The Lifetime Writings of Iris Murdoch

This morning I want to depart from my normal course of reviewing a current novel and, instead, talk to you about the lifetime writings of Iris Murdoch. A few weeks ago, Jan Haaken and I talked to you a bit about the movie, “Iris”; while we were both somewhat disappointed with the movie, we ended by agreeing that, at least, the popularity of the movie might get some people to actually read Murdoch and might serve as well to slow her disappearance from the public mind. Shortly after our review, I was urged by a number of friends to write some sort of editorial about Murdoch’s philosophy as an attempt to correct the impressions made by the movie as well as simply to provide some overview of her work that was woefully lacking in the movie. Although the movie has come and gone, it still seems appropriate to try to say something of the importance of Murdoch.

If the movie were all one had to go on in trying to decide what Murdoch was about, her work would seem pretty vacuous indeed. Let’s face it, though Judy Dench did a great job of portraying the older Murdoch, the movie was more about Kate Winslett’s bare breasts than about Iris Murdoch’s philosophy. As Jan remarked to me (and mentioned in our joint review), all we learn about Murdoch in the movie is some vague claim that we ought to be free along with an endorsement for free love. Neither does any justice to Murdoch’s views. Indeed, one of her major disagreements with both Anglo-American, analytic philosophers and Continental, existentialist philosophers, centers on their endorsement of free will and duty as central to morality. While Murdoch sees little agreement between these two warring traditions, she insists that analytic philosophers have centered morality on the concept of duty, and the moral person is the one who, often heroically, uses leaps of will (against natural inclination) to do their duty, to do the right thing. Existentialists, while not thinking much of the concept of duty, nevertheless insist that freedom is everything; indeed, Sartre in his characteristic hyperbolic way, insists that he is nothing but his freedom. Remember his little shibboleth that is supposed to unlock the meaning of existentialism? Existence precedes essence; we (as human beings) have no essence, but instead we create our essence by our acts of choice. You are what you choose; you are what you do.

Murdoch, although sympathetic to Sartre and to his attempt to really make philosophy count in everyday life, to live his philosophy, nevertheless takes him to task for his claims about what she calls the much vaunted freedom of the will. Murdoch insists that the works of Marx and Freud have altered the intellectual landscape forever, and that it is not free will (or even the concept of duty) that is central to morality. Indeed, we are determined by our natures to be selfish; we are self-interested naturally, though not necessarily. We can (to some small extent) overcome our natural tendencies to see everything through the veil of our selfish cares and concerns, but this occurs (when it does occur at all) not through heroic acts of will in dramatic moments of decision, but, rather, via the painfully slow and incremental establishing of habits of really looking at others—seeing them not through the veil of our cares and concerns but as they really are. Morality, properly understood, is simply truth applied to ethics; i.e., seeing the real needs of others and acting on those needs. Thus, it is neither will nor duty that is central to ethics, but the good. Indeed, the title of one of her most famous and most important philosophical essays is “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”.

Murdoch’s moral philosophy is not unique to her, nor is it a complex or completely worked out view. To put is simply: Murdoch believes that good is real (it is not, as Sartre would claim, created by choice or by the will); it is not relative to the individual (or tribe, or culture). The problem with much of analytic philosophy (according to Murdoch) is that while it correctly rejects Sartrean (and similar) attempts to place value in the subject (to make it subjective and relative), it attempts to come up with a successful analysis of good; i.e., to come up with some property or set of properties that all good things share and by virtue of which they are good. Murdoch, agreeing with an Oxford philosopher famous to academic philosophers though not to others, G.E. Moore, insists that while good is real, is an objective feature of the universe, it is simple and unanalyzable. There is no property that all good things share except their goodness.

