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Features

Iris Murdoch Interview: 92Y & The Paris Review, 1990

Added: 2026-08-22

Deep Dive

Overview of Iris Murdoch's dual legacy as both a Booker Prize-winning novelist and a prominent 20th-century moral philosopher.

Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

357

This section traces the aftermath of Murdoch's death and the enduring influence of her philosophy. 'Nuns and Soldiers' (1980) was Murdoch's most sustained attempt to imagine what the moral life looked like in the absence of God—not the cheerful absence of atheism but the more difficult absence experienced by people who had inherited the structures and longings of religious devotion without the metaphysical ground that once supported them. Murdoch had spent decades reading the Christian mystics, Meister Echart, Julian of Norwich, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. She read them not as a believer reads devotional material seeking confirmation of a faith already held, but as a moral philosopher reads case studies carefully with a willingness to learn from the precision of the analysis, even when the metaphysical framework was one she could not accept. 'The Good Apprentice' (1985) was the novel in which Murdoch's fiction felt most personally pressured. The earlier novels had examined moral failure with a quality of detachment of a writer who understood the problem from the outside. This novel felt like a book written from inside the difficulty it described. Edward Boltram, the young man who caused his friend's death, spends the novel in a condition that Murdoch refused to sentimentalize. His guilt is real and his reckoning with it is genuine. The novel does not offer him absolution in exchange for sufficient suffering. What he achieves by the end, if he achieves anything, is fragmentary—he is not redeemed but perhaps slightly more capable of seeing clearly than he was at the beginning. The question Murdoch asked was whether a person who had looked away, who had failed in the most consequential moment, could learn to look steadily afterward. This represented her focus on the deeper improvement of perception—the slow and painful alteration of the way one sees—rather than the improvement of the will, which the dominant philosophical tradition had emphasized. In 1995, Murdoch's 26th novel 'Jackson's Dilemma' was published. The loosening in the prose was not a stylistic experiment but a reflection of Murdoch's cognitive architecture—the extraordinary filing system that had held 25 previous novels, four philosophical books, and four decades of sustained argument in precise and accessible order. The disease took first the language, then the coherence of arguments, then the names of people she had known for decades, then the faces, then the continuity of experience itself. The formal diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease came in 1997, though by that point the progression had been visible for some time to those who loved her. The woman who had given her students the sensation of being genuinely perceived, who had made the people she loved feel that they were seen in their irreducible particularity, was now largely unable to perceive. The specific reversal was to those who understood her work almost too painful to look at directly. It was not irony or punishment but simply what happened. John Bailey's memoir 'Iris' was published in 1998 while Murdoch was still alive. Bailey described the physical reality of caring for someone with advanced dementia without the softening that memoir conventionally applies. He described her confusion and occasional distress and the body that remained when so much else had gone. He also described the marriage as it had been in its earlier decades. The memoir answered the question of whether Bailey's extraordinary acceptance of Murdoch's freedom represented wisdom or surrender not by argument but by evidence. Bailey's love was not passive or the absence of need dressed up as generosity. It was a form of devotion so thorough, so specifically directed at the actual person of Iris Murdoch rather than at any idea of her, that it continued to function when almost everything that had made her recognizable had been removed. The publication of Bailey's memoir and the film that followed divided people who had cared about Murdoch. The objection was not to Bailey's motives but more philosophical—an objection Murdoch herself might have articulated. She had written extensively about the conditions under which attention becomes possession and had been suspicious of the impulse to render another person fully legible, because that impulse, however warmly motivated, was also a form of appropriation. The memoir controversy illuminated something true about the problem Murdoch had spent her career investigating. The question of what we owe another person in love, whether that debt includes the preservation of their privacy, the protection of their dignity even when they can no longer protect it themselves, or whether love's obligation is to witness and to record, has no clean answer. Murdoch's 26 novels have been continuously in print since their initial publication, accumulating a readership whose relationship to the work is characteristically split. Popular readers love the plots, the erotic entanglements, the large casts of eccentric and believable characters. Academic readers have sometimes approached the novels primarily as vehicles for philosophical positions. Murdoch believed with conviction that goodness and beauty were not separate domains. A novel that was good in the moral sense, that saw its characters honestly and rendered their experience with sufficient density, would also be beautiful. A novel that was beautiful but morally evasive would eventually feel hollow. She was a demanding novelist and a demanding moralist who asked a great deal of her characters and a great deal of her readers. Murdoch's 'The Sovereignty of Good' has had an influence on subsequent moral philosophy that is difficult to measure precisely because so much of it has operated through channels that do not always acknowledge their sources. Virtue ethicists drew on her critique of the will-centered model without always citing her directly. Philosophers of care found in her concept of attention a theoretical foundation for positions they had arrived at through different roots. The most striking extensions of Murdoch's work have occurred outside the academy in fields where the quality of one's perception of another person is not a theoretical concern but a daily consequential one. Nursing, psychotherapy, social work, education, palliative care have returned to the concept of attention with a recognition that goes beyond intellectual agreement. The experience of moral failure as a failure of perception rather than a failure of will is one that almost everyone on reflection recognizes from the inside. The experience of moral improvement as a slow alteration of seeing rather than a sudden decision to act better is one that practitioners of many kinds have confirmed from their own observation. Murdoch described the moral life as it is actually lived rather than as it looks in the simplified conditions of philosophical thought experiments, and the description has proven durable for that reason. Her philosophy worked not because it was original in the academic sense of introducing entirely new propositions but because it described something real. People applied her ideas in conditions she had barely envisaged and found them sufficient. The question that actually mattered was harder than whether Murdoch's philosophy of love was true. What her life demonstrated when read with honesty

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The Greatest Booker Winner

The Greatest Booker Winner

6.6K

Iris Murdoch's novel The Black Prince exemplifies how great literature combines entertaining, intricate plots with profound philosophical ideas, demonstrating that the Booker Prize celebrates authors who successfully merge intellectual depth with engaging storytelling; Murdoch's work challenges the misconception that philosophical novels are difficult to read, as her novels feature messy love affairs and suspenseful mysteries alongside complex ideas about truth, perception, and human relationships, making her the greatest author to have won or been nominated for the Booker Prize.

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The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch

228

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was one of the most significant novelists of the 20th century, born in Dublin and educated at Oxford where she studied classics and later taught philosophy. Her career spanned from her first novel 'Under the Net' (1951) through 26 published novels, earning the Whitbread Award for 'The Sacred and Profane Love Machine' (1974) and the Booker Prize for 'The Sea, the Sea' (1978). She was named Dame of the British Empire in 1987. The discussion explores how Murdoch combined her philosophical training with her fiction writing, examining whether she should be read as a philosopher who wrote novels or primarily as a novelist with philosophical ideas. Murdoch herself believed both disciplines helped each other, though readers generally find her novels more enjoyable than her philosophy. Her work explores ethical problems of human interrelation through complex characters and psychological depth.

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The work Iris Murdoch

The work Iris Murdoch

1.5K

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was a British novelist and philosopher who argued that morality is objective rather than subjective, responding to the horrors of World War II. She believed that goodness is a real fact in the world that we can recognize, but to do so we must see the world as it really is, not as we want to see it. Murdoch emphasized that moral life requires 'unselfing'—breaking through the 'fat relentless ego' that prevents us from seeing others properly. She developed this philosophy through her engagement with Plato, existentialists like Sartre, and her contemporaries at Oxford, and she expressed these ideas both in her philosophical writings and in her novels, which feature characters who struggle to see the world clearly due to their own fantasies and selfish concerns.

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The Sovereignty of Good (Iris Murdoch): Overview

The Sovereignty of Good (Iris Murdoch): Overview

5.3K

Iris Murdoch's 'The Sovereignty of Good' presents a vision-centered ethics arguing that moral progress requires purifying our vision of reality through beauty, intellectual disciplines, and contemplation of the good, which serves as an objective, non-personal, transcendent reality that illuminates the world and enables true moral understanding despite human selfishness and life's apparent pointlessness.

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Deep Dive

Basic understanding of Platonic philosophy, particularly the concept of 'the Good,' which heavily influenced Murdoch's ethical and aesthetic frameworks.

IRIS MURDOCH MORAL PHILOSOPHY By Cathy Mason

IRIS MURDOCH MORAL PHILOSOPHY By Cathy Mason

4.9K

Murdoch develops the concept of 'the Good' as central to her ethics—an absolutely perfect concept infinitely distant from our imperfect lives yet ever present in daily life. The Good is the ultimate object of moral knowledge and the object of our love, responding to its magnetic appeal even without conceptualizing it. The Good provides unity to moral life, relating all virtues together. The best courage requires temperance, love, and intelligence; the best justice requires compassion and mercy. The virtues are interrelated and cannot be possessed in isolation. The Good is single, perfect, transcendent, non-representable, necessarily real, and an object of attention. Perfection is essential to moral understanding—it provides direction to recognize even good things are imperfect and could be better. Only a perfect ideal inspires the best love needed for moral improvement. The Good is transcendent, existing behind and beyond imperfect things we experience. It is non-representable—we can see particular good things but not the Good itself. Unlike contingent things that might not have existed, the Good is necessarily real—whatever exists or fails to exist, we need this standard to make sense of anything. Attention to the Good serves an ethical function similar to religious prayer, providing energy to overcome natural shortcomings and inspire actual moral improvement.

