Читать книгу The Saint and Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 6

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. Byatt, Baldanza and Todd.¹ In its concern with the role of art in redeeming contingency it clearly echoes La Nausée; but it is also a novel which differently undercuts its existentialist hero-narrator. It is in fact a novel which draws on the Romantic tradition, the first novel of a Platonist in the making, schematically enquiring into the nature of the Good man and his relations with art, with true vision, and with copying. Art as much as Jake is its hero, copying its prophetic subject-matter. It takes on anxieties about realism many decades before these became fashionable in England.

Under the Net’s success has been obscured by the later work. It would be a very odd and unintelligent writer whose work did not develop at all over more than thirty years, so that her first novel remained her best; and whatever else Iris Murdoch is as a writer, she is an exceptionally intelligent one. In comparison with The Black Prince, a better novel about art and the education of an artist, where the idea-play is fed by a much more interesting story and better-drawn characters, Under the Net is extraordinary but still clearly apprentice work. Apprenticeship is another of its subjects. Both Hugo and Jake end up apprenticed to their crafts, of watchmaking and fictionmaking respectively.

And yet if Murdoch had written nothing else she would have been remembered for Under the Net. It is only the stature of her later work which dwarfs it, an astonishingly assured, inventive and funny first book. She had destroyed three or more earlier unpublished novels^*; on the grounds of their immaturity, and this rigour had paid dividends. Under the Net partly resembles The Pickwick Papers: a picaresque, charming, light and innocent first novel, an episodic account of the boozy journeyings of a quixotic, illusionridden knight and his cannier squire. There have indeed been few critics who are not Chestertonian in their enthusiasm for the zest and buoyancy of her early novels, and because this has meant an undervaluation of the later work it seems useful to try to see the early work in a perspective which the later work makes available, and to read the early work through the later. I’m not – or not simply – pleading, like Edmund Wilson with the ‘dark’ Dickens, for a demonic and alienated later Murdoch to set off against her early optimism. One aspect of the brilliance of the later work is the critique it offers of that facile pessimism which is nowadays the insignia of the intellectual: to have a passion for imagining the worst, as John Bayley puts it in The Characters of Love, is the main premise for being thought serious.² The general movement, however, is, as Murdoch put it, from the ‘quaint, funny, absurd and touching’ early work towards the ‘sad and awful’ later dark comedies (Bellamy, 1977). A crucial word here is ‘comedy’. The later books are not only darker, much more confident and less anxious to charm us than the early ones – they are thereby also wiser and funnier. She latterly showed us terrible things and made us laugh, and without diminishing the awfulness one whit. The face of the mature work resembles Martin Lynch-Gibbon’s in A Severed Head, ‘the face of someone laughing at something tragic’ (15). There are connexions between comedy and ‘contingency’ in her work which cut across all other distinctions, and where the books are less than fully successful it is often not because they are more ‘symbolic’, but because they are less comic.³

By these high standards the interest of Under the Net is partly in its exposition of themes which were to recur. It is the first and least disquieting of her brilliant first-person male narrations. She called her identification with the male voice ‘instinctive’ (Caen, 1978); I know nothing quite like them. There are male novelists who can persuade you into the minds of young women – Tolstoy, Henry James, Angus Wilson; the reverse feat seems rarer. Virginia Woolf’s pleasure in animating Orlando as a man can seem winsome and create a mild disassociation. In Murdoch what you detect is not so much the author’s pleasure as her relaxed and businesslike efficiency, into which she has wholly disappeared. The question of her relation with these heroes is a legitimate one. The subversive power of these narrations comes from our intimate relation with them and hence from our identification. This is solicited through a strenuous suspension of moral judgement on the author’s part, which comes to mean that judging these ‘loveable monsters’ resembles passing judgement on ourselves. This is one reason why reading these books can be, as well as a hilarious and spellbinding experience, also a very uncomfortable one. The prototype for this subversive relation between author-character and reader is Dostoevsky’s blackly comic Notes from Underground, a work to which The Black Prince, A Word Child and The Sea, The Sea show a debt. Dostoevsky’s relations with his hero, like Murdoch’s, are profoundly equivocal, and depend on devious intimate play with his own potential worst self or selves. Murdoch’s mastery of this equivocation is extraordinary.⁴

What might be added is that if there is a naïveté involved in identifying the author with her, very different, first-person narrators, as if this were a mere feat of literary transvestism, another sort of simplicity wholly detaches her from this crew as if they were moral exhibition-pieces, waxworks in some cautionary tale. Her success depends on the warmth of her identification as much as on the rigour of her simultaneous detachment. Where she gets too close (Jake in Under the Net), or too distant (Edmund in The Italian Girl), the book can be less successful. Moreover, despite conspicuous differences between these narrators, there are also evident similarities. Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea and Jake Donaghue in Under the Net are both short men who blush and like swimming. All these narrators, from Jake to Charles, are within a year of their author’s age at the time of writing. All are in her specially extended sense ‘artists’. All are differently fastidious, are in some (not simply sexual) sense puritans, and experience that terror of multiplicity or contingency which Murdoch acknowledged in her interview with Ruth Heyd (1965). ‘I hate contingency; I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason’ (24), says Jake. Such fear marks us all; what Murdoch shows in each portrait is also that relaxation of censorship at the threshold of consciousness which Schiller emphasised, in a well-known letter admired by Freud, as the peculiar, dangerous gift of the artist.⁵ Her suspicion of this relaxation of censorship, and her mastery of it alike, make for a sense of drama.

