Faulting the Lemon
James Wood
- Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch
Chatto, 546 pp, £20.00, July 1997, ISBN 0 7011 6629 0
English fiction since the war has been a house of good intentions. Inside it are thick theories and slender fulfilments. English novelists solemnise, in commentary about the novel, the qualities and virtues they most obviously lack in practice. They people their artistic gaps with desiderata. Thus Angus Wilson possessed a serious liberal politics, and an ethical respect for the individual, which illuminates his criticism of the novel; but he never created a single character of free and serious depth (he got closest in Late Call). A.S. Byatt has written well about her desire to write what she calls ‘self-conscious realism’; but her realism is seldom deep enough to warrant its self-consciousness. Margaret Drabble appears to want to combine Dickens and Woolf, to combine caricature and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most naturally, and most amusingly, ironic. And Iris Murdoch has written repeatedly that the definition of the great novel is the free and realised life it gives to its characters, while making her own fictional characters as unfree as pampered convicts. Perhaps in our time only V.S. Pritchett has written the fiction his criticism desires.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 2 · 22 January 1998
From Terence Hawkes
According to James Wood, Iris Murdoch just ‘knows’ that Shakespeare and Tolstoy are great artists (LRB, 1 January). The ‘strange, quasi-philosophical circularity’ of this view quite dazzles him. In my experience, it’s the sort of judgment undergraduates come up with all the time. One’s own marginal comments tend to be shorter, and ‘quasi-philosophical’ is not usually among them. What’s odd is that the great artists themselves don’t seem to share this knowledge. Shakespeare’s view of Tolstoy isn’t on record, but Tolstoy makes no bones about the ‘repulsion, weariness and bewilderment’ that the Bard’s work tended to arouse in him. Disloyal, really. Surely a bit of solidarity is the least we can expect from the truly great.
Terence Hawkes
Penarth, Glamorgan
From Peter Lamarque
James Wood offers a characteristically robust and enlightening appraisal of Iris Murdoch, but some curious remarks about aesthetics mar his conclus-ions. ‘Aesthetics,’ he contends, ‘does not really exist’ – the reason being, apparently, that ‘it is always a form of criticism.’ This is doubly wrong. Aesthetics does exist, as a branch of philosophy which happens to be in a particularly healthy state. Yet it is not, and never has been, a form of criticism, though it can explore the conditions of criticism.
At the heart of aesthetics – in the tradition of Kant, Hegel and Croce – is the philosophical investigation of the peculiar kind of value attached to objects of beauty. Iris Murdoch, as philosopher rather than novelist, has made a significant contribution to this enterprise which she believes to be inextricably linked to metaphysics and to ethics. When she discusses truth in art, for example, she draws on a well-developed conception of truth (explained in quasi-moral terms) as well as of art. Her distinctions – between fantasy and imagination, the egocentric and the objective, the particular and the accidental, all essential to her aesthetics of the novel, stem from deep philosophical reflection. How odd then for Wood to conclude that ‘her aesthetics is not aesthetics at all, but philosophy.’
Wood’s mistake is to reduce aesthetics to aesthetic (or critical) judgment. Although connected, these are not the same any more than musicology is the same as playing a musical instrument. Iris Murdoch’s aesthetic judgments – on the supremacy of Shakespeare and Tolstoy or the superiority of 19th-century realist over 20th-century Modernist novels – do not encapsulate her aesthetics, though they may find justification in it. A good theory of art – aesthetics done well – is always more than the sum of such opinions and must be accountable both to the norms and practices of a culture and to the rigours of philosophical argument. The weakness, such as it is, of Murdoch’s aesthetics is not that it is too philosophical or that it rests on unfounded crit-ical judgments but that it fails -inevit ably? – to offer sufficient intellectual support for its elaborate Platonist superstructure.
Peter Lamarque
British Journal of Aesthetics – Hull University
Vol. 20 No. 4 · 19 February 1998
From James Wood
Terence Hawkes finds me criticising Iris Murdoch for ‘simply knowing’ that Shakespeare and Tolstoy are great (Letters, 22 January). Since Hawkes has written repeatedly about the impossibility of finding greatness in writers (and particularly in Shakespeare), he is presumably delighted to see one of his opponents apparently doing the same. But I did not criticise Murdoch for ‘knowing’: I criticised her for ‘simply knowing’ – for recognising greatness too hastily, without appeal to criticism. For Murdoch, greatness seems to be almost the same as ostensive definition; she points at something and says: ‘There, that is great.’ I was arguing against this kind of philosophical (or Platonic) knowledge, in favour of substantiated critical judgment. It is the difference between ‘knowing’ God and knowing that Durham Cathedral is a majestic building. We know the latter by arguing for it. Yet Hawkes acts as if all critical judgments were like knowledge of God. He decides that critical judgments can never be made, that anyone who uses the word ‘great’ is a mere ‘undergraduate’ (an interestingly scornful term).
But of course, critical knowledge can be had, and critical judgments made, in the same way we gather other non-instinctual knowledge and make judgments from it: by referring to the world we live in, and to the texts in question; to other artworks; to our inherited and changing definitions of words and forms; by learning from people more knowledgeable than ourselves, and so on. We can never ‘prove’ that Durham Cathedral is a great building, and so we will disagree about its greatness, but it is nonsensical to infer from this, as Hawkes does, that we can’t make a judgment about it. Because our values change, value is not valueless. Hawkes once told me that he prefers jazz to Shakespeare; this is something he seems to ‘know’ well enough. So perhaps he would explain to readers how he enjoys jazz, and how he makes judgments about different players and songs?
James Wood
Washington DC
