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Philosophy and the Novel
from Part III - 1945–1975
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2024
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.
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