Under the Net is told by Jake Donaghue, a bohemian, an Irishman brought up like Murdoch in London, and a ‘professional unauthorised person’, a raffish outsider. Talkative yet secretive, an irresolute sentimentalist with ‘shattered nerves’, he announces himself as a swift, intuitive type of thinker. This comes to mean, as the story unfolds, that he is impulsive, restless, profoundly impressionable, romantic and somewhat lost. Jake is a charming, feckless bohemian hack given to bouts of melancholia who earns money by translating the French novelist Breteuil, whose work he despises. At the beginning he arrives back from France to find himself homeless. His squire Finn tells him that Madge, with whom they have been living rent-free in Earl’s Court, is marrying and has kicked them out. The book concerns Jake’s subsequent journeyings; as Frank Baldanza has pointed out, they represent a mixture of flight and quest.⁶ Flight and quest are indeed often indistinguishable here. The mystery he is seeking seems to him partly embodied in the two Quentin sisters, Anna and Sadie, partly in his erstwhile friend Hugo Belfounder. Like Jane Austen’s Emma, Jake makes mistakes about who loves whom. He thinks he loves Anna who he imagines is pursued by Hugo who he thinks must be loved by Sadie. In fact Anna pursues Hugo who loves Sadie who is keen on him, Jake. He has been told all this but has licensed his own fantasies. He similarly thinks that Breteuil will never write a good book and that Finn will never return to Ireland, though Finn often says he wishes to. Finn does return to Ireland and Breteuil wins the coveted Prix Goncourt. Jake is progressively disenchanted, and ends the book with a newly-won joy at such withering into the truth, ready to write a book of his own, and trying to eschew theory.

What distinguishes Jake’s tale from that of a nineteenth-century hero or heroine – Emma, or Isabel Archer, also a ‘person of many theories’ – is the special use of picaresque convention, which is more self-conscious than Dickens’s, the extraordinary relations between the two central figures and what passes between them, and finally the tale’s openendedness.

A.S. Byatt noted the peculiar difficulty of discussing this ‘light, amusing, rapid’ book without making it sound portentous.⁷ This is a problem with all of Murdoch, but especially here with her least unphilosophical novel. She has rightly resented the attempt to ‘unmask’ the work, or to allegorise the books as if they were merely philosophy-in-disguise, preferring to be thought a reflective, religious or speculative novelist like Dostoevsky rather than, like Sartre, directly a philosophical one. To use her own favourite metaphor of water, we might say that good art is philosophy swimming, or philosophy drowning. ‘Ideas in art must suffer a sea-change’ (Magee, 1978). There is always more event, story, incident than the idea-play can use up, here as everywhere in her work, and this surplus of sense and action over meaning helps constitute the particular mysterious and instructively frustrating atmosphere. Reviewers of the first two novels noted that there was ‘too much’ in them (I shall discuss this ‘too much’ and its function in Chapter 5).

The play with the picaresque takes two forms. Traditionally it is the quest of the knight that matters, while that of his Sancho Panza takes second place. Jake fails, however, to see that Finn too has his story. He tells us that Finn has ‘very little inner life’, and that he connects this with Finn’s absolute truthfulness: ‘I count Finn as an inhabitant of my universe, and cannot conceive that he has one containing me; and this arrangement seems restful to both of us’ (UN 9). Finn is the first of a series of Murdoch characters who disappear from the narrative – some commit suicide, some die by avoidable accident, others, like Luca in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, are locked up in institutions – without ever having been properly apprehended. Their demise or disappearance is a direct result, we are made to feel, of the failure of the other characters to imagine their needs or to see them as other than ‘subsidiary’ characters. This is an inability in which the author, as her virtuosity grows, is herself decreasingly complicit. When the despairing Clifford Larr dies in A Word Child our curiosity about him is aroused and carefully cheated. Henry James said that he felt he could pass a stiff examination on Mrs Brookenham in The Awkward Age. We feel that the examination Murdoch could pass on Larr would be a stiffer one than she might care to sit on Finn. This conditions our sense of her success, not in persuading us of Jake’s shortsightedness, but in intimating what a longer vision might resemble. By the time she writes the later books her mastery of the confessional mode is such that one senses a greater authorial grasp of that depth of field which her narrators are busy simplifying, as well as the narrator’s simplifications.

The second use of the picaresque has to do with play with a great and continuing theme in Murdoch’s work, that of iconoclasm, the destruction of images, pictures and states of mind. Here the pathos and impermanence of the phenomenal world distantly mirrors, perhaps prefigures, the Socratic smashing of illusions and of all theoretical attempts to dominate reality with which the tale ends. The Hammersmith theatre where Anna conducts her mime is seen first full and then empty, and there is a film-set of ancient Rome which looks real, then rapidly collapses. The emptiness of the City of London at night, through which Jake hunts for Hugo, contrasts with the fullness of Paris on the fourteenth of July, through which he hunts for Anna. Hugo’s flat is perceived full of art-treasure (apart from his sparsely furnished bedroom) and then, soon after, in the process of being stripped. London is in this book as patiently apprehended as the characters, and this is distinctly an immediately post-war London, with bomb-sites and the coming end of Empire to link it with Catiline’s Rome.

The writing which evokes all this is freshly done, the emotions are felt, the structure vivid and alive. At the same time this picaresque theme is a Platonic one. Other critics have usefully shown the book’s indebtedness to Wittgenstein, from whom the title comes. The ‘net’ in the title alludes to Tractatus 6.341, the net of discourse behind which the world’s particulars hide, a net which is necessary in order to elicit and describe them: language and theory alike (which constitute the net) both reveal and yet simultaneously conceal the world. The use of the idea of the ‘provisionality’ of theory in this book is as much Platonic as Wittgensteinian. Wittgenstein, it is true, wrote of the disposability both of the ‘ladder’ at the end of Tractatus and of the various stages of his argument once understood. Murdoch’s bias is Neoplatonic in the sense that it gives a primary, and highly ambiguous, place to art itself in the discovery of truth, and also in that it subordinates the argument to the moral psychology of the characters. Under the Net enquires into the nature of the Good man vis-à-vis art.

