Iris Murdoch: Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Murdoch

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris MurdochAuthor(s): DANIEL MAJDIAKReviewed work(s):Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer 1972), pp. 359-375Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754212 .Accessed: 10/08/2012 12:28

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DANIEL MAJDIAK

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch

ALTHOUGH IRIS MURDOCH'S CONCERN WITH THE EFFECTS OF ROMANTI-

cism on modern culture has been a persistent theme in her philosophical writings as well as her novels, we have not yet had much commentary on the role it plays in her aesthetics.1 It is a topic to which she continu- ally returns because it is her conviction that the explanatory and per- suasive metaphors bequeathed to us by Romanticism are a major source of our problems. She sees the inadequacies of existentialism and lin- guistic analysis, in her view the most important modern philosophies, as the result of this influence of Romanticism. Likewise, she finds its in- fluence the chief cause of what she considers a crisis of modern art : the "degeneration" of the novel. In this essay I want to describe the ways in which her concern with the influence of Romanticism is reflected in her aesthetics, and then analyze two of her novels from this perspective to show how this concern is reflected in her art.

I

Iris Murdoch believes that the image of man we most commonly use to explain the human condition is a Romantic Kantian one: "It has already in fact occasioned a whole era in ... philosophy, beginning with Kant and leading on to the philosophy of the present day. The chief characteristic of this phase of philosophy can be briefly stated: Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in

1 Gabriel Pearson, in his essay "Iris Murdoch and the Romantic Novel," New Left Review, 13/14 (1962), 137-145, is the only critic who treats this subject in any detail, and he examines only one of Murdoch's critical essays, "Against Dry- ness," and applies his findings only to The Bell and A Severed Head. In the two major studies of her novels, A. S. Byatt's Degrees of Freedom (London, 1965), and Peter Wolfe's The Disciplined Heart (Columbia, Mo., 1966), the writers deal with Murdoch's art as a whole and therefore their discussion of my subject is necessarily limited. My essay will likewise ignore aspects of Murdoch's thought, as well as elements in her fiction that are of real importance, but it will, I hope, illuminate one of her central concerns.

Texas Studies in Literature and Language XTV.2 (Summer, 1972)

360 DANIEL MAJDIAK

the age of the Kantian man, or the Kantian man-god."2 And she points out that the central Romantic image for this conception was found ready-made in the last great English epic based on the pre-Romantic picture: "Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer" {Sovereignty, p. 5). Murdoch appears to accept the mistaken belief that Lucifer evoked admiration from Romantics such as Blake and Shelley because of his assertion of freedom, his exertion of the will to power, and that they saw in him the epitome of the heroic solitary rebelling against repressive tyranny and asserting the value of "this in- tellectual being,/ those thoughts that wander through eternity." How- ever, the more common result of this revaluation, says Murdoch, was that the picture of this eternally suffering rebel was used "to transform the idea of death into the idea of suffering" (Sovereignty, p. 6) . Hence there came about a shift in attention that has led to a disastrous indul- gence in our tendency to demonic fantasy, a taming and beautifying of the idea of death, a cult of pseudo-death and pseudo-transience. Death becomes Liebestod, painful and exhilarating, or at worst charming and sweetly tearful. . . . [This is not true] of course . . . of the great romantic artists and thinkers at their best, but of the general beaten track which leads from Kant to popular philosophies of the present day. When the neo-Kantian Lucifer gets a glimpse of real death and real chance he takes refuge in sublime emotions and veils with an image of tor- tured freedom that which has been rightly said to be the proper study of philosophers. (Sovereignty, p. 8)

The task for us now, as Murdoch sees it, is to find a way to minimize this projection of the demonic and find a conception of man that will

put limits on our fantasies. To begin with, she wants to revitalize a

2 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts (Cambridge, 1967), p. 4. Hereafter page references to Murdoch's philosophical and critical writings will be given in the text to the editions here listed with abbreviations as fol- lows· Sovereignty; Sartre for Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (New Haven, 1959); "AD" for "Against Dryness," Encounter, 16 ( 1961 ) , 16-20; "DPR" for "The Dark- ness of Practical Reason," Encounter, 27 (1966), 46-50; "IP" for "The Idea of Perfection," Yale Review, 23 (1964), 342-380; "SBR" for "The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited," Yale Review, 49 (1959), 247-271; "SG" for "The Sublime and the Good," Chicago Review, 13 (1959), 42-55; "TSEM" for "T. S. Eliot as Moralist," in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Neville Braybrook (London, 1958), pp. 152-161; "VC" for "Vision and Choice in Moral- ity," Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume XXX (London, 1956), pp. 32- 58. Also, the following interviews will be abbreviated: Bryden for R. Bryden, "Talking to Iris Murdoch," The Listener, 79 (1968), 433-434; Kermode for Frank Kermode, "House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists,' Partisan Review, 30 (1963), 63-65; Rose for W. K. Rose, "An Interview with Iris Murdoch." ShenandoaL· 19 ( 1968), 3-22.

