TRIBUTE
Fiction as knowledge
RENUKA RAJARATNAM
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To remember Iris Murdoch is to remember the value of imperfection.
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Iris Murdoch: Each of her novels was an attempt at the ideal. Photo: N. Srinivasan
SEVEN years ago Iris Murdoch was tragically silenced by Alzheimer's on February 8, 1999 in Oxford. Murdoch's husband John Bayley, a noted academic and literary critic, movingly relates in his memoir, Iris, how the dreadful disease slowly damaged one of the most engaging minds of modern times. In a fictional landscape which is rather dry and arid today, owing to crass sensationalism which privileges presentation over content, it is a sheer pleasure to return to Murdoch's work which is so distinctively characterised by her steely intelligence, moral clarity and powerful, imaginative vision.
It is perhaps in her large and wide-ranging production of 27 novels that Murdoch met her own demands for art. In her attempts to attain her ideal of art and life through fiction, Murdoch, like many of her own memorable characters, ironically arrived at recognising the value of human imperfection. It is worth quoting from the Time's obituary on Murdoch, which succinctly expresses what seems to be central to Murdoch's fiction — which is the notion of imperfection: "Those who reproached her for publishing too much, were perhaps missing the point: her project was one of imperfection, or imperfectability, even, as if the perfect — like the good, about which she meditated so deeply — was fundamentally beyond human achievement". This recognition of the value of the imperfect — whether of goodness, purity or romantic love — recurred time and again in Murdoch's fiction. Each novel perhaps was, in that sense, a fresh attempt to realise her ideal followed by the failure to grasp the ideal.
Since her first emphatic emergence on the literary scene in the post-war Britain, Murdoch had successfully combined the roles of a novelist, philosopher, an academic and a relief worker. Born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish background, Murdoch grew up in London's suburbs. She went to Badminton School in Bristol, read classics at Oxford and studied philosophy under Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge. At the end of the war, Murdoch worked in the Belgian refugee camps for the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Association. In 1976 she was awarded the C.B.E. and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987.
Murdoch's fiction was flavoured with the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her debut novel, Under the Net, probed matters of existential anxiety and displayed strong influences of both Sartre and Wittgenstein. The influence of the Sigmund Frued is also seen in the novel A Severed Head, which was later dramatised by J.B. Priestley and filmed by Richard Attenborough. The realism of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which she so much admired, is shared in much of her writing. The exotic romantic-realism of Shakespeare often pervaded the atmosphere of her fantasy fiction while her splendid invention of human characters drew inspiration from what Shakespeare said: "the world must be peopled". Shakespearean themes and echoes are particularly seen in The Sea, the Sea which won her the Booker Prize in 1978 and the Black Prince which was based on the story of Hamlet.
Ranging from love-romances to religious fables, picaresque stories to experimental inventions, parodies to fantasies, Murdoch's novels display an extraordinary power of creative-intelligence. Murdoch viewed the novel as a serious art form and more specifically looked at it as a form of human knowledge. In her essay "Against Dryness" (1961), Murdoch defined the novel as a "fit house for free characters to live in". It is this perspective of the form that gave Murdoch a clear vision to deal with the reality of human figures and their relationships. Murdoch's world is peopled with complex human individuals who struggle to free themselves either from each other or from their own actions and are most often cast in the chaos and pity of the human condition.
In essence, Murdoch's sensibility stems from the splendid symbiotic relationship of her philosophy and literature, embodying a formidable body of work which has been inspirational to the later generation of writers. And what seems to be important today is to return to that Murdochian sensibility for its passion for humanity at large.
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