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60 Philosophers Who Will Flip Your Mind Inside Out to Fall Asleep To

60 Philosophers Who Will Flip Your Mind Inside Out to Fall Asleep To

957

Iris Murdoch didn't believe ethics was a set of rules but about seeing, really seeing, not through the lens of ego, habit, or personal narrative but through moral clarity. Goodness was not about actions alone but about attention—the quality of one's gaze on the world determined the quality of one's life. She drew heavily from Plato but reanimated his metaphysics into the modern world. Just as Plato spoke of the Forms, Murdoch believed the good was not just an idea but a presence, always waiting, always there, always obscured. The task of the moral life was to turn toward it, to look past selfish preoccupations and see what is truly there. But the ego resists and distorts, projecting desires onto the world and calling it truth.

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8 Books Oxford Scholars Read to Build Their Minds

8 Books Oxford Scholars Read to Build Their Minds

5.8K

Iris Murdoch was deeply shaped by Plato's Republic, which asks why be just if injustice is more profitable. Plato illustrates this with Gaji's ring—a ring that makes its wearer invisible. If you could act without consequences, would you still choose justice? Murdoch took this seriously, arguing that morality is not primarily about rule following but about where we place our attention. It's about learning to see reality clearly without ego distorting judgment. For Murdoch, Plato's idea of the good demanded inner discipline—doing the right thing when nobody's watching, knowing that ultimately you will know what you've done or failed to do.

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Philosophers In Midst of History Session 27 | Iris Murdoch, Philosophy, Art, & Very Late Platonism

Philosophers In Midst of History Session 27 | Iris Murdoch, Philosophy, Art, & Very Late Platonism

1K

This extensive section presents Murdoch's distinctive philosophical project: late modern platonism, applying Platonic ideas to 20th-century problems like totalitarianism, technological alienation, and refugee crises. The Form of the Good remains impersonal and transcendent—not a personal deity but an impersonal reality providing orientation. Her ethics centers on recognizing other persons as genuinely different beings with legitimate claims upon us, not mere projections of ourselves. Drawing on Plato's Symposium, she describes love's ascent from physical attraction through beautiful souls to good laws and ultimately to beauty itself—a continuous spiritual energy that orients us toward good or evil, transforming the desiring subject. The section also examines her practical ethics grounded in everyday relationships, arguing genuine ethical living occurs in marriages, friendships, families—not in abstract theorizing. Her work influenced the revival of virtue ethics and ethics of care, emphasizing particularity over universal principles. She rejected Freud's id/ego/superego framework, finding its roots in Plato's appetites and internalized authority voices.

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Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

357

Murdoch's 26 novels have been continuously in print since their initial publication, accumulating a readership whose relationship to the work is characteristically split. Popular readers love the plots, the erotic entanglements, the large casts of eccentric and believable characters. Academic readers have sometimes approached the novels primarily as vehicles for philosophical positions. Murdoch believed with conviction that goodness and beauty were not separate domains. A novel that was good in the moral sense, that saw its characters honestly and rendered their experience with sufficient density, would also be beautiful. A novel that was beautiful but morally evasive would eventually feel hollow.

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Deep Dive

The intellectual context of mid-20th-century existentialism (such as the work of Jean-Paul Sartre) and Murdoch's critique of its emphasis on radical will over moral realism.

History Session 3. Monday Morning. IAPh2021.

History Session 3. Monday Morning. IAPh2021.

117

Murdoch was critical of analytic philosophy for condoning reflection on important issues like conscious and moral values, and of existentialism for its solipsistic exaltation of the individual and denial of mystery. She linked existentialists and logical positivists in their reflections on facts and values, noting both emphasized that real value depends on a free act of valuation rather than an objective quality of the world. She identified common methodological features across logical analysts, existentialists, and Marxists: non-dualistic patience with phenomena, overcoming the rigid opposition between idealism and materialism, and a sense of unity between theory and practice. Murdoch analyzed existentialism as a political myth addressing the 20th century's dilemma: deciding what rejection of Marxism means for intellectuals who find Soviet conditions morally unacceptable. She argued existentialism does not provide answers but expresses the desire for a middle way to preserve innocent individualism in a threatening world, anticipating discussions about a 'third way' between capitalism and communism.

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Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

357

This section traces Murdoch's development of her central philosophical argument about attention and moral perception. Her first book, 'Sartre, Romantic Rationalist' (1953), was a serious engagement with Sartre's existentialism. Her central claim was that Sartre's philosophy, for all its rhetorical power and moral seriousness, was finally a philosophy of solitude. At its core, it could not make room for the full reality of other people. The existentialist subject was an individual consciousness defining itself through its choices and radical freedom. Other people appeared primarily as threats. Love in Sartre's account was essentially a power struggle. Murdoch found this insufficient because it left out the possibility of genuine attention to another person's reality, of love understood not as a transaction or competition but as a form of moral perception. Her departure from the Communist Party was not an event but a quiet process conducted without theatrical self-flagellation. Two forces had converged to make the withdrawal inevitable: what she had witnessed in postwar Europe, and the accumulation of information about Stalinist terror that could no longer be dismissed as western propaganda. What distinguished Murdoch's departure was its emotional character—she did not emerge with the bitterness that former believers so often carry toward the faith they have left. She emerged with something quieter, a deepened skepticism about the capacity of any ideological system to bear the full moral weight placed on it. She joined the philosophy faculty at St. Anne's College, Oxford in 1948 and remained there for 15 years. The Oxford tutorial system was well suited to a certain kind of teaching intelligence—one that listens as sharply as it speaks, can hold a student's argument in mind while simultaneously locating its weaknesses. Murdoch was possessed of exactly this intelligence. What her former students most often described was the quality of her attention. She did not listen in the way that polite people listen, waiting for a pause in which to deliver their own view. She listened as though the student's argument were genuinely uncertain, as though she had not already decided what the truth of the matter was. The first moral act, she believed, was the act of genuine attention to another person—not to one's idea of them, not to the version useful to one's purposes, but to the actual irreducible human being in front of you. Her debut novel 'Under the Net' (1954) marked a decisive departure from dominant modes of English fiction. The novel's narrator, Jake Dono, cannot perceive other people clearly because he is always translating them into the story he is already telling about himself. Murdoch discovered that fiction could do something philosophy could not: make the reader commit to the failure of moral perception themselves. Her second novel 'The Bell' (1958) examined what happened when people who genuinely aspired to goodness came into contact with the full weight of human desire. The central character, Michael Me, believes in his own goodness and has constructed a life organized around the ideal of goodness, but is precisely because of that belief incapable of seeing the ways in which his actions cause harm. Good intentions held with insufficient self-scrutiny were not a moral safeguard but in certain conditions a moral risk. In 1970, Murdoch published 'The Sovereignty of Good', which brought together three essays that had been delivered separately in lecture form. Anglo-American moral philosophy in 1970 was dominated by positions that shared a common assumption that morality was fundamentally a matter of the will. Whether existentialist or linguistic philosopher, the consensus held that what a moral agent did ultimately was make choices. Murdoch found this insufficient because it placed the self at the center of the moral universe and left it there. She proposed that the good was real in a sense that did not require supernatural grounding but did require something more than mere preference. The good was what we perceived when we managed through sustained moral effort to defeat the distorting influence of the self and see the world as it actually was. She borrowed the concept of attention from Simone Weil and gave it a specifically moral application. Attention in her usage was not passive looking but disciplined, patient, humble, and active. It required the continuous effortful displacement of one's own desires and fantasies in order to make room for the reality of another person or another situation to be received as it actually was. Attention was love's prerequisite. Without it, what passed for love was something else—a projection, a possession, a fantasy wearing love's clothing. The Enchanter in Murdoch's account is the moral mirror image of the attention she theorized. Attention practiced rightly erases the self in order to make room for the reality of the other. The Enchanter's attention faces the other in order to extend the reality of the self. The two look from the outside almost identical, which is what makes the Enchanter so difficult to resist and so dangerous. 'The Sea the Sea' (1978) brought all of Murdoch's fictional work to a kind of culmination. Its narrator, Charles Arabi, is a retired theater director who retreats to a house by the sea in the belief that he has at last achieved the self-knowledge and equanimity that have eluded him throughout his professional life. The novel systematically dismantles that belief. 'The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists' (1977) was among all Murdoch's philosophical writings the most personally charged. Plato had argued in the Republic that artists were dangerous—they dealt in images of the world rather than the world itself, appealed to the lower irrational parts of the soul, and produced pleasure rather than truth. Murdoch understood why Plato had argued it but fundamentally disagreed. She argued that great art was produced by artists who had undergone something analogous to the Platonic ascent toward the good, who had defeated to some significant degree the ego's demand to be at the center of everything they made, and who had consequently achieved a quality of perception accurate enough to render the world as it actually was.

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Sartre (biographie) : star intellectuelle du XXe siècle... grâce aux amphétamines ?

