Character and Liberalism—II

Extract

A similar concept of character to John Bayley’s was presented by Iris Murdoch, in an influential essay called ‘Against Dryness’, published in Encounter in 1961. Her approach is more overtly philosophical: she argues that in the face of the failure of traditional liberal philosophy to develop an adequate concept of man, the novel can give us a full sense of the uniqueness and mysteriousness of human personality. She finds these qualities exemplified in the great novelists of the nineteenth century, particularly the Russians, and contrasts their kind of novel with the typical fictional modes of the twentieth century: the ‘journalistic’ novel of accumulated fact and information, a degenerate descendant of literary naturalism, which is often a formless, inflated daydream; and the ‘crystalline’ novel of dry aesthetic concentration, which is more concerned with an ideal of form than with conveying the variousness of reality. A normative note emerges at the end of Miss Murdoch’s essay:

Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for the imagination. Think of the Russians, those great masters of the contingent. Too much contingency of course may turn art into journalism. But since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid of incompleteness. Literature must always present a battle between real people and images; and what it requires now is a much stronger and more complex conception of the former.

There is a clear consonance between Iris Murdoch’s ideas and John Bayley’s, and, again, the contrast between these ideas and the characteristic utterance of the Continental or American avant-garde is striking.