Murdoch described her novels as pilgrimages from illusion towards reality (Bradbury, 1976), and also pointed out that ‘reality’ as such is never arrived at in the books, any more than it is in life. The dismantling of the various scenes connects with the book’s interest in the guilt and the attempted purification of art. The novel is much concerned with lies, art-as-lies, and the deceptive nature of all copying. Debates in the West about the value and the danger of art have a way of finding their way back to Plato, some version or private use of whose philosophy lies behind both most attempts to censor art by the virtuous, and also the grandest defences. Murdoch’s book on this (The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists) is notable for the sympathetic vigour of her explication of Plato’s objections to art, and also for the pyrrhic victory she awards herself, and art, at the end. Her sympathy for Plato, as for all puritan thinkers about art and morals – Kant, Tolstoy, Freud, Sartre would be others – is quite clear. In a lecture at Caen (1978) she might be said to have crystallised her own objections. The magical nature of art cannot be overestimated. It is an attempt to achieve omnipotence through personal fantasy and is the abode of wish-fulfilment and power mania. It is a prime producer of illusory unities. It both pretends to be more unified than it is, and allows us in reading (or looking, listening) to conceive of ourselves as more unified than we are. Art is an egoistic substitute for and copy of religious discipline. To Plato, who originated a metaphysical theory about the nature of copying, art is far removed from the truth, springs from merely vicarious knowledge, is the product of the inferior part of the soul, and harms by nourishing the passions which should be educated and disciplined.

At the same time she pointed out that great art is also lofty, and expresses or explains religion to each generation. All art lies, but good art lies its way into the truth, while bad art is simply bogus. Moreover since no art is perfect, all art partakes of a degree of moral ambiguity.

Anxieties about art have been lately much in the air again, though the most puritan reactions to it have come not from the censors but from formalist critics who are inclined to denounce the illusions of ‘realism’ as inauthentic or naive. Under the Net is decades ahead of its time in its concern with these anxieties, and perhaps further ahead of its time in its relaxed and cheerful mediation between two extreme positions: that truth is simply and immediately knowable, or very distantly accessible through a recession of intervening cultural conceptions. These anxieties enter into Jake’s relationship with Hugo, and are thought out at the level of character. The experience of solipsistic anxiety, the apprehension of the world’s inexhaustibility: Murdoch submits neither to any grand reduction, but shows them engaged in playful warfare.

Iris Murdoch noted that Plato was one of the first to define the good man as opposed to the hero (FS 74). Under the Net has two heroes, not one. Jake, who is recognisably the typical jaunty anti-hero of his time, is systematically undercut by Hugo, who is presented as a truer and less visible kind of anti-hero.

Murdoch opposes to the man ‘trying to impose or assert or find himself’ (the existentialist hero) an alternative picture of ‘the anxious man trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself (the mystical hero)’ (em). In Hugo’s questioning of Jake’s picture of events, Under the Net partly mocks the voluntarist pieties of the age.

Jake tells us that his acquaintance with Hugo is ‘the central theme of the book’ (UN 53). At the heart of the great richness of comic incident the book affords is Jake’s fascination with Hugo and the misunderstandings and relative differences between them. Jake’s relation with Hugo shapes the book and helps fund its tone. Without Hugo’s presence Jake has slipped into a variety of illusions. Yet just as Jake is in Anna’s presence for only five minutes during the book, so he is in Hugo’s for only a few moments of ‘present’ time at the film studio, and then for half an hour at the hospital. This half-hour constitutes the book’s comic reversal and Jake’s sad, partial recognition of the truth.

We first see Hugo in the mime theatre where a ‘huge and burly central figure, wearing a mask which expressed a sort of humble yearning stupidity, was being mocked by the other players’ (36). The irony of the mask that Hugo wears here is that it expresses his real nature. He is the only character apart from Finn shown incapable of untruth or dissimulation. Thus towards the end Hugo speaks of Sadie to Jake with an air which Jake characterises as ‘disgustingly humble’ (225). In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch praised humility as ‘a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern…The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are. He sees the pointlessness of virtue, and its unique value, and the endless extent of its demand’ (103–4).

Jake and Hugo meet in a cold-cure centre where Jake takes Hugo for a mental defective and ignores him for two days, despite the fact that they are sharing a room. Hugo puts up with this snubbing with gentle patience and self-possession. When Jake engages him in conversation he realises he is closeted with a person of great fascination – indeed ‘the most purely objective and detached person’ (57) Jake has ever met. Jake notes that the conversation which ensues is germane to the whole story he has to tell. For Hugo

Each thing was absolutely unique. I had the feeling that I was meeting for the first time an almost completely truthful man; and the experience was turning out to be appropriately upsetting. I was but the more inclined to attribute a spiritual worth to Hugo in proportion as it would never have crossed his mind to think of himself in such a light. (61)

Given the care that Murdoch has put into picturing Hugo as a man aspiring to be good, connecting this quite explicitly to his scepticism about the act of classification, there is an irony in the way critics have positively rushed to classify him. Jake notes that to try to ‘place’ Hugo, as he at first attempted, was a failure of taste which showed a ‘peculiar insensitivity to his unique intellectual and moral quality’ (58). One critic links Hugo with pataphysics, another tells us he is an existentialist. Others have linked him with Wittgenstein,⁸ with whom he certainly shares a quality of ‘unnerving directness’ (Mehta, 1961) in his approach to persons and problems. Like Wittgenstein Hugo is a wealthy Central European attracted to an ascetic ideal, sexually tormented, with a curious care for his boots, and a man who worked in his family factory, and had a capacity to renounce. But Hugo’s forebears are as much literary as philosophical. In particular he seems to owe something to Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, another holy fool, half clown, half spiritual emperor, comic-pathetic and wise. The ‘sparse simplicity’ of Hugo’s bedroom (92), moreover, resembles not merely that of Wittgenstein but the simplified rooms of the other saintly figures in Murdoch’s novels, who are extremely unlike the Austrian philosopher. It is to Hugo’s renunciatory capacities, as much as his intellectual lineage, that Murdoch is drawing our attention. It has been well observed that her novels contain only fools and holy fools.⁹ Jake is the common fool, Hugo the holy fool.