So, good is real; the concept of good is central in ethics, and people come to be good not by heroic acts of will, but by the day to day accretion of the habit of attending to others. But why write novels instead of simply writing good, clear, discursive essay if one wants to put forward this theory of morality? Well, Murdoch believes that since good is not analyzable, cannot be broken down or analyzed further, the best that we can do to portray good is by pointing to it. Murdoch supposes herself to be agreeing with Plato in claiming that metaphor is not simply a useful tool in displaying good, but a necessary one. She reminds her readers that Plato often uses the metaphor of the sun when speaking of good, and invites us to again think about his allegory of the cave. Plato, usually so successful in analyzing difficult and pivotal concepts, seems here to resort to metaphor. Likewise, Murdoch, in her novels, intends to show us good in the concrete acts of characters immersed in life. She intends also to show us, clearly and convincingly, the myriad ways in which we are blinded by self, the ways in which not only the will to power can lead to self-absorption (and consequently moral blindness), but many other things that are not normally seen as selfish. For example, guilt can, easily and completely, return the gaze to the self, and though guilt may be understandable, may even seem morally required, guilt rarely if ever leads us to good. Resentment, grief, guilt, even what gets called love (especially of the romantic and sexual variety) are ways of being self-absorbed, and thus are also ways of going wrong, of not being good.

Murdoch writes novels not to take the place of discursive essay, and indeed insists that discursive essay has its part to play in doing ethics. She simply thinks that it is not enough, especially if the attempt is not simply to talk about morality but to make people better, to help them to really see. Novels concretize, put into context, good acts and good people, but even more clearly, they show us how people ‘go bad’, how and why they usually miss the mark . It is one thing to say that deceit leads to deceit, that lies accrue and gather and destroy, it is quite another to show how this happens. One simple lie, often enough told to ‘spare’ another some unpleasant truth, begins an entire network of lies and obfuscation. In one of her best novels, A Fairly Honorable Defeat, there is a good and successful homosexual relationship between two men who rank among the best of Murdoch’s characters (characters who are so often dark and selfish and deceitful); the relationship is one of very few I can think of in her novels that seems to be a really good and mutually caring, mutually seeing one. But a skillful enchanter (and there are so many skillful enchanters in Murdoch’s novels) decides, just for the fun of it, to test this relationship, and he does it by the simply machination of getting Simon (the younger and more naive of the lovers) to cover a possibly embarrassing admission with a lie. The reader has to stand by in horror as a series of cover-up lies ensues; no one horrible in itself, but deceit (Murdoch shows us) destroys trust and intimacy.

But I am trying to do too much here too fast. Let me end by saying simply that you ought sometime to pick up an Iris Murdoch novel, and I’m tempted to say that any one will do. Read through it expecting it to say something important, expecting it not to simply be pessimistic or simply mocking the human condition. In fact, pick up one of her essays on ethics (say from the excellent collection “Existentialists and Mystics”), and read what she has to say about morality. And then read another of her novels, or read the same novel again. I think you will see that Murdoch is getting at essential truths about the human condition, and that she is doing so with the intention of making us better, making us wiser. Perhaps you will even come to agree with me that Murdoch is a very good ethicist, and one of the most important novelists of the century.

Range of Motion by Elizabeth Berg

I want to talk to you this morning about another little city book. I mean by that expression, a book short enough and engaging enough to be read by busy city workers in a few days rather than a few weeks or months. I have talked about this author before, Elizabeth Berg. The title of the little book I am reviewing today is Range of Motion.

As I have mentioned before, I prefer talking to you about books that are current to me and about us, here, now. Were this not my guiding principle, I may not have discussed this book today, because I do not think it is a great book, and there are plenty of great books I might have chosen instead. Still, I think the underlying message of this book is an important one, and the author is so emotionally astute that one always gets considerable insights that are simply asides to the main story.

Iris Murdoch, one of the truly great novelists and philosophers of the last half of the 20th century likes to remind us over and over that the world is chancy and huge and that there is no external telos—no human independent purpose for human existence. As maddening as it can be for a reader, Murdoch often takes us through some long and painful development of a character, brings that character very close to some sort of world-shaking realization, some momentous reconciliation, and then a page or two later, allows our emerging hero to die due to a fall on the ice, a traffic accident, or some other whim of chance. And while the reader may be crushed by the chance turn of events, and mad at the author for letting it happen, Murdoch’s intentions are very deliberate; she wants her novels to mirror life, and life is full of chance turns, of what is so often called luck. As the current (and I think excellent movie) “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing” reminds us, if we do not believe in luck, that is often enough simply an indication that we are experiencing a run of good luck, and we have become so used to it that we think somehow we have earned it, that we deserve it, that it is meant to be. But nothing is meant to be, and the test of our characters will occur when our luck changes, when we are faced with some sudden illness or death of a loved one.

