The Event of Love and the Being of Morals: A Deleuzian Reading of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell

Abstract

SummaryIris Murdoch's philosophical novel The Bell (1958) presents a singular ethical situation by portraying a prospective priest, named Michael Meade, engaged in a homoerotic relationship resulting in thorny moral dilemmas. The previous studies of the novel claim that Michael is doomed to a tragic failure because of his wrongdoing and the consequent sense of guilt. Contrarily to such traditional, “dominant” readings, in the present article I offer a Deleuzian-ethical reading and discuss how Michael finally achieves freedom by embracing the joy of his “schizophrenising” love. I argue that Michael's love for Nick and Toby should not be judged according to the constrictive rules of slave morality as a wrong feeling, because it aims at forming an open multiplicity that would increase the power of both bodies. Whereas religion by definition is supposed to bring happiness for human beings, in this fictional universe such restrictive societies as the Abbey relegate it to a repressive “order of judgement” requiring blind obedience to a set of reactive moral doctrines. In the end, solely Michael and Dora manage to find a line of flight by revolting against reactive morals. By offering such a “resistant” reading, this article reveals the virtual forces within this text as yet unactualised and demonstrates how such texts indeed are “becoming-texts.”