The Discovery of Reality in Iris Murdoch's The Bell

Abstract

Although literature and philosophy are concerned with many of the same problems, attempts to combine them have seldom been successful; too often the union of fiction and philosophy has produced the hybrid novel of ideas or, more recently, the highly complex symbolic novel, a metaphysical kaleidoscope which creates a Weltanschauung however one twists it. However, at least one modern philosopher-novelist, Iris Murdoch, has succeeded in creating genuine fictional worlds which are enriched but not dominated by her philosophical interests. One of Miss Murdoch's central theses, propounded in her essays and her book on Sartre, is that both contemporary fiction and philosophy fail to set forth an adequate idea of human personality. Across the spectrum of modern thought—in philosophical works like Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind and in novels like Sartre's Nausea—Miss Murdoch finds the same shallow image of man, an image derived from Hume's materialistic behaviorism and Kant's idea of the isolated will. What is needed, she feels, is a better grasp of man's nature and his situation: “we have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave, naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we substituted a facile idea of sincerity. What we have never had, of course, is a satisfactory Liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn.” In her novels Miss Murdoch tries to correct the current oversimplified concept of man by delineating with great persuasiveness both the complexity and diversity of human beings and the complicated relationship between the individual and the society; in The Bell the ideas which emerge from a very credible fictional world are concerned with the inadequacy of absolute moral codes, the nature of love, reality, the irrational, and freedom.