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch 361

famous distinction made by Coleridge (the most Kantian of the great English Romantics) that explains the difference between the imagi- nation and fancy. She places similar value on the imagination, but she explains the inferior operation of mind in the light of the more modern concept of fantasy; it does not "grapple with reality: hence 'fantasy,' not 'imagination'

" ("AD," p. 19) . Either may be described as "a type

of reflection on people, events, etc., which builds detail, adds colour, conjures up possibilities in ways which go beyond what could be said to be strictly factual" ("DPR," p. 48), but fantasy is unrealistic. Imagi- nation is a positive aspect of mind, and exercising it is an activity which, though not empirically verifiable, is

an exercise of will. Imagining is doing, it is a sort of personal exploring. The world which we confront is not just a world of "facts," but a world upon which our imagination has, at any given moment, already worked; and although such working may often be "fantasy" and may constitute a barrier to our "seeing what is really there," this is not necessarily so. ... The formulation of beliefs about other people often proceeds and must proceed imaginatively and under a direct pressure of will. We have to at- tend to people, we may have to have faith in them, and here justice and realism demand the inhibition of certain pictures, the promotion of others. ("DPR," p. 48)

For Murdoch the solution to the problem is to focus on the concept of attention itself, and though she takes the term from Simone Weil she derives the particulars of the concept from Kant. She revisits his com- mentaries on the sublime and the beautiful and finds in them the ma- terials for a concept of the imagination which connects art and morals to form the basis of a value system that can stand as an alternative to that of the neo-Kantian Lucifer.

Kant saw that "self is such a dazzling object that if one looks there one may see nothing else" ("IP," p. 367), and to prevent such blind- ness he formulated the concept of Achtung, Achtung is "the experience of respect for the moral law. In Achtung we feel pain at the thwarting of our sensuous nature by a moral requirement, and elation in the con- sciousness of our rational nature" ("SG," p. 45). Kant connects this experience with the more general one of sublimity that is found in our response to the awesome forms of nature, an emotional experience which results from the defeated yet invigorating attempt of reason to compass the boundless and the formless. As Murdoch explains, the ex- perience is invigorating even in defeat because reason has gained a "fresh sense of its independence and dignity [and] since reason is the moral will, the experience of the sublime is a sort of moral experience"

362 DANIEL MAJDIAK

("SBR," p. 249). But she extends Kant's concept by suggesting that sublime feelings "have to do, in their real complexity, not only with morals but also with sex. Achtung itself . . . has connections with sex." In this respect attention is instinctual, it is the agency of Eros impelling humans to seek what is real, and the real is other people. Thus, since love is the realization of the other's being, it is, Murdoch insists, the es- sence of all imaginative activity, the essence of both art and morals: "Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. What stuns us into a realization of our supersensible destiny is not, as Kant imagined, the formlessness of nature, but its unutterable particularity" ("SG," pp. 51-52). Imagination is, as the great Romantics saw, "sympathetic." When we fail to see the reality of others, it is because we are "com- pletely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own. Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination. "This is what Shelley meant when he said that egotism was the great enemy of poetry" ("SG," p. 52). We must, Murdoch argues, heed Wittgenstein's principle:

" 'What has to be accepted, the given, is ... forms of life.' [We must] take the moral forms of life as given, and not try to get behind them to a single form" ( "VC," p. 57 ) . That is, she believes, we must expand the sympathies of the imagination and abandon the Romantic quest for unity. If there is any unity conceivable, says Murdoch, we can only know it as "scattered intimations of good." In art and in morals the work of attention is con- tinuous; it imperceptibly builds up structures of value so that "at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over" ("IP," p. 373). The exercise of our freedom is hardly the grandiose gesture of Lucifer. "The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation presents the will not as unimpeded move- ment, but as something very much more like 'obedience' " ("IP," p. 376). The artist and the good man can thus be described in the same terms: "the lover who, nothing himself, lets other things be through him. And that also ... is what is meant by [Keats'] 'negative capa- bility'

" ("SBR," p. 270). As Murdoch indicates, Shelley was very near what she would con-

sider a viable aesthetics, but, she argues, however mistakenly, Romantic aesthetics in general is flawed because based on the wrong aspect of Kant's thought; it is built not on the theory of the sublime but on that of the beautiful. The production of the beautiful in art has as its primary goal not the discovery of truth but "rather the production of a certain kind of quasi thing. . . . The work of art is conceived by Kant and

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch 363

mostly by the Romantics, on the analogy of a fairly small perceptual object, ... a self-contained object, strictly purposeless, yet with an air of purpose, existing for its own sake. . . . The enjoyment of art is an analo- gon of the free rational act, in that it is the construction of something clean, free, empty, self-contained, not contaminated by the messiness of emotion, desire, or personal eccentricity" ("SBR," pp. 248-249). But this conception of art is actually self-consoling fantasy :

3

Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recog- nize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form. This form often seems to us mys- terious because it resists the easy patterns of fantasy, whereas there is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art since they are the recogniz- able and familiar rat-runs of selfish daydream. . . . We are presented with a truthful image of the human condition in a form which can be steadily contemplated ; and indeed this is the only context in which many of us are capable of contemplating it at all. . . . Most of all it exhibits to us this con- nection, in human beings, of clear realistic vision with compassion. The realism of a great artist is not a photographic realism, it is essentially both pity and justice.

