Iris Murdoch's Comedies of Unselfing. Winner of the 1990 TCL Prize in Literary Criticism

Abstract

No novelist. writing in English since D. H. Lawrence, not even Aldous Huxley, has pursued theme of attacking the with more sustained intensity than Iris Murdoch. But Lawrence and Murdoch are ideologically opposites. In spirit of Rousseau and Romantic individualism, Lawrence sought dissolution of a socially derived self-consciousness and attempted to discover a true, pristine self associated with instinctual consciousness. His stance was radical in its subversion of prevailing consciousness but humanistic as well in its replacement of a degraded by an improved idea of what it means to be human. Murdoch, on other hand, has consistently attacked (most evidently in her essays and reviews) whole tradition of Romantic, humanistic individualism from philosophy of Kant to existentialism current in her youth. Her fiction is almost as bold conceptually as Lawrence's own, though quieter in style and so traditional in form that it reminds us more often of George Eliot and Henry James than of any modern models.2 From Plato she has resourcefully assimilated idea that images are illusions, from Wittgenstein idea that ultimate truth lies in silence, and from Simone Weil idea that ego must be stripped even of consolation of suffering. Her vision like Lawrence's may be called religious but it derives from a core of humility rather than pride. It reaches out beyond personal godhead of Protestant Christianity Murdoch grew up in and approximates doctrines of Buddhism.3 Murdoch's view of human fate, strongly influenced by shock of Hitler's war, is, like Buddhism and unlike Protestantism, virtually ahistorical; her unspecified though vaguely mid-twentieth century present