exact. Thr oughout the novel Charles is revealed, by himself and by his acquaintances, as egoistic, vain and self­ ish. Lizzie's descri ption places him as the type of person Miss Murdoch disapproves of in her philosophy: 11 You don 't respect people, you don't s ee them" (The Sea, the Sea, p. 45). He is her typical solips ist. He cannot conceive of Gilbert as an opaque person . He refers to him as a man of twigs. Gilbert and Rosina too accuse him of not being aware of other people. He broke up Rosina's marriage not because he wanted to marry her himself, but because he wanted her full attention, and then he left her for Lizzie . Now he is threatening t o break up Gilbert and Lizzie's arrangement out of sheer pique, simp l y because he cannot bear anyone's taking precedence over him in her life. When he complains about women taking thi ngs so intensel y and maki ng such a f uss , it is clear that he doesn 't really know what he de- 97

~· sires from life, He writes to Lizzie extending a tentative invitation but by the time she arrives, Hartley is on the scene and he is hard pressed to get rid of Lizzie.

~e is unbearably egoistic: "His I~Hlbert 's] devotion to me ' proved that he had some sound ideas" (p. 242). He is in­ sensitive and cannot understand Peregrine's hate. He never realised how Peregrine had really felt about losing ' the wife whom Charles had so callously taken from him and then discarded. The knowledge of his child that Rosina

·f, destroyed is terrible. Rosina emphasizes Charles 1 s penchant ,. ,for never becoming involved, for keeping his hands clean:

,, "You say you I always wanted a son 1 • That 1 s just a senti- -> :mental lie, you didn't want trouble, you didn't want to , know. You never put yourself in a situation where you could have a real son. Your sons are fantasies; they're .( easier to deal with ••• you can't grasp the stuff of real­ ity" (p. 315).

Like Hilary, Charles suffers from self-delusion, His con­ nection with the theatre and the frequent references to it emphasize the artificiality, the lack of sincerity that characterizes his life. He describes himself as not being "highly-sexed", but appears to have had affairs with most actresses of his acquaintance.

Although his seaside situation is described in idyllic terms, it is clear from the start that it is impermanent. He wanders around looking at the creatures in his rock pools 98 and watches the c l ouds and collects pretty stones. He ex­ presses delight in his loneliness, but anxiously waits for a letter from Lizzie. Nature and Charles seem to be hold­ ing their breaths, waiting for something to happen.

And of course, the great drama is the adv~nt of Hartley, a little old woman, a mere shadow of the girl he had loved. Charles twists the whole situation out of perspective. In his self-centredness he cannot conceive of Hartley's not returning his love. In spite of her repeated protests, he persists in forcing his attentions on her. He cannot un­ derstand how she could possibly prefer Ben, and it remains for Rosina to point out that Ben is a very attractive man.

Charles is incapable of really seeing Hartley. She is still his first young love. Superficially he recognizes and admits that she is old, that she has lost her beauty, but subconsciously she is still the young girl who used to cycle around the countryside with him, unchanged by the passage of time. He seems to believe in the rejuvenating power of his love, and in this respect both he and Hartley are rather pathetic. "The restoration of middle-aged lovers to the freshness of youthful love, the restoration of child to parent, the regenerating power of sea-change, these miracles of late Shakespeare are not beyond the aspirations of elderly Charles Arrowby, but they prove to be beyond his art" (Gribble, 1979:37).

Hartley puts her finger on t he di fference that separates 99 them: "You're like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a lit tle and don't look -" (p. 330). But in spite of the fact that Charles is an experienced man of the world, he is unable to accept the reality of the situation. He fools himself that Hartley will have a chance to compare him and Ben and in his egoism he cannot doubt that she will choose him. He believes that she will return to him, hav­ ing tasted "liberty". But what liberty has he deluded himself into thinking he has offered, having kept her im­ prisoned against her will? Charles is incapable of real­ izing the extent of Hartley's commitment to Ben, that she at no stage has any intention of leaving Ben. Charles is too overwhelming and she turns him down as she did before. His selfish need of her is so great that he cannot conceive of its not being satisfied. He shamelessly uses Titus to lure her to him. Only much later, after Ben and Hartley have deceived him about the date of their leaving the country, does he come to admit, albeit reluctantly, that Hartley had been right when she said that their love was not part of the real world.