Herein we find the remarkable redemption of our tendency to conceal death and chance by the invention of forms. Any story which we tell about ourselves consoles us since it imposes pattern upon something which might otherwise seem intolerably chancy and incomplete. However, human life is chancy and incomplete. It is the role of tragedy, and also of comedy, . . . to show us suffering without a thrill and death without a consolation. Or if there is any consolation it is the austere consolation of a beauty which teaches that nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be vir- tuous. (Sovereignty, p. 14)

Tragedy is the highest form because in it "self-contained form is com- bined with something, the individual being and the destiny of human

persons, which defies form" ("SG," p. 54). In their being and destiny we begin to perceive, if we attend to them properly, that our capacity to imagine otherness is without limit, and this perception is tragic be- cause we also perceive that there is no prefabricated harmony or unity; others are always different. If, Murdoch suggests, we think of Kant's

spectator as gazing not at the Alps but at the spectacle of human life

presented in art, we can find in the theory of the sublime a valid aes- thetics. This spectator would be no neo-Kantian Lucifer: "faced by

3 This fantasy is explicitly parodied in the character of Pat in The Red and the Green, a would-be poet who believes that the poet is "capable of lifting out of the muck and mess of life some self-contained object" (The Red and the Green [New York, 1966], p. 78).

364 DANIEL MAJDIAK

the manifold of humanity [he] may feel, as well as terror, delight, but not . . . superiority. He will suffer that undramatic, because un-self- centered, agnosticism which goes with tolerance" ( "SBR," p. 269 )

II

Of course Iris Murdoch's major concern in art is the novel. She was writing criticism of the novel even before she published fiction of her own, and her belief that the novel's problems are related to Romanti- cism is evident from the beginning. Her first critical essays are commen- taries on Sartre, and her early interest in him is explained by the fact that as a philosopher he devotes his thought to the study of the prob- lematic individual. Further, as a novelist one of his major subjects is the dilemma of form. La Nausée has as its theme the conflict between nec- essary form and contingent reality, and its hero, Roquentin, is, as Mur- doch says, a person who yearns for a logical necessity in the order of the world (Sartre, p. 5). Sartre permits him to find this in the end; he is duped by the fantasy that form in art can satisfy his yearning for totality (Sartre, p. 13).4 In allowing Roquentin this resolution Sartre creates what Murdoch calls his "philosophical myth," and she finds in this in- vention of a closed mythology a crucial error. Any such closed myth is falsely consoling because it is the result of fantasy - a projection of the desire for necessity. Furthermore, since the solution of Roquentin's problem is the writing of fiction, he compounds the error. In all this, she argues, Sartre is Romantic: he portrays a solipsistic individual who contains the whole of reality and this reality in turn is seen as having the order and unity of art. This combination produces what Murdoch calls the "crystalline" novel, and she takes this to be the epitome of Romantic fiction. (By "crystalline" Murdoch means that kind of novel which is, as Martin Price says, self-enclosed and of high internal coherence. In this kind of novel, "character becomes at most the constellated form of image patterns, historical allusions, philosophical themes.")5

4 Like Roquentin, Jake Donaghue of Under the Net also finds contingency to be his great antagonist. And like Roquentin, Jake finds that the way to defeat his antagonist is to write a novel about his life. But Murdoch differs from Sartre in allowing her hero only a temporary victory; Jake knows that his fiction gives his life only a provisional form.

5 Martin Price, "The Other Self, in Imagined Worlds: Essays in Honor of John Butt, ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London, 1968), p. 291. Price makes this point in connection with Eliot's "Gerontion," but it is part of a general discussion of the symbolic mode and of equal relevance to the novel. Price points out that Murdoch shares this negative view of the symbolic mode with such critics as Angus Wilson, Barbara Hardy, W. T. Harvey, and, not surprisingly, John Bayley, her husband. Price goes on to give an interesting counterargument

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch 365

Thus in Romantic fiction Murdoch sees once more the result of taking the wrong way from Kant's thought. Achtung has become Angst; Achtung is respect for the moral law, whereas Angst is fear of its absence ("SG," p, 53) , and man, the solitary choosing animal with no rationale for his choices, is overwhelmed by a feeling of this absence. So the basic subject matter of Romantic fiction is neurosis, though in the nineteenth century only a few great novelists were affected by this -

