which expressed a sort of humble yearning stupidity, was being mocked by the other players’ (36). The irony of the mask that Hugo wears here is that it expresses his real nature. He is the only character apart from Finn shown incapable of untruth or dissimulation. Thus towards the end Hugo speaks of Sadie to Jake with an air which Jake characterises as ‘disgustingly humble’ (225). In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch praised humility as ‘a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern…The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are. He sees the pointlessness of virtue, and its unique value, and the endless extent of its demand’ (103–4).
Jake and Hugo meet in a cold-cure centre where Jake takes Hugo for a mental defective and ignores him for two days, despite the fact that they are sharing a room. Hugo puts up with this snubbing with gentle patience and self-possession. When Jake engages him in conversation he realises he is closeted with a person of great fascination – indeed ‘the most purely objective and detached person’ (57) Jake has ever met. Jake notes that the conversation which ensues is germane to the whole story he has to tell. For Hugo
Each thing was absolutely unique. I had the feeling that I was meeting for the first time an almost completely truthful man; and the experience was turning out to be appropriately upsetting. I was but the more inclined to attribute a spiritual worth to Hugo in proportion as it would never have crossed his mind to think of himself in such a light. (61)
Given the care that Murdoch has put into picturing Hugo as a man aspiring to be good, connecting this quite explicitly to his scepticism about the act of classification, there is an irony in the way critics have positively rushed to classify him. Jake notes that to try to ‘place’ Hugo, as he at first attempted, was a failure of taste which showed a ‘peculiar insensitivity to his unique intellectual and moral quality’ (58). One critic links Hugo with pataphysics, another tells us he is an existentialist. Others have linked him with Wittgenstein,8 with whom he certainly shares a quality of ‘unnerving directness’ (Mehta, 1961) in his approach to persons and problems. Like Wittgenstein Hugo is a wealthy Central European attracted to an ascetic ideal, sexually tormented, with a curious care for his boots, and a man who worked in his family factory, and had a capacity to renounce. But Hugo’s forebears are as much literary as philosophical. In particular he seems to owe something to Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, another holy fool, half clown, half spiritual emperor, comic-pathetic and wise. The ‘sparse simplicity’ of Hugo’s bedroom (92), moreover, resembles not merely that of Wittgenstein but the simplified rooms of the other saintly figures in Murdoch’s novels, who are extremely unlike the Austrian philosopher. It is to Hugo’s renunciatory capacities, as much as his intellectual lineage, that Murdoch is drawing our attention. It has been well observed that her novels contain only fools and holy fools.9 Jake is the common fool, Hugo the holy fool.
It is important to our sense of Hugo before we have met him that his flat, despite being so full of art-treasure (Renoirs, Miro, a Minton) should be left not merely unlocked but with the door ajar. His wholly austere and unornamented bedroom suggests that he is inwardly neither covetous nor attached. He has given up the armaments factory he inherited before the action commences and converted it to fireworks, and then, when these are acclaimed and pretentiously classified, lost interest in them too. At the end of the story he is giving up some remaining attachments: his passion for Sadie, whom he has persecuted, his film industry, his money, his friendship with Jake, London itself, and the role which he conceives of as false of consoling Anna. This is a different mode of detachment from Jake’s, though both are ‘outsider’ figures, Jake an Irish expatriate, Hugo the child of German refugees. Jake spends much time wondering where he will sleep during the tale and in fact passes one night, like a tramp, on a bench on Victoria Embankment. What distinguishes these modes of detachment has everything to do with the specially enlarged sense Murdoch gives to the word ‘artist’.
Jake’s separateness makes him extraordinary to himself; Hugo is nobly unself-conscious. If Hugo resembles anyone in the story it is the shadowy but truthful Finn who, like him, cannot imagine himself at the ‘centre’ of any story, or the dog Mars whom Jake has stolen. Hugo’s exit from the hospital and almost from the book is conducted on all fours, with his bottom in the air, dribbling into the boots he holds in his teeth. This noble unself-consciousness gives him, as the would-be good man who sees objectively, an alarming ordinariness, and an odd, dogged, animal intelligence.
Jake early notes that Hugo is devoid of general theories. All his theories, if they can be called theories – for they read as exercises in patient inquisitive particular enquiry – are local. An early conversation dramatises the difference between them and concerns the problem of describing states of mind or feelings. That such description belongs to the novel as a form, as much as to moral philosophy, is important.
’there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,’ said Hugo. ‘All these descriptions are so dramatic.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ I said.
‘Only,’ said Hugo, ‘that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt “apprehensive” – well, this just isn’t true.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t feel this,’ said Hugo. ‘I didn’t feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards…As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you…’
’touch it up?’
‘It’s deeper than that,’ said Hugo. ‘The language just won’t let you present it as it really was.’ (59)
’the whole language is a machine for making falsehoods’ (60), Hugo adds. Jake finds Hugo’s puritan suspicion of language not desiccating but life-giving because it is in the service of a love of truth and a love of the real. ‘For Hugo each thing was astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious. During these conversations I began to see the whole world anew’ (58). For Hugo as for Plato art is a special case of copying, and he shares Plato’s typically puritan suspicion of mimetic art. When Hugo creates his fireworks he ‘despised the vulgarity of representational pieces’ and preferred that his creations be compared, if to anything, then to music. Moreover he finds the impermanence of fireworks a positive recommendation.
I remember his holding forth to me more than once what an honest thing a firework is. It was so patently an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left. ‘That’s what all art is really,’ said Hugo, ‘only we don’t like to admit it. Leonardo understood this. He deliberately made the Last Supper perishable.’ (54)
Again this echoes Plato (Laws 956b) who argued that ‘artefacts offered to the gods should be such as can be made in a single day’ (FS 71) – should be deliberately impermanent. It is important that when Jake and Hugo reach the conclusion ‘in that case one oughtn’t to talk,’ they at once burst out laughing, thinking of how they had for days been doing nothing else. The puritan ideal of total silence is hedged around with irony. It is also important that, as Patrick Swinden points out, we never come into direct contact with Hugo’s philosophy. Even of the ‘original’ conversation between Jake and Hugo we are told that it took half a dozen cold-cure sessions for them to reach this point, so that what we have been given must be an ‘artistic’ conflation of many weeks’ talk into one discussion. This is as it were already at one remove from the truth. And given Hugo’s doubts about the ways, once you tell a story, you immediately begin to ‘touch it up’, it is ironic that Jake immediately finds himself very guiltily working up his and Hugo’s conversations into a flowery philosophical dialogue which he calls ‘The Silencer’. In the excerpt that he reads, art once more plays the pivotal role. The dialogue owes something to the Romantic, and the Buddhist, quest to get beyond the duality of self and world.
Annandine:… All theorising is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is