Range of Motion is about just such a chance event. A young couple with two young children who, unlike many of us, is not only happy but aware of their happiness and of their luck in love has it all tumble down in a moment. The husband is struck by ice falling off of a roof, and from that moment, the lives of all four change drastically. In a coma that it seems unlikely he will ever awake from, his wife, Lainey, visits him daily, first in the hospital, and then in a long-care nursing home, trying to bring to him each day some part of his life that might miraculously awaken him from his long sleep. Most of the staff at the nursing home laugh at her feeble efforts; they have seen too many cases of this sort, watched confidence change to hope, hope to despair.

On the jacket of this book there is a review that calls it the love story of the year, and I suppose one could see it that way. But I doubt that is Berg’s intention. Yes, Lainey loves her husband, Jay, and continues to love him even as he lies silent and helpless. But she also wonders if she should go on hoping, if she should keep her children hoping. Is it a favor to them to keep her doubts to herself? Shouldn’t she at least attempt to start some new life, if not for herself, then for her children? And how could this have happened, to her, to them? How could she have allowed it, how could he have deserted them? And on and on with the unanswerable questions, while in her lucid moments, she sees it for what it is, simple chance. She and her children do not deserve the loss any more than they deserved the happiness that had before.

Although I have no way of knowing whether Berg has ever read Murdoch, one could easily believe that she has taken this theme of the huge and chancy world laid out by Murdoch and decided to do a kind of phenomenology of luck, show just how chance plays itself out in the lived-life of some particular family. This particular story reminding us all as readers not to be smug, not to suppose so quickly or so easily that those who are less fortunate somehow deserve their misfortune, that they have somehow fallen from grace. Our protection, our safety-net, is an illusion; we are only a chunk of ice, a traffic accident, a virus away from pain and death and hopeless despair.

Of course, I have no intention of giving away any of the particulars of the story, and even in what I quote from the book, I will quite intentionally omit any parts that give away the outcome. But don’t expect a good outcome, either in your own life or in the lives of these characters. Chance is real, destiny is an illusion. But let me have Lainey (and I am supposing Berg) speak for herself in the Epilogue:

I am living on a planet where the silk dresses of Renaissance women rustled, where people died in plagues, where Mozart sat to play, where sap runs in the spring, where children are caught in crossfire, where gold glints from rock, where religion shines its light only to lose its way, where people stop to reach a hand to help each other to cross, where much is known about the life of the ant, where [gifts are as accidental as losses], where the star called sun shows itself differently at every hour, where people get so bruised and confused they kill each other, where baobabs grow into impossible shapes with trunks that tell stories to hands, where rivers wind wide and green with terrible hidden currents, where you rise in the morning and feel your own arms with your own hands, checking yourself, where lovers’ hearts swell with the certain knowledge that only they are the ones, where viruses are seen under the insistent eye of the microscope and the birth of stars is witnessed through the lens of the telescope, where caterpillars crawl and skyscrapers are erected because of the blue line on the blueprint--I am living here on this planet, it is my time to have my legs walk the earth. ... I am saying that all of this, all of this, all of these things are the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude, and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of my might.

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

This morning I have the opportunity to talk to you about a truly excellent book by Barbara Kingsolver entitled Prodigal Summer. If you are a reader and somewhere on the left, liberal, progressive side of things, then you know of Kingsolver. She is one of the really important political writers of the last twenty years. I admire her not only because she is an excellent writer, but because she is an overtly political writer. That would be surprising enough if she had a small but devout circle of leftist readers—large enough to tempt even a big corporate publisher into risking the publication of a few thousand, even a few hundred thousand, copies, but it is simply stunning when you realize that her books are huge best sellers, reviewed by even the most stodgy and business oriented periodicals and newspapers. I believe that what she has to say is downright dangerous to corporate capitalism, and if her readers really manage to read beyond the story, allow themselves to hear the deeper and more important message, then they cannot help but move further to the left.

I’m sure that many readers were able to read her earlier work, Poisonwood Bible, and yet see in it only a clever story and a condemnation of religious fundamentalism. At best, to see in that wonderful book a studied examination of ethnocentrism and the arrogance of chosen people religions, without also seeing how clearly she paints the role of America and the CIA in the political assassination of Patrice Lumumba, without seeing how the hunger for cobalt and diamonds and the economic enslavement of a whole continent by the U.S. and other imperial giants denies millions of people not only what is rightfully theirs, but keeps them on a razor’s edge of poverty.

