BOOKS The Romantic Miss Murdoch

By MALCOLM BRADBURY

TRIS MURDOCH'S reputation as a novelist is _thigh; but it is surely not as high as it was. The shift in critical opinion derives in part from what seems to me an initial misapprehension about the kind of novelist she was when she began writing, and a consequent disappointment in the way she has developed.

Her fifth novel, An Unofficial Rose, manifests a considerable change of tone and manner which has continued through her more recent books. The new manner has been criticised as novelettish; in fact, it is a turn to something incipiently present in the earlier books, a turn, surely, to the romance tradition of the English novel. This tradition, which tends in subject-matter toward metaphysi- cal speculation and in technique toward allegory and symbolism, has recently had considerable interest for our novelists. Iris Murdoch has ex- ploited it at the point where it fuses with the novel of sentiment; her subject, more and more, has become love relationships; and this can lead us to feel that—though, evidently,' she deals with such relationships with a distinctive kind of psychological and moral concern—the moral deductions, the moral consequences, are explored not in life as we may live it, but in a special world, socially, geographically, even humanly isolated.

These more fantastic, less social novels of Iris Murdoch's not only pose problems on their own account, but make us look again at the early Works. Under the Net, for instance, was aligned With Lucky Jim and Hurry On Down when it came out, taken as a social document of the welfare state; it is an evidently mistaken attribu- tion. Its dedication, to Raymond Queneau, ought to have reminded us straight off of its strongly surrealist qualities, its distinctively Murdochian vein of fantasy; at the same time, it was marked, as the other two 'Angry' novels were not, with a distinctive philosophical concern. The concern Was a concern with the proper conduct of human relationships, and with the moral and logical grounds on which we can judge human action to be rewarding and alive. Its premises are romantic; its end in view is human renewal, the sense-of the wonder of the world. And like much romantic literature, like much literature focused on the capacities of the imagination and on the connections outward the human spirit can make, it is supported by a distinctive msthetic; one of the themes of the novel is that of the kind of transformation or order constituted by a work of art—a therne explored by reference to novels, films, mime-plays, song, even to fireworks.

This sort of testhetic concern links Iris Murdoch with the experimental writers of our century, and there are a number of obvious com- Parisons and connections to be made—with Henry James and Virginia Woolf in the English tradi- tion, with Sartre and Camus in the French. To saY that there is something 'Bloomsbury' about her work is not to place her at a disadvantage; there is also a kind of irony, a particular sense of fantasy, and above all a philosophical sophis- tication that separates her distinctively from Bloomsbury; in a sense, A Severed Head directly explores the differences.

Ent she is a novelist of personal relationships, a novelist devoted to the unutterable particularity of individuals, and to the external realities which transcend individuals—for a man is 'related to a rich and complicated world from which as a moral being he has much to learn.' In the essay 'Against Dryness' (Encounter, January 1961), in which she makes this comment, she asserts the need for the novel of character, the novel which asserts the complexity of persons and the contin- gent nature of experience. She proposes (rather like Barbara Hardy in her recent study of the novel, The Appropriate Form) a fiction of con- tingency; literature must have a form, and in thi§ respect it violates the seamless web of ex- perience, but the sense of reality must be vigilant against 'the consolations of form, the clear crystalline work, the simplified fantasy-myth.'

The paradox is that Miss Murdoch is far from urging naturalism upon us; indeed, if any- thing distinguishes her work, it is its distinctive mode of fantasy or surrealism. And this is per- haps the paradox which has puzzled critics and led them to challenge her work in significant ways. For instance, to pin, as Iris Murdoch does, her view of naturalism to character alone is to isolate what is not isolatable in a work of fiction. It is the 'now so unfashionable naturalis- tic idea of character' that she sets against dryness, but it is apparent that her structures are not naturalistic, nor is her tone. Thus we can com- plain that, though her books are about con- tingent experience, they have grown more and more formalised, so that we lose not only the sense of recognition, the sense that the problems explored here matter in life, but even the sense that these problems originate in life. Now the distinctive Murdoch fantasy does, I think, genuinely take up the problems involved here. Her structures are of a sort which, assert the complexity of the external reality, but they shy away from any final revelation. And so the novels have an xsthetic of search, but a search without final revelation. It is an aesthetic of wonder, a modified romanticism in which 'whatever is con- tingent, messy, boundless, infinitely particular and endlessly still to be explained' does have its place. Its symbolism is not a symbolism lead- ing to revelation, not a crystalline symbolism; it is an opaque symbolism closer to surrealism.

