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 between Murdoch’s desire to set her characters ‘free’ and her belief that human beings are profoundly unfree. Her exploration of such matters is interesting, and in its very vulnerability, more compelling than the currently fashionable ‘fictionalist’ case, which turns on a facile self-exemption. It is not so easy, her work assures us, to become truly or honourably cultureless. As for shedding illusions, it is a curious fact about us, much displayed in all the books, that no matter how fast we think we are discarding them, there always seem to be a few more to lose. The opportunities for specious disillusion, and for seeing through everybody else’s states of mind but our own, are, her work reminds us, as long as life itself. The kind of man who does earn his right to be ‘outside’ society turns out in her work to be the good man or ‘mystical hero’ unsupported by religious dogma, in the world but not of it, the man who is trying to educate his own desires.
2 Under the Net and the Redemption of Particulars
Iris Murdoch once called Sartre’s La Nausée the ‘instructive overture’ to his work. The same description fits Under the Net (1954). It was at the time placed with novels such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (which she had not read) as new ‘Angry’ social realism, an ascription which, despite the Dryden epigraph (‘’tis well an old age is out/And time to begin a new’) bears little scrutiny. It has also been related to Murdoch’s interest in Sartre, to the dedicatee Raymond Queneau, and to Beckett. The hero cherishes books by Queneau and Beckett. These debts have been explored elsewhere by A.S.