It is important to our sense of Hugo before we have met him that his flat, despite being so full of art-treasure (Renoirs, Miro, a Minton) should be left not merely unlocked but with the door ajar. His wholly austere and unornamented bedroom suggests that he is inwardly neither covetous nor attached. He has given up the armaments factory he inherited before the action commences and converted it to fireworks, and then, when these are acclaimed and pretentiously classified, lost interest in them too. At the end of the story he is giving up some remaining attachments: his passion for Sadie, whom he has persecuted, his film industry, his money, his friendship with Jake, London itself, and the role which he conceives of as false of consoling Anna. This is a different mode of detachment from Jake’s, though both are ‘outsider’ figures, Jake an Irish expatriate, Hugo the child of German refugees. Jake spends much time wondering where he will sleep during the tale and in fact passes one night, like a tramp, on a bench on Victoria Embankment. What distinguishes these modes of detachment has everything to do with the specially enlarged sense Murdoch gives to the word ‘artist’.

Jake’s separateness makes him extraordinary to himself; Hugo is nobly unself-conscious. If Hugo resembles anyone in the story it is the shadowy but truthful Finn who, like him, cannot imagine himself at the ‘centre’ of any story, or the dog Mars whom Jake has stolen. Hugo’s exit from the hospital and almost from the book is conducted on all fours, with his bottom in the air, dribbling into the boots he holds in his teeth. This noble unself-consciousness gives him, as the would-be good man who sees objectively, an alarming ordinariness, and an odd, dogged, animal intelligence.

Jake early notes that Hugo is devoid of general theories. All his theories, if they can be called theories – for they read as exercises in patient inquisitive particular enquiry – are local. An early conversation dramatises the difference between them and concerns the problem of describing states of mind or feelings. That such description belongs to the novel as a form, as much as to moral philosophy, is important.

’there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,’ said Hugo. ‘All these descriptions are so dramatic.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ I said.

‘Only,’ said Hugo, ‘that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt “apprehensive” – well, this just isn’t true.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t feel this,’ said Hugo. ‘I didn’t feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards…As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you…’

’touch it up?’

‘It’s deeper than that,’ said Hugo. ‘The language just won’t let you present it as it really was.’ (59)

’the whole language is a machine for making falsehoods’ (60), Hugo adds. Jake finds Hugo’s puritan suspicion of language not desiccating but life-giving because it is in the service of a love of truth and a love of the real. ‘For Hugo each thing was astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious. During these conversations I began to see the whole world anew’ (58). For Hugo as for Plato art is a special case of copying, and he shares Plato’s typically puritan suspicion of mimetic art. When Hugo creates his fireworks he ‘despised the vulgarity of representational pieces’ and preferred that his creations be compared, if to anything, then to music. Moreover he finds the impermanence of fireworks a positive recommendation.

I remember his holding forth to me more than once what an honest thing a firework is. It was so patently an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left. ‘That’s what all art is really,’ said Hugo, ‘only we don’t like to admit it. Leonardo understood this. He deliberately made the Last Supper perishable.’ (54)

Again this echoes Plato (Laws 956b) who argued that ‘artefacts offered to the gods should be such as can be made in a single day’ (FS 71) – should be deliberately impermanent. It is important that when Jake and Hugo reach the conclusion ‘in that case one oughtn’t to talk,’ they at once burst out laughing, thinking of how they had for days been doing nothing else. The puritan ideal of total silence is hedged around with irony. It is also important that, as Patrick Swinden points out, we never come into direct contact with Hugo’s philosophy. Even of the ‘original’ conversation between Jake and Hugo we are told that it took half a dozen cold-cure sessions for them to reach this point, so that what we have been given must be an ‘artistic’ conflation of many weeks’ talk into one discussion. This is as it were already at one remove from the truth. And given Hugo’s doubts about the ways, once you tell a story, you immediately begin to ‘touch it up’, it is ironic that Jake immediately finds himself very guiltily working up his and Hugo’s conversations into a flowery philosophical dialogue which he calls ‘The Silencer’. In the excerpt that he reads, art once more plays the pivotal role. The dialogue owes something to the Romantic, and the Buddhist, quest to get beyond the duality of self and world.

Annandine:… All theorising is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net…

Tamarus: So you would cut all speech, except the very simplest, out of human life altogether. To do this would be to take away our very means of understanding ourselves and making life endurable.

Annandine: Why should life be made endurable? I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story – but that doesn’t stop all stories from being lies. Only the greatest men can speak and still be truthful. Any artist knows this obscurely; he knows that a theory is death, and that all expression is weighted with theory. Only the strongest can rise against that weight. For most of us…truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. (81)

All speech lies, and art is only a special form of speech, yet great art alone can tell us essential truths. The same idea occurs in An Accidental Man twenty years later, where the novelist Garth says, ‘you may know a truth but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie’ (107). Under the Net is as full of artists as it is of philosophers – it concerns, in part, the ancient quarrel between the two, between art and truth. Jake is an artist who writes philosophy of a sort, a translator who has written and had torn up an epic poem, and who ends the book ready to write a novel. His friend Dave Gellman is a ‘pure’ linguistic philosopher. Mrs Tinckham, whose shop Jake finds welcoming, reads Amazing Stories and lives in a world ‘where fact and fiction are no longer clearly distinguished’ (18). Anna is a singer who, being in love with Hugo, takes over like Jake what in him is lived out (Hugo is the man trying to get beyond duality) and creates a second-hand vicarious version of it in the mime theatre. She calls singing ‘corrupt’, ‘exploiting one’s charm to seduce people’, compared to the puritan ideal of mime, which is ‘very pure and very simple’.

The art-form which dominates the story and links most of its picaresque worlds – raffish-bohemian, sporting, and high capitalist – is film. This is the world Madge is suing to enter, over which Sadie reigns as a star, and which rumours tell us Anna may be seduced by, though we last hear of her not in Hollywood but as a singer in Paris. Murdoch wrote of the necessity of thinking of reality as ‘a rich receding background’ (ad). This idea – which is incidentally not the assertion of a simple realist but rather of one who believes that truth lies in a certain kind of directedness – gets into the text in a variety of ways. Just as we meet Hugo for most of the text only through Jake or Anna’s reflections and copies of his world-view, so there is in the worldly realm of film also a recession of power figures. Hugo is involved in film-making too, which gives this recession another kind of piquancy. Jake is outwitted by Sadie and Sammy Starfield over the theft and use of a Breteuil translation he has made. They in their turn are outwitted by Madge and possibly H.K. Pringsheim, who are going to ‘wipe out’ Hugo’s film company. Madge undergoes two changes of style during the book, and there is some ‘final’ paymaster behind Madge’s second metamorphosis into a starlet in the making, but though Jake muses about this person and imagines him in three different guises, his curiosity remains unsatisfied. Just as Hugo is the absent centre of the world of ideas, so there is some final paymaster in the world of power who also makes Jake feel peripheral.