Emily Bronte, Melville, Dostoevysky - because society could still be seen as an end, and its conventions and the role of the individual within them could still be a legitimate theme for fiction. (Murdoch is thinking primarily of the English tradition, of course.) But despite the allegiance of English novelists to realism, the influence of symbolist aesthetics en- abled Romanticism to triumph even over "the great tradition," and we find, says Murdoch, that almost all the great modern novels are neurotic in theme and crystalline in form ("SG," p. 53) . What survives of real- ism becomes a "large quasi-documentary" narrative in which there is a superficial depiction of the conventions of society. The great nineteenth- century novels were free of these weaknesses because they portrayed "a plurality of real persons ... in a large social scene, . . . representing mu- tually independent centers of significance . . . free and independent of their author, and not merely puppets in the exteriorization of some closely locked psychological conflict of his own" ("SBR," p. 257) . But the modern novel is either a "quasi-allegorical object portraying the human condition and not containing character" ("AD," p. 18), or a loose journalistic narrative. Murdoch ignores the latter, because she be- lieves that no real creative work can now be done in this form; how- ever, she is vitally concerned with the crystalline novel. She believes it represents a crisis in modern art because, while poetry may "attempt to be a thing, . . . may be ... a Bateau Ivre, ... the novel has got to face the special problem of the individual within the work" ("SBR," p. 267 ) . The crisis arises because very few writers are attempting to deal with this problem: the crystalline novel "represents what is best and most influential in our literature, Romanticism in its final, purest, and most undiluted form; ... the triumph of neurosis, the triumph of myth as a solipsistic form" ( "SBR," p. 265 ) .

Though her theories on Romantic fiction apply to modern novels in

in favor of recognizing "the inevitable artifices in the conception of character." Another able defense of the symbolic novel is Ralph Freedman's The Lyrical Novel (Princeton, N.J., 1963). At one point in his discussion Freedman almost duplicates Murdoch's term: in whatever form we find this kind of novel, its de- fining characteristic is that the author's "point of view is crystallized in his pro- tagonists, who transform their perceptions into a network of images" (p. 16) .

366 DANIEL MAJDIAK

general, it was while meditating on her own work that she conceived the notion of the crystalline novel. In looking at her books, she found that all too often "the structure of the work itself, the myth ... of the work, had drawn [the characters] into a sort of spiral, or into a kind of form which ultimately was the form of one's own mind" (Kermode, p. 64). To prevent this she continually tries to open up the form of her plots, but the attraction of the closed myth proves as strong for her as it does for Sartre. The result is vacillation, "a kind of alternation between a sort of closed novel where one's own obsessional feeling about the novel is very strong and draws it closely together, and an open novel where there are more accidental and separate characters" (Rose, p. 12) . To counteract the neurotic tendencies in her art, she appears to go back, again, to a pre-Romantic point of view; that is, essentially, that one should imitate the great masters of the past. She argues that "the élan of the great nineteenth-century novels isn't spent, that there's plenty of room for people to go on trying to write like Tolstoy or Dickens or Jane Austen, just doing it in the modern idiom" (Bryden, p. 434).

But actually, Murdoch means to imitate the nineteenth-century masters in the sense that Coleridge said that all genuine art imitates; she does not wish to produce a mere copy of their mode or structures, but to present correspondences of contemporary consciousness, to rep- resent, that is, the actual processes of mind by which we know our reality. What one takes for a model is not the mental constructs of these authors - ours are much too complex and unstable to admit of that - but their tolerance, their respect for the reality of the people in their works. Since love, not freedom, is the main theme of fiction, the form must be open enough to contain human beings in all their contingency.

But of course to create free characters one must be especially con- scious of the way one uses symbolism. Here, the errors of the great modern novelists are instructive. Virginia Woolf, Murdoch says, at- tempted to make the moment permanent by embalming it; Joyce tried to turn life into literature and give it the cohesion of myth; Proust tried to catch the present through memory (Sartre, p. 8) ; but "how is the creator to transfer these yearned for projections to, even, his own past? If no present thought of his can confer necessary form upon his past, then neither can a partial image of that past, worked up into the whole- ness of a work of art, confer the necessity. Any such sense of necessity must be an illusion" (Sartre, p. 9) .e Belief in this illusion is another of

6 Robert Langbaum provides fine argument for the view that novelists like Joyce are presenting a more truthful picture of the reality of selfhood in their use

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch 367

the Romantic extensions of Kant's theory of the beautiful. It is a char- acteristic form of Romantic fantasy :

a yearning to pierce through the messy phenomenal world to some perfect and necessary form and order. An adoration of necessity . . . has always been a characteristic of Romanticism, . . . [and] one might say of the [Ro- mantic] Symbol that it is an analogon of an individual, but not a real in- dividual. It has the uniqueness and the separateness of the individual, but whereas the real individual is boundless and not totally definable, the symbol is known intuitively to be self-contained; it is a making sensible of the idea of individuality under the form of necessity, its contingency purged away. ("SBR,"p. 260)

Murdoch is not, of course, arguing that the novelist abandon symbol- ism, but she is asserting that when symbol becomes the controlling prin- ciple of the novel's structure (as does the "master image" of "viscosity" in La Nausée) the novel ceases to be a "house fit for free characters." This is an urgent truth for her because frequently the symbolism in her own novels is connected to a dominating myth ; she is unable to por- tray a whole society and must rely on more personal patterns to provide structure - "sexual, mythological, psychological patterns" (Bryden, p. 434). Again, she relies on characterization to prevent these patterns from becoming crystalline: the symbol must "come in a completely natural way, . . . through the characters (Rose, p. 12), because only with them can the novelist "emphasize the inexhaustible detail of the world, the endlessness of the task of understanding, the importance of not assuming one has got individuals or situations 'taped'

" (VC," p.