James reveals an insight that Charles doesn't have, because he is incapable of seeing anyone else as an individual. "We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and 100 look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds : is pseudo-knowledge . We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating t he importance of what we think we value'~ i (p . 175).

Byatt says that "the sea in a Murdoch novel represents what the priest of no god in The Time of t he Angels calle~ 'power and the marvel of power, chance and the terror of chance'. It is beauti ful, shifting, contains inhuman beasts friendly and alien. It kills, supports, entices, delights and terri f ies, reminding one that those things exist" (Byatt, 1978:9). The sea represent s life. As Irwin, says, "The sea is the sea of life. Char les, unlike Hartley and her husband, i s a swimmer. He feels at home in this dangerous element . He takes risks. But t he daring, the control, the trickery, are all put at the service of his selfishness . He swims with monsters" (1978:945). Gilbert, who claims that he has the soul of a serf, cannot even walk on the rocks, and never ventures into the sea. Titus, on the other hand, is a swi mmer, sporting in the sea like a young seal. He seems to Charles to repr esent a rejuvenated self, and i n hi s vanity Charles does not warn him of the dangerous sea, and Titus drowns, adding yet another night­ mare to Charles's growing repertoire. Tit us, perhaps, had better insight into Hart ley's compulsive misery: "Nothing could make her happy, nothing. Ever" (p. 259). Ironically, his death does make her happy. It removes the object of Ben's jealousy, the supposed proof of her unfaithfulness. 101

It removes the constant reminder of Hartley's guilt ~or not siding with Titus against Ben when he was a child. It makes it possible for them to leave the country because all ties have been severed.

Minn's Cauldron, with the waves crashing themselves into extinction against the rocks, is symbolic of Charles's passion beating itself to death against the wall of Hart­ ley's unwilling passivity. It is in this same cauldron that Charles nearly meets his end, and in which he meets the sea monster again. Bradbury points out that "if one o'f' the central images of this no¥el is the clean, various and ambiguous sea, then another is that of the ambiguous prison of marriage, a chamber of dark horrors of enslave­ ment and boredom which none the less is much desired" (1978:247). Charles, having eavesdropped on Hartley's marriage and witnessed its horror, is not deterred from desiring to take Hartley away from Ben so that he may en­ ter a similar state with her. He dreams of a life of bles­ sed ordinariness.

Charles knows that he is selfish, but the fact that his egoism is being brought to his notice so pertinently by so many people, and the knowledge of the pain it has caused, is becoming nightmarish. As it was for Hilary in A Word

~. it is a rude awakening for Charles to find out that everyone is not mad about him. The deference peopl e showed to him was the result of fear because of his power in the theatrical world, and not because of his personal charisma. 102 The one person who had really l oved him was probably James. The sea monster he twice saw, and once remembered with hor- r i fying clarity, symbolizes his unmasking, to himself, as a demon i n the lives of most of the people he has had to do ''J with.

'., Charles's fear of physical violence is comical. He fears ' •.; that Ben will rally a gang of friends to beat him up and finds a blunt instrument with which to defend himself, which James secretl y removes.

Before Charles leaves the sea, he is granted his own vision of order and meaning: "As I lay there, listening to the soft lap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, oblit­ erating the separ ateness of the milky way and filling up the whole sky. And far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behi nd stars, as in magical odeons of my youth. And I saw the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning i tself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing" (p. 475).

Eventually Charles attempts to justify himself: "What an egoist I must seem in the pr eceding pages . But am I so exceptional? We must live by the light of our own self­ satis faction, t hrough that secret vital bUsy inwardness 103 which is even more remarkable than our reason. Thus we must live unless we are saints, and are there any? " (p. 482). At the end one wonders whether Charles has been im­ proved by his moral crisis. He has lost his power over most of those he used to control and exploit. Peregrine attempts to murder him. He has suffered t he intens ely painful loss of Titus, and also of Hartley, who represents the dreams of a lifetime. He drives James and Lizzie away because of his unreasoning jealousy. This jealousy, whic h has been the bane of his life, breaks out when he confronts these two and gives vent to the spiteful jealousy he has felt for James since childhood, James always having been just that one step ahead of him. That indeed has been the monster in his life, destroying his peace of mind,' making him oblivious of other people's pain. Like so many Mur­ dochean characters, Charles realizes too late the wonder­ ful friendship with James that would have been possible, had it not been for his jealousy.

