Mysticism and the Mid-Century Novel

Mysticism and the Mid-Century Novel James Clements

Mysticism and the Mid-Century Novel

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Mysticism and the Mid-Century Novel James Clements

© James Clements 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–30354–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clements, James, 1980– Mysticism in the mid-century novel / James Clements. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–30354–6 (alk. paper) 1. Mysticism in literature. 2. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Australian fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Philosophy in literature. 6. Ethics in literature. 7. Murdoch, Iris—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Golding, William, 1911–1993— Criticism and interpretation. 9. White, Patrick, 1912–1990—Criticism and interpretation. 10. Bellow, Saul—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR888.M93C54 2011 823'.91409—dc23 2011029563 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Robert, for helping me find the words, And to Tia, for leaving me speechless.

‘What says any man when he speaks of Thee? And woe to him who keeps silent.’ St Augustine

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: The Middle is Everywhere 1 2 3 4

1

Towards an Ideal Limit: Linguistic Authority in the Work of Iris Murdoch

31

From Apophasis to Aporia: William Golding and the Indescribable

67

Verbal Sludge: The Ethics of Instability in Patrick White’s Prose

102

Bliss from Bricks: Saul Bellow’s Moral Phenomenology

148

Conclusion: Drawing Circles in the Sea: Un-Defining the ‘Mystical Novelist’

183

Notes

189

Works Cited

195

Index

205

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Richard Clements, Richard Gauvain, David Gooblar, John Harvey, Julia Jordan, Jane Lewty, Jan Schramm, Tia Seifert, Hugh Stevens, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Mark Wormald for their guidance and feedback on early drafts of this book. Above all, I would like to thank Robert Macfarlane for his support and feedback throughout the writing process.

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Introduction: The Middle is Everywhere

The mid-century novelist has often been regarded as occupying an ambiguous intermediary period, lost somewhere in the no-man’s-land between modernism and postmodernism. David Lodge sees the midcentury novelist standing with his peers ‘at a crossroads’ (22) while Malcolm Bradbury sees him huddled in the ‘ruins’ (Modern 267) of a collapsed civilization, awaiting, but not contributing to, the establishment of the next. They are in the middle, and middleness is middling. The middle, however, is where decisions are pondered, where deliberation is done, before a stance is finally taken. The mid-century novelist can, to some degree, be correctly understood as occupying a period of reflection rather than decision, of humility rather than confidence. The question is whether this should be seen as contributing to their lack of definition, or as a definitive quality in itself. The dismissive views of Bradbury and Lodge have received some critical nuance in recent years, although there remains little agreement on how to characterize the writing of the mid-century, or even how, exactly, to define where the era begins and ends. Part of the difficulty extends from the fact that the mid-century novel is usually defined negatively; it appears as the gap between modernism and postmodernism, and its edges shift as critics relocate the borders of the two dominant movements. In recent years, there has been a growing critical focus on ‘late modernism’ that seeks to extend the borders of modernism to at least the end of the Second World War.i This tendency has spread into many literary surveys of the second half of the twentieth century, such as Brian W. Shaffer’s Companion to the British and Irish Novel, which similarly understands modernism to have persisted until 1

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1945, albeit in a rather desiccated form in the latter decades. Some surveys, including Dominic Head’s Modern British Fiction and Steven Connor’s The English Novel in History, begin their studies neatly in 1950, but, in these cases, the literature of the two decades following the Second World War is treated in far less detail than the novels of the 1970s and 1980s; this carries the common implication that the ‘real’ literature of the second half of the twentieth century did not appear until several decades after the war, with the era’s early literature stuck in what Head calls ‘the post-war wilderness’ (14). Other surveys, including Randall Stevenson’s The Last of England? 1960–2000, elide the post-war years altogether, concentrating instead on the boom of postmodern literature. The mid-century novel is not properly modernist or postmodernist; therefore, it must be, at best, a literature of regrouping and readjustment, or, at worst, lost in the wilderness. Recently, a movement in criticism has arisen that attempts to treat the mid-century novel as a unique entity, distinct from modernism and postmodernism. Kristen Bluemel, in her introduction to the influential collection Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-TwentiethCentury Britain (2009), argues for the utility of considering the fiction of the interwar, wartime, and immediate post-war periods as ‘intermodernism,’ a label she justifies by arguing that the writers of the period were united by a common ideology rooted in working- and middle-class political radicalism, rather than just temporal coincidence.ii Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge, in their collection British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (2007), also approach the mid-century novel as mostly independent of both modernism and postmodernism, but they set the dates of the era slightly later, extending from the post-war years through to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both of these collections have provided a crucial lens through which to approach twentieth-century literature, and have successfully complicated the derogatory ‘two movements’ paradigm that has contributed to the critical oversight towards this literature. However, much of the scholarship in these collections on the midcentury novel is primarily concerned with situating the literature of the period in its political and social climate; it is placed in relation to the end of imperialism, the diminishing sense of nationalism, re-engagement with problems of social inequality, the rise of nonliterary media, questions of the writer’s political duties and obligations, and so on. Consideration of the philosophical, spiritual, and,

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indeed, moral interests of these writers (outside the political or social spheres) has so far been largely neglected. This book presents a new perspective on the mid-century novel by proposing that many of the writers who occupied the liminal ground between modernism and postmodernism – Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Patrick White, and Saul Bellow – were united less by social or political ideologies than by metaphysical concerns: they wished to return what they considered to be the increasingly interior novel to the world, but not to a dry world of empirical facts and events; instead, they sought to unveil a world of inherent moral value. This was not a return to nineteenth-century realism, but a new form of realism; one that refused to ignore the philosophical ideas that had led to the novel’s apparent impoverishment – the opacity of language, and the loss of stable external sources of meaning – and sought new techniques and structures to overcome them. The shapelessness that characterized (or inhibited characterization of) mid-century literature is partly the result of the fact that a concrete vocabulary was only just beginning to emerge through which authors could articulate and overcome a growing dissatisfaction with the philosophical and literary assumptions that had shaped the thought and artistic output of the preceding decades. At the root of this discomfort was the status of ethical discourse, as it had been shaped and handed down, primarily via two major intellectual developments. The first was the idea, clearly presented in the writings of Kant, that goodness cannot be considered to be anything other than a product of the human will; ‘Nothing in the world,’ wrote Kant, ‘indeed nothing even beyond the world, can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will’ [his italics] (9). Goodness, consequently, became inextricably connected to duty, which effectively deontologized the Good; Goodness, suggested Kant, is not found, nor aspired towards – it is made. This concept was taken to its logical extreme in the 1940s and 1950s in the philosophy of Sartre and Camus, where ethical considerations almost disappeared completely while demonstrations of will became ends-in-themselves. The second major development was first articulated by Wittgenstein in his 1921 work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and subsequently adapted by the logical positivists and other philosophers of the early analytical school. It held that goodness, like all other metaphysical considerations, is either a) extra-linguistic and therefore beyond discussion, or

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b) a linguistic illusion that can be dispelled through rephrasing or the substitution of an equivalent empirical term. This branch of philosophy considered ethical matters only insofar as they reveal language’s limits, or its deceptive capacities. As with the former development, ethics became little more than an interesting symptom or by-product of more pressing philosophical concerns. The consequence of both developments is that the worlds of fact and value, man and god, the objective and subjective, became segregated. If there is such a thing as goodness, it was perceived either as an entirely human construction, or as entirely beyond our understanding. To be in the middle of these extremes is not to be anywhere; it cannot be more than a moment of confusion before one chooses a side. The major shift away from realism in the early twentieth-century modernist novel can be seen as the result of the increasing influence of these philosophical trends, as writers began to retreat from the increasingly impoverished external world and sought refuge in subjective consciousness, which appeared to be the only place where meaning could lie. The modernist novel is commonly understood to have explored individual consciousness in isolation from society, rather than engage with the objects and events of the desiccated world; as John Barth explains in his essay ‘The Literature of Replenishment,’ modernist novelists often defined themselves through ‘the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse’ (170). Value, argues Barth, was located, by the modernists, in the mind of the perceiver, with the external world of worth only when considered as a subject of an individual’s consciousness. Admittedly, there are many exceptions to this rather simplistic picture, as many modernist works have mystical overtones that gesture towards a reality beyond subjective experience. An interest in such metaphysical speculation in the form of occultism and theosophy was apparent from early in the era, and was a subject of great interest for poets and writers such as William Butler Yeats and D.H. Lawrence; however, this early strain of mysticism was less concerned with the development of an objective and moral vision than with the intricacies of arcane cosmologies and a solipsistic ‘perfecting of the I’ (qtd. in Webb 234–5). Alex Owen notes that this began to change in the decades following the First World War; he observes that the ‘highly systematized philosophy and world-view’ of the occultists began to dissipate in the 1920s and 1930s, and was replaced with a less dogmatic,

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more experiential form of mysticism, which can be observed in works such as T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Virginia Woolf’s late autobiographical writing (176). However, as Owen notes, even this subtler form of mysticism remained firmly rooted in the self; he argues that it stayed focused ‘on the spiritual potential and experiential immediacies of the “I,”’ rather than on the external world (176). This tendency is reflected in modernist novels, which remained committed to depicting subjective impressions of the external world, rather than daring to suggest the existence of an objective reality. Woolf’s novel Between the Acts, which gestures to a permanent world that transcends the individual, may stand as the exception, yet Woolf remains constrained in the novel by her unwillingness to relinquish the primacy of subjective impressions. As James Naremore has argued, Woolf was never able to decide whether there is an ‘ultimate order’ or if there is only a ‘chaos from which we “create” order through the power of imagination’ (123); consequently, Woolf ‘waver[s] between mysticism and aestheticism’ (123). Stephanie Paulsell goes further, arguing that, even in the fleeting moments where Woolf appears convinced of a hidden reality, she never transcends subjectivity, as she holds that a reality that exists beyond the self is unimaginable (Paulsell 253). Regardless of whether or not the modernists were truly as inward looking as Barth, Owen, and others have suggested, many writers of the generation that followed modernism shared in this (mis)conception of their literary predecessors: Graham Greene scornfully remarked that Mrs. Dalloway shows us not ‘Regent Street … but Regent Street seen by Mrs. Dalloway’ (qtd. in Adamson 154). Iris Murdoch went a step further, arguing that, in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the physical world is not just subjugated to subjective consciousness, but ‘objects and scenes dissolve into words’ (Murdoch, ‘Art’ 251) – the real (and important) world disappears entirely, replaced only by the arbitrary signs of language. Murdoch’s words may be unfair when directed towards the modernists, but they would be entirely apt – and, indeed, not seen by their targets as negative criticism at all – if levied at modernism’s immediate heirs. In the 1950s, a new language-centred hermeneutic was emerging in the shape of an early form of structuralism, which would soon supersede existentialism as the philosophy du jour. It gave rise to a generation of experimental writers, including B.S. Johnson in the UK and John Barth in America, who rejected the antiquated notion of the

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‘soul’; they considered the stream-of-consciousness to be not an emanation of self, but consciousness itself. The individual was the creation of language, not the other way around, and, if there is a world under the net of language, it cannot be known and should remain beyond consideration. These works consequently referred not to the world, but only to themselves. Concurrent to this development, however, writers such as William Cooper, Kingsley Amis, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and C.P. Snow were reacting to the perceived solipsism of experimental fiction by turning back towards the world in an attempted return to realism. Cooper argued, in 1959, that modernism’s short lifespan was due to the fact that, in its unwillingness or inability to recognize any relationship between self and world, it necessarily created alienating and socially irresponsible works: ‘it is a retreat into writing about the sensations of Man-alone by people who cannot stomach present day industrialized society’ (29). Cooper and his peers sought to remedy the perceived imbalance by turning back towards the world, but, in doing so, they fell victim to the other edge of the blade that had cleaved the interior from the exterior world. These novels were unable to recapture the unselfconscious gaze of the nineteenth-century novel, which so casually melded the objective and subjective worlds, because they unwittingly shared their opposition’s inability to locate value anywhere other than in subjective perception. This gave the neo-realist novel a dry and documentary tone; they are works stocked with facts and objects, but oddly devoid of humanity. In rejecting the modernist obsession with the self, these writers turned back towards the world, but found it populated only by empty shells. As argued by Scholes and Kellogg in The Nature of Narrative (1966) (and echoed by the majority of the early critical work on the mid-century novel),iii the period’s rejection of an external foundation of value effectively bifurcated the genre into soulless ‘novels of society’ and navelgazing experimentalism, effectively destroying what George Lukacs called the ‘antagonistic duality between soul and world’ (Lukacs 88) that contributed to the novel’s success (Scholes and Kellogg 15–16). The nineteenth-century realist novel had drawn its success from its concern with the ethical-objective; from its convincing illusion of a real world resplendent with meaning. This area was now off-limits, as it is either non-existent (according to Kant and existentialism) or extra-linguistic (according to Wittgenstein and his followers). This

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left only the empirical-objective (the neo-realist novel) or the ethicalsubjective (the self-referential experimental novel). As David Lodge stated in his 1969 essay ‘The Novelist at the Crossroads,’ ‘To anyone whose imagination has been nourished by the great realistic novelists of the past, both these side roads will seem to lead all too easily into desert or bog – self-defeating banality or self-indulgent excess’ (22). There was, however, a kind of novel emerging in the 1950s that did not fall victim to this dichotomy. The authors of these works believed that the argument that the ethical-objective cannot logically be proven to exist, while possibly true, by no means precludes its pursuit, as confidence in rational forms of knowing had been eroded by recent historical events. They also felt that the second claim – that the ethical-objective is extra-linguistic – while not necessarily wrong, does not stop it from being an artistic concern either; the notion that metaphysical concerns were beyond language was hardly a revelatory idea, and there already existed an artistic discourse regarding the relation between writing and the ineffable that could be drawn upon in developing a new canon of literature. These authors did not attempt to strike a compromise between the objective and subjective worlds, nor did they attempt to carve out a ‘third road’ as Lodge suggests; instead, they sought to effect the novelistic reintegration of the subjective and objective worlds by overrunning dichotomous definitions, by challenging the very nature of binary thought, and without turning a blind eye to recent philosophical developments, particularly those regarding the opacity of language. They suggested that it is a fallacy to believe that one can ever truly be on one side or the other of any issue. Despite rational thought’s tendency to reject whatever does not fit into its pre-established poles, the excluded never really disappears. Rather, it remains on the periphery, in the more nebulous areas of cognition, a pressing presence that constantly undermines adherence to either/or distinctions. If these writers are in the middle, it is because middleness is, in fact, the only enduring condition: the middle is everywhere.

Against Rationalism – Contexts In her 1970 essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics,’ Iris Murdoch argued that a type of novel had appeared in the decades following the Second World War that resisted the hard divide between subject and object.