Sartre (biographie) : star intellectuelle du XXe siècle... grâce aux amphétamines ?

50.6K

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) became the most famous French philosopher of the 20th century, transforming existentialism from a technical philosophical concept into a cultural phenomenon through his 1945 conference 'L'existentialisme est un humanisme' and his influential political positions during the Algerian War; his exceptional intellectual output was fueled by daily amphetamine use, which enabled him to write frantically but also contributed to his premature cognitive decline, while his unconventional teaching methods at Lycée Henri IV and his 51-year relationship with Simone de Beauvoir further cemented his legacy as a defining figure of French intellectual and political life.

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El Existencialismo de Sartre - Filosofía del Siglo XX

El Existencialismo de Sartre - Filosofía del Siglo XX

93.1K

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was the principal representative of 20th-century existentialism, a pessimistic European philosophy centered on human existence. Influenced by Heidegger's Dasein, Husserl's intentionality, Kierkegaard's anguish, Nietzsche's nihilism, and Hegel's dialectic, Sartre developed his core thesis: 'existence precedes essence.' Humans are born without predetermined nature and must create their own essence through choices and projects. This freedom is both a gift and a condemnation—humans are condemned to choose, even when choosing not to choose. Sartre maintained moral indeterminism: no eternal values exist, and humans must create their own values through responsible choice. He attempted to reconcile existentialism with Marxist historical materialism in his 'Critique of Dialectical Reason,' arguing that individual freedom must struggle within class conflict. As a writer, his literary works (novels like 'Nausea' and plays like 'No Exit') are more brilliant than his philosophy, exploring the dialectic between individuals where 'the others can be hell.' Unlike Hegel who continued dialectical resolution, Sartre stopped at tragic consequences without offering solutions.

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Philosophers In Midst of History Session 27 | Iris Murdoch, Philosophy, Art, & Very Late Platonism

Philosophers In Midst of History Session 27 | Iris Murdoch, Philosophy, Art, & Very Late Platonism

1K

This comprehensive section traces Iris Murdoch's formative years from her progressive Irish childhood through her Oxford education and wartime experiences, establishing the foundation for her distinctive philosophical voice. Born in Ireland in 1919, she attended Froebel-inspired schools fostering intellectual independence before studying Greats at Oxford, encountering Plato and Aristotle. World War II transformed her path—she served with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, witnessing post-war devastation firsthand. Her brief Communist Party membership provided valuable disillusionment. The section then analyzes the dominant philosophical paradigm of her era: mid-20th century British philosophy rejected metaphysics as meaningless 'BS,' embracing behaviorism (reducing personality to observable behavior) and emotivism (treating moral statements as emotional expressions). Murdoch argued this narrow approach left humanity with 'too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality,' failing to account for genuine moral depth or the transcendent dimensions of human existence.

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Deep Dive

Familiarity with the evolution of the 20th-century English novel, particularly the return to moral realism and character-driven narratives post-WWII.

SIMON BLACKBURN'S QUASI-REALISM: AN INTERVIEW

SIMON BLACKBURN'S QUASI-REALISM: AN INTERVIEW

5.1K

Over the course of the 20th century, moral realism underwent significant transformation. Originally, realism was understood as a theory about ethics involving a higher, non-natural reality. However, contemporary moral realists no longer think in terms of a separate moral realm. Instead, saying there is a moral reality now serves primarily to affirm one's first-order moral commitments—expressing opposition to cruelty, disapproval of war, and support for kindness. This deflationary approach to realism has led to its gradual hollowing out, with few modern self-described realists maintaining the original conception of a transcendent moral domain.

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20th Century English Literature

20th Century English Literature

5.7K

The 20th century English novel underwent a fundamental transformation from 19th-century realism to innovative psychological techniques, driven by global events like World Wars and economic crises; this evolution is exemplified by the emergence of stream of consciousness (as practiced by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf), which replaced external world depiction with internal psychological exploration, alongside parallel developments such as H.G. Wells' scientific naturalism, E.M. Forster's multi-perspective narrative in 'A Passage to India,' Aldous Huxley's point-counterpoint debates, and George Orwell's political allegory in 'Animal Farm,' demonstrating how literary form continuously adapts to reflect changing social consciousness and philosophical inquiries about human experience.

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How Did English Literature Evolve from Victorian Morality to Modern Rebellion? | Dr. Anamta Rizvi

How Did English Literature Evolve from Victorian Morality to Modern Rebellion? | Dr. Anamta Rizvi

205

English literature evolved from the rigid Victorian morality of the 19th century, characterized by strict sexual codes, patriarchal structures, religious devotion, and belief in progress and empire, to the rebellious modernist movement of the 20th century, which emerged after World War I and challenged traditional values through themes of disillusionment, individual identity, psychological fragmentation, and questioning of religious and social conventions, as exemplified by authors like George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

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Major Movements of Twentieth Century

Major Movements of Twentieth Century

33.3K

The modern English novel (1900-present) evolved through three distinct periods reflecting changing literary sensibilities. The first period (1900-1918) featured established realists like Henry James, George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, and Joseph Conrad. The second period (1918-1939) between World Wars saw revolutionary experimentation, with Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Forster pioneering stream-of-consciousness techniques that captured subjective psychological experience. The third period (1939-1960) post-war era brought new voices like Graham Greene and Henry Green. This evolution demonstrates how modernist fiction progressively abandoned external realism for interior exploration, fundamentally transforming narrative possibilities.

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CUET PG English Literature 2026 | English Literature Marathon | 75 Questions in 90 Min! | PW

CUET PG English Literature 2026 | English Literature Marathon | 75 Questions in 90 Min! | PW

1.8K

George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' explores the conflict between personal desire and social duty, embodying her concept of moral realism. The novel's protagonist Dorothea Brooke represents the struggle between individual aspirations and societal expectations.

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Early Life & Education

War & Philosophy Career

Philosophy's Influence

Art, Truth & Morality

Literary Influences

Writing Method

Sartre & Existentialism

Critique of Deconstruction

Audience Q&A

On Beauty & Sublime

Early Life & Education

0:01

Playing Section

1
Discusses Irish childhood, move to London, and boarding school.
2
Studies classics and philosophy at Oxford, emphasizing Greek and Latin.
3
Criticizes studying contemporary literature over classical works.

Deep Dive

An in-depth reading of Murdoch's key philosophical work, 'The Sovereignty of Good', to examine her concepts of 'attention' and 'unselfing'.

Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

357

This section traces Murdoch's development of her central philosophical argument about attention and moral perception. Her first book, 'Sartre, Romantic Rationalist' (1953), was a serious engagement with Sartre's existentialism. Her central claim was that Sartre's philosophy, for all its rhetorical power and moral seriousness, was finally a philosophy of solitude. At its core, it could not make room for the full reality of other people. The existentialist subject was an individual consciousness defining itself through its choices and radical freedom. Other people appeared primarily as threats. Love in Sartre's account was essentially a power struggle. Murdoch found this insufficient because it left out the possibility of genuine attention to another person's reality, of love understood not as a transaction or competition but as a form of moral perception. Her departure from the Communist Party was not an event but a quiet process conducted without theatrical self-flagellation. Two forces had converged to make the withdrawal inevitable: what she had witnessed in postwar Europe, and the accumulation of information about Stalinist terror that could no longer be dismissed as western propaganda. What distinguished Murdoch's departure was its emotional character—she did not emerge with the bitterness that former believers so often carry toward the faith they have left. She emerged with something quieter, a deepened skepticism about the capacity of any ideological system to bear the full moral weight placed on it. She joined the philosophy faculty at St. Anne's College, Oxford in 1948 and remained there for 15 years. The Oxford tutorial system was well suited to a certain kind of teaching intelligence—one that listens as sharply as it speaks, can hold a student's argument in mind while simultaneously locating its weaknesses. Murdoch was possessed of exactly this intelligence. What her former students most often described was the quality of her attention. She did not listen in the way that polite people listen, waiting for a pause in which to deliver their own view. She listened as though the student's argument were genuinely uncertain, as though she had not already decided what the truth of the matter was. The first moral act, she believed, was the act of genuine attention to another person—not to one's idea of them, not to the version useful to one's purposes, but to the actual irreducible human being in front of you. Her debut novel 'Under the Net' (1954) marked a decisive departure from dominant modes of English fiction. The novel's narrator, Jake Dono, cannot perceive other people clearly because he is always translating them into the story he is already telling about himself. Murdoch discovered that fiction could do something philosophy could not: make the reader commit to the failure of moral perception themselves. Her second novel 'The Bell' (1958) examined what happened when people who genuinely aspired to goodness came into contact with the full weight of human desire. The central character, Michael Me, believes in his own goodness and has constructed a life organized around the ideal of goodness, but is precisely because of that belief incapable of seeing the ways in which his actions cause harm. Good intentions held with insufficient self-scrutiny were not a moral safeguard but in certain conditions a moral risk. In 1970, Murdoch published 'The Sovereignty of Good', which brought together three essays that had been delivered separately in lecture form. Anglo-American moral philosophy in 1970 was dominated by positions that shared a common assumption that morality was fundamentally a matter of the will. Whether existentialist or linguistic philosopher, the consensus held that what a moral agent did ultimately was make choices. Murdoch found this insufficient because it placed the self at the center of the moral universe and left it there. She proposed that the good was real in a sense that did not require supernatural grounding but did require something more than mere preference. The good was what we perceived when we managed through sustained moral effort to defeat the distorting influence of the self and see the world as it actually was. She borrowed the concept of attention from Simone Weil and gave it a specifically moral application. Attention in her usage was not passive looking but disciplined, patient, humble, and active. It required the continuous effortful displacement of one's own desires and fantasies in order to make room for the reality of another person or another situation to be received as it actually was. Attention was love's prerequisite. Without it, what passed for love was something else—a projection, a possession, a fantasy wearing love's clothing. The Enchanter in Murdoch's account is the moral mirror image of the attention she theorized. Attention practiced rightly erases the self in order to make room for the reality of the other. The Enchanter's attention faces the other in order to extend the reality of the self. The two look from the outside almost identical, which is what makes the Enchanter so difficult to resist and so dangerous. 'The Sea the Sea' (1978) brought all of Murdoch's fictional work to a kind of culmination. Its narrator, Charles Arabi, is a retired theater director who retreats to a house by the sea in the belief that he has at last achieved the self-knowledge and equanimity that have eluded him throughout his professional life. The novel systematically dismantles that belief. 'The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists' (1977) was among all Murdoch's philosophical writings the most personally charged. Plato had argued in the Republic that artists were dangerous—they dealt in images of the world rather than the world itself, appealed to the lower irrational parts of the soul, and produced pleasure rather than truth. Murdoch understood why Plato had argued it but fundamentally disagreed. She argued that great art was produced by artists who had undergone something analogous to the Platonic ascent toward the good, who had defeated to some significant degree the ego's demand to be at the center of everything they made, and who had consequently achieved a quality of perception accurate enough to render the world as it actually was.