It is doubtful, however, whether he has really undergone a change. Living in James's flat after James has died, he meditates on his many failings. He sees himself in the role suggested by James, that of "celibate uncle", but this is belied by his succumbing to the pressure exerted on him by seventeen year-old Angela, and in the end by the suggestion of perhaps returning to the stage. This implies that Charles has not yet consented to t ake l eave of his youth, but will attempt to pe rpetuate it with the young 104 girl and the son she has offered to bear him.

In this novel Murdoch makes use of super natural phenomena to illustrate her moral concern. The monster which Charles sees in the sea, suggests his monstrous ego which has led to his immoral ignoring of other people's rights and emo­ tions. When Peregrine pushes him int o Minn's Cauldron, he does it to avenge the loss Charles's selfishness has caused him, and Charles, appropri ately, finds the monster in the thundering water wi th him. James saves him from drowning, exhibiting superhuman power. If Charles had been able to curb his jealousy, James might have been able to save him from himself. The fact t hat James rescues Charles symbol­ izes the fact that the solipsist can event ually not survive. To attain meaningful existence he needs to accept .moral ob­ ligation for and be, to a certain ext ent , "morally dependent" on other peopl e.

The final irony is that the casket Charles was too afraid to open because of the demon it might contain, has accident­ ally fallen, and t he lid has come off. If there was a de­ mon in it, it has escaped. This is symbolic of Charles's life. The l id too has been lifted and the demon has been allowed to escape , leaving him to end his days in a sort of innocence. 105

5 EVALUATION: AN ATTEMPT AT AN ASSESSMENT OF IRIS MURDOCH'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY NOVEL IN GENERAL AND OF HER MORAL CONCERN IN PARTICULAR

I believe that Iris Murdoch's contribution to twentieth century literature is underrated. Many critics and review­ .ers tend to maintain an air of amused cynicism concerning

~;her work, some declaring that she has never fulfilled her initial promise, others finding fault with the fact that she is so prolific a writer. I think that this criticism rests on lack of full attention to what she is doing, from critics who insist on attempting to force her work into a preconceived mould.

Iris Murdoch coined new phrases and expressions like "con­ tingency" and "opacity of persons", the latter depicting u i : the moral obligation to see people as individuals, not merely as reflections of ourselves.

Her first novel, although it was initially misunderstood, • established her as a good novelist, one .of the most bril- liant and intelligent of her age. She has continued in the realist tradition, although some of her earlier novels tend toward mysticism. Even in a novel as late as The Sea, the Sea there is the suggestion of magic and superhuman powers, and unidentified monsters.

Under the Net, apart from being the story of a young man's quest for identity, also explores the philosophical ques­ tions concerning language and art, and contingency and de­ sign. Her development does not follow any definite pattern, 106 The Bell, one of her mos t realistic novels, being followed a few years later by the decidedly mys t ical The Unicorn. Her only historical novel, The Red and the Green, is fol­ lowed by The Time of the Angels, the most intense of her .. novels. Her later novels are concerned to a greater extent with the moral development of characters, brought about by moral crises.

