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