Abstract
The next time I come across a pebble-covered stretch of beach, I will surely think of Iris Murdoch as presented by Paul S. Fiddes in Iris Murdoch and the Others. Even if you have never read a novel by Murdoch, by the time you finish Fiddes’s book you will have a clear understanding of several recurring themes in her work: the importance of attention to particular individuals and objects (often symbolised by stones) and the need for love, art, or a shocking experience of contingency to shake us out of self-centredness into an awareness of the Good.
Fiddes presents the book as a multi-layered dialogue: between literature and theology in general, between Murdoch and specific theologians she studied, and between Fiddes qua theologian and Murdoch qua writer. Fiddes argues that these dialogues are uniquely appropriate in their resonances with Murdoch's ideas and practices. He suggests that literature can contribute to making theology, while theology simultaneously provides a perspective for reading literature, all made possible by the reality of revelation. While honouring the intentions behind Murdoch's well-known insistence on a sharp separation between philosophy and literature, Fiddes respectfully questions the distinction. He argues that Murdoch's philosophical concerns clearly show up in her novels not only as literary devices, but as manifestations of the philosophical and theological dialogues she herself was working through. Fiddes does not distinguish between philosophy and theology in this argument. This perhaps explains why three of the six chapters in the book focus primarily on non-theologians—a fact that might otherwise lead to some surprise on the part of the reader, given the title and Fiddes’s recurring emphasis on the benefits of bringing theology and Murdoch's work into dialogue.
The first chapter of the book does an excellent job of setting the groundwork in familiarising the reader with Murdoch's vision of reality and the main themes of her writing, both philosophical and fictional. Beyond the defeat of egoism through contingency, art, or erotic love that I mentioned at the beginning of this review, the chapter introduces Murdoch's concern over the dangers of magical thinking, whether through seeking to control others (potentially with good intentions) or fantasising about religious symbols beyond the range of healthy consolation. Although his name surprisingly doesn’t make it into the chapter's title, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the major focus of much of the second part of the chapter. Fiddes assesses Murdoch's engagement with several of Bonhoeffer's ideas on how we understand God and how God engages with humanity. He gently criticises aspects of Murdoch's interpretation, but also invites theologians to learn from Murdoch about the danger of putting one's hope in false saviours.
The second chapter is a study of how Murdoch's theological reading affected the development of her thought between her writing of The Time of the Angels in 1966 and The Good Apprentice in 1985. Particularly convincing is the work Fiddes does to demonstrate Murdoch's engagement with actual theologians and theological ideas, based on a careful study of her marginal notes and comments in her book collections. This chapter again emphasises the main themes of Murdoch's work, expanding on her rejection of a personal God in favour of an impersonal Good. The reader might be somewhat startled by a sudden detour into Fiddes’s own views on the Trinity toward the end of the chapter, but overall, his demonstration of Murdoch's engagement with a variety of theologians is interesting and persuasive. These expositions of his own theological ideas, which reoccur in later chapters, must be intended as the layer of dialogue between Fiddes the theologian and Murdoch the writer, but instead tend to come across as theological monologues with Murdoch used as an occasional supporting example.
The purpose of the third chapter is ostensibly to bring Murdoch into conversation with Gerard Manley Hopkins, but is in fact predominantly an introduction to Murdoch's revision of Immanuel Kant's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Fiddes argues that Murdoch can help theologians find a place for the negative sublime. The comparisons he draws between Hopkins and Murdoch at the end of the chapter feel like a bit of a footnote that attempts to support his reasonable suggestion that theology must affirm both the realities of truth and goodness and the ‘experience of the sublime which arises on the outer borders of representation, when human words and images fail and fall to nothing’ (p. 108).