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IRIS MURDOCH, UNDER THE NET | With Hannah Marije Altorf, Lucy Bolton, and Mara-Daria Cojocaru

IRIS MURDOCH, UNDER THE NET | With Hannah Marije Altorf, Lucy Bolton, and Mara-Daria Cojocaru

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Loving attention is Murdoch's central philosophical concept, borrowed from Simone Weil, referring to the practice of directing one's gaze outward from oneself toward something or someone else. In 'The Sovereignty of Good,' Murdoch illustrates this through a person who, while preoccupied with their own injured pride, looks out the window and sees a hovering kestrel—this momentary focus on an external object transports them out of self-preoccupation. For Murdoch, cultivating loving attention toward other people, nature, or art constitutes genuine moral work. It involves not merely caring practically for others but fundamentally altering one's vision and perception of the world, thereby improving one's moral character through sustained, unselfing attention to what lies beyond oneself. The novel's title 'Under the Net' derives from this philosophical position—that reality resists totalizing theoretical frameworks, and true understanding requires looking beneath these nets to appreciate the particularities of existence.

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Begründungsabbrüche in der Ethik

Begründungsabbrüche in der Ethik

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The speaker proposes reading Kant not primarily from the Groundwork but from the Faktum der Vernunft in the Critique of Practical Reason - the fact that we always already find ourselves in ethical responsibility that cannot be exhausted by human conventions. Kant states that we neither introduce nor invent morality but can only presuppose it. In 'The Sovereignty of Good,' Iris Murdoch establishes a project of 'substantive attention and care' - an ethical attitude expressed in a turn toward what is valuable in itself, what shines from itself. Her plea for cultivating this attitude corresponds with a skeptical attitude toward the reach of justifications in ethics. She writes that our fate can be investigated but not justified or fully explained. Following Simone Weil's idea of 'decreation,' Murdoch speaks of an 'unselfing' as a central prerequisite for cultivating ethical attitudes that cannot be transmitted through procedures of justification. She avoids the term 'beauty' because she prefers to speak about reasons rather than experiences, giving examples of transformative experiences with nature where for a moment nothing else exists but the object of attention.

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Ninety-Nine Novels: The Bell by Iris Murdoch

Ninety-Nine Novels: The Bell by Iris Murdoch

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Murdoch's novels are implicitly philosophical, drawing on Plato's allegory of the cave where prisoners mistake shadows for reality. For Murdoch, moral goodness requires seeking truth and rejecting illusion. She was also deeply influenced by Simone Weil's concept of 'unselfing'—paying acute attention to others' feelings and thoughts to see them clearly. Weil argued that attention involves putting aside ego to enable unreserved love. Murdoch described attention as 'a just and loving gaze upon an individual reality'—the mark of the moral agent. This philosophy rejects solipsism, as demonstrated when Dora's secular experience at the National Gallery destroys her self-absorbed mood through engagement with authentic artistic reality.

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Eps 7 Iris Murdoch Sovereignty of Good (Learn while you sleep)

Eps 7 Iris Murdoch Sovereignty of Good (Learn while you sleep)

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Murdoch believed morality and aesthetics, goodness and beauty, are inseparable because beauty trains attention, unselfs us, pulls us out of the ego, widens our vision, and reveals truth. She wrote that beauty is the only spiritual thing which can make the self at once virtuous and happy. Practical daily practices include: the morning window (beginning each day with stillness before the ego wakes up); the 3-second ego delay (ego reacts instantly, clarity needs a moment); the compassion scan (looking for wounds, fear, exhaustion); the beauty dose (seeking something beautiful daily); and the 'What am I not seeing?' question. Murdoch's core teachings: The ego is a storyteller, not a reliable witness—morality begins when we question the ego's stories; Attention is the foundation of goodness—morality is perceptual, not heroic or dramatic; Beauty unselfs us and unselfing is moral liberation; Love is the clear vision of another's reality, not projection or desire; The good is real and goodness is orienting ourselves toward it—orientation is enough, not perfection. Each day a little more clarity, each day a little less ego, each day a little more reality.

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Deep Dive

A critical analysis of her major fiction, such as 'The Bell' or 'The Sea, the Sea', to observe how her philosophical views on morality manifest in her narrative characterizations.

The work Iris Murdoch

The work Iris Murdoch

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Murdoch's moral philosophy was formed in opposition to the dominant Oxford view that moral judgments do not describe the world but express emotions and chosen values. She found this view 'shallow or complacent' in light of her World War II experiences witnessing the Holocaust. She came to believe that there must be such a thing as getting it right in morality. Her first published novel, Under the Net (1954), explores the 'contingency' of the world and reflects her own experiences of depression and remorse. The Bell (1958) confirmed her as the leading novelist of her generation, featuring characters whose inner lives are explored in detail. Murdoch argues that most moral theories about how to act are too late in the game—we need to first figure out what it is to see the world properly. In The Bell, when the character Dora Greenfield sees Gainsborough's portrait, she experiences transcendence where her ego is 'cracked' and she sees something completely outside herself.

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Elizabeth Duval: "Iris Murdoch: Entre La Ficción Y Las Virtudes"

Elizabeth Duval: "Iris Murdoch: Entre La Ficción Y Las Virtudes"

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This segment examines how Murdoch developed her philosophical ideas through her novels before writing philosophical essays directly. In 'The Bell' (1958), she explored ideas about attention and the Good as a substitute for the idea of God. The segment covers her view that novels feature polyphony of voices with different moral positions, creating complex moral landscapes. It examines her treatment of morally flawed characters, noting that her novels allow readers to identify with characters who are frequently monstrous or profoundly imperfect, showing that moral complexity is not distant from ordinary human experience. The segment also covers her belief that great art serves as a moral guide by presenting images of virtue that allow us to look without sin, and her distinction between fantasy (which can lead to perversion) and imagination (which generates alternative possibilities).

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Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, and what’s on my TBR list for the New Year 2022!

Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, and what’s on my TBR list for the New Year 2022!

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This comprehensive analysis explores Iris Murdoch's philosophical framework through her novel The Sea, The Sea. Murdoch believed humans are self-interested beings driven by ego, creating self-serving reasonings that detach us from reality and damage our character. Charles Araby, an aging retired theatre personality, exemplifies this through his delusional pursuit of his childhood love Hartley, trapping her in his house despite her clear desire to return home. Murdoch's philosophy of unselfing holds that goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself—to see and respond to the real world in the light of virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of transcendence. Charles Araby experiences transformation toward the end of the book when he is left abandoned, lonely, and hopeless after close friends and relatives die, leading him to reconcile with the world. Murdoch's philosophy confronts major human demons including fear, jealousy, envy, the pain and confusion of misplaced love, and the impulse to violent action.

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THE BELL by Iris Murdoch 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 BOOK REVIEW

THE BELL by Iris Murdoch 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 BOOK REVIEW

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Iris Murdoch's 1958 novel The Bell explores themes of personal transformation and moral philosophy through the story of Dora Greenfield, a woman who returns to her abusive husband at a lay religious community in Gloucestershire, England, where she confronts her troubled marriage alongside Michael Mead, a gay former schoolteacher; the novel demonstrates how Murdoch integrates her philosophical ideas into engaging fiction, creating imperfect, realistic characters who navigate complex moral dilemmas in a setting designed as a refuge for those seeking self-discovery.