The other apparent paradox is that, though she is concerned with regard for persons, her fables are fables of Power. A Severed Head (which I think to be her best book) takes us beyond the liberal Christian concept of love as understanding, as spirit, to love as something totemistic, violent and concerned with power. Martin Lynch-Gibbon is, so to speak, initiated into the role of kingship that has previously been associated with the incestuous relationship of Palmer and Honor. He leaves behind the gentler world, enters a world of control, which has 'nothing to do with happiness.' The anthro- pological and mythological underpinning is fundamental to this story, giving it both its fabulous qualities and its moral emphasis. It is present in the other novels, too, and is surely part of Miss Murdoch's effective critique of liberal man.

There are basic forces, definable in psy-

chological or anthropological terms, which act in groups and communities and in the pro- cesses of love. The essential relationships of the Murdoch universe are not directly passionate ones; they are special groupings of men and women into fundamental rituals. All this surely

leads us far away from the naturalistic notion of character, and leads us toward a sense of

order behind contingency. Miss Murdoch's fic- tion, then, is about love and power in groups of people, and about the springs of experience

which in fact lie behind our normal definitions of our impulses. The moral speculations of the philosopher are allied to the sense of society of the anthropologist. And hence her novels do have a form . . . the form of moral myth.

'A novel must be a fit house for free charac- ters to live in; and to combine form with a respect for reality with all its odd contingent ways is the highest art of prose.' Miss Mur- doch's position has its paradoxes; and it's with

a lively- sense of these that Mrs. Byatt engages

with her novels in this intelligent new book.* '[Her novels] presented themselves, it seemed to me, like puzzles out of which a plan of ideas, a scheme of references could be extracted for examination, with some effort. . . . To have made the effort has increased my own respect for her as a novelist—she seems to me to be dealing honourably with real and important problems.' Primarily devoted to the analysis of

Miss Murdoch's philosophical and moral ideas as they appear in her first seven novels, Degrees of Freedom manages in a serious and scrupulous way to clear the essential ground and to justify this kind 'of judgment.

The basis of Mrs. Byatt's argument is that all Miss Murdoch's novels can be seen as studies of 'the degrees of freedom' available to individuals —freedom in relation to other people, freedom in relation to 'transcendent reality.' The first two

books—Under the Net and Flight from the Enchanter—have a social dimension, a concern with freedom in the context of a large and

mechanised society; the later novels tend to shift attention to freedom within personal relation- ships, to Jamesian studies of one person's power over or modification of another person. This view Mrs. Byatt sustains by ambitious, careful reading of the books. There are moments which invite quibble; I'd be inclined to think, for instance, that the artistic consequences of the two paradoxes I've mentioned limit Miss Murdoch's sense of human freedom much more than Mrs. Byatt suggests.

Further, because of Mrs. Byatt's interest in their structure of ideas, the novels do come out looking very abstract indeed; yet one of the striking things about them is their distinctive texture, the special renderings of experience, which reveal an essential Murdoch style.

Mrs. Byatt's final chapter faces the latter problem and comes to some extremely acute judgments about Iris Murdoch's narrative art and her use of symbols, judgments that involve some fascinating questions about her comparative success and failure. And though one of the distinctive .qualities of Miss Murdoch's novels is the lucidity and intelligence of her verbal manner, she can at times be charged with the employment of romantic cliches; Mrs. Byatt examines some revealing examples. But the real point about her book is that it helps us to see the

special and distinctive kinds of concern that have turned Miss Murdoch's novels in the direc- tion in which they have gone. And in doing that, Mrs. Byatt has helped us towards a clearer esti- mate of one of the best novelists we have.

* DEGREES OF FREEDOM: THF. Novas OF IRIS MURDOCH. By A. S. Byatt. (Chatto and Windus. 30s.)