Continuing the discussion of the sublime, the fourth chapter is an interesting comparison of the concepts of the sublime, attention, and conflict within the self in the work of Murdoch and Julia Kristeva. Beginning once more with a contrast between Kant and Murdoch's views of the sublime, Fiddes moves on to introduce the reader to some key ideas in Kristeva's thought. He suggests that Kristeva's greatest contribution to the conversation about the sublime lies in her idea of sublimation, in which abjection is elevated and transferred via art or love. Through a discussion of Kristeva's novel Murder in Byzantium and Murdoch's novels Nuns and Soldiers and The Bell, Fiddes connects Kristeva's emphasis on forgiveness with Murdoch's attention to the other, and then returns to his own theological suggestions of engaging with both positive and negative experiences of the sublime in response to the divine Other.
Fiddes’s engagement with postmodern philosophers moves in the fifth chapter to Jacques Derrida, a philosopher whom he suggests Murdoch radically misinterprets. Murdoch sees Derrida as a structuralist whose ideas on meaning and language threaten the possibilities of truth, contingency, and individual responsibility. Fiddes clarifies Murdoch's misreading of Derrida and then demonstrates several real differences between the two thinkers, especially in terms of their contrasting views of how essential language is to our experience of reality and whether writing (or at least symbolisation) is prior to speaking. While Derrida claims that we know everything fundamentally through language, Murdoch always insists that we come up against ‘an external reality which is not language and so which constantly challenges it’ (p. 140). As they encounter stones, water, art, and other realities external to their own imaginations, Murdoch's characters experience (or fail to experience) a turning towards the other that is often expressed as a place where language fails. Fiddes shows how Murdoch's engagement with these issues shows up in her novel The Black Prince, which addresses encounters between language and contingency. In the final analysis, Fiddes convincingly shows that in this novel, Murdoch undermines her own rejection of Derrida. He concludes the chapter with theological reflections that reiterate themes nearly identical to the ones he suggests in earlier chapters.
The final chapter of the book is a fascinating examination of Murdoch's engagement with Simone Weil. Interestingly, the evidence shows that Murdoch encountered Weil much earlier than she herself later remembered, and Fiddes makes an extremely convincing case for the impact that Weil had on Murdoch's thinking—to the point where Murdoch may no longer have recognised the influence, because themes of particularity, suffering, the void, and attention to others had become so integral to her own thought. Some of the specific connections Fiddes makes between Weil's writing and Murdoch's are perhaps overly tenuous, but the overall argument holds. Fiddes concludes the book with a brief ‘coda’ recapitulating his key points about lessons theologians can learn from Murdoch, as well as critiques of Murdoch on the basis of theology.
The first, second, and last chapters of the book would be the most relevant for readers who are interested specifically in Iris Murdoch and the development of her ideas in tandem with her fictional writing. Readers who are interested in the concept of the sublime will find the related chapters thought-provoking, although this book would not be the place to look for an in-depth study of the sublime. This division points to the fact that in some ways, the title of the book is misleading. Fiddes certainly makes his case for the importance of theology to Murdoch's writing, but his personal theological reflections don’t always resonate directly with the themes that concerned her. In that sense, the dialogue between Murdoch's writing and contemporary theologians may be somewhat one-way. I was not convinced by the book that reading Murdoch's novels would necessarily offer a theologian more, theologically speaking, than could be gained from directly reading the theologians whose work influenced those novels. However, Fiddes’s comments on the ways in which fiction can communicate what cannot be contained in theoretical thought and language are meaningful and compelling. Perhaps a theologian can read Murdoch for theological insight, while a philosopher may find philosophical insight.
Fiddes is often at his strongest in the many sections of the book in which he opens up and weaves together themes from particular novels. Although at times a reader who is less familiar with a specific novel might get lost in references to many different characters, for the most part the relevant aspects of plot and character, and their importance for the philosophical and theological themes Murdoch was working with, are clearly presented. I suspect that other readers will have the same reaction that I did: I’m interested in reading more of Murdoch's novels, and when I do, I’ll be alert to the themes of attention to contingent details, desiring the Good for its own sake, and the dangers of false saviours that Fiddes has highlighted.