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She stated that, in contrast to existentialism’s claim that there is ‘nothing of inherent value except will-power itself’ (224), this new form, which she calls ‘the mystical novel’ (225), was marked by ‘an uneasy suspicion that perhaps after all man is not God’ (226). Where the protagonist of the early twentieth-century novel was ‘an anxious man trying to impose or assert or find himself’ in a meaningless world, the newer form contains a protagonist ‘trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself’ in an attempt to follow his ‘genuine intuitions of an authoritative good’ (227). Murdoch insisted that these writers did not revert to theism; on the contrary, they operated outside the ‘traditional trappings of religion,’ rejecting ‘familiar religious imagery,’ and often appearing ‘speechless’ in the face of the mystical fact (225). She includes among their number Patrick White, Saul Bellow, William Golding, and, in an early draft of the essay, herself.iv Murdoch’s essay is short and lacks depth, yet her argument is compelling insofar as it offers a convincing alternative to the familiar dichotomy of the mid-century novel, accurately positing a group of writers unwilling to relinquish the ethical-objective, while aware of the limitations of language. The same writers are characterized by their unknowing, by their comfort residing in between-places, by their inability to rest comfortably within any stable form of knowledge. Murdoch posits several reasons for their appearance. Her central contention is that the cult of rational thinking was no longer beyond reproach; the war had shown it to lead not to enlightenment but to moral chaos and confusion. The technological advances made during the Second World War, in particular, felt like not advancement but regression; she wrote, ‘Science today is more likely to make us anxious than to make us proud, not only because we are now able to blow up our planet, but because, oddly enough, space travel does not make us feel like gods. It makes us feel rather parochial and frightened’ (Murdoch, ‘Existentialists’ 226). Her description of society’s so-called advancement undermining confidence in rational thinking, rather than affirming it, is echoed in the concurrent reaction of Bellow, White, and Golding to their wartime experiences. Each felt that, rather than affirming any ideas about human nature and the world, either positive or negative, the logically organized and technologically assisted atrocities of the Second World War instead only served to emphasize the dangers and limitations of such enterprises. Each of the novelists wrote and spoke in depth of the way in which the war, nuclear proliferation, and the holocaust conditioned their

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views of mankind in the post-war years. Perhaps surprisingly, for each of these writers, these traumatic events created not a pessimism towards the human condition, nor an unequivocal optimism for the possibility of change; instead, they instilled a sense of suspension, of unknowing, of between-ness. In Britain, as Steven Connor has argued, novelists after the war found themselves in a suspended state, struggling for a sense of personal and national identity after the collapse of empire (Connor, English 3). This limp state of British identity had ramifications for Australia’s own sense of nationhood; as John D. McLaren argues, Australia’s identity was, at the time, largely predicated on ‘resentment of the continuing power of British capital to shackle Australian development,’ and this, coupled with massive immigration onto the continent, had left Australia’s sense of nationhood in a similarly liminal state (17). The situation appears to have been different in America, as the post-war period was an age of economic prosperity; nonetheless, the significance of the action against Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not yet fully understood, and the looming Cold War had reawakened a mainstream conservatism and religiousness that led to a burst of reactionary literature from political and cultural minorities that sought to define an identity in a country that seemed out of their control. Indeed, the striking absence, in the post-war period, of significant American literature dealing with the most horrific aspects of the war – Auschwitz, Hiroshima – suggests that it was, as Bellow calls it, a time of ‘adumbration’ (Sammler 73); a period rife with symbols, but with no sense of these symbols’ true significance, or how they should be interpreted. White, Golding, and Bellow wrote openly about their experiences in the Second World War. Patrick White served for the duration of the war as an operational intelligence officer in the Middle East and Greece, but considered his role a ‘pretty insignificant one’: ‘[m]uch of the time was spent advancing or retreating across deserts, sitting waiting in dust-ridden tents, or again in that other desert, a headquarters’ (‘Nobel’ 42). In his 1972 Nobel lecture, however, he reflected that the war had a profound effect on his worldview, although it left him not in despair, but, instead, confused and disconnected: ‘Occasionally during those years bombs or gunfire created what should have been a reality, but which in fact made reality seem more remote’ (‘Nobel’ 42). In White’s later years, he became actively involved in anti-nuclear campaigning, but, again, his involvement was not inspired by hopelessness or rage, but instead by a desire to reconnect a severed spiritual

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cord; in the middle of a speech he gave at an anti-nuclear rally in Hyde Park, Sydney, White read the following words of Gandhi: I have been experimenting with myself and my friends by introducing religion into politics…. It is not the Hindu religion … but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds on indissolubly to the truth within and which ever purifies…. It is the permanent element in human nature which counts no cost too great in order to find full expression and which leaves the soul utterly restless until it has found itself, known its maker and appreciated the true correspondence between the Maker and itself. (‘Letter’ 110) For White, the significance of this passage, quoted at length in front of 40,000 people, is that, when morality has been reduced to agreements, treaties, laws, and duties – as he felt it had been in the twentieth century – it can only be rescued by locating a true source of metaphysical value through passive reflection, rather than through the constant re-creation of rational ethic systems. He believed that the absurd horrors of the twentieth century did not create despair or outrage, but called for a response based in reflection and humility. Golding had a significant military career; he was present at the sinking of the Bismarck, and participated in the Normandy invasion. His early response to the war was characterized by an unequivocal pessimism, very different from White’s seemingly ambivalent reaction: Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganization of society. It is possible that today I believe something of the same again; but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another. I am not talking of one man killing another with a gun, or dropping a bomb on him or blowing him up or torpedoing him. I am thinking of the vileness beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states. (‘Fable’ 86–7) His feelings, however, eventually developed into something more ambiguous and tentative, and more in line with the other authors

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considered in this study; in 1970 he said to Jack Biles, ‘I think I know far less now than I did after the war…. [A]fter the period of knowing what one thinks, one surely has to go through a period of knowing what one does not think, of being astonished’ (qtd. in Biles 31–2). In his undated manuscript draft, ‘Through the Dutch Waterways,’ Golding shares an anecdote that reflects a similar feeling; he relates the story of meeting a Dutch judge while on a family holiday in Veere in 1960. Looking out together upon the destruction wreaked upon Westkapelle by Golding’s regiment, the judge asks Golding what he feels; he replies, ‘strangely little’ (qtd. in Carey 109). Bellow voluntarily joined the merchant marines in April 1945, but spent the five months of his service at the barracks in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. While he did not have the combat experience of Golding and White he similarly understood the war to have undermined the rational enterprise, rather than to have solidified it. His Jewish heritage, as well, meant that the tragedy of the holocaust resonated to a greater extent in Bellow’s life and thought. In a 1963 speech, he stated: Just what the reduction of millions of human beings into heaps of bone and mounds of rag and hair or clouds of smoke betokened, there is no one who can plainly tell us, but it is at least plain that something was being done to put in question the meaning of survival, the meaning of pity, the meaning of justice and of … the individual’s consciousness of his own existence. (Recent 2) Bellow, like White and Golding, argued that the war did not affirm a negative picture of mankind, but rather, served to destroy one’s ability to make any affirmations at all. The eponymous protagonist of Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet – which is, significantly, a late work, and the first of Bellow’s novels to address the holocaust directly – is himself a holocaust survivor, and finds himself traumatized by the war in the sense that he has become ‘someone between the human and non-human states, between content and emptiness, between full and void, meaning and not-meaning’ (240). In ‘Existentialists and Mystics,’ Murdoch referred to this state of unknowing as a consequence of the ‘general demythologizing of the modern scene’ (233), and saw it as potentially heralding an age in which consoling illusions regarding the nature of man could – and

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should – be destroyed. In his 1976 Nobel lecture, Bellow suggested that the horrors of the twentieth century had given rise to a new kind of person in ‘whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies, and ability to live with many kinds of madness, and immense desire for certain durable human goods – truth, for instance, or freedom or wisdom’ (93). Each of these authors saw the potential for a new individual, one able to live with strangeness, ambiguity, and, perhaps, the pensionable metaphysical concepts such as goodness, and truth. They admitted, however, that the required suspension of rational knowledge, the feeling of awe in the face of the unknown, was anathema to the modern sensibility. William Golding saw the pervading rationalism to be a philosophy of desperation that grew from the human desire to resist astonishment, to apply logical order and structure to a world that constantly resists such control. ‘Looking out,’ he said, ‘I see with continuing astonishment the huge images, the phantasmata that condition our world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket’ (‘Belief’ 186–7). Murdoch, too, often spoke of projections or ‘pictures’: organizing mental structures that individuals use to understand and delimit the world. ‘Psychic energy flows,’ she argues, ‘into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world’ (‘Idea’ 36). ‘Reality is a projection of something or another,’ agreed Bellow, ‘[but] I don’t often believe that the truth could be as easy as that’ (‘Literature’ 92). These ‘pictures’ can take various shapes; they can exist overtly in the form of ideology – moral, political, psychological, spiritual – or more insidiously as subconscious metanarrative, or, crucially, as language itself. In a 1975 interview with Robert Boyer, Bellow said: It’s very difficult to escape from any system of metaphors which successfully imposes itself upon you. You begin to think that way and pretty soon you can’t think in any other way… All of these metaphors are very powerful and they’re very compelling. Are they the last word? Is this it?... Once you’ve given yourself over to one of these systems, you’ve lost your freedom in a very significant degree. (‘Literature’ 93) Golding concurred, agreeing with Biles’ contention that explanative thought-structures ‘either ignore or deny that part which their

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system does not comprehend’ (qtd. in Biles 103). These ‘exclusions’ can be subtle, but their consequences can be severe: in Riders in the Chariot (1961), White suggests that the followers of Nazism were drawn to Hitler’s own reductive systems because they served to simplify the chaos of German society between the wars; in that instance, morality was one of the system’s ‘exclusions.’ Mordecai Himmelfarb, White’s protagonist in the novel, claims, after escaping Auschwitz, that ‘[t]he intellect has failed us’ (198). A method of recovering the breadth of human experience without rational reduction or exclusion needed to be found.

Speaking the Unspeakable Each of the writers under consideration believed in the existence of extra-linguistic or supra-rational modes of thinking, although they remained sceptical towards any codified religious belief, choosing instead to maintain their ‘faith’ on an experiential level only. White stated in 1969 that ‘I belong to no church, but I have religious faith’ (‘Making’ 19), and Golding claimed to ‘suffer those varying levels or intensities of belief which are, it seems, the human condition’ (‘Belief’ 192). Saul Bellow was uncomfortable with the word ‘God,’ but claimed a religious sensibility nonetheless; in a 1978 interview with Henrietta Buckmaster he admitted that, to him, religion is ‘necessarily nondenominational. It’s something that comes out of your intuition, and it’s not something that you grow up believing’ (‘Risks’ 131). Murdoch maintained an ambivalence towards Catholicism throughout her youth, but was unequivocal at the time regarding her belief in a ‘soul.’v In her 1969 essay ‘On “God” and “Good,”’ she attempted to refine her position by introducing a vocabulary that posits the Platonic notion of the Good as a replacement for God. While this may distinguish Murdoch’s belief from religious individuals who hold to an exceedingly conventional image of God, when seen in comparison to the broad religious conceptions of Golding, Bellow, and White, the difference is little more than semantic. Regardless of the trappings, each of these writers believed in the existence of an objective source of meaning and value that is immanent, transcendent, or both, and were simultaneously convinced that this source can never be grasped by the intellect, or put into words. White considered the moral sense to be something that is

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inherent in human beings, but is gradually abandoned when, acclimatized by society and education, we begin to prioritize intellect over intuition. Bellow made a similar claim in a 1984 interview with Matthew C. Roudané: There appears a primordial person. He is not made by his education, nor by cultural or historical circumstances. He precedes culture and history…. This means that there is something invariable, ultimately unteachable, native to the soul. A variety of powers arrive whose aim is to alter, to educate, to condition us. If a man gives himself over to total alteration I consider him to have lost his soul. If he resists these worldly powers, forces of his own come into play. (‘Junkyards’ 160) This ‘unteachable’ thing is, for each writer, tied to morality. The moral sense is innate and ineffable, and to logically systemize it can only reduce or pervert its substance. William Golding, speaking of his father to Jack Biles in 1970, said: My father … ended up with a kind of system, as I firmly believe that rationalists and many others do, a system in which there was no place, logically, for right and wrong. But all the same, right and wrong were there… [He] never saw that the morals by which [he] lived were not deducible from the system which [he] held to apply. (Qtd. in Biles 84–5) For these writers ‘true’ morality cannot be consciously formulated – on the contrary, rational formulation can blind one to it – because it transcends the tenets of politics, laws, and duty. As Bellow said to Jo Brans in 1977, ‘What a woman does for her children, what a man does for his family, what people most tenaciously cling to, these things are not adequately explained by Oedipus complexes, libidos, class struggles, or existential individualism – whatever you like’ (‘Unexpressed’ 103). The use of the term ‘mystical,’ as it relates to these writers, describes a mode of perception through which one sheds or suppresses the rational mental constructs that form, organize, and distort immediate experience, in order to experience the world without mediation.vi It therefore has a phenomenological dimension, but it differs from

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Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology in that the knowledge imparted by the experience includes the revelation of intangible objective qualities such as meaning, value, and goodness. As such, it is a sub- or supra-rational way of knowing, intrinsically connected with experience, through which one is brought into contact with ontological value, rather than sheer Being. As the object necessarily transcends organizing devices such as language and form, the question remains as to whether or not it can exist as a topic of discussion. From a Wittgensteinian point of view, the answer is clearly negative; as it states in the Tractatus ‘There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical’ (187), and, so, ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (189). To a certain extent, the writers of the ‘mystical turn’ would not disagree with the contention that language can never capture or explain the object; but this is not to say that there is no benefit in the creation of literature.

A Greater Realism It may still appear peculiar, however, that these writers, so concerned with the intangible, the ineffable, and the transcendent, and so sceptical of society, language, and rational thinking, would choose to write in a relatively traditional form that strongly resembles, at least superficially, the nineteenth-century realist novel. The realist novel, after all, is necessarily interested in things: in objects, in society, in the tangible world – the very things that the mystic invariably wants to transcend. Nonetheless, Murdoch, White, and Bellow (if not Golding) each considered the nineteenth-century realist novel to be the primary model for their own work. Murdoch described Tolstoy as ‘the greatest of novelists’ (‘Sublime’ 261), and stated, ‘The most obvious difference between nineteenth-century novels and twentieth-century novels is that the nineteenth-century ones are better’ [her italics] (‘Existentialists’ 221). Bellow listed his literary masters as Dickens, Balzac, Hardy, Melville, Hawthorne, and ‘the Russians,’ Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (Atlas 186), while White’s two most re-read novels were Madame Bovary and The Brothers Karamazov (the latter of which plays an important part in the narrative of his novel The Solid Mandala) (Marr 448, 487). While White and Bellow do admit that Joyce – who is not usually considered a Realist – was a major influence in their

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formative years, they were both primarily attracted to his lively prose, rather than to his formal innovation; as Bellow argued, ‘Joyce was a Flaubertian to begin with’ (qtd. in Atlas 187). Only Golding claims no major influence from the nineteenth-century realists; in fact, his first encounter with Dickens’ Pickwick Papers almost turned him off writing entirely, as he felt he could never share Dickens’ interest in other people (Carey 259). Golding, however, is an odd case, as he showed no interest in the modernists either, and instead claimed to read nothing except the Greeks. Regardless, he stated that ‘no novelist is influenced in more than his punctuation by any other novelist’ (qtd. in Carey 259). But what is it about the realist novel that appealed to these writers who appear so driven to see beyond empirical detail? Virginia Woolf, whose own mystical sensibilities are well documented,vii made a strong case against the realist novel in her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’ on the basis that the realist novel necessarily becomes mired in mimesis, and is unable to transcend its base materials: ‘They [the Edwardian realist novelists] have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature’ (28). The realist novelist, she argues, ‘hypnotise[s] us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there’ (26). Her argument, however, reveals her understanding, typical of modernism, that, if material things are significant, it is only when and because they are approached through a subjective perceiving consciousness. It is this belief that led Woolf to place the subjective consciousness at the forefront of her fiction; Graham Greene’s afore-mentioned comment that Mrs. Dalloway shows us not ‘Regent Street … but Regent Street seen by Mrs. Dalloway’ would not, therefore, have necessarily disturbed Woolf, as, to her, the real Regent Street is the one seen through Mrs. Dalloway’s eyes.viii What does not appear to have been of great concern to Woolf – and certainly was for Murdoch, Golding, White, and Bellow – is the way in which the reader’s own subjective consciousness plays a part in the experience of a text. To best understand the role of the reader’s consciousness in the play of the ‘mystical’ novel, it is useful to turn briefly towards recent arguments in literary criticism concerning literature-as-event and literature-as-cognition.

