She brought out the pathos and dignity of life
By B.L. Chakoo

ON the cool but fine morning of May 15, 1984 my newly-acquainted colleague at Warwick University, UK, drove me in his Ford from Coventry to Oxford. Though many years have lapsed in between, that remarkable day in still fresh in my mind. I was going to meet the world’s most prolific English writer, Dame Iris Jean Murdoch, who, by that time, had written twenty-one novels, some philosophical works such as, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), The Sovereignty of Good (1970), and The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banned the Artist (1977), and had won the James Tit Black Memorial Prize for her novel, The Black Prince (1973), the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) and the Booker Prize for her widely successful realistic, archetypal or "mystical" novel with Buddhist overtones, The Sea, The Sea (1978).

After having reached Oxford, I first straightway, as per my schedule, went to St. Catherine College, University of Oxford, to meet one of the best known literary critics, John Bayley, whom Murdoch had married in 1956. He was Warton Professor of English literature, and was even at that time, well-known for his unusually wide range — Shakespeare, the novel in England and Europe, the great Russians, contemporary Soviet writers and modern American and English poetry.

His brief but enlightening comments on Murdoch’s art of fiction. Particularly on her dominant narrative symbols’ which, he thought, explored the resources of her creativity as female writer handsomely influenced my reading of Murdoch’s novels when I went back to them and plunged in. However, after having a ceremonious lunch at the college’s staff canteen with Bayley and some of his young Oxford dons greying at their temples, I rushed to 30 Charlbury road, Oxford Oxz — a place where, at that time, this unique couple, cretively intelligent and significant in their own respective fields — happily lived, even though they were childless.

Meeting Murdoch was in itself a memorable experience because it effectively registered in my mind a very grand lady that had, what Henry James would say, "an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage." Her personality had an approachable dignity, avoidance of publicity and image-making "process." Indeed, there was in her a loftiness, a spontaneous literary imagination, a stance of absolute intellectual superiority. This impression led to a regular correspondence with her till the mid nineties. Later on, her ill-health was considerably aggravated by her constant Alzheimer’s disease —the disease that finally ended, a fortnight back, her life’s creative journey in death in Oxford, with John Bayley present at her death-bed. Though she was, to quote her own words mentioned in a letter to me, "considerably interested in Indian philosophy" including Buddhism and Zen and had read the world’s most celebrated book, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, she had not, ironically enough, expressed (as Aldous Huxley did) a prior request that at the time of her death a Tibetan manual (which goes like this: "Now there is approaching that clear white light of the Void, do not be afraid; do not be afraid; it is your friend; go fearlessly into that Light of the Void) be read into her ear. On the contrary, she had requested that "there be no funeral and memorial service." In this single wish she probably, in a philosophical sense, had initiated herself, through acquaintance with the French existentialists and deconstructionist (even though she differed from them in approach and conclusions), into the maturity of disillusionment and indifference to the standards of the "ritual".

Most obviously, in her death the world has today lost an exceptionally creative intelligence, an extraordinarily inventive and intellectually fertile novelist who, to use Harold Bloom’s terminology, made novelistic history and cleared "imaginative space for herself." Born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, she was educated at Badminton and Somerville College, Oxford, and later lectured in philosophy at Oxford and then at Royal College of Art in London. She began to write at the age of nine. "I (Murdoch) wrote quite a long story when I was about ten or so, and I wrote a number of frightfully bad novels before I published anything. I wrote about, four or four and a half novels, before I published my first one, but they were fearfully bad and only one did I try on a publisher, the others I just put away." And this first published novel was Under the Net (1954). Written through the consciousness of woman, she used here a first person male narrator, Jake, and displayed her gift for writing about things "on the whole" where "it doesn’t matter whether y’re male or female, in which case you’d better be male, because a male represents ordinary human beings, unfortunately as things stand at the moment, whereas a woman is always a woman." (Very often she said this to her interviewers with more than usual reflectiveness).

It was partly influenced by Queenean, partly influenced by Beckett, Beckett’s English novels, and it was a sort of adventure love story, with a very faint play with philosophical ideas." Indeed, the title of the novel is philosophical, which has to do with the net of philosophies such as, Wittgenstein’s philosophical concern on language, and contemporary theories of the period about absurdity. There is no particular philosphical message that comes through its modest narrative. It simply expresses the novelist’s preoccupation with the springs of cunningly contrived illusion. That is why it presents a kind of journey from appearance to reality, a kind of discovery about "reality" which is shown in the course of the novel. People have an illusion which they relatively drop as the novel ends. Anyway, this was her first novel not her first best book. But did she ever really write the best book?

Under the Net was followed by The Flight from the Enchanter (1955), The Sandcastle (1957), and The Bell (1958). As one reads through them it becomes quite clear that Murdoch had changed a lot after her first novel, because her basic aim as a literary writer was to write something which could stand up as a work of art. For she always wanted, as she wrote to me. " to be a realistic novelist in the tradition of the English novel and to portray real people and real problems, as those great writers like Tolstory and Dickens and Jane Austen did." All the above mentioned three novels are a somewhat successful attempt at her realistic fiction. The characters are placed in ordinary social relationships rather than in extreme situations. But here too her existentialist and metaphysical position seems to become intensified, even though the ideas are presented by "image" rather than speculative statement.

