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Chapter 19 - Iris Murdoch

Philosophy and the Novel

from Part III - 1945–1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2024

By
David Dwan
Edited by
Rachel Potter  and
Matthew Taunton
Rachel Potter
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew Taunton
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Summary

This chapter considers Irish Murdoch’s torn feelings about the role of philosophy in fiction. Such ambivalence, I argue, expresses her broader concerns about the role of ‘ideas’ both in art and in life. Murdochs’s novels are often embarrassed by their own conceptuality and yearn for a more brute contact with the world that has no recourse to the mediating role of ideas and theories. But this wish is also exposed as a fantasy in her work. Literature in Murdoch is a form of thought and is subject to its limitations. Not only does it rely on concepts, it is also pulled between different aspects of thinking: between particular and general viewpoints and inner and outer perspectives. As I show, the friction between these modes of thought accounts for the uneven form and philosophical power of Murdoch’s fiction.

Keywords

the philosophical novelcognitionparticularismgeneralityordinarinessPlatonismcharacter
Type
Chapter
Information
The British Novel of Ideas
George Eliot to Zadie Smith
 , pp. 322 - 338
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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