is writing an article for Mind on the incongruity of counterparts:
he wrote sitting in front of a mirror, and alternately staring at his reflection and examining his two hands. He had several times tried to explain to me his solution but I had not yet got as far as grasping the problem. (157)
Finally, in the last chapter, and before Jake meets Mrs Tinckham and her cat, which has perplexingly but only partly copied itself, producing half Siamese and half tabby kittens, he hears in an upper room someone playing the piano. ‘Someone else picked up the tune and whistled it’ (224).
Thus is one of the novel’s themes – plagiarism – mockingly elaborated. The sea of small, shy jokes about copying matters because copying is one of the book’s great themes. Jake copies Hugo’s ideas in ‘The Silencer’ just as Anna copies his ideas in the mime theatre. In each case Hugo ironically turns out to be too modest to recognise the reflections. He is, as Jake comes to see, a ‘man without reflections’ (238). He is closest to the truth of all the characters, because he lacks much self-image. He can begin to educate Jake twice – first in showing him what the world looks like to one who lacks preconception, and then at the end by showing him the truth about his relations with the other characters. Hugo’s wisdom represents the direction in which art must be pulled if it is to succeed in making a structure that illuminates what it points to without too greatly obscuring it; in a sense, without lying.
The point that Jake lies and is an unreliable narrator is made many times. He has a rule of ‘never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion’ (13). He lies to the reader that he pays Madge ‘little rent’, and confesses that he pays none. Soon afterwards with Anna he tells ‘my first lie’ (43), that he has nowhere to sleep that night. He assumes that others are lying back to him, and his habit of untruth has consequences since when Sadie – whom he has decided is a ‘notorious liar’ (68) – tells him plainly that Hugo is in love with her, he permits himself to believe that it is really she who loves Hugo. When questioned by Lefty he notes that under direct questioning he usually lies (96). During his crucial encounter with Hugo in the hospital his asseveration that ‘I felt I had to be desperately truthful’ is followed within five lines by ‘uttering my first lie’ (220).
Jake’s habit of untruth is explicitly connected with his being an ‘incorrigible artist’ (25). His care for verbal shapeliness and impressiveness is evidenced when, in considering how to tell Mrs Tinck about his homelessness, he says:
But I gritted my teeth against speech. I wanted to wait until I could present my story in a more dramatic way. The thing had possibilities but as yet it lacked form. If I spoke now there was always the danger of my telling the truth: when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what’s duller than that? (18)
We are to see a connexion between Jake’s habitual carelessness with the truth and his working-up of Hugo and his talks into a stylish, shapely, pretentious dialogue. By contrast the two most truthful people in the story have problems with the very act of writing, apart from Hugo’s suspicion of art. Of Finn, who ‘never tells lies, he never even exaggerates’, we are later told that Jake had never seen his handwriting: ‘Some of my friends had once had a theory that Finn couldn’t write’ (246). And of Hugo, who is ‘an almost completely truthful man’, we learn that, despite being so successful a businessman, he ‘finds it very hard to express himself on paper at all’ (67). Like Socrates, Christ and Buddha, who never wrote anything at all, the good man here is inarticulate on paper. Hugo notes that ‘when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth completely dead’ (60). He represents the charmlessness of truth itself.
In The Philosopher’s Pupil we learn that Hugo has died and left his clocks to Jake. In that book also the philosopher Rozanov suggests that ‘art is certainly the devil’s work, the magic that joins good and evil together, the magic place where they joyfully run together. Plato was right about art’ (192). Rozanov, however, dies of his perfectionism and puritanism. Against his severe judgement might be set the comment of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue Art and Eros. There Plato condemns art, on similar grounds, but Socrates defends it: ‘Art must embrace the second-best,’ he argues, since human beings are second-best creatures who occupy a second-best world.
Murdoch was not hostile to conceptualising, but argued for a particular, provisional relation to it. She was scarcely an advocate of silence. In her aptly named essay ‘A House of Theory’ she blamed modern philosophy for having discouraged theorising. In her polemic ‘Against Dryness’ she called for a modern liberal theory of personality. ‘Where we can no longer explain, we may cease to believe’ (sbr). In The Sovereignty of Good she advocated a dialectic between theory and fact, called for a deepening of concepts and vocabulary, and urged a ‘siege of the individual by concepts’ as an access to moral growth. ‘The discipline of committing oneself to clarified public form is proper and rewarding: the final and best discoveries are often made in the formulation of the statement’ (FS 87). She suggested that ‘the paradox of our situation is that we must have theories about human nature, no theory explains everything, yet it is just the desire to explain everything which is the spur of theory’ (mmm). And her Blashfield address (1972) was aptly entitled ‘Salvation by Words’.
It is rather that she placed no absolute trust in theory. It should be local and provisional, not general and imperial. It is a means, not an end, and she was as aware as Sartre that most cerebration tries to control experience rather than submit to it. Thought itself tries to freeze what is ‘brute and nameless’ behind words, to fix what is always ‘more and other’ than our descriptions of it.
In Nuns and Soldiers we are told of the Count that ‘he loved Gertrude and he classified Anne’ (487). The opposition between love and classification runs throughout Murdoch’s work. We might say, à propos Under the Net, that the two activities are both mutually necessary and yet permanently opposed. Classification by itself produces a world of dead facts, love a world mysteriously alive and inexhaustible. In a sense it is the capacity to love the world, as well as to be more ordinary in it, that Hugo teaches Jake; both depend on attenuating the desire for cognitive mastery, and Jake aptly at the end gives up having any ‘picture’ of Anna at all (238) as a premise for apprehending her aright.
The critic too has to struggle to crawl under the net. To study Murdoch is to become newly aware of the puritanism of critical discourse, which makes for embarrassment about the discussion of character and bewilderment about the ‘centrifugal’ pressures within the work: it is easy enough to speak about ‘structure’, but hard to find a context in which to celebrate those particulars which break away from and blur the structure, and give us the artful illusion that the work is overflowing back into life. Jake’s problem is also the reader’s.
In a discussion of Under the Net with Murdoch in 1983 she pointed out that a problem with the book is how little Jake and Hugo’s combat engages with the other characters, especially the women. Their relationship is, she suggested, uncompleted because they are such different kinds of being. Hugo is ‘a sort of unconscious spiritual being’ by whom Jake is shaken up. Jake might be a better writer later on as a result of meeting Hugo, but what Hugo is doing is not real to either of them.11
This seems just. In comparison with later treatments of the theme of the artist and the saint this is schematic and shadowy work, more interesting than it is good, and interesting in part because of what it foreshadows in the later work. Anna, Sadie and Madge are caught at the edge of the book’s vision. It is not that we disbelieve in them, but that we never get close enough to test our unbelief.
We are nonetheless to understand that ‘wisdom’ is what Jake is in the process of acquiring. Hugo and Jake’s whispered colloquy in the darkened hospital at night, where Jake risks and indeed loses his job, is the first of a series between artist and saint, always carried out at a pitch of difficulty in
