Passions of the Mind by A. S. Byatt

Author:A. S. Byatt [Byatt, A. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81957-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

III

An analogous sense of the ambiguous power and restrictiveness of the tradition goes to create the difficulties readers have with the surface of Iris Murdoch’s work. She calls herself a realist, and claims that she is in the English tradition: her progress as a whole has been in the opposite direction from Angus Wilson’s.8 Under the Net (1954) contains elements of deliberate parody and surreal joke, and is partly a philosophical game with Wittgenstein and Sartre. It corrects, or rereads, La Nausee by rewriting scenes of it. Iris Murdoch complained that Sartre “had an impatience, fatal to a novelist proper, with the stuff of human life …” and lacked “an apprehension of the absurd, irreducible uniqueness of people, and of their relations with each other.”9 Critics have ponderously accused Miss Murdoch of failures in density—“the serious novel calls for intensity of characterization,” says F. R. Karl, whereas Iris Murdoch’s comedies “frequently decline into triviality.”10 This criticism fails to recognise that Under the Net is a fable about realism, a conceptual game about the need for the concepts, language and emotional movements of a new realism. It is not intended itself to be a densely realist work.

Her later novels are the result of a sustained attempt, moral and formal, at the realism she and John Bayley admire. When I read The Bell in 1959, I felt that something odd was happening; I was able imaginatively to inhabit a fictional universe, to care about the people and their fate, in what I judged to be a “good” book, in a way I thought, then, was confined to my reading of nineteenth-century novels and my stock of non-literary “bad” books or children’s books. By An Unofficial Rose (1962), my sense of achieved imaginative reality was much more strained. The reason was the obtrusive presence of Henry James, and with him, of John Bayley’s reading of The Golden Bowl; of Jane Austen, and with her, of Lionel Trilling’s reading of Mansfield Park. This is difficult, as I suspect the imaginative process involved for Iris Murdoch in writing An Unofficial Rose was not essentially different from George Eliot’s greedy reworking of Goethe. An Unofficial Rose cannot be called parodic, but a trained reader senses its relation to the past in a way that makes its fictional world less accessible, less immediate to the imagination.

Related to this, maybe, is a frequently voiced view that Miss Murdoch is confining her attentions to the “wrong” kind of characters, an “irrelevant” group of the upper bourgeoisie. In terms of her own morality, there is no reason why she should not do so. Free and separate persons can be studied in any social setting. I think part at least of the readers’ dissatisfaction is aesthetic, to do with the pressure of the Tradition, which was made by such a society, for such a society, and helped to create and perpetuate it. These are the people of James’s and Forster’s fiction, and this, perhaps, makes them feel artificial and unreal even where they are not.

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