as the story unfolds, that he is impulsive, restless, profoundly impressionable, romantic and somewhat lost. Jake is a charming, feckless bohemian hack given to bouts of melancholia who earns money by translating the French novelist Breteuil, whose work he despises. At the beginning he arrives back from France to find himself homeless. His squire Finn tells him that Madge, with whom they have been living rent-free in Earl’s Court, is marrying and has kicked them out. The book concerns Jake’s subsequent journeyings; as Frank Baldanza has pointed out, they represent a mixture of flight and quest.6 Flight and quest are indeed often indistinguishable here. The mystery he is seeking seems to him partly embodied in the two Quentin sisters, Anna and Sadie, partly in his erstwhile friend Hugo Belfounder. Like Jane Austen’s Emma, Jake makes mistakes about who loves whom. He thinks he loves Anna who he imagines is pursued by Hugo who he thinks must be loved by Sadie. In fact Anna pursues Hugo who loves Sadie who is keen on him, Jake. He has been told all this but has licensed his own fantasies. He similarly thinks that Breteuil will never write a good book and that Finn will never return to Ireland, though Finn often says he wishes to. Finn does return to Ireland and Breteuil wins the coveted Prix Goncourt. Jake is progressively disenchanted, and ends the book with a newly-won joy at such withering into the truth, ready to write a book of his own, and trying to eschew theory.
What distinguishes Jake’s tale from that of a nineteenth-century hero or heroine – Emma, or Isabel Archer, also a ‘person of many theories’ – is the special use of picaresque convention, which is more self-conscious than Dickens’s, the extraordinary relations between the two central figures and what passes between them, and finally the tale’s openendedness.
A.S. Byatt noted the peculiar difficulty of discussing this ‘light, amusing, rapid’ book without making it sound portentous.7 This is a problem with all of Murdoch, but especially here with her least unphilosophical novel. She has rightly resented the attempt to ‘unmask’ the work, or to allegorise the books as if they were merely philosophy-in-disguise, preferring to be thought a reflective, religious or speculative novelist like Dostoevsky rather than, like Sartre, directly a philosophical one. To use her own favourite metaphor of water, we might say that good art is philosophy swimming, or philosophy drowning. ‘Ideas in art must suffer a sea-change’ (Magee, 1978). There is always more event, story, incident than the idea-play can use up, here as everywhere in her work, and this surplus of sense and action over meaning helps constitute the particular mysterious and instructively frustrating atmosphere. Reviewers of the first two novels noted that there was ‘too much’ in them (I shall discuss this ‘too much’ and its function in Chapter 5).
The play with the picaresque takes two forms. Traditionally it is the quest of the knight that matters, while that of his Sancho Panza takes second place. Jake fails, however, to see that Finn too has his story. He tells us that Finn has ‘very little inner life’, and that he connects this with Finn’s absolute truthfulness: ‘I count Finn as an inhabitant of my universe, and cannot conceive that he has one containing me; and this arrangement seems restful to both of us’ (UN 9). Finn is the first of a series of Murdoch characters who disappear from the narrative – some commit suicide, some die by avoidable accident, others, like Luca in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, are locked up in institutions – without ever having been properly apprehended. Their demise or disappearance is a direct result, we are made to feel, of the failure of the other characters to imagine their needs or to see them as other than ‘subsidiary’ characters. This is an inability in which the author, as her virtuosity grows, is herself decreasingly complicit. When the despairing Clifford Larr dies in A Word Child our curiosity about him is aroused and carefully cheated. Henry James said that he felt he could pass a stiff examination on Mrs Brookenham in The Awkward Age. We feel that the examination Murdoch could pass on Larr would be a stiffer one than she might care to sit on Finn. This conditions our sense of her success, not in persuading us of Jake’s shortsightedness, but in intimating what a longer vision might resemble. By the time she writes the later books her mastery of the confessional mode is such that one senses a greater authorial grasp of that depth of field which her narrators are busy simplifying, as well as the narrator’s simplifications.
The second use of the picaresque has to do with play with a great and continuing theme in Murdoch’s work, that of iconoclasm, the destruction of images, pictures and states of mind. Here the pathos and impermanence of the phenomenal world distantly mirrors, perhaps prefigures, the Socratic smashing of illusions and of all theoretical attempts to dominate reality with which the tale ends. The Hammersmith theatre where Anna conducts her mime is seen first full and then empty, and there is a film-set of ancient Rome which looks real, then rapidly collapses. The emptiness of the City of London at night, through which Jake hunts for Hugo, contrasts with the fullness of Paris on the fourteenth of July, through which he hunts for Anna. Hugo’s flat is perceived full of art-treasure (apart from his sparsely furnished bedroom) and then, soon after, in the process of being stripped. London is in this book as patiently apprehended as the characters, and this is distinctly an immediately post-war London, with bomb-sites and the coming end of Empire to link it with Catiline’s Rome.
The writing which evokes all this is freshly done, the emotions are felt, the structure vivid and alive. At the same time this picaresque theme is a Platonic one. Other critics have usefully shown the book’s indebtedness to Wittgenstein, from whom the title comes. The ‘net’ in the title alludes to Tractatus 6.341, the net of discourse behind which the world’s particulars hide, a net which is necessary in order to elicit and describe them: language and theory alike (which constitute the net) both reveal and yet simultaneously conceal the world. The use of the idea of the ‘provisionality’ of theory in this book is as much Platonic as Wittgensteinian. Wittgenstein, it is true, wrote of the disposability both of the ‘ladder’ at the end of Tractatus and of the various stages of his argument once understood. Murdoch’s bias is Neoplatonic in the sense that it gives a primary, and highly ambiguous, place to art itself in the discovery of truth, and also in that it subordinates the argument to the moral psychology of the characters. Under the Net enquires into the nature of the Good man vis-à-vis art.
Murdoch described her novels as pilgrimages from illusion towards reality (Bradbury, 1976), and also pointed out that ‘reality’ as such is never arrived at in the books, any more than it is in life. The dismantling of the various scenes connects with the book’s interest in the guilt and the attempted purification of art. The novel is much concerned with lies, art-as-lies, and the deceptive nature of all copying. Debates in the West about the value and the danger of art have a way of finding their way back to Plato, some version or private use of whose philosophy lies behind both most attempts to censor art by the virtuous, and also the grandest defences. Murdoch’s book on this (The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists) is notable for the sympathetic vigour of her explication of Plato’s objections to art, and also for the pyrrhic victory she awards herself, and art, at the end. Her sympathy for Plato, as for all puritan thinkers about art and morals – Kant, Tolstoy, Freud, Sartre would be others – is quite clear. In a lecture at Caen (1978) she might be said to have crystallised her own objections. The magical nature of art cannot be overestimated. It is an attempt to achieve omnipotence through personal fantasy and is the abode of wish-fulfilment and power mania. It is a prime producer of illusory unities. It both pretends to be more unified than it is, and allows us in reading (or looking, listening) to conceive of ourselves as more unified than we are. Art is an egoistic substitute for and copy of religious discipline. To Plato, who originated a metaphysical theory about the nature of copying, art is far removed from the truth, springs from merely vicarious knowledge, is the product of the inferior part of the soul, and harms by nourishing the passions which should be educated and disciplined.
At the same time she pointed out that great art is also lofty, and expresses or explains religion to each generation. All art lies, but good art lies its way into the truth, while bad art is simply bogus. Moreover since no art is perfect, all art partakes of a degree of moral ambiguity.
Anxieties about