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This field has roots in Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response hermeneutic, but has gained recent momentum through its absorption of the concerns of critics of the ‘ethical turn.’ It holds that literature is, among other things, a facilitator of thought, a record of a writer’s struggle, and, perhaps most importantly, a generator of knowing that is activated by an encounter with a reader. As Derek Attridge argues in The Singularity of Literature (2004), it is more useful to think of literature as an event than an act (56); words, when read, initiate a process in which the literary comes to being within a newly created domain inhabited by both text and reader. The effect of a work of literature is not restricted by a text’s ‘realism,’ because, even if the words of a text refer to things in the world, the text, taken as a whole, does not have to; it can deal implicitly with the ineffable without being a description of the ineffable. A realist text – one filled with recognizable characters, things, and events – can move past ‘the upholstery of the carriage’ through the employment of a wide range of literary devices that agitate a text so that it moves from being purely descriptive to acting as an experience/event. By grounding these techniques in a realist narrative, the writers of ‘mystical’ novels maintain the reader’s focus on a recognizable world, rather than on the techniques themselves. Consequently, the more experimental elements of these novels remain no more than tools that facilitate knowledge or experience, and do not become ends-in-themselves. As Murdoch warned, literature that is written in an overtly experimental or non-realistic style runs the risk of reducing the world to ‘objects and words.’ By foregrounding their texts in a realistic world, the writers of ‘mystical’ novels resist this reduction. Literary realism is therefore no less apt a genre for these authors than more experimental forms, and, indeed, may be more suitable, as experimental fiction runs the converse risk of becoming too mired in language, and ignoring the world altogether. The indescribable content received from a work of art is often relegated to the difficult realm of the aesthetic; according to Wittgenstein’s argument, the reason the aesthetic cannot be described is because it has no cognitive content. This argument is comforting in its clarity, but it oversimplifies the character of cognition by denying the existence of extra-linguistic thinking. It is more useful to put aside the category of the aesthetic and instead consider all mental activity as a form of cognition with both active and passive elements. When we

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ask ourselves ‘what does this mean?’, or when we solve an equation or plan a party, we are ‘actively’ thinking, and, indeed, this form of thought appears to be conducted in our minds in something resembling language. Analysing problems and answering questions often involves trapping complex and multifarious situations and options in language (or language-like shapes), and this relieves the anxiety of not-knowing, in a similar way that ‘explaining’ our nebulous moods to a diary or analyst can remove our neuroses. Yet cognition is not always so goal-oriented; we are, after all, also thinking when we listen to music, even when we are not actively seeking to understand or engage with the piece. This form of cognition necessarily has some linguistic content – we cannot avoid recognizing individual instruments within the wordless harmony as ‘cellos,’ ‘flutes,’ and so on, and we will also undoubtedly ask ourselves, at some point, what it is we are feeling as we listen – but this does not comprise the totality of the experience. To relegate the remainder of the experience to the world of ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’ is a mistake, as it implies the Cartesian fallacy that non-linguistic experiences rest somewhere other than in the mind, and are clearly bifurcated from what has been described as the cognitive realm; to say we are feeling, rather than thinking, does not account for the blurry mid-region of cognition where words hazily flicker in and out as we listen, where ‘active’ thoughts slowly coagulate and gently disperse within a wider wordless understanding. Peter de Bolla, in Art Matters (2001), divides the listening experience into ‘attentive’ and ‘inattentive’ moments, but insists that inattention exists within attention; giving conscious focus to a particular element of a piece of music ‘allows the release of focus in the inattentive. The sound of music floods over us’ (65). These passive elements of the listening experience are not entirely separate from the moments of active focus; rather, they are a subset: mute thoughts that exist in the negative space of active thinking. To insist on the impossibility of such wordless cognitive content is to enforce a rigid dichotomy between articulable knowledge and mute emotion that is not sympathetic to the subtler and more amorphous nature of living thought. A dose of lithium may stop the listener from crying at a sonata, but it will not stop him from learning things he cannot describe. It is not difficult to recognize the presence of passive cognition in the experience of non-linguistic art forms such as music or painting,

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but can we experience a linguistic art form such as literature extralinguistically? As Attridge and others have argued, literature, even realist literature, is considerably more than a mimetic reflection of its object of consideration; Walter Benjamin argued that literature’s ‘essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information’ (70), and, to use Wolfgang Iser’s terminology, literature is not a ‘denotative’ art (109). In The Act of Reading (1978), Iser argues that the knowledge imparted by literature is not finite, as reading generates an overflow of possibilities, from which the reader selects, rejects, or ignores, either knowingly or unknowingly, throughout the event. The unselected or ungraspable possibilities – Iser’s ‘alien associations’ (126), or Attridge’s Levinasean Other – remain on the periphery of knowing, exerting pressure on the reader, indefinable yet experientially real. Peter de Bolla argues that one of the chief characteristics of art is that it provides us with the impalpable sense that it contains something we ‘already know but have yet to figure to [ourselves] as knowledge… [We] sense the artwork as containing something [we] strive to uncover or appropriate’ (13). De Bolla rightly insists, however, that while we cannot state with any confidence the substance of something we have not yet ‘figured’ as knowledge, this does not perturb us, nor does it cause us to dismiss it as a delusion or a projection; on the contrary, we are used to situating ourselves in relation to these things, and we spend a great deal of our lives seeking out such experiences. Certainty is never more than part of any experience: its edges always bleed into nebulous concepts that elude a firm grasp, and this all takes place within the cognitive realm. Indeed, as Emmanuel Levinas has argued, it is that which eludes our finite understanding that provides our desire to engage in the world; if our lives were comprised only of understandable things, we would have few qualms in tucking it away, a puzzle solved. A work of literature, therefore, can contain – or, better, radiate – things that transcend its finite content, as there are forms of knowing that will never sit as still as ‘knowledge.’

A ‘Mystical Turn’ It is in light of such conclusions that the term ‘mystical novel’ seems particularly apt. The canon of mystical literature is comprised of texts

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created by individuals also attempting to do justice to their knowledge of the extra-linguistic. In the majority of cases, ‘doing justice’ meant not just to mimetically represent the mystical experience, but to help engender a similar encounter or state of mind for the reader. The majority of comparative mystical literature is not comprised of accounts of mystical experiences, but of tools, and similar tools were adopted and employed by the authors under consideration in this study to fashion works that did not seek directly to articulate the mystical fact, but rather to usher in new ways of thinking. The techniques used in the mystical canon, and by Murdoch, Golding, White, and Bellow, can be divided into two broad categories: the apophatic (unspeaking), and the kataphatic (overspeaking). Apophasis, from the Greek apophatikos (apo –‘other than’ and phanai – ‘speak’), means to speak negatively. God cannot be discussed, as he necessarily overruns any human concept; He is greater, or other, than human thought. However, as Clement of Alexandria wrote, ‘we may somehow reach the idea of the Almighty, knowing not what he is, but what he is not’ (5.71.3). The first, and lowest, form of apophasis involves the denial of affirmative propositions; by systematically noting everything that is not God, God will eventually be revealed in the negative space, just as a sculptor reveals an image by chipping away the marble that surrounds it. An example can be found in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s Mystical Theology: ‘There we say that the Causes of all … has neither body [soma] nor shape [schema] nor form [eidos] … neither is He a place [topos] nor seen … nor perceived [by the senses]’ (4.1). This, however, is a limited form of apophasis, because, as J.P. Williams explains, it indirectly offers truth-claims, where really none should be made (4). That is to say, by describing God as being without shape, Dionysius implicitly affirms that God is shapeless. The higher order of apophatic language, explains Williams, ‘denies the accuracy of both whatever affirmative proposition is at stake, and its contradictory’ [his italics] (4). An example of this can be found in a later passage from the same Mystical Theology, where PseudoDionysius writes that God does not ‘belong to the category of nonexistence or to that of existence … nor is It darkness, nor is It light, or error; or truth, nor can any affirmation or negation apply to It’ (5.1). Use of this form of mystical language has a great deal of precedence in late modernism; Samuel Beckett’s use of negative language, albeit

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without a clear theological goal, has been well documented,ix as has the place of the via negativa in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.x T.S. Eliot, also, in the Four Quartets, draws heavily on this higher form of apophasis: At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline…. (62–6) In this passage, because all statements are negated, the author relays no information about God at all. What the passage says, however, is less important than what it does. For the speaker, it provides the longed-for opportunity to speak about God without error. This is Austin’s language-as-performance, a ritual and supplicative gesture; as Augustine wrote of the Trinity, ‘the formula three persons has been coined, not in order to give a complete explanation by means of it, but in order that we might not be obliged to remain silent’ (5.9.10).xi For the reader, an encounter with this higher form of apophasis serves to emphasize the artificiality of linguistic construction, and propel him or her towards supra-linguistic thought. In one branch of the Buddhist tradition, the Zen koan (e.g. ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’) serves a similar purpose: to expose the illusory mechanisms of language, using words to destroy words in order to usher in higher forms of thinking. Apophasis does not only exist on the statement level. The method of un-writing, of undermining one’s own enterprise, can be employed on a structural level, as well as in a more general conceptual sense. Some of the novelists under consideration engage in negative selfanalysis throughout, drawing attention to their limitations and conventions in order to reveal the illusory influence of their rational mechanisms. They destabilize their own narrative authority through experimentations with ‘unreliable narrators’; they self-consciously use clichéd or blatantly ‘constructed’ structural devices that emphasize their own fictionality; they draw metafictional parallels between deluded protagonists and the author; they undercut their novels’ purported themes to reveal the fraudulence of self-constructed ‘meaning.’

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However, the effect is different from the neurotic self-effacement common in postmodern fiction, as the goal is primarily to reveal, rather than to undermine. Apophasis, however, is a very limited tool, as it is the most rational of anti-rational techniques; Paul Tillich has gone so far as to describe it as the progenitor of rational enlightenment philosophy, rather than its antithesis (287). It is based upon a strict dichotomy, and works by very strictly demarcating the limits of language. The great danger of the apophatic is that systematic negation of all statements can potentially leave the reader facing not the ineffable God, but nothingness – as often occurs in the writing of Samuel Beckett. More overtly ‘deconstructionist’ writers such as William Gass and David Markson would later capitalize upon this nihilistic consequence of negation; but, for those employing negative language to approach positive metaphysical realities, it presents a significant problem. Philip Blond, in Post-Secular Philosophy, argues that in order for apophasis to avoid presenting the reader with nothingness, it ‘requires a positum, a positum reserved for theology alone’ (5): in other words, it requires faith.xii Apophasis, therefore, can serve only one positive function: it can dispel illusion by revealing the limits of language and rational understanding. It cannot, however, contribute in any way towards our knowledge of that which lies beyond these limits. The writers of the twentieth-century mystical turn experimented with apophasis, but each eventually became frustrated with the limitations of such a logical system; as mentioned, apophasis was, to some extent, an inheritance from late modernism, and needed to be adapted to fit the new enterprise. The more successful novels written in this period are those that draw upon kataphasis (from the Greek kataphatikos – kata: intensifier and phanai – ‘speak’). Kataphasis is ‘up-speaking’: a technique of pushing language to its breaking point, utilizing its inherent ambiguity and aporia as a generator of unresolving meaning. Kataphatic techniques include the use of overdetermined symbols, an emphasis on the non-signifying elements of language (musicality, prosody, ontology), the adoption of cabbalistic and anagogic interpretive techniques, and the suggestion of the universal interconnectedness of meaning implied by the possibility of endless interpretation. As Thomas Carlson argues, both apophasis and kataphasis play on ‘the ever ambiguous edge where language wavers between its own production and failure, the unstable border

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where language is generated precisely – and impossibly – with the aim of undoing itself’ (168). Kataphasis, however, treats the ‘edge’ as a gradated territory, rather than a defined line, and is less pessimistic about the potential of human consciousness. It implies that consciousness is not a blindfold placed upon intuitive knowledge, but an unrefined vessel of knowing that can be stimulated into adopting a more fluid and flexible relationship with the strangeness, mystery, and aporia that exceeds it. Ian T. Ramsey argues that much religious language serves a kataphatic purpose, in that it destabilizes knowledge, rather than proclaiming or negating it (75). Pseudo-Dionysius’s claim that God does not ‘belong to the category of non-existence or to that of existence’ is a simple paradox; it is basic apophasis and, as such, does no more than demonstrate the limitations of language. A phrase such as ‘infinite goodness,’ however, is not a simple paradox; to misquote Eliot, the words strain and crack under the tension, but they do not quite break. Ramsey observes that many biblical phrases are like this; they take familiar words and make them strange by coupling them with unusual qualifiers or with terms that undermine the first-order definition. While Russell or Wittgenstein might declare a sentence such as ‘infinite goodness’ to be nonsensical, it is not technically a paradox, nor is it without purpose. While apophasis does nothing more than emphasize God’s distance from linguistic characterization, kataphatic language, while also not making any claims for transparency, nonetheless provides a direction for our thoughts. Ramsey argues that ‘[T]he first logical function of the word “infinite” is to stimulate us’ but without any ‘intention of arriving at “God” as a last term’ (77). This stimulation is provided by the ‘impropriety’ of the phrase itself; this ‘impropriety’ creates a strain that ‘reminds us that the phrase, while having such a basis as we have indicated in ordinary language, points to something outside “good language” altogether’ (Ramsey 77). Ramsey’s argument finds support in the work of Ian Crombie, who argued that religious language is primarily evocative, rather than denotative; it points us ‘outside the range of possible conception [but] in a determinate direction’ [his italics] (40). Kataphasis compels the reader to engage in an endless process of chasing meaning; ultimate understanding remains beyond its grasp, but, in the pursuit, the reader is pushed away from stable forms of knowledge, and forced to wrestle with something wholly other.

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This argument for kataphasis has useful parallels in the work of literary critics such as Wolfgang Iser, Michael Wood, and Derek Attridge, and in the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas. Each of these writers will be explored in more depth in the following chapters, but it is worth noting at this stage that, while some of these critics would reject the notion of an infinitely unknowable Other, each considers the process of destabilizing forms of knowledge in order to accommodate the Other to be at the root of ethical engagement, and, for some, the very foundation of the literary. It is at the limits of language – where words necessarily exist but are pushed to breaking point – where we can encounter (without encompassing) the Other as other, without reducing or destroying it through its appropriation within common language. Consider the similarity of the kataphatic technique to Derek Attridge’s description of the confrontation with the Other in The Singularity of Literature: [The introduction of otherness] is achieved not just by fashioning into a new shape the materials at hand – in literature these materials include the rules and regularities that govern its forms and its operation as well as its sonic, rhythmic, and graphic properties; in philosophy these are ideas – but, more importantly, by destabilizing them, heightening their internal inconsistencies and ambiguities, exaggerating their proclivities, and exploiting their gaps and tensions, in such a way as to allow the otherness implicit in these materials – the otherness they exclude in order to be what they are – to make itself explicit. (56) While these critics differ on whether the other is ultimately knowable – Attridge, for instance, rejects Levinas’ argument for the wholly Other – each shares the notion that the indescribable is a real presence, and exerts pressure on us, and on our language. Kataphatic mystical texts hold that God can never be contained within a word, but language, when overdetermined, oversaturated, pushed to breaking point, can give rise to forms of thought that rise above linguistic cognition, and lead us towards confrontation with the Other. While kataphasis lacks the logical clarity of apophasis, it is, as such, perhaps more suited to its task. Even if it (necessarily) falls short of conveying absolute knowledge, kataphasis is comfortable occupying the middle ground between

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certainty and strangeness, and it is an intermediary domain where the mid-century novelist stands. As Gadamer wrote in Truth and Method, ‘The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between’ (295).

