Abstract
This chapter outlines the growth of Murdoch’s standing in twenty-first-century critical acclaim and analyses her unique philosophical and literary contribution to contemporary thought, including her influence on the ‘ethical turn’ in literature and her interaction with her readers, before identifying the centrality of remorse in her work. Murdoch’s fiction abounds in images of remorse, augmenting the literary tradition she inherits by adding fresh imaginative material to the theme of remorse which runs through Shakespeare, Eliot, Dostoevsky, James, and Conrad. After tracing the development of remorse studies and identifying the leading theorists working in this area (Christopher Cordner, Murray Cox, Raimond Gaita, Michael Proeve, Mark Stern, Alan Thomas, and Steven Tudor), the vocabulary and concepts involved in this theoretical discourse are clarified, differentiating remorse from regret, guilt, and shame and distinguishing chronic remorse from lucid remorse. A dialogue between Murdoch’s thought and Simone Weil’s work on affliction is begun. It is argued that in Murdoch’s view remorse is a non-substitutable index of moral sensibility because, at its lucid best, remorse produces that attention to the reality of the other which Murdoch defines as love. Finally, the parameters of this study of remorse in Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction are set out.
Remorse, remorse, the pages of the novel whisper.
—Dipple (1995, 7)
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Notes
- 1.
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- 3.
This was in response to Haffenden’s remark, ‘One of the most interesting aspects of your novels is that you often depict characters […] who are repressed or in some way fixated by their past lives, by certain events or situations that they cannot escape’ (TCHF 130).
- 4.
This book is held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives IML573.
- 5.
For a doctoral thesis on remorse ‘data […] were gathered by asking subjects to write a description of a person who is remorseful, using the following prompt questions to guide the description: What would the person be feeling? Thinking? What would the remorseful person do? What other details about the person would indicate that he or she is experiencing remorse?’ (Proeve 2001, 75). Murdoch’s novels offer just such guided descriptions of remorse with the richly imaginative empathy of the great artist.
- 6.
The Latin itself for ‘to feel remorse’ is conscientia morderi or ‘conscience-bitten’.
- 7.
See Janet: ‘Le remords est la douleur cuisante et, comme l’indique le mot, la “morsure” qui torture le coeur après une action coupable’, qtd in Grand Larousse de la Langue Française, Vol. 6 (1977).
- 8.
The other is raskayanie—remorse as in ‘I very, very much wish I hadn’t done it’, from raskáyat—the verb meaning ‘to regret, feel sorry for’. Both are used in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
- 9.
‘Our verbal articulations of psychological suffering very often achieve their greater descriptiveness and, hence, communicative power through metaphoric […] reference to physical pain. We speak of having aching hearts, tortured souls, boiling blood, of being in the grip of fear, racked by guilt, pierced by a betrayal, and so on. In this way, physical pains aid in the articulation of psychological suffering by being descriptively primitive. Our thousand natural shocks can thus serve as elemental colours on the palette for describing psychological suffering’ (Tudor 2001, 26).
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For example, in An Accidental Man Mavis Argyll has been trapped by ‘guilt and remorse’ (46); Charles Arrowby says, ‘I knew that I was surreptitiously attempting to ease my own remorse and guilt’ (TSTS 429); ‘remorse and guilt’ remain with Tim Reede in Nuns and Soldiers (412), and Lucas Graffe tells Sefton Anderson to ‘avoid remorse and guilt’ (GK 274).
- 12.
Dorina Gibson Grey in An Accidental Man is a prime example of such guilt-ridden characters in Murdoch’s novels. Just before her accidental death, Dorina, who has committed no crime or sin, is in a state of fearful anxiety and neurosis and trembles with ‘old terror, only now it was worse and she felt guiltier’ than ever (AM 306).
- 13.
The term shame occurs with greatest frequency in Nuns and Soldiers in which Gertrude Openshaw becomes engaged to (the much younger and poorer) Tim Reede indecently soon after the death of her husband, Guy. Both experience shame in front of onlookers at their hasty union, far more so than they experience guilt about the relationship in itself: ‘Piety, reason, shame […] seemed to suggest some […] delay’ (NS 201).
- 14.
The edition of Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception used here is the substantially revised second edition of 2004, but the original edition was published in 1991 and thus predates Remorse and Reparation by eight years. As Alan Thomas is the only contributor to the later book to cite Gaita’s work, the two studies of remorse remain independent of each other.
- 15.
