Narrative as Redemption: The Bell

Abstract

In her 1978 interview with Bryan Magee, Murdoch addresses the question (not before time, some might have felt, given the rhetorical sway of her literary criticism) of why twentieth-century novelists are unable to emulate the achievements of their nineteenth-century predecessors:

An author’s relation to his characters reveals a great deal about his moral attitude, and this technical difference between us and the nineteenth-century writers is a moral change but one which is hard to analyse. In general our writing is more ironical and less confident. We are more timid, afraid of seeming unsophisticated or naïve. The story is more narrowly connected with the consciousness of the author who narrates through the consciousness of a character or characters. There is usually no direct judging or description by the author speaking as an external authoritative intelligence. To write like a nineteenth-century novelist in this respect now seems like a literary device and is sometimes used as one. (Magee, 1978)

Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic.

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (23)