Murdoch drew attention to F.M. Cornford’s comparison of the cinema with Plato’s Cave, a place of darkness, false glitter, specious Goods, mechanical fantasy. In The Fire and the Sun television figures twice as an image of Platonic eikasia, the lowest realm of illusion. Film’s standards of truthfulness and accuracy are evoked for us in the scene at Hugo’s studio in Chapter 12. Sadie is playing the part of Orestilla in a film about the Catiline conspiracy. Sallust says of Orestilla that no good man praised her save for her beauty, and Cicero professed to believe her to be not only Catiline’s wife but his daughter too. Despite three eminent ancient historians on the film’s payroll the script presents her as ‘a woman with a heart of gold and moderate reformist principles’ (UN 140)!

Jake rejects the inglorious, tawdry consumerist fantasies of film in Paris where Madge offers him a sinecure position as scriptwriter, a rejection paralleled by his distancing himself from Lefty Todd’s requirements also. Madge asks him to use his art, if only part-time, to prettify capitalism; Lefty wishes him to serve the revolution. Though this is to make the book sound unduly allegorical, the echo is there. Jake is declaring for the independence of art, which best serves society when it serves its own truth, in rejecting both Lefty and Madge.

Under the Net is full of lockings-in and lockings-out, of unlocking and of theft. It is also full of jokes about copying, and Jake occupies a world perplexingly full of copies. Murdoch noted that in writing the novel she was copying Beckett and Queneau as hard as she could, but that it resembles nothing by either of them (Caen, 1978); such an account of the book’s gestation also mirrors its themes.

The theme of doubling is most apparent in Jake’s feelings about the Quentin sisters who, like Gainsborough’s daughters in the painting that Dora visits in the Tate Gallery in The Bell, are ‘like, yet unlike’. Jake mistakes the sisters and his feelings for them. He thinks the singer Anna ‘deep’ because she handles her own emotional promiscuity with an apparent slippery success, and finds the film star Sadie glossy and dazzling and hard. His quest is dramatised for us in the superb scene in the Tuileries where he pursues a woman he takes for Anna but who merely resembles her, and where the statuesque stone lovers mock and imitate the human ones. Moreover Paris, full on the fourteenth of July, recalls and parodies the City of London, empty at night, and the glassy Seine is explicitly compared with the tidal Thames. Notre Dame is reflected in the tideless Seine ‘like a skull which appears in the glass as a reflection of a head’. There is a catalogue of churches in both London and Paris. We are told that all women copy one another and approximate to a harmonious norm (10). In another episode which has been related to G.E. Moore and David Pears,¹⁰ Dave Gellman is writing an article for Mind on the incongruity of counterparts:

he wrote sitting in front of a mirror, and alternately staring at his reflection and examining his two hands. He had several times tried to explain to me his solution but I had not yet got as far as grasping the problem. (157)

Finally, in the last chapter, and before Jake meets Mrs Tinckham and her cat, which has perplexingly but only partly copied itself, producing half Siamese and half tabby kittens, he hears in an upper room someone playing the piano. ‘Someone else picked up the tune and whistled it’ (224).

Thus is one of the novel’s themes – plagiarism – mockingly elaborated. The sea of small, shy jokes about copying matters because copying is one of the book’s great themes. Jake copies Hugo’s ideas in ‘The Silencer’ just as Anna copies his ideas in the mime theatre. In each case Hugo ironically turns out to be too modest to recognise the reflections. He is, as Jake comes to see, a ‘man without reflections’ (238). He is closest to the truth of all the characters, because he lacks much self-image. He can begin to educate Jake twice – first in showing him what the world looks like to one who lacks preconception, and then at the end by showing him the truth about his relations with the other characters. Hugo’s wisdom represents the direction in which art must be pulled if it is to succeed in making a structure that illuminates what it points to without too greatly obscuring it; in a sense, without lying.

The point that Jake lies and is an unreliable narrator is made many times. He has a rule of ‘never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion’ (13). He lies to the reader that he pays Madge ‘little rent’, and confesses that he pays none. Soon afterwards with Anna he tells ‘my first lie’ (43), that he has nowhere to sleep that night. He assumes that others are lying back to him, and his habit of untruth has consequences since when Sadie – whom he has decided is a ‘notorious liar’ (68) – tells him plainly that Hugo is in love with her, he permits himself to believe that it is really she who loves Hugo. When questioned by Lefty he notes that under direct questioning he usually lies (96). During his crucial encounter with Hugo in the hospital his asseveration that ‘I felt I had to be desperately truthful’ is followed within five lines by ‘uttering my first lie’ (220).

Jake’s habit of untruth is explicitly connected with his being an ‘incorrigible artist’ (25). His care for verbal shapeliness and impressiveness is evidenced when, in considering how to tell Mrs Tinck about his homelessness, he says:

But I gritted my teeth against speech. I wanted to wait until I could present my story in a more dramatic way. The thing had possibilities but as yet it lacked form. If I spoke now there was always the danger of my telling the truth: when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what’s duller than that? (18)

We are to see a connexion between Jake’s habitual carelessness with the truth and his working-up of Hugo and his talks into a stylish, shapely, pretentious dialogue. By contrast the two most truthful people in the story have problems with the very act of writing, apart from Hugo’s suspicion of art. Of Finn, who ‘never tells lies, he never even exaggerates’, we are later told that Jake had never seen his handwriting: ‘Some of my friends had once had a theory that Finn couldn’t write’ (246). And of Hugo, who is ‘an almost completely truthful man’, we learn that, despite being so successful a businessman, he ‘finds it very hard to express himself on paper at all’ (67). Like Socrates, Christ and Buddha, who never wrote anything at all, the good man here is inarticulate on paper. Hugo notes that ‘when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth completely dead’ (60). He represents the charmlessness of truth itself.

