The Preacher’s Tone: Murdoch’s Mentors and Moralists

Abstract

A philosopher and a novelist, Iris Murdoch was influenced by her great predecessors in philosophy as well as in fiction: Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, Sartre. She also deeply admired Simone Weil and we can recognize some of Murdoch’s own convictions in the above passage. Most of it could have been written by Murdoch and most of us would agree with it, especially that ‘fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm’. In the work of some writers, the good characters are often disastrously less interesting than the villains and this feels unintended and a weakness in the moral realization of the fiction. One can think of obvious Victorian examples, such as Dickens. The virtuous characters seem insufficiently imagined or implausible or limited by a simplistic view of complex situations. ‘Flat’ seems exactly the right word, recalling E.M. Forster’s distinction between flat and round characters. The innocent Lucie Manette is never as compelling as the murderous Madame Defarge, the virtuous Charles Darnay never as heartrending as his compromised tormented doppelgänger Sidney Carton. But one feels that the author, who gave Darnay his own initials C.D., loves Charles and Lucie and expects his readers to do so. In Murdoch’s fiction, however, the lack of vitality in some of her best characters is intended, programmatic, a moral statement in itself.

Nothing is as beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm […] It seems, therefore, that immorality is inseparable from literature, which chiefly consists of the fictional […] Writers with pretensions to high morality are no less immoral than the others, they are merely worse writers […] But it is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost entirely composed of fiction.

(Simone Weil, ‘Morality and Literature’)¹