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  • Chapter 19 - Iris Murdoch

  • from Part III - 1945–1975
  • Edited by Rachel Potter, University of East Anglia, Matthew Taunton, University of East Anglia
  • Book:
    The British Novel of Ideas
    Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024, pp 322-338

  • Summary

    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.