Murdoch’s prolific output continued with A Severed Head (1961), An Unofficial Rose (1962), The Unicorn (1963), The Italian Girl (1964), The Red and the Green (1965), The Time of the Angels (1966), The Nice and the Good (1968), Bruno’s Dream (1969), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), An Accidental Man (1971), The Black Prince (1973), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), A World Child (1975), Henry and Cato 1976).

With these novels she, against her wishes, gained the popularity of a symbolist novelist, even though they are not in any ultimate sence symbolist novels. They simply have a great tendency towards symbolism which has the sound of French eloquence, or rather a uniquely effective English adaptation of it. If Murdoch made use of symbols in her novels it was because the symbol suggested to her the comfort of disappearance, selflessness or away-ness, and in her case it deepened and reversed.

However, these novels present everything in the world: Realism, symbolism, very strong anthropological mythological dimension, father-daughter incest, brother-sister incest, sibling sexual rivalries, the idea of love in its quotidian betrayals or fulfilments, the views of freedom, the contingent situations as restrictions on freedom, transcendence into something wider than the ego (by means of which some characters try to escape from the tormenting consciousness of being themselves), fantasy, illusion, belief, the oppsing wills of others, Freudian tensions characteristically diffused by humour, intellectual and linguistic games, narrative tricks, and finally a male questing hero whose progress involves a certain degree of, to use a Freudian phrase, "Libidinal investment" on the part of the reader as well as the novelist.

Moreover, what has always struck me about these novels is that they are, what Murdoch had herself said, "much less than the great novels of the nineteenth century." In fact, her absolute dissatisfaction was quite noticeable in her honest confession: "We’re pygmies compared with those great writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Dickens and Jane Austen."

The best work did not come; it knows what it is setting out to do, which a Murdoch novel did not. She, therefore, did not stop but continued her anxiety to confer her literary vitality on the best: That is, she wanted to create in a wonderful magical way (as did Shakespeare whom she considered "the patron saint of every novelist") real characters, real independent people who would grow and be remembered as real individuals. In short, she urgently felt herself wanting to write "a Shakespearean novel," to have an ability to create "free people who are wandering round in a sort of open air atmosphere and certainly not simply creatures of some intent of mine (Murdoch) to combine the existence of these people with pattern and this deep myth which comes quite involuntarily, I think, out of the unconscious mind." For achieving this, she even believed that "I (Murdoch) would rather sacrifice the pattern, and the magic even, if I could create the people."

Undoubtedly, her later novels — The Sea, The Sea (1978) in which language became an art of magic and a key to literary power, and deservedly won her the recognition from the world as a genius novelist by way of getting the Booker Prize, Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Philsopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprenatice (1985), and The Book and the Brotherhood (1978), both were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Message to the Planet (1989) and The Green Knight (1993) are rich and full and strange as Shakespeare’s late comedies. They have people like us, real characters whom Murdoch loved. (In a letter to this writer she wrote: "the good novelist — and good writers in general — love their characters, and write out of a consuming interest in the idea of a human being who is imagined in a world of fiction: that is a real person in a work that is made up."

Like most of Shakespeare’s plays they explore drakness as well as light and mingle sublimity with pathos, bitterness with joy and peace and love, splendid intellectual subtlety with the cryptic utterances of wisdom. They have fullness and fertility, they are romances in the most positive sense, and show Murdoch at the very height of her narrative powers. Wonderfully readable and felicitously written they are many faceted novels; they have myth, magic, philosophy, psychology, mythology or the power figure, metaphysics, the struggle between the would-be artist and the would-be saint, themes of human personality and human freedom and love and death and many more.

Though many of her concerns in all her 27 novels are a typical subject of the existentialists, philosophers and psychologists, her manner of proceeding was entirely different from that of most writers, including continental ones. For example, she did not creat a protagonist to present her arguments about freedom in "a concise or tortured dialectic," as did Sartre in Les Chemins. Neither did she narrate a myth like story which would have proved itself to be "a quasi-religious revelation" of the world’s meaninglessness, as Camus did in L’Estranger. Nor did she construct a metaphysical tale to advocate the case of suffering mankind before an unapproachable and unknown judge, as did Kafka. On the contrary, her method was more novelistic, or in her words, more "an art of image."

In this connection it is worth mentioning what she rightly wrote in a letter to me: "My novels are not "philosophical" in the sense that Sartre’s, for instance, are. That is to say they do not set out a philosophical position, using plot, characters, and commentary to outline and illustrate that position. On the other hand any good novel is philosophical in the sense that it is exploratory of human life and human prolems. The riddle of human life cannot be solved in a novel, but it should certainly be discussed in them. With as few generalisations as possible. I would agree that humanity should never figure in a novel — only human beings." Regarded primarily as a novelist, she also wrote a highly acclaimed philosophical book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) and some less effective plays. However, as a great novelist she brought out the pathos and dignity of human life. Her novels elevate a situation that in real life seems low and degrading, by drawing attention, as Tolstoy did, to the nobility which is immanent in the most humble circumstances. She was a sage and master of an art which only the initiated could fully understand.