‘Remorse is often in the news and has been the subject of great literature, but it has been under-researched, in both psychology and philosophy. It is a fundamentally important moral emotion, one which has the potential to turn lives around—or indeed to cripple them—and yet, curiously, it has remained relatively peripheral as a topic of research by psychologists and philosophers. Also, despite the fundamental role of remorse in the discourses of criminal justice, the policy basis of that role is notably underdeveloped’ (Proeve and Tudor 2010, 1).
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‘The fact that an emotion can—and often enough does—go wrong is not a sufficient basis for assuming that all instances of it are inherently pathological. Indeed, we maintain that the central or paradigmatic case of remorse should be seen as a lucid and rational emotion’ (Proeve and Tudor 2010, 2).
- 17.
Conradi observes that Weil is ‘the only woman among Iris’s great teachers’ (IMAL 260), and George Steiner denotes her a ‘key persona’ and ‘tutelary presence’ in Murdoch’s writing (EM xiii–xiv). A.S. Byatt, Murdoch’s earliest critic, initially realised the influence of Weil in Murdoch’s fiction and later critics continue to comment on Murdoch’s Weilian themes and maxims, the most recent being Düringer (2022) and Panizza (2022).
- 18.
‘Void’ is a key concept in Weil’s philosophy and theology: see Gravity and Grace (1947 [2002]) and The Notebooks of Simone Weil (1956). The impact that this concept had on Murdoch is evident in her choosing ‘Knowing the Void’ as the title of her single essay on Weil, a review of Weil’s Notebooks that she wrote for the Spectator in 1956, which, as Conradi notes, fails to indicate Weil’s ‘importance for Murdoch’ (EM xxvii).
- 19.
At Caens in 1978, Murdoch said: ‘People often talk of somebody’s philosophy of life, meaning their general outlook. The novel itself of course, the whole world of the novel, is the expression of a world outlook. And one can’t avoid doing this. Any novelist produces a moral world and there’s a kind of world outlook which can be deduced from each of the novels. And of course I have my own philosophy in a very general sense, a kind of moral psychology one might call it rather than philosophy’ (TCHF 92).
- 20.
On the importance of the image of flaying in Murdoch’s fiction, see Rowe (2002, 144–51).
- 21.
Cf. ‘Falling in love is for many people their most intense experience […] and most disturbing because it shifts the centre of the world from oneself to another place’ (MGM 16–17). Murdoch’s (frequently criticised) device of having her fictional characters fall in love with one person after another within the same novel—A Severed Head (1961 [2001a]) is a prime example—is a deliberate ploy to show this ‘intense experience’ in action and also to put it into question. She acknowledges that ‘Love in this form may be a somewhat ambiguous instructor’ (EM 417), and her novels show how much self-seeking fantasy can be mixed up with the human tendency to ‘fall in love’. But she is not cynical about its genuine power for good, saying, ‘But a love which […] comes to respect the beloved and […] treat him as an end not a means, may be the most enlightening love of all’ (EM 417). Her novels display both characters whose love is self-delusory and characters who arrive at such an ‘enlightening love’ which truly perceives and attends to the reality of the other.
- 22.
Cunningham delineates the renaissance and advocates the re-empowerment of ‘tactful’ reading as a method of literary criticism, drawing on Murdoch’s poetics to make his case.
- 23.
This work, unpublished in her lifetime, was until recently only available to Murdoch scholars in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives KUAS6/5/1/4. The first twenty-six pages of the manuscript were published in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (2011) in which Justin Broackes discusses the work in his editorial; the whole work is now forthcoming with Oxford University Press, edited by Broackes.
- 24.
This practice been criticised on the grounds that ‘a cento approach would necessarily have a cramping effect on Murdoch criticism [because it] would limit professional discussion of her work only to those completely familiar with everything she has written’. Author unidentified, Iris Murdoch Newsletter 5 (Summer 1991), 5.
- 25.
‘In the modern period religion was ignored, tolerated, repressed, and […] persecuted. But today we witness a massive return of religion, with all of its ambiguity, together with a “return of God to the center of theology” and to certain streams of postmodern thought in general’ (Caputo and Scanlon 1999a, 11).
- 26.
On the apophatic element in Murdoch see Lazenby (2014).
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White, F. (2023). A Meeting of Minds: Iris Murdoch and the Theory of Remorse. In: Iris Murdoch and Remorse. Iris Murdoch Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43013-8_1
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