In The Philosopher’s Pupil we learn that Hugo has died and left his clocks to Jake. In that book also the philosopher Rozanov suggests that ‘art is certainly the devil’s work, the magic that joins good and evil together, the magic place where they joyfully run together. Plato was right about art’ (192). Rozanov, however, dies of his perfectionism and puritanism. Against his severe judgement might be set the comment of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue Art and Eros. There Plato condemns art, on similar grounds, but Socrates defends it: ‘Art must embrace the second-best,’ he argues, since human beings are second-best creatures who occupy a second-best world.

Murdoch was not hostile to conceptualising, but argued for a particular, provisional relation to it. She was scarcely an advocate of silence. In her aptly named essay ‘A House of Theory’ she blamed modern philosophy for having discouraged theorising. In her polemic ‘Against Dryness’ she called for a modern liberal theory of personality. ‘Where we can no longer explain, we may cease to believe’ (sbr). In The Sovereignty of Good she advocated a dialectic between theory and fact, called for a deepening of concepts and vocabulary, and urged a ‘siege of the individual by concepts’ as an access to moral growth. ‘The discipline of committing oneself to clarified public form is proper and rewarding: the final and best discoveries are often made in the formulation of the statement’ (FS 87). She suggested that ‘the paradox of our situation is that we must have theories about human nature, no theory explains everything, yet it is just the desire to explain everything which is the spur of theory’ (mmm). And her Blashfield address (1972) was aptly entitled ‘Salvation by Words’.

It is rather that she placed no absolute trust in theory. It should be local and provisional, not general and imperial. It is a means, not an end, and she was as aware as Sartre that most cerebration tries to control experience rather than submit to it. Thought itself tries to freeze what is ‘brute and nameless’ behind words, to fix what is always ‘more and other’ than our descriptions of it.

In Nuns and Soldiers we are told of the Count that ‘he loved Gertrude and he classified Anne’ (487). The opposition between love and classification runs throughout Murdoch’s work. We might say, à propos Under the Net, that the two activities are both mutually necessary and yet permanently opposed. Classification by itself produces a world of dead facts, love a world mysteriously alive and inexhaustible. In a sense it is the capacity to love the world, as well as to be more ordinary in it, that Hugo teaches Jake; both depend on attenuating the desire for cognitive mastery, and Jake aptly at the end gives up having any ‘picture’ of Anna at all (238) as a premise for apprehending her aright.

The critic too has to struggle to crawl under the net. To study Murdoch is to become newly aware of the puritanism of critical discourse, which makes for embarrassment about the discussion of character and bewilderment about the ‘centrifugal’ pressures within the work: it is easy enough to speak about ‘structure’, but hard to find a context in which to celebrate those particulars which break away from and blur the structure, and give us the artful illusion that the work is overflowing back into life. Jake’s problem is also the reader’s.

In a discussion of Under the Net with Murdoch in 1983 she pointed out that a problem with the book is how little Jake and Hugo’s combat engages with the other characters, especially the women. Their relationship is, she suggested, uncompleted because they are such different kinds of being. Hugo is ‘a sort of unconscious spiritual being’ by whom Jake is shaken up. Jake might be a better writer later on as a result of meeting Hugo, but what Hugo is doing is not real to either of them.¹¹

This seems just. In comparison with later treatments of the theme of the artist and the saint this is schematic and shadowy work, more interesting than it is good, and interesting in part because of what it foreshadows in the later work. Anna, Sadie and Madge are caught at the edge of the book’s vision. It is not that we disbelieve in them, but that we never get close enough to test our unbelief.

We are nonetheless to understand that ‘wisdom’ is what Jake is in the process of acquiring. Hugo and Jake’s whispered colloquy in the darkened hospital at night, where Jake risks and indeed loses his job, is the first of a series between artist and saint, always carried out at a pitch of difficulty in Murdoch’s work. Hugo, who has already divested himself of much, ends the book wishing to ‘travel light. Otherwise one can never understand anything,’ and feels the urge to ‘strip himself’ (223). He advises Jake to ‘clear out’, as he is doing.

’some situations can’t be unravelled,’ said Hugo, ‘they just have to be dropped. The trouble with you, Jake, is that you want to understand everything sympathetically. It can’t be done. One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on…The point is people must just do what they can do, and good luck to them.’

‘What can you do?’ I asked him.

Hugo was silent for a long time. ‘Make little intricate things with my hands,’ he said. (229)

What Hugo is going to do about this is become a watchmaker (‘A what?’ asks Jake) in Nottingham (‘In where?’), and when Jake asks ‘wildly’, ‘What about the truth? What about the search for God?’, Hugo replies, ‘What more do you want?…God is a task. God is a detail. It all lies close to your hand’ (229).

The scene is funny and touching and true. Hugo’s wisdom, we might say, is centrifugal and particular. His adoption of watchmaking – ‘an old craft, like baking bread’ – signals his calm absorption in the task of honouring the world’s details. He stands for a loving empirical curiosity about particulars, for reverential ‘attention’, that crucial Murdochian word (ad), and proposes to Jake that he renounce the grandiloquent – the search for God – in favour of the local – seeing life as task, as blundering on, and writing, by implication, as an unpretending craft which must also negotiate the detail and contingency of the world. His face ‘masked by a kind of innocence’, he calls Jake a sentimentalist who is always far too impressed by people. ‘Everyone must go his own way. Things don’t matter as much as you think.’

