Philosophical and aesthetic background of Iris Murdoch’s writing.

Jean Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) had a distinguished career as a philosopher and novelist. She has also written several plays and published a volume of poetry, A Year of the Birds (1978). Her intellectual interests include music, painting, Shakespeare, Plato, Kant, and Existentialism. Most of Iris Murdoch’s fiction is focused on ethical and moral topics, partly due to her philosophical training, though she kept denying that philosophy, or the Catholic faith, had any effect upon her novels.

Though Iris Murdoch wrote a set of theoretical works, in which she stated her own philosophical and aesthetic views. These are: Sartre. Romantic Rationalist (1953), The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts (1967), The Fire and the Sun. Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977), Acastos. Two Platonic Dialogues (1986), Above the Gods (1987), The Existentialist Political Myth (1989), Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992).

The analysis of these works gives the opportunity to follow the evolution of Murdoch’s moral and philosophical interests, which are reflected in her novels. They have focused on the problematic character of the human situation, through which man is continually confronted with diverse possibilities or alternatives. Man makes himself what he is by his choices and actions; choices of ways of life (Kierkegaard) or of particular actions (Sartre).

Murdoch’s first published work, Sartre. Romantic Rationalist (1953), examines Sartre’s philosophy, and the events in his personal life that led him to his conclusions, focusing on Sartre’s influential Being and Nothingness. It deals with three major philosophical problems, connected with Sartre’s views. These are: 1) the problem of language, claiming that people are not anymore able to accept the language as a means of communication and that the transparency of language is lost; 2) the problem of freedom and 3) the problem of aesthetic value.

For Murdoch “Sartre is profoundly and self-consciously contemporary, he has the style of the age”.

Similarities:

1) Like Sartre, Murdoch views man as a “lonely creature in an absurd world impelled to make moral decisions, the consequences of which are uncertain”.

2) Like Sartre, Murdoch believes that writing is “above all else a collaboration of author and reader in an act of freedom”.

Though there are similarities, one may note some important differences between the two philosophers:

1) Murdoch rejected Sartre’s emphasis on the isolation and anguish of the individual in a meaningless world. She considers the individual always as a part of society, responsible to others as well as to herself or himself; and insists that freedom means respecting the independent being of others.

2) Unlike Sartre, Murdoch sees the claims of freedom and love as identical. She states that only when one is capable of love is one free.

The basic concept for the philosophy of Wittgenstein is a “gap between vision and its verbalizing”. The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of truth (philosophy of silence) is already observed in Murdoch’s first novel Under the Net, which is based on Wittgenstein’s idea that we each build our own “net” or system for structuring our lives – “the net of language under which we may seek for what is real” (Murdoch).

Besides, Murdoch arrived at a form of neo-Platonism, arguing that the “Christian conception of God can be replaced with a neo-Platonic notion of the Good, being the background for her moral philosophy (the main concepts of which are Love and Good). Interpreting Plato, Murdoch writes, “The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God”.

Thus, Murdoch elaborated in her philosophical system the understanding of such concepts as Love and Freedom, Good and God, Art and True Artist, which found their futher treatment in her fiction.

Having not created her own philosophical system, Iris Murdoch, the follower of such philosophers as Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein, the researcher and critic of existentialism, belonged to the sphere of free mind handling, her world outlook is deeply philosophical: in the works of Murdoch-artist one can trace Murdoch-philosopher.

Murdoch’s characters and situations are the illustrations to her philosophical doctrines.

Although Murdoch repeatedly denounced the interpeters who persist in considering her novels disguised philosophical tracts, insisting that they be read for what they actually are, fictional works, Murdoch’s background as a philosopher is obvious in her fiction. Her novels often seem like dramatized philosophical debates on the nature of good and evil, on the conflict between rationality and sexuality, and on free will and determinism.

On the one hand, the novels of Iris Murdoch are considered to be philosophical and psychological, on the other hand – “the novels of idea”.

Postmodernism in English literature of the last decades of the 20th century.

- Indeterminacy and doubt – the major signifiers of the post modern era.

- Postmodernism – some kind of movement/era that goes after modernism and Realism. It mixes Modernism and Realism and plays with its traditions. It continues some tradition started by modernism (the open final, linguistic techniques, stream of consciousness fragmentation). They differ in their vision of life, humanity, tradition in general. Most postmodernist texts can be treated as metafictional, because their inspiration is the past, classics, history, literature in general.

- Intertextuality – when different characters and plots from classics are interwoven into the same text.

- Novels of idea/intellectual novels – most texts in Postmodernism.

- Intertextuality (main devices)

· Allusions (literary)

· References

· Quotations

- Each postmodernist text is a multilayered

- Often omnipresent narrator (usually several narrators)

- Several endings

- Motto: “Nothing can be taken for granted”; “There is no universal truth”

- No social novel, usually they pay more attention to the literary process.

- Fiction about fiction (how to write fiction)

- Postmodernists tried to rewrite and reread the tradition, implying irony. Try to defamiliarize some things which are well known to a reader.

Postmod. is trying to mix fact and fiction, the history and the contemporary life.

- the dialogue between the tradition and present movement.

- history is revisited in postmod. ironically

- short story and novel

· Novel

- The conic ironical novel (David Lodge, M. Bradbury, J. Barns)

- The campus novel (D.Lodge, M. Bradbury)

- The historical novel (historiographical metafiction) (J.Barns, J. Fowles)

- The biographical novel (P. Ackroyd, J. Barns)

John Fowles

Was an English novelist, much influenced by both Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism.

- Multilayered storytelling and ambiguous endings

- Many critics now consider his work on the cusp between modernism and postmodernism:

(1963) The Collector

(1966) The Magus (revised 1977)

(1969) The French Lieutenant's Woman

(1977) Daniel Martin

(1985) A Maggot

(1982) Mentissa

- Essays: “The Aristos” (a collection of philosophical thoughts) (1971)

- book of essays: “Worm holes” 1998

- Novels continue the tradition of realistic novels, but they are enriched by existential motives, psychological insight.

- Intertextuality, open final, allusions, references, quotations.

- His novels- novels of ideas.

- He is creating his own reality, he doesn’t depict reality.

- Life as a play (stage)

“The Collector” 1963

- Psychological thriller

- The novel about crime

- Psychological detective story

- Existential table

- Time and place are conventional; they don’t play any role in this novel.

- The conflict between Miranda Grey (the victim; the elite) and Frederick Cleg (the aggressor, middle class, consciousness)

- The problem of beauty and possession

- Concepts: of beauty, lov, freedom.

- 2 models of narration

- Ends with Miranda’s death

(1969) The French Lieutenant's Woman

- the Victorian novel is taken as background

- the best example of postmodernist novel

- 3 endings