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Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

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Murdoch's second published novel, 'The Bell' (1958), marked a deepening of the fictional project she had begun with 'Under the Net'. Where the first novel had been buoyant and comedic in its treatment of human self-deception, 'The Bell' was something heavier and more demanding. It asked what happened when people who genuinely aspired to goodness came into contact with the full weight of human desire. The central character, Michael Me, is a man of genuine religious aspiration and considerable personal warmth who serves as the community's informal leader. He is not a villain—he believes in his own goodness and has constructed a life organized around the ideal of goodness. The damage he does is not the damage of malice but the damage of unexamined self-knowledge.

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Deep Dive

Investigation into the relationship between art and ethics, specifically how Murdoch argues that aesthetic appreciation can serve as an entry point to moral goodness.

Ep 67: Basic Bitches, Gen Z, & the Power of Aesthetic Stereotypes | A Discussion with Alice Harberd

Ep 67: Basic Bitches, Gen Z, & the Power of Aesthetic Stereotypes | A Discussion with Alice Harberd

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Traditional philosophical boundaries between aesthetic and ethical domains are overly simplistic. Aesthetic judgments inherently involve evaluative content that bleeds into character assessment. Words describing aesthetic appearance ('boisterous,' 'bubbly') already carry moral implications. Iris Murdoch argued that moral change occurs through attending differently to others, showing how aesthetic perception transforms moral evaluation. Following Murdoch's Platonist approach, beauty, truth, and goodness are different aspects of a single underlying reality—these domains cannot be neatly separated.

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Words in Edgewise: Justin Osmond - The Sovereignty of Music

Words in Edgewise: Justin Osmond - The Sovereignty of Music

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Iris Murdoch's ethical philosophy centers on 'attention' as the foundation of the ethical life, contrasting with traditional ethics (Aristotelian and Kantian) that focus on controlling will to conform to duty. For Murdoch, goodness begins with learning to look intently and lovingly at others—a selfless vision attained through unconditional attention. Art plays an instrumental role by presenting visions of the world that differ from our own, causing us to recognize a real world external to our thinking. The key mechanism is the 'limited whole'—works of art that present alternative worldviews, making us aware that our conception is equally limited. All thinking tacitly acknowledges something beyond any conception, recognizing the world's inexhaustible complexity. Thus, ethical goodness begins by checking the self and dismantling selfish fantasy to better see and treat others.

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Should Art Be Moral?

Should Art Be Moral?

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Writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch offered a third perspective that avoids the extremes of autonomism and moralism. For Murdoch, the function of the best art is to pierce the veil and let us see things as they truly are. However, she argued that this vision is inseparable from virtue—artists need to understand human virtue to convey a truthful vision of the world. Under this thinking, works like 'Triumph of the Will' and 'Birth of a Nation' cannot be considered great works of art because they don't show a true picture of the world; they're 'functionally racist fever dreams.' Murdoch believed that truth becomes the real morality in art, requiring artists to understand both reality and morality to create meaningful works.

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Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

Iris Murdoch: Why Love Is Far More Dangerous Than Hate | A Bedtime Biography

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Murdoch's 26 novels have been continuously in print since their initial publication, accumulating a readership whose relationship to the work is characteristically split. Popular readers love the plots, the erotic entanglements, the large casts of eccentric and believable characters. Academic readers have sometimes approached the novels primarily as vehicles for philosophical positions. Murdoch believed with conviction that goodness and beauty were not separate domains. A novel that was good in the moral sense, that saw its characters honestly and rendered their experience with sufficient density, would also be beautiful. A novel that was beautiful but morally evasive would eventually feel hollow.

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Laura D'Olimpio - When good art is bad: educating the critical viewer

Laura D'Olimpio - When good art is bad: educating the critical viewer

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The ethicist position holds that ethical features of artworks are integral to their meaning and appreciation. Moderate moralism argues that when works concern morality, such evaluation is relevant to overall value. The all-things-considered view states that wherever ethical value exists in an artwork, it is relevant to the overall value. This position argues that aesthetic sensibility requires ethical judgment, particularly for narrative artworks, and vice versa. Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum argue language itself is a moral medium, making ethical engagement unavoidable when dealing with literature about human behavior.

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Deep Dive

A study of the 'Paris Review' interview format and the broader tradition of public literary and intellectual dialogue during the late 20th century.

Alain Elkann’s Latest Book: “Interviews”

Alain Elkann’s Latest Book: “Interviews”

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The Paris Review's 'Writers at Work' interviews represent a model of careful, long-form interviewing. These interviews are made with great care, are very long, and are extensively edited. The speaker would love to create interviews with this depth and quality, which differ from quick news interviews. This model demonstrates that interviews can be both in-depth and artistically crafted.

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Philip Gourevitch at the Edinburgh International Book Festival Part 1

Philip Gourevitch at the Edinburgh International Book Festival Part 1

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The Paris Review inadvertently created a significant contribution to literary history by developing a project of interviewing living writers. This approach emerged from their desire to discuss literature and the writing life without publishing only new fiction. This was the first time that anyone seriously embarked on a systematic and careful project of interviewing writers, creating a unique archive of literary voices and perspectives that has become invaluable to literary scholarship.

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Stories from Lost Archives

Stories from Lost Archives

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The Paris Review revolutionized interview authenticity by giving writers back to the interviewees for post-interview editing and rewriting, starting in 1953 with interviews with Faulkner and Hemingway. The editors argued that this gave a clearer and more true essence of the interview than a verbatim transcript would have. This approach raises ongoing questions about whether edited interviews, when done ethically, represent a more pungent distillation of an interviewee's story than verbatim transcripts.

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Bernard Pivot

Bernard Pivot

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Some literary interviews are emotionally powerful because they capture writers at vulnerable moments. The French tradition of politician-writers dates back to Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Charles de Gaulle, continuing through Georges Pompidou and François Mitterrand. This tradition combines political leadership with literary engagement, creating leaders who are both effective politicians and thoughtful intellectuals. The interview with Solzhenitsyn captured his evolution from exile in the United States to return in Moscow, demonstrating how literary journalism can reveal the humanity behind literary achievement.

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George Plimpton on the History of The Paris Review

George Plimpton on the History of The Paris Review

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Founded in Paris in 1953 by expatriate writers, The Paris Review distinguished itself from contemporary literary magazines by dedicating almost all its pages to publishing short stories and poetry rather than criticisms and essays, which were the norm at the time.

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Early Life & Education

War & Philosophy Career

Philosophy's Influence

Art, Truth & Morality

Literary Influences

Writing Method

Sartre & Existentialism

Critique of Deconstruction

Audience Q&A

On Beauty & Sublime

Early Life & Education

0:01

Playing Section

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Discusses Irish childhood, move to London, and boarding school.
2
Studies classics and philosophy at Oxford, emphasizing Greek and Latin.
3
Criticizes studying contemporary literature over classical works.

25.7K views35852:23@92YPlusOriginal Release: 2013-12-09

Iris Murdoch, renowned Irish novelist and philosopher, explains her writing methodology in this 1990 interview: she emphasizes creating detailed plans before writing, including every chapter and conversation, believing that imagination works in two stages—first allowing the work to invent itself, then executing the plan. She distinguishes between fantasy (expression of immediate feelings) and imagination (elevation of self in art), arguing that great art requires overcoming egoism to achieve truthfulness. Murdoch connects her philosophical training to her fiction through moral dilemmas in characters, though she keeps these domains separate to avoid writing philosophical novels. She identifies with the English novel tradition from Austen to Henry James and Russian literature, while criticizing structuralism and deconstructionism for reducing literature to scientific interpretation.

