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).