46 ) . But, she argues, Romanticism, taking off from Kant's conception of personality, has made characterization problematic. The neo-Kan- tian Lucifer looms so large in whatever story he is found that he threatens to swallow up all of the other characters. (Hegel's influen- tial picture of personality affirms this state of affairs and makes it seem normal and desirable. ) In the crystalline novel characters are shown in "a static monistic manner, as denizens of a ... simple emotional world, rather than as active beings who can only be properly characterized by being shown in reciprocal connection with the society they inhabit" (Sartre, p. 47 ) . That is, in the crystalline novel character is rendered in a solipsistic and dramatic way that is opposite to the tolerance of the great novelists. This, in Murdoch's opinion, is a surrender to neurosis and an attempt to allay anxiety by the creation of an absolute, a monis^ tic perspective that has the form and clarity of something necessary.

of myth and archetype than criticisms like Murdoch's would allow ("The Mys- teries of Identity," in The Modern Spirit [New York, 1970], pp. 147-164).

368 DANIEL MAJDIAK

However, "what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. . . . Against the consolations of form, ... the simplified fantasy-myth, we must pit the destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic idea of character" ("AD," p. 20). Like Lucifer, man is free and separate, but he is "related to a rich and unlimited world," and we must not sur- render this background.

Though Murdoch has never been completely successful in creating this background in terms of a whole society, she has at times achieved a microcosmic picture of it in the pattern of a psychological dilemma involving three or four characters. Form in her work is usually clear be- cause of this structure, but it is also usually "open" enough to allow these characters to realize themselves - at least in the successful novels. The dilemma portrayed is always involved in some aspect of the de- monic. Murdoch's concept of the demonic can be related to the others we have been considering in this way: whereas Achtung is "dismay at the frailty of the will combined with an inspiring awareness of the reality by which the will is drawn," Angst is a condition of alarm caused by loss of that awareness. Angst is thus related to the demonic in that it is "a kind of fright which the conscious will feels when it apprehends the strength and direction of the personality which is not under its con- trol" ("IP," p. 375). An apprehension of the demonic forces us "to accept a darker, less fully conscious, less steadily rational image of the dynamics of the human personality" ("IP," p. 379). But a major dif- ference between Murdoch and Freud is that for her there is no fully adequate explanation for the dynamics of personality; she emphasizes that our tendency to fantasy makes the exploration of the demonic ex- traordinarily difficult: "We are obscure to ourselves because the world we see already contains our values" ("DPR," p. 49). And from this perspective she shows that love itself is problematic : though it is the way to understanding "it is capable of infinite degradation and is the source of our greatest errors" (Sovereignty, p. 36). She believes love makes people play the role of demons for others or have others play such roles for them. Hence, in a way which is neither religious nor meta-

physical, demonic energy is an important factor in human life; "whether it comes from the unconscious mind or however one likes to describe this, [it] suddenly focuses a situation and makes a person play a com-

manding role. . . . [People may be] possessed of this kind of energy, . . . but then too there are always victims ready to come forward Sexual

energy is ... [thus] connected with this sort of worshiping and extension of power, with the way in which we make other people play roles in our

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch 369

lives - dominating roles or slave roles." (In her connection of love with enslavement her theory is reminiscent of Hegel. ) "So this sort of drama is a fundamental expression of sex, though it has other aspects con- nected with power in what seems to be a much more primitive sense" (Rose, pp. 14-16). Likewise, Murdoch believes that though much of our motive power is sexual, we cannot explain our spirituality solely on this basis. The relation of "sexuality and spirituality is very much more ambiguous and hard to understand" (Rose, p. 17). But we do know, she says, that as "the world of religion and God and gods has become completely problematic, there are more psychological forces working loose ... as if they were demons or spirits" (Bryden, p. 434). Paul Tillich notes that there is a tendency in modern thought to place the demonic in closer connection with form, without reference to its nega- tive character. Murdoch would call this a Romantic tendency and as- sert the opposite view, also Tillich's, that the demonic "destroys the living, independently powerful quality in ... things and therewith the inner community of knowing and the known."7 But Murdoch cannot accept Tillich's Christian solution to this problem; for her the only possible way out is the deeper understanding of living persons.