Mysticism and the Mid-Century Novel The following chapters trace the use of techniques and concepts drawn from, and with parallels to, mystical writing, as they were put to use in overcoming the stark subject/object divide that had impoverished the mid-century novel, moving from Murdoch’s and early Golding’s use of apophasis, through to the kataphatic novels of later Golding, White, and Bellow. This study concentrates on novels written between 1953 and the late 1970s. Between 1953 and 1955, each of the writers under consideration published the novels that would establish their reputation. It was in 1953 that Bellow’s first major novel, The Adventures of Augie March, was published. He had published two earlier works – Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) – but has dismissed them as apprentice works (‘his M.A. and his Ph.D’) (qtd. in Hoberek 75). They are also philosophically and stylistically dissimilar to the novels that followed, leaning on an inherited existentialism that runs contrary to the more inclusive worldview apparent in his later works. Golding and Murdoch’s first novels (Lord of the Flies and Under The Net, respectively) followed in 1954, and both works were career making. Patrick White, like Bellow, played down his first two novels, Happy Valley (1939) and The Living and the Dead (1941), and they remain out of print. His 1948 novel, The Aunt’s Story, showed increasing confidence, but it was not until 1955’s The Tree of Man that White’s thematic interests reached maturity and he began to achieve recognition as a major novelist. The end date of this study is more arbitrary. For the most part, by the end of the 1970s, each of the writers had received recognition for their body of work (each had received the Nobel Prize, with the exception of Murdoch who won the Booker Prize in 1978), but their major work was behind them.xiii Importantly, I make no claim that these novelists were aware of working together as a group or movement with a unified focus or purpose. They were separated by their geographical locations, had little interaction, and each, for the most part, refused to comment on their literary peers with any specificity, in either praise or derision. Suggestions of mutual respect amongst these writers exist nonetheless: White praised

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Bellow for his ‘detachment’ (‘Making’ 23) and Golding spoke highly of Murdoch’s achievement of depicting ‘actuality’ in her novels (Conradi, Life 449), and taught Under The Net to his students at Hollins in 1961 (Carey 253). Jeanne Delbaere-Garant, attempting to wring Golding for comments on the contemporary literary scene, writes that the only ‘novelist whose name was met with an eloquent silence was Patrick White’ (206). There is also some evidence of face-to-face meetings between the novelists. In a letter to his friend Geoffrey Dutton, White mentions that Murdoch visited him on her tour of Australia in the spring of 1967: with characteristic meanness, he described her as ‘plump, homely, and dowdy,’ but he also lamented the brevity of her visit, as he felt they were ‘on the same wavelength’ (White, Letters 310–11). White also met with Golding on at least two occasions, once while both were vacationing in Molyvos, Greece in 1963 (Carey 277), and again in Australia in 1974 (Carey 344); there is, however, no record of their conversations. Nonetheless, stylistic and ideological similarities unite the works of these writers, and a general sense of concurrent progression – a rise and eventual dissolution – of technique and intent can be traced within them. Throughout this book, connections will also be drawn between the four writers by tracing common lines of influence and placing them within relevant philosophical and intellectual currents. Many of the philosophical works mentioned are direct and well-documented influences, such as Wittgenstein’s influence on Iris Murdoch, the medieval mystic’s place in William Golding’s thought, and Rudolf Steiner’s formative impression on Bellow. In several cases, however, the precise nature of the influence of philosophy upon these writers is less clear, as is the case with the suggestive connection between Patrick White and the moral phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. In situations such as this, any possible direct influences are highlighted through synoptic readings of passages from philosophical works that appear to have inspired the novel or novels in question; where no direct allusions exist, these texts are approached only as concurrent writing projects that stand as exemplars of the eras’ philosophical concerns, and that serve to illuminate the complex ideas woven into the primary texts. While the authors considered in this study are sometimes seen as occupying different points on an imaginary grey scale that extends from modernism to postmodernism – White’s stylistic similarities to

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Lawrence and Woolf have caused him to be seen as a late modernist, or at least modernist inheritor, while Murdoch’s formal innovation has led critics to see her as an early postmodernist – this study resists a structure that places these novelists as intermediary stepping stones between these dominant movements. Consequently, the chapters are not organized in relation to these paradigms. Further, as their writing was mostly concurrent, no attempt is made to discuss these authors’ works chronologically. Instead, the study follows the spectrum of approaches to the problem of expressing the ineffable Good, moving from the apophatic to the kataphatic. The first chapter posits that Iris Murdoch’s novels, and her ethical philosophy, may at least in part be viewed as an ambivalent response to Wittgenstein’s claim in the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus that metaphysical concerns are wholly beyond discussion. It explores her early novelistic struggle with the problem of linguistic authority, through to her later successes with apophatic structure in the ‘writer’ novels of the late 1970s. It may seem counterintuitive to place Murdoch, who appears to have the most postmodern affinities of the authors in question, at the beginning of the study. However, her seemingly postmodern traits arise less out of an affinity with post-structuralism than from an apophatic mysticism that draws directly from Plato, and, more ambivalently, from Wittgenstein. As mentioned earlier, the combination of apophaticism with literary experimentalism is not a purely postmodern trait, as it had a strong precedent in the modernist era. This is particularly true of the later work of Eliot, Joyce, and Beckett, each of whom negates language in their writing in order to move beyond it. It is useful to begin this study with Iris Murdoch because, of the four writers under consideration, she is the only one to directly discuss morality, mysticism, and their place in the novel in any depth outside her fiction; consequently, an exploration of her philosophical writing provides an important framework for this book’s wider concerns. Furthermore, by exploring the way Murdoch’s philosophical mode of thinking sometimes clashes with her act of literary creation, this chapter gestures towards many of the challenges that faced the other novelists when they attempted to approach the supra-rational through rational means. The second chapter explores William Golding’s progression from the apophatic novels of his early career through to the kataphatic

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revelation of The Spire. Golding’s early work, born out of his post-war pessimism, located evil solely in the rational mind. He held that the human compulsion to organize the world into pictures, structures, and words separated individuals from each other, and from the world; morality was consequently deemed the product of rational thought, rather than a form of intuitive knowledge. His early novels, from Lord of the Flies through to Free Fall, followed an experimental pattern not dissimilar to Murdoch’s, in which his puzzle-like literary constructions attempted to undo themselves in order to approach a supra-rational silence. Golding, however, unlike Murdoch, eventually became dissatisfied with this approach, and sought the creation of a new literary language that emphasized excess, rather than asceticism, so that language began to serve as a generator of thought, rather than a limiting container. His fifth novel, The Spire, is presented as the site of this transformation, where a rigid structure (both the spire within the novel, and the novel itself), instead of collapsing into nothingness, is transfigured as an endlessly equivocal and overflowing vessel of supra-rational thought. In The Spire, human consciousness is no longer seen as being entirely ‘other’ from the external world; rather, the boundaries between self and other can be overcome by agitating the habitual structures of thought in order to open up the possibility of new forms of thinking. The third chapter focuses on the more developed (and less selfconscious) use of this kataphatic technique as it occurs in the novels of Patrick White. Through close readings of White’s novels, this chapter reveals the ways in which White encouraged cognitive overflow and linguistic aporia through the use of overdetermined symbols, dislocated syntax, and ‘painterly’ techniques, such as his inventive use of ekphrasis. Throughout, connections are drawn between the effect of these techniques upon the reader and White’s moral-phenomenological worldview, which is elucidated through the parallel readings of works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. White’s goal was to enact, within his novels, a phenomenological assault on the subject/object divide, in order to reveal that subject, object, and goodness itself are, to use Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, part of the ‘flesh of the world.’ White had similar aspirations to Murdoch and early Golding, in that he wished to overcome limiting rationalism in a quest for transcendent goodness; his approach, however, was different, in that he rejected the either/or distinction

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between self and non-self, and concentrated on revealing that the seemingly rigid border was, in fact, dappled and amorphous. The fourth chapter continues to explore the collapsing subject/ object divide as it appears in the mid-period novels of Saul Bellow. Bellow, like White, rejected the distinction between the physical and spiritual worlds, arguing, instead, that ‘corporeal things are an image of the spiritual and visible objects are renderings of invisible ones’ (Henderson 74). This chapter presents how Bellow’s belief was largely indebted to the scientific writings of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and to his follower Rudolf Steiner, who both believed that objective truth could be found through subjectivity. Bellow, however, employs a more tempered kataphatic technique than Golding and White, and views the human condition with a more sympathetic eye; he is less interested in leading the reader into new levels of thought than in depicting his characters’ very human struggle against the limits of their own understanding. The chapter focuses on the way Bellow’s philosophical influences manifest in his complex appraisal and depiction of human cognition, which, for Bellow, is ultimately not as rational or limited as the more pessimistic Murdoch and Golding believed. Throughout this book, the focus will be on the ways in which this literature ‘thinks,’ rather than on the thoughts it contains, with the aim of showing how these novelists attempt to use language to get beyond language, and to use fiction to approach truth, in the pursuit of a higher morality than exists outside rational thought, but which had been lost in the mire of an increasingly rational age.

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1 Towards an Ideal Limit: Linguistic Authority in the Work of Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch began her postgraduate degree at Cambridge in 1947, the same year that Ludwig Wittgenstein retired from teaching at Trinity College to concentrate on his writing. Wittgenstein remained a significant presence on campus during Murdoch’s stay, and his ideas came to dominate the thought and conversation of the young Murdoch and her coterie. Murdoch’s interest in Wittgenstein was and remained centred on his 1921 publication, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, despite the fact that Wittgenstein had long since rejected its argument by the time Murdoch arrived in Cambridge.i The Tractatus claimed, in Wittgenstein’s words, to provide the ‘final solution to the problems of philosophy’ (4). As Murdoch explains it, Wittgenstein’s book claimed two subjects (which she facetiously refers to in her Metaphysics as two ‘godheads’): the world of fact (or what Wittgenstein calls ‘states of affairs’), which can be expressed and discussed in words and combinations of words, and another ‘which is totally independent of that world’ (Metaphysics 27). The reason that philosophy has never resolved the problems surrounding the realms of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics is, according to Wittgenstein, that they lie outside the realm of facts, and, as such, are beyond discussion, philosophical or otherwise. The Tractatus is divided into seven sections. The first six attempt to systematically break down and delineate the potential and, more importantly, the limits of language. It is the seventh, however, that haunted Murdoch; it consists of only one sentence: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (189). Bertrand Russell, in his otherwise admiring introduction to the first edition of the Tractatus, dismisses the mystical implications of this sentence, arguing that, if 31

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something cannot be spoken of, it should not even be considered to exist at all. The metaphysical realm implied by the seventh section is, according to Russell, not only ‘inexpressible, but a fiction, a mere delusion’ (23). Wittgenstein, however, publicly resisted Russell’s interpretation of his book, which he felt misunderstood and misrepresented his central contention; as he wrote to Ludwig Ficker in 1919 (in a letter quoted by Murdoch in her Metaphysics), the Tractatus ‘consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely the second part that is the important one’ (qtd. in Janik and Toulmin 192). Despite the unpopularity of his position among the Cambridge set, Wittgenstein insisted that ‘There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical’ (Tractatus 189). Peter Conradi, in Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), recognizes in Murdoch a Bloomian anxiety towards Wittgenstein; he writes that Murdoch dreamt of Wittgenstein throughout her life, and described him as both ‘numinous’ and ‘evil’ on separate occasions (263). The Tractatus is a regular point of reference throughout Murdoch’s essays and novels, and, judging by the content of these allusions, she was not captivated by the passages that interested the analytical school – the methodical analysis of grammatical propositions – but, instead, by the implications of that brief final sentence. Murdoch was not naturally inclined towards the type of philosophy that pervaded Cambridge at the time of her attendance, as she was and remained, at heart, an ethical philosopher (and, unfashionably, a Platonist).ii Wittgenstein’s claim at the end of the Tractatus that the metaphysical realm exists but is beyond discussion provided a contemporary distillation of an intellectual and artistic problem that was of great relevance to Murdoch: what is the relation of forms of human expression – language, art, literature – to greater metaphysical concerns? It also instilled within her a profound ambivalence, as she was shocked by the extremity of Wittgenstein’s position, but was also compelled to accept its veracity, to at least some extent. In her philosophical writing, she returns again and again to spar with Wittgenstein and his immediate followers;iii she never manages to quite lay to rest these opponents in her philosophical writing, but, as her recurring entreaties to ‘common sense’ within these passages of intellectual jousting suggest, it is likely she believed that the argument would not be won in the logical medium of philosophy anyway, but through other more intuitive or artistic means.

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The Problem of the Novel Murdoch published her first novel Under The Net in 1954, only seven years after first meeting Wittgenstein.iv The novel was published into a literary scene that Murdoch felt to be ‘in turmoil’ (‘Existentialists’ 221). In each of her major essays on the state of the novel – ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959), ‘Against Dryness’ (1961), and ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ (1970) – she draws a connection between the linguistic turn in philosophy, as represented by Wittgenstein, and the central problem of the novel in the post-war period: its bifurcation into the ‘journalistic’ novel which dealt with the real world of facts and objects but eschewed the metaphysical, the aesthetic, and the ethical; and the ‘crystalline’ novel which was concerned with the ‘human condition,’ but had no relation to the objective external world (‘Against’ 291). In ‘Against Dryness,’ she explains the source of the novel’s impoverishment: From Hume through Bertrand Russell, with friendly help from mathematical logic and science, we derive the idea that reality is finally a quantity of material atoms and that significant discourse must relate itself directly or indirectly to reality so conceived. This position was most picturesquely summed up in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. (287–8) As words can only attach themselves to objects and things, and not to issues of value, the novel should only concern itself with ‘straightforward stor[ies] enlivened with empirical facts’ (291); this leads to the ‘journalistic’ novel. If the novel does not take this approach, it is really only presenting fantasy; hence the ‘crystalline’ novel. This kind of novel may appear to discuss metaphysics concepts, but it is in fact only referring to ‘linguistic quasi-things’ (292). This follows logically from Wittgenstein’s thesis: it is impossible to discuss extra-linguistic concepts (ethics, aesthetics, religion); consequently, any non-journalistic ‘art’ – art that purports to discuss non-empirical data – is not actually referring to anything ontologically real, but only to itself: it is about words, not worlds. Novels of this sort, at best, will be consoling fantasy, ‘small myth[s]’ (292). They can help the reader understand language and the subjective mind, but not the world. The modernist novel, Murdoch suggests, was ‘crystalline’ in form, as, within its stream-of-consciousness passages, ‘objects and scenes dissolve[d] into words’ (‘Art’ 250).

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While Wittgenstein provided Murdoch with a contemporary proponent of the inexpressibility dilemma, she did not believe the idea to be entirely original, except in its extremity. She argued that Plato’s own rejection of the arts was related to a similar belief that higher concepts cannot comfortably exist within language, especially writing. In her long essay ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists’ (1976), she explained: [According to Plato, t]he ideal of knowledge is to see face to face not (eikasia) in a glass darkly. However, truth involves speech and thought is mental speech, so thought is already symbolism rather than perception: a necessary evil… Language itself, spoken, is already bad enough. Writing and mimetic art are the introduction of further symbols and discursive logoi or quasi-logoi which wantonly make a poor situation even worse and lead the mind away in the wrong direction. (413) This is a very Wittgensteinian reading of Plato, although Wittgenstein would not have considered the discussion of metaphysical concepts to be a ‘necessary evil,’ as he held any discussion of these topics to be absurd. Elsewhere, however, Murdoch argues that Plato in fact shared Wittgenstein’s contention that metaphysical ideas cannot be expressed in words to any degree, despite the fact that the majority of Plato’s writing was devoted to the direct discussion of these concepts. Plato, she writes in her Metaphysics, mostly attempted to approach these concepts in extra- or supra-linguistic ways; she quotes a passage from Stanley Rosen’s The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry, which explains that Plato himself ‘sought to avoid a speech which would temporalise, objectify, or rationalise being itself’ and that ‘the dialogues become intelligible only when we perceive this unstated luminosity which is directly present as the silence of Plato’ (180–1). She mentions Plato’s awareness that language’s real function is not denotative, but evocative: it can serve as a bridge towards ‘private inexplicable states of consciousness’ (183). The Cave myth, she says, shows that ‘a higher moral level appears to us first, at our own lower level, as an image, reflection, or shadow’ (183). She believed that Plato, while recognizing the impossibility of capturing metaphysical notions in language, was not willing to say that the indescribable is also the unknowable; as she asks, ‘Can we not see a little beyond

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those transcendental barriers, do we not have intimations, gleams of light, glimpses of another scene?’ (36). Murdoch wrote regularly, in her novels and in her philosophy, of mystics and their attempt to approach the ineffable through words. Over centuries, mystics, east and west, had developed linguistic and formal techniques through which to convey, rather than directly articulate, their experience to the reader; if, as Wittgenstein stated, the extra-linguistic is mystical, then perhaps, in order for it to have a place in philosophy and art, it needed to be approached mystically.

