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

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СКАЧАТЬ virtue – naturalism and symbolism – is Shakespeare. ‘Perhaps only Shakespeare managed to create at the highest level both images and people; and even Hamlet looks second rate compared with Lear’ (ad). In ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ she argued that the greatness of Dostoevsky, Melville, Emily Brontë and Hawthorne was not of the same order as that of Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and especially Tolstoy. This was scarcely her last word on the matter, however. When I interviewed her in 1983 she no longer recalled this distinction but said that, if obliged to ‘place’ these respective geniuses then, would undoubtedly consider Dostoevsky a greater writer than George Eliot. She also paid tribute to such diverse forebears as Proust, Homer, Wuthering Heights, Dickens and James; and to such very diverse romances as Treasure Island, Peter Pan and The Tempest; and to Shakespeare generally.

      A task for critics today would seem to be to understand the indebtedness of her demonic, tormented sinners and saints and of the curious co-existence in her work of malevolence and goodness, to the dark tragi-comedies of Dostoevsky, and to romance; and also to focus her recoil from the rational, optimistic importunacies of George Eliot. Murdoch’s assertion of the primary value of ‘character’ has meant that she has sometimes been placed, much too simply, in one camp. It was always her point that ‘character’ and ‘form’ must be reconcilable. Great literature would provide two satisfactions rather than one. It was never merely that ‘there is a temptation for any novelist…to imagine that the problem of a novel is solved…as soon as a form in the sense of a satisfactory myth has been evolved’ (sbr). The problem was also that myth is inescapable. ‘The mythical is not something “extra”: we live in myth and symbol all the time’ (mmm). The novelist must use myth and magic to help liberate us from myth and magic, an enterprise which, since both writer and client are frail and human, can never be more than minutely successful; and the artist, in her view, had better not give himself too many airs. We are all symbol-makers, mythmakers, story-tellers, she repeatedly asserted. Art is, as it were, the ordinary human condition, and not (or not merely) the peculiar task and property of a vain crew of specialists.

      In his Modes of Modern Writing (1977) David Lodge usefully described the alternative virtues on the one hand of ‘realism’ – a writing that emphasises the uniqueness of things, persons, places – and on the other of ‘modernism’ – a writing which aspires to a concentrated symbolic formal unity. In the article that acts as an informal coda to this book he notably suggested that, since literary history over the last century could be seen as alternating between these two ideal types, one possible programme for a new writing might reside in the conscious attempt to combine the virtues of each in a single book.¹⁷

      This is not unlike Murdoch’s avowed aim twenty-five years before. In 1958, after publishing her first four novels, she said that

      I find myself thinking in terms of two kinds of novel which might be called ‘open’ and ‘closed’, and I cannot at the moment decide which kind I want to write: perhaps, more or less alternately, both. The open novel contains a lot of characters who rush about independently, each one eccentric and self-centred; the plot to some extent situates them in a pattern but does not integrate them into a single system. The closed novel has fewer characters and tends to draw them, as it were, toward a single point. Under the Net and The Flight from the Enchanter were, I think, [‘closed’], The Sandcastle and The Bell [‘open’]. The advantage of the open novel is that it is bright and airy and the characters move about freely; it is more like life as it is normally lived. Its disadvantage is that it may become loose in texture and it is more difficult to make the structure evident. A closed novel is more intensely integrated but may be more claustrophobic in atmosphere and the characters may lose their sense of freedom. Ideally, and if one were a great writer, one could, I think, combine both these things in a single work and not have to oscillate between them.¹⁸

      I believe that Murdoch, having oscillated between these two kinds of work until about 1970, then produced a number of superb novels that do indeed combine these two sets of virtue, with the aesthetic interest divided equally between ‘form’ and ‘character’. Her ‘closed’ novels – especially The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels – have never been well understood in Britain. The essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ makes clear that, far from these religious novels being divertissements, or interruptions from the business of making attempts at the ‘true novel’, they are, whatever their individual success, central to her purpose; and the interview from which I have just quoted suggests that the formal intensity of which these books are capable is one essential ingredient in good art.

      Character and image are mutually exclusive, therefore, only in second-rate art. In good art there is a dynamic tension between the two, and ‘character’ is as incalculable and private as the symbolic whole of the art-work itself, which it resists. Just as Murdoch always argued for the centrifugal primary value of ‘character’, so she also always argued for the centripetal value of a strong formal unity. In a straight fight between the two, since she was aware that she excelled at the latter, she would clearly have come down on the side of ‘character’, and hence on the side of the ‘open’ novels. What she wanted was ‘character’ sufficiently strongly imagined to hold its own in a living tension with the ‘myth’ embodied in the plot: ‘I care very much about pattern, and I want it to have a beautiful shape, an apprehensible shape.’ And she admired in Shakespeare the ways in which he has ‘an extraordinary ability to combine a marvellous pattern or myth with the expansion of characters as absolutely free persons, independent of each other – they have an extraordinary independence, though they’re also kept in by the marvellous pattern of the play’ (Bryden, 1968). They exist freely, yet ‘serve the purpose of the tale’ (Magee, 1978). Myth, she suggested to Kermode, (1963), is not altogether the enemy – it should be present also.

      Two rare book reviews might serve to drive the same point home. Writing of Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball (1964) she distinguished epigrammatically ‘novels one inhabits’ from [crystalline] novels ‘one picks up in one’s hand’, and added that ‘perfection may belong to either’. And of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (1954) she said that ‘Form and economy have been sacrificed to particularity and comprehensiveness’, and criticised the work for lacking that ‘imaginative unity’ typical of the authority of a true work of art.¹⁹ In conversation with Magee she pertinently attacked the division between ‘autonomous’ and wholly ‘mimetic’ views of the art-work as, in its most reductive form, simply an irrelevance dreamt up by aesthetically-minded critics. Good art must be both autonomous and mimetic, unified and yet also expansive.

      Murdoch’s courageous exploration of Gothic romance in The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels, many years before the mode became voguish, and at the expense of the relative incomprehension of British reviewers, and her early aspiration to marry the advantages of ‘realism’ and ‘fantasy’ – ‘the best novels explore and exhibit [fantasy and realism] without disjoining them’ (Hobson, 1962) – are two ways in which she now seems always to have been more deeply in touch with her own time than have other writers. The division between Gothic romance and realism, on the grounds that one is ‘radical’, the other ‘reactionary’, has been exposed as facile. Gothic has for two hundred years been one element or wing within the traditional British novel and has been employed, as Marilyn Butler has shown, by writers of every political persuasion and for every possible ideological purpose. Moreover, during the last century, as Gerald Graff conclusively demonstrated, if the critic were obliged to insist on one genre as the ‘socially progressive’ one, it would be realism.²⁰ Any convention, no matter how apparently austere, can cosily flatter the presuppositions of the reader, and will stay alive only so long as good writers are employing it.

      What the alternation between open and closed works does evince is a conflict СКАЧАТЬ