[00:00:01]92nd Street y online media is made possible by a generous gift in memory of Christopher Lightfoot Walker a longtime friend of 92 y's unterberg poetry Center and the Paris review this program part of an ongoing collaboration between the Poetry Center and the review features a writers atw work interview with Iris Murdoch it was recorded on February 22nd 1990 before a live audience at New York's 92nd Street y [Applause] could you begin uh by telling us a little bit uh about your childhood and early youth I'd like to begin biographically I remember you said to me once when we were talking that you had uh had an idilic childhood and uh as an only child experienced what you called a perfect Trinity of love with your parents and I find this in itself such a rare circumstance that I wonder if you could talk about a little bit well I I was um I was born in Dublin uh and my um parents are uh a Protestant Irish uh and um my father decided for uh reasons which I've never entirely been able to sort out though I can guess it I SP some of them decided to leave Ireland uh when I was one I was removed therefore to London where he went into civil service so I grew up in London uh though I went to Ireland for holidays and I I feel extremely Irish and feel I feel very involved in Ireland and in what's happening in Ireland now but I I grew up in London and um uh I went to a boarding school and then I went on to uh uh to to to Oxford and at Oxford you did grades I did grades yes that is is Greek and Latin Classical Languages and history and philosophy so I I got a big dose of philosophy there I I'm I'm interested you said uh one point that you had uh started out you knew very early on that you were going to be a writer and yet at Oxford you gravitated more toward philosophy of course they didn't have such things as creative writing classes all they still don't no you can't even study contemporary authors no I I don't well I'm afraid that study of temporary authors which I rather deplore actually has begun in Oxford but not as far as creative writing goes no no what do they call Contemporary my day it was Yates and Ardon oh well now I'm afraid it's it's uh you know what was published last week but this is a very bad arrangement I think because it means that young people uh will always tend to want to read the modern books probably they find them easier and so on and they they want to be up to date and so forth and to spend uh hours of study in a great University um reading the latest novel seems to me a waste of time they ought to be reading things which are much more difficult but probably much more rewarding I mean the the literature of the past cha Spencer Shakespeare Milton uh and the great 19th century novels because they will find these less accessible later on if they don't read them then and they may simply lose that part of their education altogether if they spend time with the moderns and so you you concentrated uh as an undergraduate great is is uh the classics but then you decide to to make an academic career out of philosophy for a Time didn't you well I didn't really decide anything um uh because of the war and so on um I I knew very early on that I wanted to be writer I mean when I was a child I I I knew that um but um the war really Disturbed all one's feelings of the future very profoundly obviously uh and when I I finished my undergraduate degree I was immediately um conscripted because everybody was and uh I went into the Civil Service and to the treasury and uh um where I spent a couple of years and then I went into unra and worked was refugees in in different parts of Europe after the war yeah could you explain to us what that is that that was the United Nations the United Nations relief and Rehabilitation organization it still exists under a slightly similar name uhuh and what sort of an experience was that well it was um extraordinary I mean it it uh um I was working first of all in in in Belgium at a sort of headquarters but I wanted to get out onto the Battlefront as it were and and uh I then was working in refugee camps in Austria where the scene was desolation I mean transport had broken down um Food Supplies had broken down people who had been uh taken over by Hitler as forced Labor uh were wandering about hoping to find somewhere to to to be and uh somewhere where they could be fed and and then ultimately of course somewhere to go to because a lot of these people didn't want to go back to their home countries which might have been Yugoslavia or Poland or Czechoslovakia or something they well a lot of them wanted to come here uhhuh well you yourself I read somewhere that you were offered a fellowship to uh America in 1946 was it after the war yeah um yes it was a bit later than that yes yes and what happened well what happened was the mcaren ACT well I I don't want to sound like this isn't the McCarthy hearings but you you were you were a member of the Communist are you now or have you ever been just because this is the '90s yes well I I was a member of the Comm party for a short time uh when I was a student around about 1939 uhhuh uh but I left it um I I I just as well in a way to have seen the inside of Marxism in a way because then one one realizes how strong it is and how awful it is I mean certainly in its organized form what do you think it it taught you in a well I think to have read a lot of uh a lot of marks I mean to have read the texts is is valuable I mean one it's part of our history and it's it's these were very very influential books um but the organization of the party was was as it were depressing I didn't like it and I soon got fed up with it however I mean this um had U repercussions later on because I was awarded um uh in about 19 I can't remember exactly which year no it must have been about 1947 by the then yes um uh a scholarship to come to vasar mhm and uh I was longing to go to America I mean you know it was sort of such an adventure you see after being cooped up in England during the War uh one did want to travel and see the world and I very much wanted to go to America but I was prevented by the macaran ACT I was not given a Visa which meant that I I had to spend a whole year in England sort of unemployed because there was a lot of I may say there was a certain amount to do about this beron Russell got involved and just your case yes was a sort of tiny little co-b actually Burton Russell and uh and Justice Frankfurter were involved trying to say how ridiculous this was but the McAn Act is made of an it's still here uh and I still have to ask for waiver if I want to come to this country is that right even now yeah it's lunatic and one of the questions which is sometimes asked one by some naive person uh some official is um uh can you prove that you no longer a member of the Communist party I should think that would be very difficult to do I think it would be extremely difficult as I left it about 50 years ago so uh instead of coming to America then you went you spend a lot of time in Paris and uh is that right well I I did spend a lot of time in Paris yes but it was really a stroke of luck this because it meant that I I hung around for year during which time I read Philosophy by myself really with some help from people in Oxford and then I went to Cambridge which was uh I got a scholarship at Cambridge as a postgraduate and um um wienstein was there he was just leaving unfortunately but I had a certain amount of talk with him before he left and but Cambridge was simply crammed with with wienstein you know I mean his disciples were there and his friends were there and I I spent the year talking to them and that was a very profitable yeah indeed how do you think philosophy uh since you're uh formerly trained in and have written several books of philosophy and taught it for many years how has it affected your fiction how does it the issues that you treat of in your in your philosophy show up in your novels well I don't think they show up directly at all uh except occasionally I've had I've had a couple of characters who were philosophers but uh it's just that I mean if if one I'm sure this room is is full of novelists or people who become novelists and the great thing is to to know something you know to know about something or other that that would be a good idea I must keep that in mind and uh uh any any skill or expertise that you have can help you in your novels I mean I would I would very much wish I knew about sailing boats or what it's like to be a soldier and all sorts of things which I I don't know so that it it's in that sense it is it's its connection with the work is very peripheral um but I suppose I mean since I'm I'm largely influenced and interested in moral philosophy uh that some of the um Reflections about moral philosophy and and about uh ethics and so on uh may have connected with is thinking about the dilemmas of my characters but this is very very indirect and I don't uh philosophy is such a different game from writing fiction and the way you write it and the pros style and everything is is utterly different and it's far more difficult and to write philosophy yes and you're now working on a on a work of philosophy well no not really there's something which I I work on occasionally but it's it's not uh it's not likely to see the light or very little of it well there but uh I think there is uh a connection if not an explicit one between the kinds of uh if you will moral vexations that afflict your your characters and the issues that you treat of in philosophy one of your very significant themes is this uh struggle of your characters to be good as it were to to act on a moral level uh against all the odds and uh on the one hand your characters are not the kind of uh innocent tea party going sorts that one would expect from Oxford novels they're very uh able to commit violence and all sorts of misdeeds and yet there's always within them this this imperative or struggle toward the good which is well yes I don't think this necessarily connects to philosophy I mean connects with religion which I I uh I mean which has traveled with my problems about religion uh I suppose I mean maybe uh this um this the consideration of moral issues in the novels is somehow intensified in a way by some philosophical considerations but on the whole I keep these things apart I think it's it's very it's terrible to be danger of writing a philosophical novel I mean this is is it not a a thing that people that writers can get away with usually in fact uh the only good philosophical novel I can think of is really which is really absolutely philosophical is l no by S which is a a good novel and uh and full of philosophy but on the whole if if take the case of Thomas man for instance when uh his characters start having very long philosophical comp conversations you know one feels well perhaps we could do without this well but your characters also have very long philosophical well they have philosophical arguments at well occasionally not very long but I I uh was reading I know we we were going to deal with this later but uh it is a fact writers always love to say that they don't read their reviews and uh of course they've memorized every word of them but Dame myus is actually the only writer I've ever met who does not read her reviews uh I've I've done some field work in this and i' for example just tonight while we were waiting to come on I sprung on her did you see the article about you today in the Times by John Russell and what did you think of it and she hadn't even read that so I can only uh trust that she actually does not read these reviews but I do and I was reading one today in the new Republic that said uh among other things one finishes your books with a sense of having been drawn into dealing with thinking about moral issues uh in a way that uh is surprising it's usually a business we leave to others to think about moral issues but by the time you've finished one of your books uh you have been draw into these uh questions and I I want to read a quote to you from uh an article in is this from the the the sovereignty of good you can tell me a great artist is in respect of his work a good man and in the true sense a free man I wonder if you could uh interpret that for us well the the important phras is in relation to his work um because obviously great artists uh can um lead less than perfect lives in in other aspects of their activities um but I I mean I think that one is U that the contemplation of great art reading of great books looking at great pictures is is is somehow very good for one in a way it's it's uh uh I was at the Metropolitan Museum this morning and and somehow the presence of the of these great works is is is calming and the there's something about truth I mean I think this is very difficult to explain that there's a kind of truthfulness about great art uh as one might see it in in the great 19th century novels which is very difficult to attain that to uh um do something to create something which is is not uh a fantasy I think i' I'd want to make a distinction between fantasy and Imagination which is not the same as Cid's distinction but but uh um would be a distinction between uh the expression of um uh immediate feelings and the elevation of yourself