Ill

To conclude this analysis I would like now to comment on the Ro- mantic element in two of Iris Murdoch's most successful novels, The Time of the Angels and The Bell. While others could be analyzed to show the effects in her art of her ideas regarding Romanticism,8 these novels best demonstrate that influence and also show better than any others that, despite her criticism of Romanticism, she is in many ways a twentieth-century romanticist herself. Two aspects of Murdoch's analy- sis of Romanticism are especially significant to the themes of these novels : the connections made between sex and spirituality in Romantic thinking on love and death, and the concept that transcendence of Ro- mantic dilemmas may be achieved through improvement of Romantic

7 Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History (New York, 1936), p. 86. 8 One could discuss, for example, how the line from Chnstabel that Martirr Lynch-Gibbon thinks of when he sees Honor Klein in bed with her brother under- scores the nature of Martin's obsessive sexual fantasies. Likewise, references to Keats and Coleridge in An Unofficial Rose play a significant role in pointing up the destructive fantasies of power and freedom in which Hugh and Randall Peronett indulge. And in the weakest of her fourteen novels, The Italian Girl, Murdoch rather too obviously draws on evocations of Keats and Coleridge to lend support to the unconvincing resolution of the conflicts of Edmund Narraway and his sister-in-law Isabel.

370 DANIEL MAJDIAK

insights. What she says about the connections between sex and spirit- uality in The Unicorn applies equally well to The Time of the Angels and The Bell: "It is about the ambiguity of these kinds of strange re- lationships when they get mixed up with the spiritual world and with notions of redemption and with religious notions. In a way ... it is about the ambiguity of the spiritual world itself, about the curious con- nexions there are between spirituality and sex" (Rose, p. 17). In these novels the picture of the demonic is made profound by virtue of the ex- ploration of its connections with religious perceptions and feelings. Likewise, the depth of characterization achieved in them is a result of the concern of the protagonists with the deepest possible conceptions of being.

The most intensely demonic of Murdoch's novels is The Time of the Angels in which the plot is closely woven around the idea that God is dead. She emphasizes the Romantic aspect of this theme by using lines from Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience as a kind of leitmotif. The character associated with these poems is a black maid, one of three females enslaved by the mad priest Carel Fisher. Like so many of Mur- doch's characters, Pattie yearns for a lost innocence: "She recalled a little poem which had troubled her at school : 'And I am black, but Ο my soul is White,' and Pattie decided that she was damned if her soul was white."9 In contrast to "The Little Black Boy," the source of Pattie's memory, she sees that in order to achieve redemption she must maintain her own identity and not become enslaved to another. But the Blakean journey through experience to an organized innocence is one that Pattie never finishes. Her love for Carel keeps her in the enslaved world of experience. The Russian exile who works for Carel has the fantasy that he can lift her out of this, and he pictures her as like the

quasi-regenerated earth of Blake's America: "the innocent, the un- discovered America, the good dark continent" (p. 207). But her true image is that of the fallen earth under a mad, tyrannical god, like Blake's Urizen.10 "Card's divine hands created her" (p. 25) : "He was the Lord God and she was the inert and silent earth" (p. 215). The

poem that continually recurs as her form of prayer is the one in which Blake's Urizenic "father of men" calls out to earth to return to him : "turn away no more, why wilt thou turn away. The Starry floor,

9 The Time of the Angels (New York, 1966), p. 24. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text.

10 The comic opposite ot this relationship is presented in muno s uream. Bruno's ridiculous son, Miles, so totally misunderstands his father's emotional nature that he thinks of him "like a sage represented by Blake, withdrawn, distant" (Bruno's Dream [New York, 1969], p. 69) .

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch 371

the watery shore, is given thee till the break of day" (p. 7, misquoted) . She has no independent identity to which she can return, however, and this is remarkably dramatized in a grotesque parody of the annuncia- tion, in which Carel makes love to her while reciting his "Hail Pattie," making her his "counter- virgin and anti-Maria" (pp. 162-163) . When she surrenders in this scene, she gives up all hope of freedom and comes to realize that for her "after all there was no salvation, no one to call the lapsed soul or weep in the evening dew" ( p. 2 1 8 ) .

Carel is Murdoch's most extreme example of the ambiguity of the spiritual world. Even more than Mischa of The Flight from the En- chanter, he seems the essence of the demonic ; he must possess the world. Elizabeth is his child by his younger brother's wife, whom Carel se- duced to spite that brother when he ran off with a woman both of them loved. As the time of the angels nears and his madness grows he takes the unacknowledged daughter as his mistress. He explains this time as the end of "the precarious reign of morality, itself of course an illusion. . . . Henceforth humankind is to be the victim of irresponsible psychological forces called 'angels'

" (p. 201). The death of God has set the angels

free, and they are terrible : "Angels are the thoughts of god. Now he has been dissolved into his thoughts, which are beyond our conception in their nature and power. . . . There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits" (p. 178). Here we have the neo-Kantian Lucifer in his most destructive guise. The Romantic dilemma of self- consciousness becomes the hell of insanity. Carel despairs of the har- mony and unity to which the early Romantics aspired: "If there is goodness it must be one. . . . Multiplicity is not paganism, it is the tri- umph of evil, or rather what used to be called evil and is now name- less" (p. 178) . Though Murdoch does not refer to it, Blake has a name for this evil. He calls it "Ulro," the hell of solipsism where there are only two laws: "There is only power and the marvel of power; there is only chance and the terror of chance" ( p. 1 78 ) .