Mi s s Murdoch has dec l ared that she prefers the nineteenth­ century novel to the contemporary novel . She has unashamed­ ly and without apol ogy continued to write in the realistic tradit ion of the English novel, but not regressively. Her novels are concerned with modern people, in their modern settings, involved in moral crises that for the most part would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century with its different moral stucture. They cover the full spectrum of man's depravity, including homosexuality and incest, ' which she is inclined to emphasize. Homosexuality i s not a generally accepted social norm, with the result t hat a homosexual has to contend with feel ings of guilt and rejec tion . He r homosexuals are sad figures, gentle and sensiti ve, desiring to conform on the one hand, and on the other, incapable of totally repressing their desires. Incest is used in her novels to indicate the perversity that arises from s olipsism, from love that is turned in upon itself. Her novels are not , however, merely cata­ logues of depravity. She has an unshakeable belief in man's basic goodness , and she i s c onvinced that for the pe rson who comes to terms with hi mself and accepts others 107 as opaque individuals, who can see people otherwise than in relation to himself, there is hope of happiness, Literature to a certain extent changes our views of life, opening up wider perspectives, and by emph&sizing the comedy of man' s battle for survival in a contingent world, she creates an awareness in the reader of his own limitations and encou­ rages him to laugh at himself by drawing his attention to the universality of the comic aspect of his particular situation.

Schneidermeyer points out Murdoch's particular approach: "External suffering because it consumes the self, cannot be the test of courage in the way that inner or moral suf­ fering can ••• Suffering can purify only. if the sufferer and the one who inflicts suffering are one, that is only if one suffers from his own conscience" (1974:53). Judging from the amount that has been written about this aspect of literature, authors and critics alike seem to be particu­ larly interested in morality in the novel. Morality in this context has two connotations: its presence and its influence. It is undeniably present. Whether implicitly or explicitly, each book presents us with a character con­ fronted with and enmeshed in a moral situation which he resolves, or fails to resolve. This, precisely, is Miss Murdoch's greatest contribution to twentieth-century literature: the fact that her chief concern, both as philosopher and novelist, has been "to illuminate the moral condition of the individual in the contemporary west­ ern world" ·(Cunneen, 1979 :1). In an age marked by a singu- 108 lar lack of general mo ral norms, this is no mean feat. "Her moral visi on has developed s lowly from her own firm belief •.• that the human person is unique, valuable and myste rious, and that t he good is sovereign" (p. 1). Cun­ neen goes so far as to suggest t hat Miss Murdoch is carry­ ing out a serious programme ·of moral illuminati on in her fiction . The moral decisions confronting people are the subjects of both her philosophical activity and her creat­ ive writing. In the less complex Victorian society it was easier to evaluate mo r ality, because of the existence of a fairly generally accept ed code , I n our society there are very few acknowledged, accepted norms.

Her concept of the individual and morality is clearly stated in one of her early polemical essays, "Against Dryness": "We need to return from the self-centred concept of si·nceri ty to the other-centred concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creat ures sunk in a reality whose nat ure we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility ; whe r eas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons" (Bradbury, 1977:29). She says that it is through the enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Nettleshi p's view approximates Murdoch's idea of "good for nothing" when he says that no action can be called moral unless i t is freely unselfish {Nettleship, 109

1971:8). Baldanza suggests that Miss Murdoch is more interested in subjective moral processes and in their value-language, than in the current British empirical philosophy which has prevailed at Oxford. "That philosophy has confined itself to analysis of simple terms like 'good•, whereas she main­ tains that the rich inner processes of attention occur in a context of very subtle and very rich linguistic distinc­ tions" (Baldanza, 1974:26).

Schneidermeyer points out that it is the task of the novel­ ist to capture the complexity, contradictoriness and contin­ gency of human beings. If he has captured this diversity his work may be disturbing, as Murdoch's often is, but it will possibly bring to consciousness our deepest but often suppressed interest, and thus make solutions possible. Schneidermeyer describes this theory as "humanistic with religious overtones", and says that it is central to Mur­ doch's thought (p. 37). "As a moral philosopher Murdoch

analyses the essence of mor~lity and examines the logic of va.rious ethical statements. The novels picture and particularize ideas presented in her philosophy. Central to both kinds of argument is her belief that the transcend­ ent value of Good has a place in morality" (Schneidermeyer, 1974:7). She gives vitality to the traditional Christian virtues of suffering and sacrifice, good works and sublime moments of insight. It is not surprising that her novels are all love stories, because love is her primary preoccu- 110 pation. She believes that love is awareness. attention, the realization that something other than oneself is real, and this is her ultimate conception of morali ty.