Jake, who famously classifies parts of London as necessary and parts as contingent, is understandably appalled by the notion of having to live outside London, which is to say of having to give up his position at the centre. Other artistfigures share this bias. Randall in An Unofficial Rose declares Australia, from which the innocent Penn comes, ‘a meaningless place’, and Hilary in A Word Child can bear only London near Hyde Park. Hugo, by contrast, is unable to conceive of himself at the centre to begin with, and, like all of Murdoch’s would-be saintly characters, and in this like Cordelia too, lacks the narrative skills which would dramatise his life as Jake consistently dramatises his (speaking throughout of ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’). Murdoch saints are always on the edge of the action, either leading happy lives or lives about whose unhappiness they have no talent for making a fuss, and which therefore lack any ‘story’. They exist, as Jake sees Hugo, as an unconscious ‘sign or portent’ for those less luckily situated.

Art for Murdoch presented the problems of true vision in a special form. She argued from first to last that particulars must be celebrated in a way that neither ties them up into some form of premature unity (symbolism) nor leaves them wholly outside the range of spirit (naturalism), condemned to banality.

In Bruno’s Dream Bruno thinks, ‘I am dying…but what is it like?’ (300). It is everywhere apparent in her work that Murdoch repeatedly asked herself ‘What is it like?’ of many disparate phenomena. In asking what the aged Bruno’s experience might be like she came up with, among other things, a man who, though he would not object to being loved by someone new, has settled for the moment to looking forward to a new kind of jam. That touching, and, surely, true ‘new kind of jam’ might stand for an emblem of how superbly and watchfully she can inhabit other experience than her own. It is a symptom of her tender-heartedness that Bruno is rewarded by the new person too. In that novel Bruno’s puritanical and self-enclosed son Miles keeps a ‘Notebook of Particulars’ in which he tries to overcome the problems of description. ‘How hard it was to see things,’ he thinks, and chronicles some marvels: ‘the ecstatic flight of a pigeon, the communion of two discarded shoes, the pattern on a piece of processed cheese’ (55). Some of the most brilliant passages in The Black Prince appear as answers to the question ‘What is it like?’, and as her work proceeds the answers she solicits are to increasingly ordinary questions.

In her early essay ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, which is ascribed as a book to the philosopher Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil thirty years later, Murdoch wrote of the ‘shyness’ of experience and the problems of ‘cornering’ it: ‘It is difficult to describe the smell of the Paris Metro or what it is like to hold a mouse in one’s hand.’ When the oafish Otto in The Italian Girl asks, ‘Has it ever struck you that we don’t eat anything blue?’ (39), the wholly unblue food we customarily, unthinkingly eat becomes invested with a kind of strange glamour, invoked as it is from so close, yet so happily alienated a perspective. A less successful example occurs in Crystal’s recounting of her seduction by the grief-stricken Gunnar in A Word Child, when, in the middle of a long and circumstantial narrative, she tells how Gunnar had spoken of Lapland, where the reindeer ‘like the smell of human water, urine’ (251). Here the improbable-but-true fact is used to authenticate the improbable and not quite plausible liaison. Finally in Nuns and Soldiers when the recently widowed and grief-stricken Gertrude, in trouble with young Tim with whom she finds herself falling in love, thinks of her dead husband, ‘I shall tell Guy about it, he will help me, he will know what to do’ (248), the moment is truthful as only high art can be.

Murdoch called, citing Simone Weil, for a ‘vocabulary of attention’ (ad), and while it is other persons who are the worthiest objects of such skill, the natural world is always well-attended. In Bruno’s Dream Miles draws attention to the tiny sound of the cracking of swallows’ beaks as they snap up flies; in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Luca hears the minute crepitation of woodworm. The oddness of what we take for granted is insisted on throughout. In The Sea, The Sea Charles hears ‘a most extraordinary rhythmical shrieking sound’ (404) which it takes him a minute to recognise as his newly installed telephone. Similarly in The Time of the Angels Marcus, who has unknowingly fallen down a coal-hole, experiences the smell of the coal before he is able reassuringly to name it. In a variety of ways Murdoch’s work constantly draws attention to the holiness, or threat, of those minute particulars which dullness and self-absorption prevent us from experiencing afresh, and which language can hide or reveal.

This is to take, in a particular way, a romantic view of the function of art. I would argue that Murdoch is, in the best and most positive sense of the word, a romantic writer – the sense in which John Bayley uses the word, in Romantic Survival, of Yeats and of Auden.¹² Both colonise the modern urban world and in so doing give it back to us afresh. One might mention here the special poetry Murdoch gets out of London, the inclusion of the half-built motorway along which David wanders in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, the disused, abandoned railway line where Peter and Morgan embrace in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and Hilda’s disintegrating telephone in the same book. She has a special gift for finding, or rather ‘seeing’, such places and objects. In Under the Net the cold-cure centre in which Jake and Hugo meet, or the hairdresser’s in which Jake and Sadie meet, are further instances. Hers is the gift for making the strange seem familiar (the cold-cure centre) and the familiar seem strange (the hairdresser’s). Like Shakespeare, in Johnson’s view of him, she ‘approximates the remote, and familiarises the wonderful; the event [she] represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would be as [she] has assigned’. ‘Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form’ (SG 86). One might quip here that it is easy enough to understand complex things: it is what is most simple that is most unyielding and mysterious. Wittgenstein pointed out that ‘the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes)’ (Investigations 129).

In The Philosopher’s Pupil Rozanov describes philosophy as ‘the sublime ability to say the obvious, to exhibit what is closest’ (133). The same might be said, mutatis mutandis, about literature. The pleasure we get from Jake’s observation that if you try to direct a cat’s attention it will look at your finger or elsewhere, but not at what you are pointing to (19); the pleasure we get from his seeing Madge’s defence of Sammy as ‘an unhappy muddled sort of person’ as ‘a standard remark made by women about the men who have left them’ (173) – these seem to me high pleasures exactly because they are humbly true; and, while each belongs naturally within its context, it also works outside its context. If criticism finds no way of saying so, then so much the worse for criticism. Murdoch’s aficion about animals and persons, like the knowledge she incorporates about spiders in Bruno’s Dream, roses in An Unofficial Rose, or pubs and churches in Under the Net, are proper sources of readerly pleasure.