Murdoch’s Theory of the Good Iris Murdoch believed that goodness is not created, formed, or chosen, but discovered. As such, it is primarily encountered negatively, when other aspects of life – language, self, ego, and so on – are suppressed. It is consequently perception, or attention, a term she borrowed from Simone Weil, that impels moral improvement. As she explained in ‘Against Dryness,’ paraphrasing Weil, ‘morality [is] a matter of attention, not will’ (293). In her later Metaphysics, she wrote, ‘moral change comes from an attention to the world whose natural result is a decrease in egotism through an increased sense of the reality of, primarily, of course, other people, but also other things’ (52). The concept of attention, in both Weil and Murdoch’s writing, has a distinctly mystical character: Weil described it as a passive and outward gaze ‘so full that the “I” disappears’ (107). How, though, is this increased vision to be achieved? With a nod to Wittgenstein, Murdoch states that people necessarily see and understand the world through mental forms, pictures, constructs, and metaphors. These forms cannot be removed altogether, because vision without mental mediation is unimaginable. Wittgenstein explained this concept through a metaphor of language as a net, an image that provided Murdoch with the title of her first novel, Under The Net: Let us imagine a white surface with irregular black spots. We now say: Whatever kind of picture these make I can always get as near as I like to its description, if I cover the surface with a sufficiently fine square network and now say of every square that it is white or black. In this way I shall have brought the description of the

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surface to a unified form. This form is arbitrary because I could have applied with equal success a net with a triangular or hexagonal mesh. It can happen that the description would have been simpler with the air of a triangular mesh; that is to say we might have described the surface more accurately with a triangular and coarser, than with the finer square mesh, or vice versa, and so on. (Tractatus 175) Reliance upon such forms of organization is intrinsic to the structure of human consciousness; such mediation necessarily imposes a false sense of order upon a contingent world, but the world cannot be seen without the net (Murdoch frequently refers to the story that the natives could not see Cook’s ships, because they had no conceptual framework) (Metaphysics 216). However, selfish interests and the desires of the ego frequently influence the shape of the net; consequently, the forms are often a poor ‘fit’ for the reality in view. A great disjuncture between truth and one’s impression of it can lead to poor judgement, and the actions and choices that follow from this misunderstanding can cause suffering. Moral work, then, is the process of questioning the mental forms that condition our vision of the world by positing new ones, and assessing the impressions in relation to one another. The better, more accurate, form is kept, while the poorer is discarded (the difficulties with assessing what is ‘better’ or ‘more accurate’ will be discussed shortly). Murdoch provided an example of this process in her 1962 essay, ‘The Idea of Perfection’: A woman (M) initially sees her new daughterin-law (D) as ‘undignified’ and ‘juvenile,’ but, by reassessing her own moral vocabulary – one of the forms through which people understand the world – she is eventually able to see her as ‘spontaneous’ and ‘youthful’ (17). Murdoch, abiding by Wittgensteinian tenets, was adamant that M does not adopt her new vocabulary as a consequence of a more accurate moral vision (unmediated perception is impossible); rather, she is able to perceive D differently because she has changed her vocabulary. However, there are moments within the example that suggest Murdoch did not truly believe this, and it is here that her deep-rooted resistance to Wittgenstein begins to emerge. In the passage from the Tractatus quoted directly above, Wittgenstein is ambiguous in regard to the relative worth of one ‘net’ over another. He first says the

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form is ‘arbitrary’ and that a different ‘net’ may be substituted with ‘equal’ success; however, he then appears to contradict his point by saying a different net could potentially have described the surface ‘more accurately.’ This is a paradox, because, if our only access to the world is through language, how could one ever objectively assess the accuracy of the language we use? This is one of the problems that led Wittgenstein to revise his position in the later Philosophical Investigations. Regardless, even the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus would have rejected Murdoch’s suggestion that a value word could ever be more ‘accurate’ than another, as he never relinquished his belief that moral words are either nonsensical or disguised statements of relative empirical value (a ‘good’ runner is, in fact, just a ‘faster’ runner). Murdoch, however, does not think that ‘youthful’ is just a more useful word than ‘juvenile’; she insists that it is also more accurate. As M reassesses her vocabulary, writes Murdoch, she moves closer to seeing D ‘as she really is’ (‘Idea’ 36). So, while Murdoch explicitly states that we can only see and know through mediating forms and structures, she appears to contradict herself by implicitly suggesting that individuals possess a way of seeing that is not bound by language. The vision that upsets M’s understanding of words and caused her reassessment cannot be structured by language; if it were, it would similarly be open to augmentation, and an infinite regress would occur through which M would never approach the world ‘as it is.’ If a word can ever be judged to be more accurate than another, the difficult concept of ‘pure vision’ must exist (Murdoch suggested as much when she hinted of the possibility of seeing ‘purely, without self’) (‘God’ 64). Reality, she implies, is perceived in the strange hinterland we encounter in the moments when our linguistic understanding collapses and we are briefly presented with a world beyond our comprehension, before our language adjusts and we once again relax into habit. This is the mystical element that provides the ‘background’ of her moral philosophy. The mystical aspect of her moral philosophy is further emphasized when it is understood that M’s transition from the term ‘juvenile’ to the term ‘youthful’ is not a terminal transition from one clear-cut, socially defined word to a relatively better one; as Murdoch explains in ‘The Idea of Perfection’: ‘M has confronted D with an endless task. Moral tasks are characteristically endless not only because “within,” as it were, a given concept our efforts are imperfect, but also because as

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we move and as we look our concepts themselves are changing’ (27). A properly moral individual, therefore, will be one who is never willing to rest upon the definitions provided by ‘ordinary language,’ or, indeed, those previously constructed by oneself: ‘The movement of understanding,’ said Murdoch, ‘is onward into increasing privacy, in the direction of the ideal limit, and not back towards a genesis in the rulings of an impersonal public language’ (‘Idea’ 28). Language at the ‘ideal limit’ would reflect the complexity of the fullest (mystical) level of attention: it would be fluid, in perpetual flux like the contingent world, and never permanently binding. The apparent goal, then, is to reach a stage in which language either cannot catch up with observation, or is rendered so infinitely complex that it bears no relation to what we know as language (ursprache). Murdoch sometimes said that this is an unimaginable endpoint that provides individuals with a sense of direction but could not be reached; at other times, however, such as when she described M seeing D as ‘she really is,’ she appears less sure. Thirty years after ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ Murdoch published Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, in which she finally stated explicitly the previously implied idea that, for an individual to be able to evaluate the accuracy of a linguistic statement, he or she must have access to an extra-linguistic reality. She wrote: Ordinary-life truth-seeking, a certain level of which is essential for survival, is a swift instinctive testing of innumerable kinds of coherence against innumerable kinds of extra-linguistic data…. Of course we are constantly conceptualising what confronts us, ‘making’ it into meaning, into language. But what we encounter remains free, ambiguous, endlessly contingent, and there. (195–6)

The Transcendent Good (Ontological Proof) Throughout her philosophical writing, Murdoch argued that accurate vision is a moral necessity; the closer we are to a selfless and accurate vision of the world, the less likely we are to do harm. Such a vision would destroy illusion and selfishness, remove personal prejudice, and help one to see past temptation. It would help one ‘guard one’s tongue’ and ‘expel bad thoughts’ (Metaphysics 503). In each case, however, Murdoch presents attention as suppressing or removing one’s ego

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and one’s inclination towards misguided and harmful actions, which makes one quieter and more tolerant. This is an ascetic form of morality, if such total passivity can be called ‘morality’ at all. Schopenhauer’s argument for the denial of the Will to Live is similarly dependent on a concept of unselfing, but he refused to think about the outcome in moral terms: he argued that evil is the result of individual manifestations of a cosmic Will, and one must ‘die to the world,’ utterly suppressing the ego, to escape the wheel of suffering. However, as Murdoch recognized in her Metaphysics, ‘Schopenhauer’s totally will-less state is not to be thought of as an automatic release into an unselfish condition of virtuous activity … it is above or beyond compassion and any “ordinary morals”’ (61). Murdoch, however, resisted this conclusion; she did not agree that to transcend the self is to rise above morality, as she believed that goodness, unlike evil, does not exist within the individual alone and is consequently not dependent upon human agency. This is a crucial difference between Murdoch’s ethical philosophy and the Buddhist mysticism that influenced Schopenhauer (and which often appears as the subject of light satire in Murdoch’s novels). The Buddhist ideal state of Nirvana is not a state of goodness, but of nothingness – it is beyond good and evil. Murdoch, however, felt that goodness is ontologically real; it is present in the world, and also transcends it (Plato’s influence is clear). In response to existentialism’s argument that there is ‘no point in talking of “moral seeing” since there is nothing morally to see’ (‘Idea’ 34),v Murdoch countered that there is indeed something to see, as morality has an ontological existence. Indeed, it is only in the light of a supreme Good that transcends the human that one can have any ethical comprehension whatsoever. Murdoch’s argument for the existence of the transcendent Good unfolds in this way: ‘A deep understanding of any field of human activity (painting, for instance) involves an increasing revelation of degrees of excellence’ (‘God’ 60). These increments, she insisted, are not simply understood in relation to one another, but exist in relation to an absolute standard, of which they are necessary degradations. To defend this claim, Murdoch, in her 1969 essay ‘On “God” and “Good,”’ turned to Anselm’s Ontological Proof for the existence of God: we have in our mind the idea of perfection, which Anselm calls God. This concept is a priori, not something we conjure or choose.

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It provides our understanding of ourselves as ‘selves,’ as well as our place within the world. It exists because it cannot not exist. Like the vanishing point in a perspective painting, we cannot see it, but we know it is there, because everything we know is situated in relation to it. Murdoch rejected Anselm’s use of the term ‘God’ (‘Useless confusion arises from attempts to extend the meaning of our word “God” to cover any conception of a spiritual reality’ [Metaphysics 419]), replacing it with the concept of the Good, a concept she borrows from Plato. Murdoch explained her idea of the Good in relation to Plato’s metaphor of the Sun: ‘The idea of perfection is … a natural producer of order. In its light we come to see that A, which superficially resembles B, is really better than B’ (‘God’ 60–1). The Good is the necessary foundation that presupposes moral thought, but, importantly, it also transcends thought, which is why the process of unselfing is crucial. Murdoch admitted that ‘the ontological proof is seen to be not exactly a proof but rather a clear assertion of faith’ (‘God’ 61). Indeed, in ‘On “God” and “Good,”’ she closed with an unsubstantiated plea for her readers to perform a leap of faith over the gaps in logic: Are we not certain that there is a ‘true direction’ towards better conduct, that goodness ‘really matters,’ and does not that certainty about a standard suggest an idea of permanence which cannot be reduced to psychological or any other set of empirical terms? […] This view is of course not amenable even to a persuasive philosophical proof and can easily be challenged on all sorts of empirical grounds. However, I do not think the virtuous peasant will be without resources. (59) When a philosopher starts appealing to the common sense of the ‘virtuous peasant,’ we tend to find that we are standing in a different place than we thought, but this is the logical endpoint of Murdoch’s moral philosophy: Evil and cruelty stem from our separation from and lack of knowledge of the world. Moral improvement comes from improving our understanding and closing this distance, but the consequence is that, because the self is constituted by this separateness, it tends to dissipate the closer one is to the goal of union. Evil disappears as the self dissolves, but goodness does not share its fate because, unlike evil, the good does not reside solely in the self;

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it is the essence of reality, while evil is human ignorance. The moral dimension of her entire argument, therefore, rests upon a single contention: that goodness is not a human construct, but a transcendent reality, and, in order to perceive it, one must suppress or destroy the egotistic self. Mysticism, therefore, is more than a ‘background’ to Murdoch’s moral philosophy; it is its foundation.

Murdoch’s Early Theory of Art Murdoch’s appeal to common sense should not necessarily be seen to undermine the strength of her moral philosophy. Rather, it should be accepted that Murdoch’s moral theory ventured into domains that are difficult (or impossible) to explore with the tools typically associated with philosophical writing. Consequently, Murdoch turned her attention to the potential of language within the discipline of art, where, she suggested, the mysterious and intuitive elements of experience can be more readily explored. Murdoch’s move towards the moral and spiritual potential of art and language was two-pronged: she discussed it from a distance within her philosophical writing and also worked directly with it in her creative fiction. The latter is more illuminating, but it is the former with which we shall first concern ourselves. As discussed earlier, Murdoch felt the novel had become impoverished in the first half of the twentieth century as it could no longer successfully demonstrate what George Lukacs called ‘the antagonistic duality of soul and world’ (88). The novel was either flat and ‘journalistic,’ or fantastical and ‘crystalline.’ In ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ Murdoch stated, with characteristic boldness, that ‘great’ art – she refers directly to the nineteenth-century realist novel – presents us with an accurate vision of the contingent world, and this is illustrated most clearly through its portrayal of the infinite expanse of character. The great novelists – Murdoch mentions ‘Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Tolstoy, especially Tolstoy’ (272) – were unhindered by the twentieth century’s scepticism towards the limits of language, and were consequently able to create a plethora of ‘real’ and ‘free’ characters; that is, individuals who are more than projections of the novelist’s own ego. She argued that the ‘individuals portrayed in [great] novels are free, independent of their author, and not merely puppets in the exteriorisation of some closely locked psychological

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conflict of his own’ (271). She goes so far as to argue that the writers of these novels are necessarily ‘good’ people, as their ability to create ‘free’ characters is a direct result of their capacity to suppress self in order to apprehend that other people really exist. The great author’s chief virtue is therefore ‘tolerance’ (of difference, of others), although Murdoch stated that, at its highest level, this quality looks more like love. Furthermore, it is not merely the author who approaches the good as a result of the creation of these novels; the reader is able to perceive fictional characters with a level of distance and detachment difficult to attain in their messy and engrossing lives where the stakes are so much higher. The vision of other people achieved through reading is translatable to real-life experience, so the novel can, in fact, aid one’s ability to attend to the world, which is the cornerstone of the moral life. Murdoch’s argument for the moral benefit of literature was taken up and refined in the theoretical writing of the late 1980s and 1990s by proponents of the so-called ‘ethical turn’ in literary criticism, including Wayne Booth, Cora Diamond, and Martha Nussbaum, all of whom admitted a debt to Murdoch. These critics wrote, in part, in reaction to the Anglo-American literary theory of the 1970s and 1980s, which tended towards treating texts as self-contained things, and addressing moral concerns only insofar as to reveal the linguistic assumptions and biases present within texts. While the approaches of the critics of the ethical turn vary, each considers literature as something that enters into dialogue with the real world, and that can affect the reader’s life, behaviour, and vision. This is not to say that they attempt to evaluate a novel upon the strength of its overt moral pronouncements; as Todd F. Davis insists, ‘few critics wish to return to a dogmatically prescriptive or doctrinaire form of reading’ (Davis and Womack x); instead, they explore the way texts portray moral decision-making, and the ways in which a reader’s encounter with a text challenges their ethical thinking. There are significant differences, however, between Murdoch’s early theories of art and the respective stances of the leading critics of the ‘ethical turn,’ and they serve to highlight the difficulties of Murdoch’s position. Both Booth and Nussbaum, for example, reject Murdoch’s early idea that novels present ‘real characters’ or real life. Nussbaum, who is less resistant than Murdoch to twentieth-century philosophical

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developments, insists that ‘Life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something’ [her italics] (8): [N]ovels do not function … as pieces of ‘raw’ life: they are a close and careful interpretive description. All living is interpreting; all action requires seeing the world as something. So in this sense no life is ‘raw,’ and (as James and Proust insist) throughout our living we are, in a sense, makers of fictions. (8) While both Murdoch and Nussbaum agree that literature positively aids the reader’s awareness of ‘particulars,’ Nussbaum insists that goodness is not found within these particulars, but through an individual’s response to them. Nussbaum – as an Aristotelian opposed to Murdoch’s neo-Platonism – believes ‘there is not only no single metric along which the claims of different good things can be meaningfully considered, there is not even a small plurality of such measures’ (36). As such, there is a necessary place within Nussbaum’s argument for a subjective interpretive authorial or narrative consciousness; if A is not objectively better than B, it requires a perceptive and intelligent mind to decide between them. Nussbaum goes so far as to condemn any novel that does not recognize the subjectivity of the authorial consciousness: ‘The authorial voice … reminds us that, even when we do attend, our attention, like all human attention, is interested and interpretive’ (144). Murdoch’s neo-Platonist beliefs, however, led her to reject this position as it locates goodness within individual choice or interpretation: she felt that this idea of various non-commensurable ‘goods’ likens morality to shopping (‘Idea’ 8). Murdoch, as discussed, believed that goodness exists outside human consciousness, so that A can be ‘really better than B’ (‘God’ 61). Unlike Nussbaum, she did believe in the existence of ‘raw’ life, and, if a novel presents only a personal interpretation of it, it is presenting a dangerous illusion of reality. It was this issue that led Plato to reject the moral role of the arts; he believed that fiction could not present reality, and therefore has no connection to the Good. Murdoch, however, could not bring herself to share Plato’s conclusion, which forced a dilemma: If form and language inhibits perception of reality, how can a novel, comprised of these very things, aid one’s understanding of the Good?