Cunneen says that Miss Murdoch's characters are uncertain as to their identity and unaware of their reality, but within her novels they learn to work through it, often literally in mud, bogs and water. Often these encounters, especially swimming, signal a psychological change. In The Time of the Angels Muriel is unabl e to escape. This is symbolized by her walk to t he river. She stands on the brink of the river , sees the lightening of the fog over the water, and t urns away. In Bruno's Dream Danby has to swim the Thames to escape from t he police, and seems to undergo a cleansing, for he feels as if his sins have been forgiven. Hilary, in A Word Child, falls into the river trying to save Lady Kitty. He survives and is granted another chance to achieve happiness. In The Sea, the Sea Charles is con­ tinually testing his strength against that of the sea, and Titus drowns i n it. In Nuns and Soldiers Tim and a dog are washed down a canal and barely escape drowning. These water masses seem to represent l ife, and the opportunity of coming to t erms with it, the f earless leap suggesting a willingness to challenge life, to wrest meaning and satis­ faction from it. Being carried away acci dentally depicts the contingency of life which Iris Murdoch often theoPizes about, and he r characters usually emerge from this expe­ rience none the worse for it, and much improved. 111 Malcolm Bradbury, one o£ Miss Murdoch's most intelligent critics, has pointed out that her practice as novelist in many ways runs counter t·o her theoretical beliefs: "She claims, he says, that life has finally no pattern, that we are ruled by necessity and chance, yet one o£ the strengths o£ both her plotting and her symbolism is that it explores fully the sense in which we £eel that our lives ~ grip­ ped by formative forces which £unction below our conscious knowledge or choice" (Byatt, 1976:25).

Something which adds immeasurably to the value o£ Murdoch's work is her awareness o£ the essential comedy o£ man's battle to survive, o£ his battle against his baser sel£, and o£ love. ~ven in the darkest o£ her novels, The Time o£ the Angels, and in one concerned with death like Bruno's Dream, one is prevented £rom feeling total despair in the former, and any despair at all in the latter, by the ex­ tremely funny episodes that are cleverly woven in, .and which warn one against taking oneself too seriously.

Iris Murdoch does not insist on an overt moral core in a work o£ art, but it seems that She approaches her cha rac­ ters as human beings with moral views, moral limitations, or confronted with moral crises which ideally lead to an improved morality. She sometimes morali zes, using a rela­ tively minor character to express her philosophical and moral views, but these moralizings never become didactic, obtrusive or coercive and do not reduce the value o£ her work. Allen Tate confirms that moral problems are the 1 12 sub ject matter of l i terature, but t he purpose of literature is not to point a moral (Simonson, 1971:33). Murdoch be­ lieves t hat literature can be our best moral teacher. Her characters are improved by t he moral suffering they undergo, emerging the stronger for the battle t hey have fought.

"Murdoch's own complex and intellectual and artistic jour­ ney conveys a simpl e message to those who wish to lead a virtuous life: consider the persons around you as your .; ' reality; your relation to them is the school of virtue that matters most" (Cunneen, 1978:175). 113 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY

6.1 PRIMARY SOURCES

MURDOCH, I. 1954. Under the Net. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1956. The Flight from the Enchanter. St Al­ bans. Triad Books Ltd.

MURDOCH, I. 1957. The Sandcastle. Triad/Granada. MURDOCH, I. 1958. The Bell. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd, MURDOCH, I. 1961. A Severed Head. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1962. An Unofficial Rose. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1963. The Unicorn. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1964. The Italian Girl. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 19E'5. The Red and the Green. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1966. The Time of the Angels. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd.

MURDOCH, I. 1968. The Nice and the Good. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1969. Bruno's Dream. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1970. A Fairly Honourable Defeat. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd.

MURDOCH, I. 1971. An Accid~ntal Man. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1973. The Black Prince. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1974. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1975. A Word Child. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. 114 MURDOCH, I. 1976. Henry and Cato. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd.

MURDOCH, I. 1978. The Sea, the Sea. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd. MURDOCH, I. 1980. Nuns and Soldiers. St Albans. Triad Books Ltd.

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