She described herself in different interviews as both a ‘poet manqué and an ‘engineer manqué’.¹³ These are not necessarily to be construed as opposed interests. It is the poetry of irreducible fact that most interested her, a poetry excellently ascribed by Gillian Beer to Dickens, Carlyle and Hopkins as ‘romantic materialism’ – a belief in the palpable and particular, not as insufficient substitutes in some Platonic scheme for their own idea, but as sufficient and even ideal, in all their incompleteness and irreducibility.¹⁴ Murdoch’s Platonism is a this-worldly commodity, and she is concerned throughout her books to redirect the reader’s attention to the sensory world in which he is immersed: ‘I had forgotten about rain,’ says Jake at one point. The books remind us, often through that ‘defamiliarisation’ of the way things are described by the Russian formalist critic Shklovski, who argued that a leading function of art was to de-automatise perception through descriptions which made the ordinary strange and therefore fresh.¹⁵

Lefty tells Jake in the Skinners’ Arms that ‘Nothing goes on for ever,’ and Jake, seeing his Jewish friend Dave at the bar, says, ‘Except the Jews.’ When Lefty concurs, Jake asks him, ‘So you do recognize certain mysteries?’ ‘Yes, I’m an empiricist,’ Lefty jokes (101). It is just such an empiricism, which finds miracle in what is most ordinary, that it is the book’s project, through its chief agent Hugo, to instil. For Hugo each thing is ‘astonishing, delightful, complicated and mysterious’ (58).

Shortly after this passage in the Skinners’ Arms Lefty and Jake wander through the bombed City as the twilight falls.

The evening was by now well advanced. The darkness hung in the air but spread out in a suspended powder which only made the vanishing colours more vivid. The zenith was a strong blue, the horizon a radiant amethyst. From the darkness and shade of St Paul’s Churchyard we came into Cheapside as into a bright arena and saw framed in the gap of a ruin the pale neat rectangles of St Nicholas Cole Abbey, standing alone away to the south of us on the other side of Cannon Street. In between the willow-herb waved over what remained of streets. In this desolation the coloured shells of houses still raised up filled and blank squares of wall and window. The declining sun struck on glowing bricks and warmed up the stone of an occasional fallen pillar. As we passed St Vedast the top of the sky was vibrating into a later blue…(95)

How superb that ‘later’ blue is! The description continues for some pages, and there is in it a freshness and an intense lyricism – a quality beautifully termed by one critic ‘lyrical accuracy’¹⁶ – that brings the John Piper bombed city-scape alive. The desolation and sweet melancholy of war-torn London – the fading of Empire, perhaps – is echoed by the elegiac processes of the fading daylight, seen with a new strangeness. The light is alive in its sensuousness, a Keatsian commodity with a behaviour entirely of its own.

The search for an ‘unmediated vision’ beyond duality, and the failure of such search – these are great themes in high Romanticism and in contemporary deconstructionism. For the critic Geoffrey Hartman, the poet is seen trying to break through social and other determinants to some ‘unmediated contact with the principle of things’. Hartman’s criticism suffers from a boastful privation in that it constantly shows off about how cheated we must be of any such final contact. To require to exhibit this is perhaps naive. In his Logic Hegel suggests that ‘nothing is absolutely immediate in the absolute sense that it is in no way mediated; and nothing is mediated in the absolute sense that it is no way immediate.’¹⁷ This commonsensical position is true for Murdoch too.

This is ignored by critics who insufficiently see the openendedness of even her most apparently ‘closed’ novels. Rabinowitz argues that Jake at the end has now learned ‘to accept contingency’. A.S. Byatt writes that Jake ‘is free of his own net of fantasy’ and describes his ‘final enlightenment’. Malcolm Bradbury speaks of his ‘learning a fresh truth’ and of ‘true vision’.¹⁸ This is at odds both with every theoretical pronouncement and also with what is there in the books. On one page of The Sovereignty of Good (23) Murdoch speaks of the effort toward reality as ‘infinitely perfectible’, an ‘endless task’, emphasises ‘inevitable imperfection’ and ‘necessary fallibility’. Again and again she attacked the liberal belief in fast change as false and magical, and opposed to it a truer picture of moral change as piecemeal, unending and in some sense goalless: ‘It would be hard to overestimate the amount of fantasy in any given soul’; ‘even the most piercing sense of revelation accompanying greater awareness of one’s moral position is likely to be partly an illusion.’¹⁹ The fact that the action of her novels rarely takes longer than a few weeks or months might be counted here as further evidence. ‘We cannot suddenly alter ourselves’ (SG 39). Indeed the books are at least as much comedies of inveteracy as they are the Advent calendars, packed with moral surprises, that critics have made of them. ‘Creative imagination and obsessive fantasy may be very close, almost indistinguishable forces in the mind of the writer’ (Magee, 1978), and what works for the writer is here true of her characters too. Her famous division between self-flattering fantasy and an imagination which links us to the world needs to be read not as expressing the total discontinuity between the two, but precisely their ambiguous continuity.

Thus Under the Net ends with Jake’s experiencing that thauma (wonder) that impels men to philosophise or create: ‘It was the first day of the world…it was the morning of the first day’ (251). But his sense of renewal carries with it, as it were, no guarantees. What we have is closer to the ending of Ulysses than of Hard Times. Molly Bloom’s decision to make her husband breakfast is a tiny token into which the reader puts as much hope as he feels the signal will bear. So with Jake’s forswearing of classification. Mrs Tinck’s cat, as if sharing the creativity which Jake experiences, has littered. Mrs Tinck is puzzled as to why the kittens should be half pure Siamese and half pure tabby. After some bluster Jake gives in. ‘It’s just one of the wonders of the world,’ he says, in the book’s closing words.

The ending asserts that the world is most apprehensible at those moments when we are calmest about submitting to its inexhaustibility. When we give up the claim wholly to ‘understand everything sympathetically’, we may be rewarded by a vision of the world’s oddness, which the urge to a completed act of comprehension will elude. Once you can admit you don’t fully know, you can begin, a little, to ‘see’.