The Saint and Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch. Peter Conradi J.

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       4 Eros in A Severed Head and Bruno’s Dream

      One problem in discussing Iris Murdoch’s works is that the truths they meditate turn out often to be as simple as ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ or ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ That such dull commonplaces can radiate as much light as apparent profundities is her point. It has proved difficult to relate her ‘ordinariness’ and her Platonism.

      At Caen (1978) she termed her philosophy a ‘moral psychology’, presumably because it is a complex mass of living insight into what being human is like, rather than a simple counter-structure. The paradox for the critic is that as Murdoch moves towards a surer sense of her philosophical position, the novels become less, not more rigid in structure. Neoplatonic themes, often taken from painting, can be found in her work even at the start, and abound in the novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Lorna Sage has shown the echo of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love in Rosa and Mischa’s last tableau in The Flight from the Enchanter as well as in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine;¹ Apollo and Marsyas, Diana and Actaeon figure elsewhere. But the shape of Murdoch’s career is towards a use of myth that is consciously disposable and provisional, subordinated to the moral psychology of the characters. She becomes less absolute, more dialectical and playful, patient, comprehensive and open. After 1971 the novels do without chapters and increase, one after another, in length.

      This chapter will attempt a description of Murdoch’s philosophy as it affects her fiction. Like Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (1980), Murdoch takes the Platonic myths not as an ecstasy that transports us to another world, but as an ironic counter-image of the process by which we attain a more accurate perception of this one.² In a sense there is nothing new here. Since the Romantic revival, which must in part be seen as a revival of Platonic thought, two opposed strains might be elucidated, best crystallised in Pater’s 1866 attack on Coleridge’s ‘lust for the Absolute’. Pater chose a more relaxed, sceptical position and later argued, against the readiness of Coleridge’s remorseless idealism to coerce away human difference, for the habit of ‘tentative thinking and suspended judgement’.³ For such a liberal Platonism the novel has always been an appropriate form. Julia Kristeva has noted the resemblance between Socratic dialogue and the ambivalent word of the novel, and Mikhail Bakhtin too saw how the dialogues are characterised by opposition to any official monologism claiming to possess ready-made truth; and championed the traditional novel’s ‘polyphony’. The novel became, as D.H. Lawrence was to proclaim, mercifully incapable of the Absolute; ‘a sort of Platonic ideal of the anti-Platonic Heraclitean spirit’.⁴ Or as Iris Murdoch put this, the novel is ‘the most imperfect of all the great art-forms’.⁵ She always rejected the classic Neoplatonic stance of believing that art is in direct contact with the Forms: ‘I cannot accept these “Ideas” even as a metaphor of how the artist works’ (Magee, 1978).

      Moral terms, for her, are concrete universals, collections of their material instances. The sole exception is the Good itself, which acts both as an inexhaustible fund ‘elsewhere’ from which we draw energy, and as a quality here which we dimly and always incompletely intuit in good art and good neighbours. Plato’s Timaeus is crucial to Murdoch because its cosmogony suggests that Good participates, but inconclusively and incompletely, in reality, very much as ‘order’ participates incompletely in art. The possession of an intuition of the wholeness of experience, irradiating and clarifying both the perception of particulars in life and the representation of particulars in art, marks both the great artist and the good man. Until we grasp the proximate moral unity of the world, its inherent diversity escapes us too.⁶

      The celebration of human and natural diversity is one aim of the novel, and the traditional novel has always been much closer to Romanticism than conventional wisdom allows. Nineteenth-century fiction, as John Bayley has shown, is a marketplace in which a number of different Romanticisms bargain and quarrel, and in displaying this the novelist may ‘bring the planes of reality and fantasy into one vision of life’.⁷ To enter into alien life, and to unify it once you are there, are from one point of view complementary projects; but there is also a necessary tension between them. Both Murdoch and Bayley have stressed the poet’s ability to understand and express all nature as it were from the inside, and argued against the devitalisation that this tradition undergoes as it develops into modernism, with its shift of emphasis onto the ‘abstracting and integrative drive of the single self-conscious vision’.⁸

      In this sense Murdoch is a traditional novelist, which is not of course to say that she cannot be boldly innovative whenever it suits her purpose; the innovations unassertively serve the work, rather than any prophetic impulses. Such a modesty means that her originality can escape notice, and not the least original aspect of her genius is the extraordinary marriage between Freud and Plato that she has effected, between a mechanical model of the psyche and a moral one, penetrating through her plots into the substance of the books. She read Freud extensively and considered him a very great and an exciting thinker. A number of her plots turn on Oedipal conflict. In The Sovereignty of Good Freud is repeatedly invoked to underwrite the view that human beings are motored by an energy that is both highly personal and individual, and yet at the same time very powerful and not easily understood by its owner. Freud shows us that we are dark to ourselves, moved by passions and obsessions we are scarcely aware of, powered by mechanical energy of an egocentric kind. Murdoch’s quarrel with Freud comes, one might say, from the fact that he has given us so authoritative an account of life in the Cave, but has little to say about life in the Sun. Murdoch identifies the fire, by whose light and heat the moral pilgrim may become mesmerised, with the ego. As a Victorian materialist Freud has an inadequate view of human perfectibility based on hostility to religion. In The Fire and the Sun Murdoch none the less also shows that Freud’s tripartite division of the soul came from Plato and that, as Freud acknowledged, ‘The enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato’ (FS 37). Murdoch’s СКАЧАТЬ