Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoc has written novels, drama,philosophical criticism, critical theory, poetry, a short story, a pamphlet, and a libretto or an opera based on her play The Servants and the Snow, but she is best known and the most successful as a philosopher and a novelist. Although she claims not to be a philosophical novelist and does not want to philosophy to intrude to openly into her novels, she is a Platonist whose aesthetics and view of man and extricable, and moral philosophy, arsthetics, and characterization are clearly interrelated in her novels.
Murdoch began to write prose in 1953. She soon became very popular with the English readers. All her novels Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle, The Unicorn, The Red and the Green, The Time of Angels, An Accidental Man, The Black Prince, and many others are characterized by the deep interest in philosophical problems and in the inner world of man. Iris Murdoch shows the loneliness and sufferings of the human being in the hostile world.
Literary work.
The complicity of Murdoch’s style.
Iris Murdoch, was born in Dublin in 1919. She attended school in Bristol and studied philosophy at Cambridge, the two oldest universities in England. The for many years Murdoch was teaching philosophy at Oxford.
Early influences on her work include French writers and philosophers including Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Well, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Raymond Queneau, as well as Samuel Beckett. Her first novel Under the Net, a picaresque tale set in London and Paris, has extensive existential derivations, including the title, and she has said that this work was influenced by Beckett’s Murthy and Queneau’s Pierrot. However the novels soon move away from existentialism, for she does not believe that existentialism it regards man’s inner life. Although honest, intelligent, and well written, the novels of Iris Murdoch nevertheless lack clear definition. Hers seems to be a talent for humour, but she appears unable to sustain it for more than a scene or a temporary interchange. Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), fits into the humorous pattern set by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim (1954) and John Wain in Hurry on Down (1953). Her Jack Donaghue of this novel is akin to Amis’s Jim Dixon and Wain’s Charles Lumley, in that he maintains his own kind of somewhat dubious integrity and tries to make his way without forsaking his dignity, and increasingly difficult accomplishment in a world which offers devilish rewards for loss of integrity and dignity.
Jake is angry middle-aged man who mocks society and its respectability. He moves playfully around law and order; he does small things on the sly- swims in the Thames at night, steals the performing dog, sneaks in and out of locked apartments, steals food. He is a puerile existence in which he remains “pure” even while carrying on his adolescent activities.
The dangers of this type of hero, indeed of this kind of novel, are apparent, for when the humor begins to run low, the entire piece becomes childish. In Lucky Jim, we saw that as the humorous invention lost vigor, the novel became enfeebled because it had nothing else to draw upon. In her first novel as well as in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) and The Bell (1958), Miss Murdoch unfortunately was enable to sustain the humor, and the novels frequently decline into triviality.
Another danger that Miss Murdoch has not avoided is that of creating characters who are suitable only for the comic situations but for little else. When they must rise to a more serious response, their triteness precludes real change. This fault is especially true of the characters in The Flight from the Enchanter, a curious mixture of the frivolous and serious. The characters are keyed low for the comic passages but too low to permit any rise when the situation evidently demands it. The comic novel usually is receptive to a certain scattering of the seed, while a serious novel calls for intensity of characterization and almost an entirely different tone. In her four novels Miss Murdoch falls between both camps; the result is that her novels fail to coalesce as either one or the other.