Muriel, Card's legitimate daughter, is likewise bound to him though she wishes to free herself after she discovers his incestuous relationship with Elizabeth in the bizarre voyeur scene that parodies the moral act of imaginative attention. But he binds her to him through Elizabeth by making her responsible for her lame half-sister. That is, when Carel commits suicide Muriel knows that even though Elizabeth is La Belle Dame Sans Merci "there will be no parting from her now" (pp. 164, 231 ). Because of her love for Carel she must respect his decision to end his life even though she finds him soon enough to save him; because of his love for Elizabeth and what he has done to her Muriel must care for

372 DANIEL MAJDIAK

her for the rest of their lives : "Love was dying and she could not save it. It was love immersed, sealed up. It could only have this demonic issue" (p. 230).

The symbol which relates the metaphysical theme to the complex relationships among the characters is an icon the Russian émigré owns, a depiction "of the Trinity represented as Angels" (p. 173). For the Russian it is a symbol of the remnant of continuity in his life: "it was there and is here" (p. 57). For his son, it is used symbolically in his Oedipal struggle; he steals it and sells it. Pattie and Muriel value it be- cause they love the Russian. But it is Card's interpretation of it that relates it to the themes of the novel: "They would be so tall. . . . How can those three be one?" (p. 181 ). The spiritual bankruptcy depicted in The Time of the Angels is attested to by the fact that only Carel per- ceives the icon spiritually, hence his madness. But there is a moral bank- ruptcy as well, and this is shown in the fact that none of the characters value the icon as a work of art, with the kind of perception that could lift the contemplating mind out of the hell of self. Early in the action Muriel voices the opinion that "the only salvation in this age is to be an artist," but that is a solipsistic view (p. 35). Rather, in Murdoch's view, the conception would be something like this: in this age a just perception of art is one of the only modes of salvation. In The Time of the Angels Murdoch uses the symbol to characterize; it points up the spiritual dilemma of the characters and suggests a solution. Yet the main characters remain free of the symbol, and because of this freedom their story approaches the dimension of tragedy. Put in her own terms, Murdoch approaches the highest form of art in The Time of the Angels because she keeps her attention fixed on the ideal of free and independ- ent character, and in the creation of the symbol of the icon, she ap- proaches the beauty of form all artists desire, yet avoids the false conso- lation of the crystalline novel.

The Bell, Murdoch's best novel, examines the ambiguity of the re- lation of sex and spirituality in both the cloister and the court. The dual perspective is achieved in the character of Michael, a priest manqué who leads a lay religious community that is attached to an Anglican convent adjacent to his family's ancestral manor. This community is barely established when demonic forces within it disrupt and ultimately destroy it. The ideals of the community are a parody of High Church culture concepts like T. S. Eliot's (the novel appeared in the same year as Murdoch's essay "T. S. Eliot as Moralist"), "a Christian society, in- spired by a Christian elite, and reminded by the Church of standards which lie beyond the individual" ("TSEM," p. 155). Meade, like

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch 373

Eliot, has a dislike for "untidy lives," and hopes for his community to return to the "clarity and cleanliness of the medieval world when, to use Eliot's phrase apropos of Dante, 'thought was orderly and strong and beautiful' " ("SBR," p. 260). Meade wants to believe that "the service of God must mean a loss of personality,"11 but he is involved with members of the community in ways which render this impossible. His second in command, the pompous James Tayper Pace, states the Eliotic dogma unequivocally: "the whole conception of personality is . . . dangerous to goodness What we need most is to see reality. And that is something outside us. ... Not in some imaginary concoction out of our idea of our own character - but in something so external and so remote that we can get only now and then a hint of it" (p. 126). The central question, as Murdoch sees it, is where outside the self does this reality exist? Meade's experience has taught him that one simply cannot ignore one's personality, because the emotion which fed his religious perceptions and his sexual desire "arose deeply from the same source" (p. 96). A recognition of this fact finally leads him to the view that "each one of us apprehends a certain kind and degree of reality and from this springs our power to live as spiritual beings and by using and enjoying what we already know we can hope to know more" (p. 195) ♦ The great danger, as he knows too well, is "that if one departs from a simple apprehension of certain definite commandments one may be- come absorbed in the excitement of a spiritual drama for its own sake" (p. 197). He is completely absorbed in his own spiritual drama, in which the chief actors are himself and his ex-pupil Nick Fawley. More so even than Gerald Scottow of The Unicorn, Nick is a Murdochian representation of Romantic Satanism: "Gone are the days in the Gar- den, the days of our innocence when we loved each other and were happy. Now ... the mark of Cain is upon us" (p. 246) . Appropriately, he claims to have had incestuous relations with his sister Catherine, "whom he loved, he swore, with a Byronic passion" (p. 101). And in his dealings with Meade he seems always to be bent on his destruction. But in his continued enslavement to Nick, Meade recognizes "not so much . . . the presssure of dark forces upon him, as the reality within himself of some active and positive spring of evil" (p. 76). He had thought to escape this reality by retiring from the world, but in allowing Nick to enter the community he insured its destruction. The catastrophe in which Catherine goes mad and Nick commits suicide proves to Meade that "the pattern which he had seen in his life had existed only