Perhaps many who read Prodigal Summer will see it merely as a kind of animal right’s piece—easy to cheer for coyote pups if your portfolio is sound. But any but the most superficial of readings has to leave the reader with so much more. Here is a person who obviously knows what she is talking about, a biologist and naturalist long before she was a famous author, Kingsolver weaves a wonderful and complex story about the interconnections between the senseless slaying of predators, the criminal pressure and lying of chemical companies selling their ever more deadly insecticides, the corporate takeover of farming, and the rapid disappearance of farm families and a whole way of life. Knowing what she knows, seeing clearly just how rapidly forests are disappearing, how species vital to all living things are going extinct at a spiraling rate almost inconceivable in its acceleration, somehow she remains hopeful, and I admire her as much for her dogged hopefulness as for her knowledge and her expertise.

Were this book simply a doomsday warning, a long and close look by someone who knows much more than we her ordinary readers about how frightening the future is, about the extraordinary cost of productive madness, it would be well worth reading. But it is more than that. There is an energy and hopefulness in Kingsolver that is simply thrilling. I wish that I could say that I am always hopeful, that I can somehow see a future that is less market mad and with some sort of sanity with respect to dwindling resources. I have always respected and admired my friends in the left who work and struggle tirelessly in trying to initiate change and who manage somehow to stave of the pessimism, even cynicism, that seems so clearly to square with the facts. Though I can’t say quite why this is so, I have come away from Prodigal Summer with somewhat more hope. Perhaps it is due simply to the huge audience that Kingsolver now reaches; perhaps this signals some burgeoning consciousness in what seems a blind and paralyzed populace. And while consciousness is certainly not enough, it is at least a necessary condition for any real change.

Even if you are simply a would-be naturalist, someone who, like me, had biology and botany as a first love, there is plenty for you in Prodigal Summer. Though I think we should all try to read more natural science, try to have some more understanding of how we play into the great chain of being, I have to admit that many (even most) science texts are badly written and overly technical for the novice. Kingsolver, as she tells us the interesting story of a few families, manages also to tell us about the incredible lives of moths, the strange habits of male butterflies, the complex language of coyote colonies. If, like me, you are an addict of fiction, a reader who has come to love and even expect skillful word-weaving from what you read, then here is a wonderful way to become more acquainted with nature and with the web of dependencies between all living things. I was hooked from the first page as I was allowed to walk along a trail with a women forest service worker, a hermit who has fled from the world of humans back to a saner and more ordered world of non-human nature. Even the first passage should get you, and if it does, you will be hooked for the whole book.

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets witnessed.

I suppose one danger of reading this book is that one could easily simply increase their disgust, even contempt, for human animals as wonder and awe for other creatures increases. I have to admit that I sometimes found myself wondering how wonderful it would be for the rest of the living organisms on the planet if some quick and sudden plague simply wiped out human beings. Such a catastrophe for humans would, most likely, insure many more thousands of years of life on this earth-garden for most other organisms. Couple that with the realization that continuing on the course we are now on will quite soon make the earth unlivable not only for us but for most other living things, and it is a short step to a kind of enlightened misanthropy. But that is certainly not Kingsolver’s intent. If you get a chance, listen to her interviews since September 11; hear what she has to say about the hatred and fear so many other countries have, not for Americans, but for the bloated and senseless economies like this one that are ravaging the earth. As saddened and sickened as she is by so much that is going on in the world, always you can hear also her pleas for change, her understated but very real hope for a better future.

On so many levels, this is a book that you should read, that you will be so glad that you did read. I swear it will inform about the real bleakness of what is happening on the biological level but without leading to simple despair. If you have heard other reviews by me, you know that I don’t bother to talk about books that I think are bad. There are too many good ones to bother knocking the bad. But one problem with that approach is that it might tend to level the good books and fail to distinguish the great from the merely good. Believe me when I say that this is one that you just must read, and when you have, you will feel privileged to be an animal among animals. Perhaps you will also find yourself renewed and committed to trying to make the future better than the past.