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’.
3 ‘Against Gravity’: The Early Novels and An Accidental Man
Under the Net presented a hero of the will at its centre and a man attempting to sacrifice his will at the edge. The pattern is common to many of the early novels and is never wholly abandoned. Malcolm Bradbury has used the word ‘psychopomp’ for these decentred educators or leaders-of-souls.1 In this chapter I suggest that these psychopomps are of two kinds, one of them distinctly more worldly than the other, and look at the ambiguous idea of worldliness itself in Murdoch’s work. Since a common form of illusion is to imagine that you are more virtuous than you really are, the psychopomp, who acts, however unwittingly, as a tantric master reconnecting the novice with the real, can sometimes speak with an apparent worldliness.
The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) was begun before the publication of Under the Net, and an early draft held at the University of Iowa makes clear that originally all the major characters were to have been refugees – not merely Mischa Fox, Nina and the Luciewicz brothers, but also Rosa Keepe and Peter Saward who, under a different name, appeared to be a Central European writing a history of the Jews. The published book distances this theme of displacement and achieves a deliberate alienation of the treatment, which is lightly comic, Lewis Carroll-like and fantastic, from the matter, which is sombre. The English, too, are subject to various displacements. Agnes Casement is a recruit to the bureaucracy where Rainborough works, and one who seems likely to overtake him. Rosa has made the reverse movement, declassing herself to work in a factory. Annette Cockaigne is a ‘cosmopolitan ragamuffin’ speaking four languages. Even the sedate and unremarkable Rainborough suffers the uprooting of an old wistaria tree with all its associations. At the centre of the book is the enchanter and refugee Mischa Fox, with one eye blue and one brown, not famous for ‘anything in particular…just famous’ (81), a figure of bad power who enslaves many of those who surround him, partly through the devices of Calvin Blick. Blick represents Fox’s ‘sub-conscious’ dark half (Caen, 1978), and his photographic dark-room occupies the cellars of Fox’s Kensington palazzo. Mischa contrives to seem innocent because the enslaved Calvin carries the full burden of consciousness and guilt. Mischa, the artist-figure, is the creator of his own myth, with which the other characters actively collude.
The magnetic difference in Under the Net between Hugo and Jake is echoed in the implicit opposition between Mischa and Peter Saward. Neither Mischa nor Peter is focused with the skilful energy shown in their later incarnations Tallis and Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Both are nonetheless interesting. Like Tallis, Peter had a sister who died. He has advanced tuberculosis, lives an ascetic scholarly life trying to decipher an ancient script, and is decked out with an unclassifiable plant. Peter is otherworldly, does not read the papers, is associated – again, like Tallis – with an unconscious night wisdom, some of it nonsensical, lives with great simplicity, has long contemplative periods, and is recognised by the effete Hunter as ‘almost a saint’ (96). He has a personality without frontiers. ‘He did not defend himself by placing others. He did not defend himself’ (31), though he defends others, even the tormented and devilish Blick (‘I don’t know, he has a pleasant smile’). Like his anti-type Mischa he is a figure about whom the others are busy weaving fantasies. Rainborough finds himself instinctively making damaging admissions to Peter out of an instinctive if irritable trust; Rosa assumes that Peter always knows when she is lying, and he represents for her the ‘sweetness of sanity and work, the gentleness of those whose ambitions are innocent, and the vulnerability of those who are incapable of contempt’ (253). His virtue is necessary to the others as an object of contemplation and speculation, just as is Mischa’s power. While Mischa feeds off such speculation and is fattened by it there is a simplicity