in a in a work of art I mean the most obvious case would be the the novel where the the writer is the hero and uh is always succeeding at least he doesn't succeed at first but he's very brave and all the girls like him and so on uh I mean this would be the obvious case of something which tends to spoil the work I think some of DH Lawrence's work is spoiled by just too much Lawrence in yes you you do hear him um and there's a sort of impersonality an ability to to uh uh have an an image of perfection and to expel fantasy and uh the sort of lesser egoistic um cravings and uh and the kind of imagery and immediate Expressions which uh might go with it and and to be prepared to to think and to to wait and so on I mean it's difficult as I say to to make this into any sort of program it's just that one sees this from the from the results that that there is some kind of truthfulness uh in Shakespeare and uh in tishan and uh in the the the work of of uh people who have managed to overcome egoism and and fantasy who would you say are some of the novelists N you you mentioned the 19th century novel which you see mostly to identify yourself with who are some of the novelists that you read or think that your own work resembles well my own work that doesn't resemble any of them because they're they they are great great novelists but um uh well I mean I I these would be very obvious cases I mean I I like the whole tradition of the English novel from Jane Austin uh um Dickens Emily Bronte uh George Elliot and uh of course Henry James who I love uh uh and um I I also love the Russian novel I I think in a curious way the the English speaking people feel a great Affinity with the Russians that somehow The Works of of TL Dev Doki when they're translated seem very natural to us it's as if that they were already writing in English and I I think that we have the same feeling about PR that he's really an English writer because he's so uh he he speaks to us so very directly perhaps this is just my own personal feeling whereas uh I think that stal and flar are more remote from us I mean we we know they're French uh um but these uh I think these these great writers are I mean that's the great age of the novel and and it's something that one can always return to and find marvelous wisdom in do you read many of your contemporaries not many no no well I must uh briefly digress to my Paris review questions which are uh about craft and uh I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about your own method of of composition how you go about writing a novel um so that we can all learn and do it ourselves just like you well I I think I well I would advise actually anybody who's just starting on the game I think it's very important to uh make a plan a very detailed plan before you write the first sentence I mean some people think one should write the first sentence you know George woke up and knew that something terrible had happened yesterday or something like this I must that way uh and then see what happens but I think this this may be a a a mistake uh uh what what one um well anyway what I do is is to plan the whole thing in a immense detail before I write uh the first sentence or or write I I have a plan and lots of notes and so on and every chapter is planned and every conversation is planned and the because I think that the imagination here Works in in two stages I mean there's a primary stage where this is of course the frightening stage because you commit yourself then I mean novel is a long job and it's uh if you get it wrong at the start you're going to be very unhappy later on uh and uh one one should sit quietly and and uh let the thing invent itself I mean that's the moment when they are going to come and and help you they okay uh when one piece of imagination leads to another I mean that you then you think about a certain situation then some quite extraordinary aspect of it suddenly appears I mean that you then are waiting and perhaps making notes and things and waiting for the main structure of the thing and the Deep uh things the r deep things which the work is about to declare themselves and to connect I mean somehow then things fly together and connect with each other and uh uh generate other things and characters invent other characters as if they were all doing it themselves as it were um and one should be patient and extend this period as far as possible and then then writing it involves a different kind of imagination and work and uh and you write by hand oh yes yes and no machines no computers and then no take them up to your publisher who's terrified because there's only one copy yes at the end there is only one copy yes but I I find this it I know that some people like word processors but um I find I do a great deal of correcting as I go along and uh uh I think if one had got that sort of green and black screen in front of one one would be so fascinated by the words on it one wouldn't want to change any of them also I think it's it is just more difficult to uh I mean to in one's notebook One turns the pages back and wants to connect a over there with B pages on and then this is take would take more time if one hadn't wasn't able to command the whole thing under your hand I'm curious about how uh about your remarkable how how remarkably prolific you are as a Anar voice you seem to enjoy it a great deal to find it Well I yes I I do enjoy it but it has of course I mean this is true of any any art form you know that there are moments when you think it's awful and you lose confidence and it's all black you can't think and so on so there are it's not all enjoyment but you you find it you always find that you can go from one book to the there there aren't great long periods of hibernation between no I mean I started thinking immediately of course about the next books just before I I end one but uh um nevertheless you know when it takes a long it's a long job uhhuh uh I I want to ask you also so I was rereading your book on on SAR your your first book and uh 1953 and you imply in that book something that I find very interesting if I've gotten you right uh that there was some kind of as as you call it I don't know if I've got it written down oh yeah that there was a kind of breaking of the social and moral fabri that has occurred at a certain point it it reminded me very much of that famous remark of Virginia wolves about human nature changed sometime around 1910 which no one quite believes but on the other hand what you're trying to describe in that book is some kind of breakdown of uh moral Authority or perhaps The Disappearance of religion and a sense of of chaos that's ushered in and reflect itself in your work I wonder if you could just talk about that you mean in this particular book that this what that book whether you still see uh the history of the century in that way and whether you could perhaps explain it to well it's it's it's a long way back to to the S uh era I mean s his popularity immediately after the war was extraordinary I mean people suddenly felt I mean people who had nothing to do with philosophy uh suddenly felt that a philosophy for them had suddenly been invented and one could understand understand this that the uh the war had been so terrible and so destructive and the Hitler era had been so unimaginably awful and uh people wanted to you know to find some way of of uh having some kind of Spirit come back into their life or some kind of sense of of goal and so on and and uh uh s's um existentialist ethic with the the notion of uh the possibility of complete freedom and uh that uh you should um get yourself into a state where you can make a a choice which transcends the uh uh conventions and the sort of uh dull sort of U um feeling of of um being contained and submerged and so on uh this and the the uh the his novels too sort of reflect the this heric in a way heric ethic um did cheer people up a lot uh I I'm I don't go along with this particularly myself but it was um I didn't really then but it had a great revivifying effect in a way well that's interesting something you said last night uh at the dinner in your honor if I could urge you to talk about it again briefly was this issue of of Freedom as it relates to your your very strong opinions on deconstructionism and structuralism uh well um yes I mean we're now moving on in the century I mean that's well we're skipping a few decades but to my amazement uh our time is uh Vanishing and there still one or two things I want to ask um well perhaps I is difficult to I had to go at it last night and to speak briefly about uh about structuralism uh this is something quite new um which uh uh started to come about in the 1960s I mean s belonged to the 40s and 50s that was his great time uh and I think the the 60s and 70s uh saw the the uh growth of uh the doctrine which Jac Dera represents uh uh which was originally called structuralism this is a Doctrine which derives uh chiefly from uh leby Strauss and suur and is influenced uh it's influenced by haiger it's influenced by Marx and fr uh and I think people that after after the sou era or during the South era too I people did really feel that nature and Marx and frud had had done the job I mean they'd blown everything up and given us a Vista of of something else and part but part of this of course was was what was called the death of God I mean the feeling that we could no longer believe in a personal God I mean I personally don't believe in in God in the traditional sense uh but I I I feel but you have said that you have Many religious impulses well I think that religion doesn't depend I mean Buddhism Hinduism exist without a personal God and I think they they are great religions but I mean very briefly to talk about structuralism it's a it's a very complicated game this that uh probably a lot of you know how how much influence darar has had and how many unfortunate students are bound to read his books that's why I'm asking you yeah what was it all about why did we have to do or worse of course uh to read the books of his disciples uh uh and the fundamental idea if one can terribly crudely put this complicated business out uh this was I mean wienstein discovered I think the things which are true in structuralism were being talked about in Cambridge by vien Stein's disciples in the 1930s I mean he he did this this job first in a way um I mean saying things like you mustn't regard words as names of things words have meaning through their connection with other words through groups of words uh and um that you can't uh agree with deart that kogo Eros Su is a great starting point because you cannot have a meaning which is isolated in a single moment because meaning Demands a texture or network um and these sort of ideas were were already in the wind uh and uh Dera taking the uh work of uh the Anthropologist liby Strauss and more more even I think the patterns uh of the thought of suir who uh as a kind of hermeneutic image said we should think of language as something which exists independent of us and which makes itself uh it's uh it transcends us and it uh um uh it makes its own meanings and its own connections and uh we are not uh the masters of language rather languages is our master and this such ideas and also the ideas taken from Freud and others but about the limitations of human consciousness and the fact that we have unconscious motives nonconscious desires and so on uh added up and together with uh the things which about the end of the era of decart which uh Vicken Stein had also been interested in uh brought about with dar's assistance a kind of metaphysic I mean it Dar do likes to say that hayiga is the last metaphysician uh but uh his brand structuralism or deconstruction or whatever you now call it uh is is a metaphysical system I mean there's no earthly reason why we have to believe in it in fact well why do you think this is such a menace to literature well well uh wait a minute I mean the part of the uh package uh is that um the writer the artist uh is a kind of innocent who doesn't know what he's doing uh he doesn't uh and this would be true actually of of uh every ordinary person and the the non-ordinary people I'll mention in a minute uh the uh ordinary person doesn't know uh um he doesn't know himself and he doesn't know what his words mean because he can't extend himself he can't uh as it were transcend language and see what the network is which surrounds his speech and one might say that um I mean this is a sort of trism that of course we we don't uh know ourselves perfectly and uh we are prepared to accept a certain amount of what Freud says about unconscious motives that perhaps only very little but something uh and uh we um we are transcended by all sorts of systems of which we don't understand and uh but nevertheless uh we continue to be uh truth seeking individuals and uh uh we do the best we can to explain the world and there's no sense in thinking of the actual existence of the whole of this network but this is what uh darar urges people to imagine and it's very easy to do this because this is oldfashioned determinism really I mean it is the feeling which people often had when they began to be so frightened of science I mean that scientists could frighten us very much by