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In her early essays, she was only able to offer an unconvincing solution: accepting that ‘Art has got to have form, whereas life need not’ (‘Sublime’ 285), she stated: Our sense of form, which is an aspect of our desire for consolation, can be a danger to our sense of reality as a rich receding background… Against the consolations of form … we must pit the destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic idea of character. (‘Against’ 294) Form, she contended, does not have to operate as a prison, but can be a ‘house fit for free characters to live in’ (‘Sublime’ 295). This argument, however, is indefensible. Language itself, as Murdoch herself insisted, is one of the ‘forms’ that limit our perception of reality, and literary characters are, of course, presented, described, and contained entirely within language. The claim, then, that characters can somehow transcend the very conditions of their fictional existence is groundless, even when considered in relation to Murdoch’s own understanding of language.

The Problem of Authority The development and improvement of Murdoch’s argument concerning the moral benefit of literature can be seen within the formal experimentation of her novels of the 1970s. The nature of these innovations suggests that she grew to consider the central problem of the contemporary novel to be the issue of narrative and linguistic authority. ‘Few questions are more important than: “Who is the boss?”’ declares Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) (216). As discussed, Murdoch believed that error is inherent any time one resolutely adheres to a single perspective or reading of a situation, or to a rigid definition of a word, as moral improvement comes from an understanding of the complex, flexible nature of any given situation. In the nineteenth-century novel, multiple and conflicting perspectives on a situation or individual could be provided by the differing views of separate characters. This could, of course, still be attempted in the twentieth-century novel, but the era’s self-consciousness meant that neither reader nor writer was able to overlook the fact

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that these seemingly different perspectives remained the creations of a single dominating authorial consciousness. When Murdoch takes the omniscient position, she sometimes appears to attempt to compensate for her limited perspective by clumsily grasping for a god-like descriptive comprehensiveness; an example of this can be seen in her much-criticized tendency to pile up premodifiers, usually in threes, but often in fours or fives:vi a bag is not just a bag, but a ‘little brown silk woven vanity bag’ (Murdoch, Honourable 35); a towel is not a towel but a ‘crispy starchy embroidered face towel’ (Murdoch, Honourable 44); a table is not a table but a ‘long solid burly wooden table’ (Murdoch, Good 109). However, this habit tended only to remind the reader of the struggling and limited humanity of the narrator. It is tempting, in light of Murdoch’s philosophy of language, to consider this awkwardness intentional. A defence of this argument can be made by observing the ambivalence in contemporary scholarship towards Murdoch’s ‘failings.’ Philip Hensher’s introduction to the 2001 Vintage edition A Fairly Honourable Defeat is a good example of this, as it describes Murdoch as ‘undeniably facile’ (ix), and her entire opus as ‘vulgar, careless, embarrassing’ (xv), while admitting it also has a ‘magnetic force’ (ix), and is ‘big, nourishing, grand’ (xv). It is unusual to find such stern criticism in a place normally reserved for unreserved praise, yet Hensher argues that Murdoch’s flaws are in fact part of her success. He writes that, without them, Murdoch would not have been better, but ‘more ordinary’ (x): ‘It is largely for the self-obsessed fecundity of spirit that we read her, and not in a wish for careful perfection’ (x). Peter J. Conradi elaborates on this claim in his book The Saint and the Artist: [Murdoch’s] style deliberately defaults on the demand that it be narcissistically ‘perfect’ and austere, in the interests of the human truths to which it points. The books are wounded so that their meanings can, as it were, leak back into life rather than create a hermetically sealed world. (371) While this argument is, of course, impossible to prove, it is compelling when seen in light of Murdoch’s later novels, written not in the traditional omniscient mode, but from more overtly experimental perspectives.

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In the 1970s, Murdoch began to experiment overtly with narrative perspective and authority, in order to create a novel that would be neither ‘crystalline’ nor ‘journalistic,’ and would resonate with her idea of what ‘good’ art should be. While some of these manipulations employ traditional devices, such as the unreliable narrator of The Black Prince, some, including An Accidental Man (1971), A Word Child (1975), and The Sea, The Sea (1978), use more subtly experimental approaches to the problem of narrative authority. An Accidental Man represents Murdoch’s first major attempt to confront these difficulties formally. The effort is largely unsuccessful, but served as an important step towards her more successful later novels. Murdoch’s awareness that language can only interpret and never present reality led her to envision a novel not dominated by any single authoritative voice, so that no single utterance is allowed to create the illusion of imparting ‘truth.’ She explained in a 1968 interview, prior to beginning the novel, that she was considering the creation of a work ‘entirely composed of peripheral characters with no main characters’ (as in real life) (‘Lively’). In a 1971 interview, she confirmed that An Accidental Man was the product of this venture, ‘a deliberate attempt to exclude the central nucleus and to have a lot of different attachments pulling the plot and the interest away into further corners’ (‘Now’). The apparent goal was to disturb the two central organizing consciousnesses that underpin every novel – that of the central character, and that of the author – in order to create a more ‘accidental’ novel that reflects the contingent nature of reality. Murdoch hoped that, without a central character’s consciousness dominating the novel, different characters would vie for centrality, and the form and content of the novel would twist and turn accordingly. Indeed, it is difficult to decide who is the central character of An Accidental Man, although there is, unavoidably, a central group. To enforce the notion that the members of this group are just a random selection, Murdoch fills the novel with minor characters, many of whom never really enter into the narrative at all, existing only in offhand references. The final three pages of the novel, for example, reference no fewer than twenty-seven different characters, some for the first time. Nonetheless, these mystery figures appear to be important to the main characters, and some appear to be having novel-worthy experiences of their own: a couple has brought a mysterious stranger back to London from their holiday; a young woman has been diagnosed with

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cancer; another has fallen in love with a female acrobat. To mention such events so casually provides the reader with the illusion that the novel could very easily have widened or altered its focus on the ‘world’ displayed within it, and that such an alteration would have greatly altered the seeming importance of one character over another. In doing so, Murdoch partly achieves her goal of denying a single character the right to serve as controlling consciousness of her novel. Murdoch appears aware, however, that this technique does not solve the real problem, which is that of the novel’s ultimate authority: the author. Therefore, she also had to attempt to remove her own voice. To do this, she employed not Flaubertian elision, but two more obvious devices that allow the characters to speak without overt authorial intrusion. While the philosophical impetus to apply these devices is somewhat original, the devices themselves hearken back to literary forms that precede the modern novel. Several chapters are written in the epistolary style, with a barrage of undated and sometimes unsigned letters placed one after the other with no authorial commentary. Other chapters feature nothing but line after line of non-attributed and largely non-contextualised stichomythic dialogue that resembles drama. Both forms resist the omniscient narrative voice; instead, the reader encounters language much as he or she would encounter it in life: as the flawed and personally formed utterances of imperfect individuals. However, the approach is unsuccessful in evoking or even gesturing towards the contingent world. This can be partially attributed to the ways in which these sections differ from our usual encounter with subjective pronouncements in our lives: we rarely encounter letters without a knowledge of the recipient or context, for example; we also never encounter dialogic utterances that have been severed from the tone or body language of the speakers. In dayto-day life, Murdoch wrote, an individual is able to move beyond the limitations of language and approach the Good by attending to the world that exists beyond the constraints of self and language. An Accidental Man allows no room for this world – or a useful illusion of this world – to appear. In these passages, there is nothing to be ‘seen’ or known except words; we are provided only with a Beckettian encounter with disembodied language. This effect contributes to the overall dourness of An Accidental Man, a novel that Valentine Cunningham describes as Murdoch’s

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‘most discomfited and most discomforting’ novel due to its ‘arrestingly awesome’ pessimism and bleakness (vii). She suggests rightly that the magnitude of the novel’s negativity makes it unique among Murdoch’s oeuvre (vii–viii). That An Accidental Man is also her most stylistically experimental work suggests that the novel’s formal properties may have contributed in some way to this darkness. Murdoch, in An Accidental Man, erects an impenetrable wall of language that allowed no suggestion of an ineffable ‘reality’ lurking beyond. While the experimental sections comprise only a portion of the narrative, the negative impressions of language they convey reflect outwards upon the entire work; the reader cannot help but see that the whole novel is constructed of words that refer not to elements of real life, but to a fictional world that does not exist outside the trappings of its creation.

The Metafictional Aspects of A Word Child There was an uncharacteristic two-year gap between An Accidental Man (1971) and her next novel, The Black Prince (1973); and, judging by the latter novel’s drastically different formal structure, it appears that Murdoch herself was not entirely satisfied by the experiment of An Accidental Man. In her first thirteen novels, Murdoch had used a first-person narrator only three times, and, in each case, the device was used inconspicuously;vii in comparison, three of the five novels that followed An Accidental Man use a first-person narrator, and, in each case, the novels directly confront the difficulties that arise from presenting a world through the subjective gaze of a deluded and manipulative consciousness. She allows these narratives to become dominated by characters that have no reservations towards treating language as a stable, transparent, and dominant authority. Once she had accepted the impossibility of eliding authority, Murdoch changed her approach, and chose instead to draw negative attention to it. The post-Accidental Man novels are characterized by an acceptance that literature cannot aspire to present ‘real’ people, and should instead acknowledge itself as a ‘kind of magic’ that can ‘inhibit magic in its more familiar and consoling uses’ (Murdoch, Metaphysics 104). A novel can do this apophatically: it can be formed – or, more

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accurately, punctured – so that ‘reality’ can be glimpsed through the holes punched in its illusion: The art object points beyond itself, the world is seen beyond it, somewhat as the artist saw it when he attempted his statement, although of course he is not just copying the world. The art object is porous or cracked, another reality flows through it, it is in tension between a clarified statement and a confused pointing, and is in danger if it goes too far either way. (Metaphysics 88) The artist, explained Murdoch, is a person who fashions work that accepts the limitations of vision and then capitalizes upon them. It is beyond literature’s ability to contain an individual or to discuss the metaphysical realm, but it is able indirectly to reveal, or at least gesture towards, these ineffable realities. As Alain Badiou wrote, ‘the maxim of art-thought is simple: To produce something finite (artificial) to rival the infinite (natural)’ (36). Hilary Burde is not explicitly the writer of A Word Child in the way that Charles Arrowby is the writer of The Sea, The Sea or Bradley Pearson is the writer of The Black Prince, but his first-person narration has a similar (if not greater) degree of control over the composition of the narrative. Hilary Burde is a philologist who explicitly propones the view of language that inadvertently gave rise to the pessimism of An Accidental Man. He is not concerned with the possibility of a world beneath the net of words; he is only interested in language as a self-contained and totalizing system, and ‘never became concerned with the metaphysical aspects’ (23). He rejects ‘fluffy vague’ words, believing that, when studied properly, language is as precise as math and ‘did not yield’ to the contingent world (22). The irony is that, as a fictional narrator of a fictional world, Hilary is correct. As there is no contingency in his world, only the illusion of it, there is nothing for his language to ‘yield’ to. His world exists only in his description. Murdoch is conscious of this, and plays with this idea throughout the novel. Unlike The Black Prince, A Word Child does not attempt to impart any information other than that thought or experienced directly by Hilary, and very little attempt is made at providing, through irony or implication, the unstated thoughts or motivations of others. This leads Hilary to have an extreme level of control over

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the presentation of events. His explanations and perspectives do not ‘yield’ to the world he describes; how could they, when there is no world outside his description? Anything Hilary describes is necessarily the truth, as long as he says nothing to contradict it. Murdoch employs several devices in the novel to emphasize the extent of Hilary’s control. She brazenly indulges in the pathetic fallacy throughout the novel: each time Hilary emerges from a closed environment into the London streets, the weather is described in detail and, without fail, it reflects his mood. After ‘bad dreams’ it is ‘a cold day with a lot of low scurrying brown clouds and a bitterly cold wind’ (129). After receiving a liberating letter from Lady Kitty that leaves Hilary feeling ‘extraordinary,’ the ‘fog had gone, to be replaced by a vivid russet-yellow light, cloud almost pierced by sun, which lent bright but strange colours to all things visible’ (177). On the day Gunnar visits Crystal, the weather, ‘which had seemed to be as cold as it could be, had suddenly become even colder and the sky had assumed a thick gathered grey congested awfulness which betokened snow’ (294). At first, only two explanations seem to present themselves: either Murdoch is naïvely and unknowingly indulging in the fallacy or Hilary’s mood is affecting his perception of the weather. The former is unlikely, as the error is uncharacteristic. If we try to prove the latter hypothesis, however, one finds it impossible to do so. One cannot argue convincingly that an ‘unreliable narrator’ is imparting questionable empirical information if there is no evidence in the text that he is lying. Our scepticism towards the unnatural correlation between mood and weather has been aroused not by anything in the text itself, but by our conviction that real life is ‘not like that.’ But we cannot do this, as we can only evaluate the veracity of a character’s claims in relation to the novel’s internal verisimilitude. In these passages, Murdoch evokes G.E. Moore’s paradox, which gained prominence through its treatment in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: ‘It’s raining outside, but I don’t believe it is.’ The difficulty of the sentence is not that there is faulty information in the statement – it may be raining outside, and I may not believe it – but that it is absurd to make such a pronouncement in the firstperson. When presented in the third-person – ‘It’s raining outside, but John doesn’t believe it is’ – the statement is not absurd. Wittgenstein considered the problem to be related to the word ‘believe.’ He argued that the first clause – ‘it’s raining outside’ – is also an assertion of

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belief, even if the word ‘believe’ is absent; the things we know are necessarily things we believe in. Consequently, the sentence could be rewritten to read ‘I believe it’s raining outside, but I don’t believe it’s raining outside,’ which transforms the sentence into a simple contradiction. The problem disappears when presented in the thirdperson, because, as such, the statement merely presents two sets of beliefs held by two different people: John’s belief that it is not raining, and the speaker’s belief that it is raining.viii While one person is certainly wrong (providing that the two share a common object), the statement itself is not paradoxical. When spoken in the first-person, however, the statement implies that one person (the speaker) is holding the two contradictory beliefs, which is nonsensical. The presence of this allusion in Murdoch’s narrative emphasizes her understanding that a) linguistic pronouncements are always subjective statements of belief, and b) the validity of our beliefs/assertions cannot be tested in monologue. To be tested, they must either enter into dialogue with the assertions of others or, ideally, confront extralinguistic information (see the above example of M and D). Because the novel’s world is not accessible (and does not exist) outside Hilary’s pronouncements, his assertions can never be tested, and therefore can never be considered to be false. Hilary is not, therefore, an unreliable narrator; in fact, Murdoch throws the entire concept into question. For a narrator to be unreliable, the reader must assume that there is a ‘reality’ beyond what the speaker says. The reader suspects, for example, that the Duke of Ferrara murdered his wife, even if the Duke refuses to admit it. The reader’s suspicion of him is raised by implicative or contradictory statements in the poem, which gives the reader the sensation (and only the sensation) of perceiving the ‘truth’ through the cracks in what he says. Murdoch’s playful twisting of the ‘unreliable narrator’ convention serves to expose this illusion; it critiques the artifice of fiction itself, and, by extension, the limitations of language. As with An Accidental Man, the experiments of A Word Child emphasize that fiction cannot present the real world: any sense of a ‘reality’ beyond what is said is nothing more than fantasy generated through textual implication and projected by the reader. The reader of A Word Child eventually grows aware that the very content, form, and structure of the novel and its fictional universe is entirely at the whim of Hilary’s pronouncements. For example: Hilary structures his life around an unalterable seven-day routine,

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which, he explains, ‘gave a comforting sense of absolute subjection to history and time’ (27). This schedule provides the formal structure for the entire novel: the first chapter is headed ‘Thursday,’ and describes only the events of that day. The second is ‘Friday,’ the third ‘Saturday,’ and so on. The novel itself aligns itself to Hilary’s perspective to such an extent that, because Hilary believes nothing happens on Sundays, they are left out of the narrative for the first two cycles. These days disappear altogether; they are never referred to after the fact, or reflected upon, as if the day never existed at all. This is reminiscent of Georgina Hogg, in Muriel Spark’s more overtly metafictional novel The Comforters (1957), who literally disappears whenever not in contact with the main characters. The extent of Hilary’s control over the composition of the novel’s internal universe is similarly emphasized in the novel’s dénouement. The story, for the most part, follows the traditional narrative arc of a tragedy, climaxing in the death of Kitty. Yet, after Kitty’s death near the end of the novel, Hilary declares (echoing Murdoch’s claim in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals): ‘[I]t was not a tragedy…. Tragedy belongs in art. Life has no tragedies’ (382).ix Once Hilary has made this proclamation, the novel abruptly changes its structure and tone. It breaks from its repetitive days-of-the-week structure, and concludes with two sections entitled, respectively, ‘Christmas Eve’ and ‘Christmas Day.’ The dramatic alteration of structure and tone in this section is emphasized by the altered print-style of the chapter headings, which are written in a large, comic font reminiscent of pulp magazine mastheads, in contrast to the simple capitalized headings of all preceding sections. These chapters eschew the foreboding tone of the preceding chapters, and take on the frothy character of romance novels; they concern themselves only with three weddings: those of Arthur and Crystal, Biscuit and Christopher, and Hilary and Tommy. By declaring that his narrative was not a tragedy, Hilary transforms the story into a comedy.

