Revisiting the Sublime and the Beautiful: Iris Murdoch’s Realism

Abstract

Iris Murdoch is an eccentric writer. Besides the oddity of her characters, their world and the plots they get wrapped up in (a strangeness that nevertheless taps into something in ourselves we all recognize) her fiction seems to position itself outside the central patterns of the post-war British novel. Her novels are difficult to place in any particular category (realism, comedy of manners, prose romance, metaphysical thriller, ‘late modernism’), seeming to constitute one all by themselves. In her philosophy and literary theory, Murdoch has consistently taken up an unfashionable position: she is a metaphysician in an age suspicious of metaphysics, a novelist who wishes to preserve the function of literary realism in a period marked by the ‘crisis of representation’. While the generation of late-twentieth-century writers to which she belongs is more self-conscious about their art and the ideas which inform it than any previous one, Murdoch’s status as a philosopher in her own right gives unusual emphases to her own self-awareness. Naturally, then, the eccentricity of her position as thinker and writer is a line many studies of her work have chosen to pursue, concentrating on the ways in which she works against the flow of the contemporary novel.

We can no longer take language for granted as a medium of communication. Its transparency has gone. We are like people who for a long time looked out of a window without noticing the glass — and then one day began to notice this too. The beginnings of this new awareness lie far back … but it is only within the last century that it has taken the form of a blinding enlightenment or a devouring obsession.

Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist(64)

I think in particular that it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that modern art (including literature) finds its impetus …

Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ (77)