11 The Bell (New York, 1966), p. 82. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text.

374 DANIEL MAJDIAK

in his own romantic imagination. At the human level there was no pat- tern" (p. 295).

Not all the characters in The Bell suffer from this catastrophe, how- ever, and in the person of Dora we find Meade's comic opposite. Her mind is hardly subtle; "She had never in fact been able to distinguish religion from superstition" (p. 14) . But because of that she has a kind of negative capability : "a certain incapacity for 'placing' others stood her ... in lieu of virtue." She lives in doubt and half-knowledge and yet is "increasingly aware that she exist [s]" (p. 10). This awareness, initially a reaction against the demonic energy of her husband's will to dominate her, does not grow into solipsism because of Dora's incapa- city; she cannot absorb the world, but neither will she allow herself to be absorbed. She rejects both convent and court and determines to value life, however messy or untidy. But it is not mere animal vitality that impels her; her imagination is healthy as well. She is "responsive without calculation to the returning glow of kindness" (p. 63). The surest sign of the vitality of her imagination is in her response to art. She sees in it "something real outside herself . . ., something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism" (p. 183).

Dora really finds herself when she decides to play the witch in the holy community; but she does not try to cast a curse on it, she wants to free it from one. This curse is associated with the fabled lost bell of the convent, flung into the lake, the legend goes, because one of the nuns had a lover. Dora thinks she can dispel this curse on sexual love by re- vealing the bell, which she has just accidentally rediscovered. Her scheme fails because the other characters continue in their fantasy, each seeing the bell in his own idiosyncratic terms. The High Church advo- cate sees it with a simplicity that mocks the impoverished concepts of the linguistic analyst: "there is no hidden mechanism. All that it is is plain and open; and if it is moved it must ring" (p. 130) . Meade's is a Romantic emphasis on the unseen power that moves the bell. "It is subject to the force of gravity. The swing that takes it down must also take it up. So we too learn to understand the mechanism of our spiritual energy, and find out ... the hiding places of our strength" (p. 196). Dora's view differs from both in a crucial respect; she sees the otherness of the bell and does not presume to know its mystery. As she perceives it, it is "a huge moving piece of darkness, . . . bellowing out in a voice that had been silent for centuries that some great thing was newly returned to the world" (p. 256) . The inscription on it reads, "I am the voice of love. I am called Gabriel," and it announces that even though Chris-

Romanticism in the Aesthetics of Iris Murdoch 375

tianity no longer presents a "satisfying or powerful picture of ourselves and each other" ("SBR," p. 256), love can still be a basis for human value. That is, at least one of the themes voiced by the symbol of the bell is that the time of the angels need not lead to despair. In Dora's development we see a positive response to this situation: "Because of all the dreadful things that had passed there was more of her" (p. 291 ) . She is nourished by them, not in the vampire manner of the survivors in The Unicorn, but in the sense that she exhibits imaginative growth and increased capacity for love. And as in The Time of the Angels, character and symbol are kept in proper relation. As a physical object the bell provides the major impetus for the plot, and as a symbol it has the resonance necessary to express the complex meanings pursued by the characters. On the one hand it seems a classic example of Romantic symbolism, which is both the physical occasion for the artist's response and the means of expressing his vision. Yet on the other, it calls forth the separate, unique vision of the protagonists and thus aids them in their attempts at self-definition. And as their awareness of themselves grows their awareness of the identity of others grows likewise, and this eventually becomes the recognition of love. The Bell, in short, is a gen- uine triumph of Romanticism.

IV

Murdoch is not anti-Romantic in the usual sense. She sees that it will not do to escape the present by ignoring how crucially we are part of it; "to exist sanely and without fear . . ., there must be ... a willed imagi- native reaching out toward what is real" ("DPR," p. 50), and this, of course, is what the great Romantics did. Her art shows that we are the heirs of these Romantics, just as much as we are the products of Romanticism; and it shows that we can claim our inheritance and thus, as Shelley said, "imagine what we know." Since man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then becomes like the picture, we need "an education in how to picture and understand human situations" ("IP," p. 371 ). As Blake put it, we have to see through our eyes, not merely with them, or, as Murdoch says, we have to "grow by looking" ("IP," p. 367). In attending to Romanticism, she finds that she must reject much of what it has created, but she has absorbed much of its vision as well and uses it to look to the future.

University of Illinois Urbana