Negative Assertions in A Word Child Unlike an Accidental Man, however, A Word Child does not lead the reader to dismiss the relevance of fiction to the reader’s experience of the real world. Rather, it provides an important reformulation of how both novelist and reader should approach both the creation

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and the experience of fiction. Murdoch appears to have realized that the question should not be ‘what can fiction teach us about reality?’ but ‘what can fiction teach us about fiction?’ This does not mean that reality has disappeared from Murdoch’s equation, but that she has realized it can only be approached apophatically, existing in the cracks of her ‘porous’ text. The success of A Word Child is partly due to the fact that it carefully and consciously treats the problem of language as a theme, whereas in An Accidental Man it appeared more as the accidental by-product of a failed experiment to excise the problem of narrative authority. Wittgenstein suggested in the Tractatus that philological study would reveal that the only problems language can solve are the problems of language. Once this has been realized, one could approach the silent metaphysical world and kick away the linguistic ladder that led to the realization. This endeavour is enacted in A Word Child within Hilary’s endless verbal examinations of the novel’s conflicts. Large sections of A Word Child are devoted to endless lists of questions, as Hilary naïvely seeks, through linguistic logic alone, to find explanations for events. After having a dream about Crystal’s death, Hilary asks himself: Whatever should I do if Crystal died?... Did she really know how she felt? Did she really know what it would mean? Did she imagine that she could marry Arthur and still have me? Was I not being stupidly heroic about the whole business? Should I not simply, as I had said to Clifford, prevent it? (83–4) As the novel progresses, these passages of neurotic self-questioning expand dramatically in length. During the final Saturday section, there is a paragraph in which, in the space of twenty-six lines, Hilary asks twelve questions and proposes six different and unresolved hypotheses regarding his relationship with Kitty and Gunnar. The majority of the second half of the novel is taken up by such cyclical conjecture. Despite Hilary’s faith in the all-encompassing power of language, he does not manage to find convincing or stable answers for his questions; they only generate more questions because they are seeking answers that exist beyond language. After each burst of self-questioning, he escapes the loop only by dismissing the path of enquiry and either focusing his attention outwards or replacing

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speculation with random and unpredictable demonstrations of will. For example, the ‘haze of black thoughts round [his] head’ (84) caused by Hilary’s questions regarding Crystal is ‘pierced and dispelled’ (84) only by the distracting appearance of Biscuit. The lengthier passage of questions regarding Kitty and Gunnar ends when Hilary illogically asserts that, regardless of the details of the situation, he must see Kitty. Only then does he come ‘to some sort of conclusion’ regarding the matter, and becomes ‘able to set [the problem] aside’ (334). The implication is that purely linguistic thinking, conducted in isolation and without awareness of the world, cannot shed light on reality; it is an enclosed system, going round and round like the Inner Circle line which Hilary rides for pleasure. To get to one’s destination, one needs to disembark; language can only process itself, and cannot touch the world that exists apart from it. However, A Word Child, unlike An Accidental Man, does not end on this dour note. Murdoch, like early Wittgenstein, suggests that the limitations of language do not deny the existence of a realm that cannot be contained or approached in words. While a novel cannot present this vision of reality, it can help the reader map language’s limited territory in order to reveal its borders. This is implied throughout the novel by emphasizing the restrictions of Hilary’s worldview, but made explicit in a scene in which Christopher drugs Hilary without his knowledge; in his hallucinogenic haze, he relates the following: I was looking at the kettle. I had never really noticed it properly before. It is odd how one lives among things and fails to notice them. Yet each thing is an individual with a deep and wonderful being of its own. The kettle was shiny and blue, glittering like a star in the bright electric light. It was a strange blue, injected somehow with black, reminding me of something. I had never noticed before how black a blue could be and yet remain blue. In fact the kettle was both black and blue all over at the same time which I had been told was impossible. Only of course it was possible since the colour was not really in the kettle. Whoever thought colours were in things? Colours surge out of things and stray about in clouds, in waves, yes in waves, is not everything supposed to be made up of waves. I could see the waves. The kettle was glowing and vibrating rhythmically and I was glowing and vibrating with it. (297)

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In this passage Murdoch emphasizes the role of attention in overcoming the limitations of language, and links it to a mystical awareness and union with the physical world. Hilary realizes that the sensory information transmitted by the world is not received without distortion; organizing systems within his mind and body alter the information. The kettle can have a single colour, and yet be both ‘black’ and ‘blue.’ This is because the kettle remains stable while the language used to describe it changes. Hilary then realizes that, when he perceives the colour of the kettle, he is not even seeing the kettle’s colour but rather the light waves that have bounced off the object and then been received and translated by his sensory organs. This light exists not in the kettle, or within himself, but in ‘waves’ that oscillate between them, and the structure of its waves is formed by the physical structure of the kettle and interpreted by the construction of his eyes. This realization does not put Hilary in contact with the kettle ‘as it is,’ but his growing awareness causes him to reassess his understanding of the relationship between himself and the world, improving his ability to attend properly. The light, in this sense, can be understood as a metaphor for language. Hilary learns that language is not ‘in things’ but ‘between’ himself and the world. If one could ‘see the waves,’ one would understand that words are but one element of the fluctuating relationship between self and world, which would temper resolute adherence to language as truth. But do we, the readers, learn anything from the kettle? We, after all, have not seen a kettle at all, but only Hilary’s description of it. Murdoch’s choice of a kettle as the object of Hilary’s mystical revelation suggests another Wittgensteinian allusion that helps to answer this question. In his later Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes, ‘If water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot and also pictured steam comes out of [a] pictured pot. But what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture of the pot?’ (101e). Wittgenstein is drawing attention to the human propensity to assume hidden elements beyond what is explicitly shown or stated, an idea that resonates with Murdoch’s critique of the ‘unreliable narrator’ device. Wittgenstein’s question reveals the human tendency to conflate a representation of a thing with the thing itself. A Word Child is not showing the world, but a representation of a world, and any sensation that the novel presents

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a world beyond the words that appear on the page is an illusion. But, as the later Wittgenstein argued, this does not render the representation useless. He relates the steaming kettle to a crying man: A public moan, he argues, is not related to a private pain in the same way that real steam is related to real boiling water. When we see steam, we can assume boiling water; however, when we hear a human cry we cannot assume the existence of pain. Nonetheless, we often do make this assumption. The implication is that hearing someone cry and assuming they are in pain is actually more like seeing a painting of a kettle and assuming it contains water. The obvious difference is that a cry can be a symptom of real pain, while painted steam cannot be an indication of water. This does not change the fact, however, that our experience with a representation is not totally unlike the experience of our day-to-day encounters with real people. Murdoch only hints at the implications of this analogy in A Word Child, but in The Sea, The Sea, written three years later, she explored in greater depth the benefits, dangers, and methods of living with illusions, and the complex overlap between experiencing fiction and fictionalizing experience.

Reflective Structure in The Sea, The Sea Murdoch first attempted a first-person ‘writer’ text in her novel The Black Prince (1973), which followed An Accidental Man. Bradley Pearson, arrested for murder, writes, in the form of a novel, the events of his life that led up to the death of his friend Arnold Baffin, in order to vindicate himself from blame. Pearson, however, is manipulating the truth within his novel, and this is emphasized in the appendix, in which other characters offer their criticisms and corrections of Pearson’s narrative. The novel is considered one of Murdoch’s finest – Peter Conradi describes it as an ‘extraordinary achievement’ (Conradi, Saint 233) – but, compared to the formal experimentation of An Accidental Man and A Word Child, The Black Prince is structurally conservative. The strength of the work stems from its plot, characters, and themes, rather than from its traditional ‘unreliable narrator’ structure. As Lorna Sage has written, the core of the novel would, for the most part, operate unaffected if this formal device was removed: it ‘could have been told in the omniscient third person – there would have been much lost in the way of local effect, but nothing of consequence in “placing” the story as a whole’ (70).

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The same cannot be said of The Sea, The Sea. In The Black Prince, the events described in the novel are in Pearson’s past, and he has had sufficient time to absorb them, alter them, and set them on paper. He claims, ‘I shall, that is, inhabit my past self and, for the ordinary purposes of story-telling, speak only with the apprehensions of that time, a time in many ways so different from the present,’ but he also admits that his ‘later wisdom … will not be absent from the story’ (xii). The Sea, The Sea, on the other hand, while also a first-person ‘writer’ text, is written, for the most part, from within the events described in the work. Its form and temporal perspective is never rigid, but constantly fluctuates: it is at different points described as a diary, a memoir, a novel, and a philosophical rumination. Unlike The Black Prince, the form remains in constant flux, so that the novel is able to illustrate the process of living with language, of reflection, reappraisal, and self-doubt in a way that the earlier novel was unable to achieve. This shows that we can, to a degree, test the validity of our claims in monologue, as monologue occurs over time, allowing us to cast a backward look over our changing beliefs. Charles Arrowby has retired to a house by the sea, longing for a mystic’s asceticism ‘where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good’ (2). He speaks of becoming a ‘hermit’ (1), and his desire to ‘repent of egoism’ (3); he longs to remove the attachments that bind and blind him to others. He wishes to relinquish magic, Prospero-like: ‘Have I abjured that magic, drowned my book? Forgiven my enemies? The surrender of power, the final change of magic into spirit?’ (39).x In the first section, entitled ‘Pre-History,’ he adopts a loose stream-of-consciousness form that is fitting to his spiritual goal; he allows his writing to contain his ever-changing thoughts and reflections, and this section, for the most part, resists the drive towards comprehensiveness and singularity of language and mind. He writes: Of course there is no need to separate ‘memoir’ from ‘diary’ or ‘philosophical journal.’ I can tell you, reader, about my past life and about my ‘world-view’ also, as I ramble along. Why not? It can all come out naturally as I reflect. Thus unanxiously (for am I not now leaving anxiety behind?) I shall discover my ‘literary form.’ (2) Charles reads and re-reads his previous entries, which leads him to question and reconfigure his statements and beliefs: ‘Rereading these

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paragraphs I feel again that I am giving the wrong impression. What a difficult form autobiography is proving to be!’ (63). The form aids his realization of the problems of language: he is enacting Wittgenstein’s suggestion that progression comes from an increased awareness of the character of language, without settling into its conventions. However, as internal and external forces begin to threaten Charles’ world – he is haunted by repressed demons from his unconscious, as well as by individuals he has unknowingly harmed throughout his life – he quickly begins to realize that rigidly formalizing his past and present views within his writing can relieve his anxiety. He writes about his terrifying hallucination of a sea-monster, and, the next morning, pens the following: ‘I slept well after writing about my monster and I still think my explanation is the right one. Anyway he recedes and the horror has gone away. Perhaps it did me good to write it all down’ (22). Charles begins to calm other worries through the act of writing. He sets down in print that the troubling noise in the attic is caused by rats, although it is later revealed that the scuffling was made by Rosina Vamburgh, who has stowed away in Charles’ house in an attempt to ‘haunt’ her ex-lover. Charles then begins to take pleasure, like Hilary Burde, from the aesthetic attraction of language itself, a severe shift away from his early insistence that he will ‘make no attempt at “fine writing,” for fear it will spoil my enterprise’ (2). He begins to take pride in his ability to encapsulate his friends in tidy little prose descriptions, although he initially admits that they lack veracity: ‘I have been looking back over my little sketch of James and it is quite stylish. Is it true however? Well, it is not totally misleading, but it is far too short and “smart”’ (67). By the ‘History’ section, Charles has rejected all of his doubts regarding his work’s ability to capture the world: ‘This novelistic memoir, as it has now become, is however, as far as its facts are concerned (though, as James would say, what indeed are facts?), accurate and truthful’ (239). After Charles meets Hartley, his projected delusions begin to permeate every aspect of his experience; eventually he comes to see his writing not as a memoir, or even as a ‘novelistic memoir,’ but, simply, as a novel. He writes: So much has been happening, I thought I would write it as a continuous narrative without too many reversions to the present

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tense. So I am writing my life, after all, as a novel! Why not? It was a matter of finding a form, and somehow history, my history, has found a form for me. (153) Most of the second half of the book, until the postscript, is ostensibly written in a single burst of energy, several months after the events described. There is consequently little reflection here. Charles attempts to force a contingent and unruly world into a closed narrative form; the form parallels his mental impulse to ignore any details that complicate or undermine his self-centred desires, and the catastrophic events that occur near the end of the work – Charles’ near-death experience, and Titus’ drowning – appear to be the direct result of this ignorance, of this book. Immorality has stemmed from inattention. Unlike The Black Prince, Charles’ shifting placement within the book’s temporal arc allows Murdoch to illustrate how the linguistic reworking of past experience does not just provide personal consolation regarding prior events, but also colours his future behaviour. Charles does not only use writing to cope with his obsession for Hartley; his infatuation appears, in fact, to have been partially manufactured by the act of literary creation. In the book’s early pages he states that he intends to tell the story of his long relationship with Clement Makin, which, he later admits, ‘made me’ (484). However, various unresolved issues surrounding this complex relationship – Clement was at least twenty years older than Charles – lead Charles to avoid its discussion. Instead, while ruminating on his seemingly idyllic childhood, he begins, randomly, to discuss Mary Hartley Smith, his first love. Although Charles begins the account of this relationship by admitting that his feelings are ‘nebulous’ and ‘untellable’ (78), they are quickly absorbed into a rigid and traditional tale of lost love and innocence (77).xi When, by sheer coincidence, Charles encounters his childhood love in the village the day after writing this passage, the newly written and romanticized account of their relationship asserts itself as truth in his mind, and the rest of the book emerges as an attempted continuation of ‘writing’ the relationship, until the disparity between reality and illusion becomes too much to bear and Charles is forced to relinquish the novel form and settle back into a reflective and fluid narrative structure. As Charles’

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cousin James later informs him, the whole romantic drama occurred because Charles made the relationship ‘into a story and stories are false’ (335). By the end of the book, Charles has learned to abandon his false view of his childhood relationship with Hartley, but Murdoch does not go so far as to imply that he has travelled the Platonic road from ignorance to truth; his mental state in the closing pages of the novel is not one of enlightenment. The end of the ‘History’ section appears to depict Charles experiencing a moment of lucid vision: throughout the novel, he has been frustrated by his inability to see the seals that, he is told, populate the waters surrounding Shruff End. James often chides Charles for this, as if it is a sign of his self-centredness. Finally, however, the seals appear to him: I had a moment of sheer fear as I turned and leaned towards the sea edge. Then I saw below me, their wet doggy faces looking curiously upward, four seals, swimming so close to the rock that I could almost have touched them. I looked down at their pointed noses only a few feet below, their dripping whiskers, their bright inquisitive round eyes, and the lithe and glossy grace of their wet backs. They curved and played a while, gulping and gurgling a little, looking up at me all the time. And as I watched their play I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me. (476) Despite the serene tone of this passage, there are several suggestions that Charles has not achieved any form of mystical unselfing. ‘I’ and ‘me’ are used eleven times in these eight lines, and the final phrase (‘visit me and bless me’) suggests that Charles’ vision has not come from loosening his linguistic control over his vision of the world, but instead from a feeling that the whole world has adjusted itself to him. Murdoch was not content to let this irony speak for itself; she tagged a postscript onto the book, entitled ‘Life Goes On.’ This section, again narrated by Charles, begins: That no doubt is how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance,

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in calm of mind, all passion spent. However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after… Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us. (477) Charles spends the following pages realizing misconceptions and creating new ones. He accepts James’ passing, then begins bizarrely to conjecture that James has faked his own death. He begins to realize that Hartley was hardly a god-like figure – he describes her as ‘not really very intelligent’ (489) and ‘untidy, frowzy, dirty, old’ (492) – but also seemingly re-deifies her by calling these statements ‘blasphemies’ (491). Charles, despite his realizations, is still writing, still creating fictions, despite the less rigid structure of the postscript. Near the end of the book, Charles writes: What an egoist I must seem in the preceding pages. But am I so exceptional? We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason. Thus we must live unless we are saints, and are there any? There are spiritual beings, perhaps James was one, but there are no saints. Well, I will try to reflect, but not today. When this is all done, will I ever write anything else? The story of Clement? Or that book about the theatre that my friends kindly profess to think so necessary? Or shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies? There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the whole world. (482) Charles appears to have accepted Murdoch’s later view of art as a necessary ‘magic’ endeavour that nonetheless manages to illuminate.

