A.S. Byatt usefully drew attention in Degrees of Freedom to Murdoch’s debt to Simone Weil. Weil urged morality as an almost impossible counter-gravitational striving against a sinfulness so natural and irresistible it is compared to gravity itself. Weil was, in the English title of her famous book, ‘Against Gravity’ in the sense that she was against sin.
She was also, however, author of The Need for Roots, which Murdoch has called ‘one of the very few profound and original political treatises of our time’ (kv), a book which has at its heart the view that ‘loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy’.16 Weil was always aware that the attempt to change oneself – or to be changed – too fast acts as a violent deracination which could radically demoralise. She often wrote of the corruptions that can attend the act which is ‘above one’s natural level’ – ‘forçant son talent’ – and Murdoch herself paraphrased this Weilism: ‘It is of no avail to act above one’s natural level’ – for example, ‘If we give more than we find natural and easy we may hate the recipient’ (kv). Drawing too on this second, sceptical aspect of Weil’s genius Murdoch might be said to be ‘against gravity’ in a second sense, that she is antipathetic to a solemn and self-dramatising moral intensity and aware of how often sin and solemnity are secret bedfellows. The idle and selfish Gracie in An Accidental Man is never more sympathetic than when she finally explains to Ludwig her shy and intensely English dislike of ‘moral fuss’ (360); perhaps it is this quality which has made the novel so hard for American critics to write persuasively about.
This aspect of Murdoch’s indebtedness to Weil and indeed to common sense has been neglected, but is just as important as Weil’s ascetic legacy, or arguably more so, since it is the means by which she accommodates the individual case, escapes from allegory, and complicates any general rule. Thus in Henry and Cato Henry finds that his renunciation of his inheritance was not intrinsically wrong, but was ‘above my level. That’s been my mistake all along, mistaking my moral level’ (378). The moment echoes another in a novel written two decades earlier, when Michael in The Bell, upset that he may have distressed young Toby by kissing him, stages a scene of apology which he then comes to see has only entangled them further.
The trouble was…that he had performed the action which belonged by right to a better person; and yet, too, by an austere paradox, a better person would not have been in the situation that required that action. It would have been possible to conduct the meeting with Toby in an unemotional way which left the matter completely closed; it was only not possible for Michael…What he had failed to do was accurately to estimate his own resources, his own spiritual level. (201)
The usually painful discovery of moral level is not infrequently a part of the education of the agents in Murdoch’s books. It is never a process that is free from paradox. As so many of her titles make clear, hers is essentially a dualistic imagination, and she repeatedly makes out of the idea of two worlds a special poetry whose resonances are complex. If many of the plots – like that of A Word Child or Under the Net – oblige the puritan dreamer to rejoin the ordinary world, the movement can be more complicated. In An Accidental Man the more worldly Mavis replaces her fey sister Dorina as minister to Austin and finds that this promotion or demotion is accompanied by the same supernatural manifestations that had formerly worried only Dorina. In the same book Garth and Ludwig exchange places as fiancés of Gracie, who clearly represents the pleasureprinciple itself, and the half-worldly would-be contemplative Matthew makes an ambiguous escape in pursuit both of Ludwig and of moral perfection. In Nuns and Soldiers, whose title enacts this dualism, the acquisitive Gertrude hopes to go through life with the ex-nun Anne Cavidge, ‘like Kim and the lama’ (105), the very image of the mutual usefulness of a worldly cunning and an other-worldly wisdom. But these two poetries separate out.
The point I am trying to make here is that Murdoch’s moral passion, which can be felt in all that she has written, does not emerge in her fiction in a simple-minded way. She is no more simply hostile to pleasure than was Plato, who thought an enlightened hedonism might suit the majority. A final characteristic example of ambiguity might be taken from The Philosopher’s Pupil, where the philosopher Rozanov is absolutist in ways Murdoch has disavowed (Haffenden, 1983). The war between best and second-best is present in his relations with his mad, demonic, third-rate pupil George, who finally tries to murder him to avenge a perfectionism by which he feels judged and rejected. To the question, ‘What do you fear most?’ Rozanov answers: ‘To find out that morality is unreal…not just an ambiguity with which one lives – but that it is nothing, a fake, absolutely unreal,’ a point of view that Murdoch, with provisos, has echoed (Haffenden, 1983). Of George’s Alyosha-like brother Tom, the sympathetic innocent of the book, the narrator comments:
Thus Tom enlarged his ego or (according to one’s point of view) broke its barriers so as to unite himself with another in joint proprietorship of the world: a movement of salvation which for him was easy, for others (George for instance) was hard. (121)
That typical note of equivocation, which does not diminish the distance between Tom and the unspeakable George, but which certainly vexes the attempt to account for it in too simply moral a manner, is a good one on which to end the chapter.
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