telling us that we don't know what we are I mean we're made of genes and and chromosomes and things and um I mean some people I mean I even saw an article of the times not long ago saying you cannot blame anybody for anything because our genes determine us way well but I mean human life is is concerned with uh with our our experience of our freedom and and of Good and Evil and uh these um this picture of darll this terrible might call it linguistic determinism uh then feeds uh the favorite few I mean it's a real picture of the senseless mass and the initiated few which s also has because s really is in sympathy with the heroic people who throw off the bonds of convention and are really free and make their choices freely so in the in literature uh the poor bited writer who doesn't know what he's saying uh has to be uh um interpreted or deconstructed by the expert so that there is a I mean and this in in a university this can be almost Sinister that there are persons who who you see young people like to feel particularly young people studying English literature they're not they're certainly not content just to to read um cha Shakespeare Spencer etc etc and try to understand them and to study the background the historical background and so on they feel there's a kind of science which they can Master which will help them to um to understand any text and and to see what's in it and to sort it out and then the one end result is that the uh the deconstruct work is taken to be the work itself so that that is you know that the the work of the original artist is set aside and what we're given is the scientific statement made by the critic secondary literature we call that right it's a new term I well I think this is I think this is Sinister and I think it means that these poor students really very often are bullied into um reading these very difficult Works instead of enjoying literature I don't know which is worst reading second literature or contemporary literature but uh well my my time with you is about to run out I I want to ask you one last question and then I will uh uh ask if there are questions from the audience uh the question I want to ask you is uh one of the one of the most uh poignant aspects of your work and your the development and depiction of your characters is the kind of uh vulnerable vulnerability that you're able to to capture the sense of of lives that have been lived out as well as they possibly can within your characters limited natures and the effort to come to terms with that so many of your characters uh I'm thinking of um Rose Kirtland in the book of the Brotherhood who's who has done a variety of things never achieving anything which could be called a career and so many of your characters who are about to write the book or dream of writing the book or were painters and gave it up or were poets uh and you have managed to live rich and honorable lives and and what I wondered was how you who who have uh who have yourself accomplished so much in life and have done so much to express what others have only felt how you feel about your own achievement and what you've done you you mean not not about the characters and the books but no I mean in terms of your own sense of your literary I'm not talking about rank now really uh but simply what you feel you've achieved well I don't know I haven't really achieved anything yet I mean I well so one's always discontented with what one has done really uh also of course how disheartening if you feel there uh and uh um also of course one's always afraid that even the thing on has has done one can't one can't do again uh I don't know I think I think artists live in the present really I mean that they have to uh think so much well I mean you know about that you're an artist uh but um uh that you have to think very intensely about about what you're doing in the present and and not to bother about what I mean forget about the past and what what you've done and because it's what you think you can do next which matters and not and one always hopes to one always hopes to do better and I mean for any writer it's uh it's terribly discouraging if if somebody when one's written a lot of books says oh I I loved your first novel my hot sinks when they say because they really you know that suest it's been done H all the way instead well thank you that's very good answer I appreciate it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] uh well we do have a few and uh as promise maybe why don't you oh we don't have our other microphone good I'll just remain seated um I will take a few questions and try and make them simple and audible this is like Chinese diplomacy would you ask Miss M early in her career have by some prot Elizabeth certainly she was a friend and I wonder what she thinks now back on not woman AEL does did everyone hear that question no no one heard the question uh the question was if you would talk a little bit about uh Elizabeth Bowen and your feelings about her this is uh interpretation done from the question and your feelings about her work that she was once very important to you according to Sandy mcache here well I I she was a friend of mine and I was very fond of her and uh I uh stayed with her in Ireland and I've I've um I somehow felt very close to her through irishness and so on uh and she was a darling um I don't think that her books particularly influenced me I didn't I did I only I didn't read all of them but I uh I don't think that they were a major influence actually but I think I think they're extremely good and um they're getting you know they're not read as much as they used to be I think the particularly the later books are a marvelous marvelous novels I mean she's a great novelist and a great Storyteller I mean a great short story writer too I mean some of her short stories I think are as good as any any there are in in English and uh I missed her very much when she departed others yes yes what were you able to accom in the dramatization of thece that you did not accom in the Noel what were you were able to accomplish in the dramatization of the black prince that you did not accomplish in the novel well the the S is such a different game uh uh and um it's it's I think writers of writers of fiction of novels are are pleased when uh they can see something of their work on the stage and hear people uttering their lines and so on uh but a a play is made of lines and uh it's got to it's got to I mean the miracle about the theater is why people stay there why why don't they get up and go uh uh and it's uh it requires a it's not at all easy to write a play and to to there's some kind of magic which is involved I I the first uh my first Adventure in the theater was very pleasant one because I I uh worked with Jack priestle JB Priestly who uh um worked with me on making a play out of out of uh a novel of mine called the seever head and uh he he said to me ducky this is a difficult game you know and very few people can succeed at it and uh these people only a few people succeed and they make money but many people are trying to make money and can't so it was not that he was primarily concerned with money but he thought that really uh if it was all that easy everybody would be doing it but it is it is very difficult uh to compress uh the reflections of one's characters and the um uh great pattern of of a of a novel and the the the thoughts of people which you could go on rambling you see for ages uh about what somebody thinks and you can Define uh their their thoughts and their character uh in a way very um much more successfully perhaps in a novel now all this has to be made into drama where it is a matter of of of lines and short speeches uh uh and uh uh actual actors and so on um I I think the forms are so different that it's so you know it's they can't possibly be compared I mean play is much more like a perem uh it it's it's got to have form and it's uh it's it's got to be um it's got to be beautiful as it were uh I mean if one thinks of the great long rambling novels of the of the great uh uh novelist of the 19th century it thinks of War and Peace or something like that it's it's uh the greatness of that thing is it it there's so much in it it goes on and on but if you are going to make a play you've got to have a to make your point very quickly and and that it's it's got to be a simpler Point than the the novel can afford to to deal with is sorry I'm I know I'm rambling on but uh we'll take two more uh yes your last this most recent novel which is really quite wonderful you you have a chapter towards the end of letters do you see this as cadential that is as what as a kind of cadence when you when you plot your novel do you do you actually think of the craft of how you're going construct the chapter in terms of let say letters or whatever along with the plock you were mentioning U um uh did everyone hear that more or less uh he was mentioning the sequence of of letters marvelous chapter in the new book uh where everyone is expressing their condolences about the death of Marcus Valar and uh whether this is something that you think of as you're constructing the novel in your head or when when the sequence of events emerges as you're writing well I think that's one of the things one one thinks about uh very early on in the sort of primary stage it it's um it's it's a very good um I mean at a certain moment I think it's a very good way of gathering up the whole of the novel all the characters are allowed to write a letter and this uh somehow uh brings one up to date the whole of the situation uh what people have been thinking which you haven't been told for a great many pages then appears very characteristically for each person in the in the letter so it is I mean it's not a Dodge one can use all the time but it's uh uh it's somehow or other there's moments when it seems very appropriate good well we'll just ask one more yes um I hope I'm not doing some deconstructionism here but I've always seen the influence of con of the the beautiful in your work I was wondering if I'm off on that and I always saw you as a go two very different things well this is a good way to end actually art and philosophy is is uh how does kant's theory of the sublime and and the Beautiful appear in your work if it does and do you see yourself as a Gothic novelist I am only the handmaiden of these questions um well perhaps I could answer the second one first I no I don't see myself as a Gothic novelist no um I think the word gothic I mean it it's ambiguous word um uh it's often used uh of uh I mean like peacock for instance would be a Gothic novelist uh I mean it it's it's as a critical term it seems to me a rather diminishing one it suggests that one is writing about um romantic Horrors or something of that sort perhaps you weren't using the word in that sense the innoc going to experience iral yes I think these I I wouldn't use these uh philosophical or semi- philosophical Concepts in in talking about I think the novel must escape from from this and uh I think it's dangerous for a novelist to be influenced by by philosophical abstractions as it were but to take the case of k um I mean i' I've written in other contexts about K and and about the sublime and the Beautiful and uh roughly the the uh the difference between the supp with the beautiful is that the beautiful uh has form and uh produces perhaps calm contemplation compation of Art and so on the sublime is something frightening uh in human life when suddenly it's a very good concept very interesting concept when you suddenly realize that you're surrounded by measureless things I mean things which transcend you uh outside you in in nature or in um in science and I think we we probably are are ready to feel these feelings now even more than in counter time I mean that the the the sublime the sort of popular Sublime as it were thinking of the Romantic Movement would be looking at uh looking at the Alps or watching a waterfall or something and seeing something absolutely chaotic I mean it's experience if one's flying over the Alps and one looks down on this endless senseless empty Stony scene you think you know it gives you a a kind of freea which count then says is a should be a good freea because you you realize first of all that all these things transcend you they're dangerous they're terrible I mean one might think about um scientific explanations of the universe or something this way one doesn't understand them on the other hand you turn return to yourself and you realize that you are a rational individual and and that you know you can snap your fingers at all that stuff because you you are have the of your own freedom and your own moral judgment uh I I don't think this has any direct connection with with the with the novels but there's something about it which I I like and then note uh you've sung for your supper and thank you very much [Music] thanks for listening 92nd Street y unterberg poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible by a generous gift in memory of Christopher Lightfoot Walker for more information on 92nd Street Y and the Paris review please visit us on the web this program is copyright 1990 by 92nd Street Y and the Paris r

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