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Charles mentions Shakespeare, who, as Murdoch herself insisted, creates ‘magic,’ but in an ideal form that ‘does not shrink reality,’ and is able to ‘inhibit magic in its more familiar and consoling uses’ (Metaphysics 104).

The Ideal Limit of Literature In The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch developed a formal structure that allowed her to show language in both its limiting and reflexive capacities. While Charles’ development is not linear (he learns and he regresses), the changing forms within the novel demonstrate a graded span of language use – sometimes rigid, sometimes reflexive – that evokes Murdoch’s claim, discussed earlier, that ‘The movement of understanding is onward into increasing privacy, in the direction of the ideal limit, and not back towards a genesis in the rulings of an impersonal public language’ (‘Idea’ 28). This ‘ideal limit,’ towards which Charles stumbles and regresses, is a state of mystical attention in which perception is not constricted by static language or form. The variety of uses of language in The Sea, The Sea help Murdoch address, for the first time, the concept of the ‘ideal limit’; that is, the possibility of attaining unhindered knowledge of an ultimate Good. She does this, not through Charles, but through his cousin James, upon whom, Elizabeth Dipple argues, ‘rests the deep infrastructure of the book’ (275). Charles’ cousin, James, is attempting to become Murdoch’s ideal mystic. He is an ex-soldier who spent a great deal of time in Tibet, developing a Buddhist faith and an interest in mysticism. He is described as having an almost otherworldly detachment, but with an intense understanding of and attention to the natural world. Peter J. Conradi, in his book Going Buddhist (2001), argues that James’ Buddhism greatly resembles Murdoch’s moral philosophy (140). James says that Buddhists see human beings as imprisoned in the wheel of samsara, a cycle of death and rebirth into a cage-like world of attachment (384). The goal is, by relinquishing attachments, to escape the wheel into a state of nirvana, which, James insists, is a state of absolute goodness. The character of James greatly resembles Matthew in An Accidental Man, who also spent time in an Eastern monastery, and was drawn back to London by his attachment to a relative: in his case, his brother Austin. Both characters are collectors of pottery and carvings, which

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suggests they are concerned less with art that reflects the contingent world than with an ideal and otherworldly ‘crystalline’ perfection. James and Matthew are both motivated by the idea of the transcendent good but remain frustrated by the earthly limitations of self, language, and contingency; they are ‘in no mood for second bests’ (Accidental 104). Matthew left the monastery because he believed that he was incapable of escaping self and could consequently only ‘play … at the contemplative life’ (103). James also considers himself tied to ‘The Wheel’ through his unshakeable attachments to others, and admits to causing harm through his past loves; he appears, for example, to have indirectly caused the death of a beloved Sherpa named Milarepa through a vain gesture to impress him. It is also suggested that James may have somehow drawn Titus to Shruff End – and consequently to his death – in order to please his cousin. Matthew never rises above An Accidental Man’s pessimism. The impenetrable wall of speech in that novel leads Matthew to a spiritual dead end; he is left, at the novel’s end, trapped in the net of language: Matthew knew with a sigh that he would never be a hero. Nor would he ever achieve the true enlightenment. Neither the longer way nor the shorter way was for him. He would be until the end of his life a man looking forward to his next drink. He looked at his watch and drifted down to the bar. (372) The Sea, The Sea provides a more positive conclusion: James attains the ‘ideal limit,’ although he does so by stopping his own heart. Murdoch does not discount the mysterious existence of the ‘ideal limit,’ but she also admits that the telos of her philosophy is unimaginable and undepictable; she is only able to hint at it playfully (and with a hint of self-mockery) through James’ death.xii The depiction of James within Murdoch’s narrative, particularly seen in relation to her portrayal of Matthew in An Accidental Man, suggests a belated and benign acceptance of the incompatibility of daily existence and mystical knowledge of the good. In The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch confidently accepts the limits of her art (and, indeed, human experience as a whole), but she has reached a position in which these restrictions no longer cause her to doubt the existence of an ineffable world beyond. She realizes that the longing for this unworldly world

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must be balanced with a sympathetic eye towards the fallibility of human experience; she consequently chooses to depict the enlightened James as strangely and off-puttingly inhuman: she colours her description with details such as his ability to perform mental magic tricks create people with his mind, and climb on walls with his strange prehensile feet. Murdoch ends The Sea, The Sea on another tongue-in-cheek note, this time in reference to the unattainable perfect art form that results from unimaginable perfect vision. At the end of the novel it is revealed that James, like Charles (and Murdoch), is an author. In the postscript of the book, Charles writes: I cannot think what to do about James’s poems. Yes, James’s POEMS! I think I have not mentioned these before! So James did, in some sense at any rate, do what he said he would do: join the army and become a poet. There, in the otherwise bare top drawer of this desk, they were, and indeed there they are: all neatly typed out and filling several large looseleaf books…. In fact I cannot bring myself to look at them, even to glance at them, for fear that they should turn out to be embarrassingly bad! I had almost rather destroy them unread. (483) The only capitalized word in the entire book is Charles’ ecstatic ‘POEMS!’ The poems, presumably the ideal art of the enlightened mystic, are never presented to the reader; they remain unknowable, unrepresentable. Charles will not show them to James’ friend Toby Ellesmere, who longs to see them, and he will not look at them himself. As hidden examples of Murdoch’s ideal form of art, they linger in the reader’s imagination as an impossible possibility. It is perhaps significant that James wrote poems, rather than novels. Hilary Burde said, in A Word Child, that ‘Novels explain. Plays don’t’ and Arthur responds to Hilary, saying, ‘Poetry is best of all. Who wouldn’t rather be a poet than anything else? Poetry is where words end’ (88). Murdoch stated in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ that prose is best suited to the reflexive and self-inquisitive ‘porous’ work of art attempted by Charles, because (she quotes Sartre) it is the ‘word which is lived’ (277). Poetry, on the other hand, is the ‘word which is met’ (277), as it ‘lies outside us, separate, thing-like, complete’ (277). In all but the ideal circumstance, Murdoch considered

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this ‘thing-like’ quality to be dangerous; it is the ‘crystalline’ projection of a single ego masquerading as pure vision. However, the ideal mystic author, hypothetically, would have no self to project, and his creation would contain the world ‘as it is.’ Such work would best be served, not by discursive and fluctuating lines of prose, but by motionless poetry. In her Metaphysics, Murdoch writes that zen poetry is theoretically closest to being the ideal form of art. The haiku, she states, attempts to show ‘that outer and inner subject and object, are one, in a way which does not lose or subjectivize the world’ (245); it has a ‘hardness’ that ‘leave[s] no holes or surfaces’ (245), a far cry from the ‘porous’ work she otherwise champions. This perfect but impossible zen poetry is no doubt the sort of work she imagines the mystical James to have written: it is language at the ideal limit, written by individuals who have overcome the limitations of the subject and the ego. However, Murdoch could only appreciate this form of art in theory, as she believed it is only in theory that art can truly overcome the limitations of language; such an achievement remains, like James’ poetry, nothing more than a teasing yet compelling conjecture. The artist, as Murdoch wrote in an early review from 1943, ‘sees the earth freshly and strangely but he is ultimately part of it, he is inside the things he sees and speaks of as well as outside them. He is of their substance, he suffers with them. Of saints I know nothing…’ (‘Rebirth’ 125–6). Saints, she implies, if they exist at all, cannot be artists, except hypothetically. The restrictive force of form and language hinders a true vision or presentation of the world. Art, like life itself, must therefore be imperfect in nature; it is the product and record of a striving, changing, and fallen human being. Murdoch suggests, however, that our encounters with art are not necessarily limited in the same way. A novel presents us with a flawed human voice, privy to all the dangers and limitations of form and language, but, if it correctly handles its own restrictions, it can create the illusion of a rich and bottomless life, and point beyond itself. This, she claimed, can help the reader by inhibiting ‘magic in its more familiar and consoling uses.’ Imperfection is a necessary aspect of life and art, but through it one could potentially glimpse momentary perfection, the real and absolute good that transcends normal vision. Murdoch never spoke in any detail of the nature of the ideal mystical state, but this does not belie its centrality to her thought; her focus on the

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path, rather than the goal, was a pragmatic necessity, as the absolute position, towards which a normal person stumbles and staggers, is beyond description. The mystic may be unimaginable, but the enigmatic pull created by the idea of a perfect language, a perfect vision, a perfect person, provides the direction and impetus that helps redeem the myriad of imperfections, and lays the foundation for Murdoch’s artistic and philosophical enterprise.

2 From Apophasis to Aporia: William Golding and the Indescribable

Arriving back in England after the war, William Golding returned to his teaching position at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. Golding was, for the most part, a reserved and aloof teacher, unsure of his abilities and dispassionate towards the prescribed lesson topics. However, he would on occasion find a reason to become energized by a subject, and speak to his class with candour and enthusiasm. One of his former students, Robert Naish, remembers one day on which Golding began enthusiastically to discuss religious experience. He recalls Golding carefully and systematically explaining his own method of stripping away the ego in order to approach the moment of revelation: He seemed at one point to hesitate, leaning towards his blackboard, chalk in hand, and evidently wondering whether to bare his soul before such an audience. Then, deciding it was too late to draw back, he continued: ‘When you have completely penetrated past the trappings of your personality, you are left with… A presence? A feeling? I can only describe it as a shape like this’ – and he drew on the blackboard something rather like a pear lying on its side. The class erupted in silent hysteria. (Carey 126) The schoolboys’ reaction is understandable, yet it is likely that the situation was incredibly painful for Golding. Naish does not mention the exact date of this event, but it certainly occurred several years before the publication of Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies. During this period, Golding had completed at least three manuscripts, but each was rejected, an experience that wreaked havoc upon his confidence. 67

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At the centre of this frustration was his inability to develop a style and vocabulary through which he could express his personal spiritual experiences, which had been central to his personal and artistic life. Golding’s earliest proper memory was of an ‘indistinct and indescribabl[y] white’ cockerel perching on a curtain rail in his room (Carey 1). Although he was less than eighteen months old at the time, he held onto the memory of its ‘utter friendliness … like a whole atmosphere of natural love’ that came ‘from the centre of all rightness’ (Carey 1). This was his first glimpse of a transcendent reality, but it also brought him face-to-face with ‘the brute impossibility of communicating’ such an experience (Carey 2). Golding had several such visions throughout his life, but with diminishing frequency, which led him to believe that individuals are born with an understanding of ‘the spiritual, the miraculous’ that fades as they grow older. He believed that discomfort with the irrational leads individuals to reduce the totality of their experience through the imposition of false patterns upon reality, which leads to faulty vision and, consequently, to moral error. He believed that the role of the novelist is to break down these patterns, to ‘scrape the labels off things’ (Carey 210), and help usher in a vision of unadulterated reality; however, he was aware of the paradox inherent when language is the only tool available in the pursuit of the extra-linguistic, and narrative structure the only weapon against restrictive patterning. Golding eventually began to develop a method through which he could approach his spiritual beliefs. In his early, published novels, perhaps fearful of eliciting amongst critics the laughter once received from discourteous schoolboys, he employs a stark and austere apophasis, the most rational approach to the irrational. Unlike Murdoch’s ‘porous’ texts through which the indescribable reality steadily flowed, Golding’s early novels are thick and impermeable shells that, following careful and intricate construction, are brutally and suddenly hacked away from what they conceal. He does not expose the sham of the text subtly, playfully, or with any regularity. He works to instil a sense of comfort in the reader through the employment of familiar genres and seemingly predictable story arcs, and then, through violent shocks, he challenges the faith engendered in the transparency of language, the benefits of form, and the authority of the novelist. It is in these moments of disorientation that the reader is pushed towards the irrational, the unknowable, which is not contained in the novel at

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all. Vision comes for his readers much like it comes for his characters: in blows. In his later novels, he develops a more evocative, generative, and kataphatic style, only after reaching the limits of apophaticism.

Pincher Martin and the Darkness of God All day long the trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicillin cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long, year in, year out, the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals a reality usable, understandable and detached…. All day long action is weighed in the balance and found not opportune nor fortunate or ill-advised, but good or evil. For this mode which we must call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it; touches only the dark things, held prisoner, incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on. Her world was real, both worlds are real. There is no bridge. (Golding, Free 252–3) There are two worlds: one physical, observable through the senses, and often predictable; the other spiritual, mysterious, and unknowable, at least to the rational mind. Human beings, suggests Golding, are more comfortable with the former, as the strength of an individual’s relationship to the latter world is directly proportionate to his ability to live with the rationally unknowable. An acceptance of mystery, Golding believed, is a necessary predicate for moral behaviour. Morality, in the rational world, is the product of individuals and communities, and is consciously applied to events and actions after rational reflection; it is, as he writes in Free Fall (1959), ‘a parliamentary decision like no betting slips or drinks after half past ten’ (226). In the second world, however, morality is real and transcendent, not decided by individuals, but existing as an ontologically unique property. ‘My guess,’ said Golding, ‘is that there are infinite cosmoses, infinite universes, and beyond that there is a thing that I call the Good’ (Golding, ‘Haffenden’ 111). In Golding’s work, this mysterious moral realm is not initially figured as illuminatory. His struggling protagonists often see it first as a paralysing darkness. This has precedent in the writing of the early Christian mystics – who, as Gunnel Cleve has shown, were influential on Golding’s worki – who often present God in or as darkness.

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Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth-century work The Life of Moses, for example, glosses the ‘dark cloud’ of Exodus 20:21 (‘Moses approaches the dark cloud where God was’) as not shielding God, but as God himself: For leaving behind everything that is observed, not only what sense comprehends but also what the intelligence thinks it sees, it keeps on penetrating deeper until by the intelligence’s yearning for understanding it gains access to the invisible and the incomprehensible, and there it sees God. This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing which consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness… [W]hat is divine is beyond all knowledge and comprehension. (94–5) God is dark because unknowable, or because not knowable through the senses or the rational mind. He can only be ‘seen … in darkness,’ which suggests a mysterious kind of perception that can only be defined through apophatic paradox: a ‘seeing which consists in not seeing.’ The ‘darkness’ metaphor, of course, has connotations beyond the visual, as darkness is a more typical symbol of the fearful, the terrifying or, indeed, the evil. These negative implications have caused some critics to challenge Golding’s representation of the moral/spiritual realm, and question the purported desirability of confronting it. Golding’s 1956 novel, Pincher Martin – which Ian Gregor describes as ‘arguably his most explicit religious novel’ (Gregor 84) – relates the events of a seaman, Christopher Martin, as he struggles for survival on a small rock in the middle of the ocean, where he has washed up after a shipwreck. Throughout the novel, Martin battles against death and dissolution by maintaining his physical wellbeing, asserting his identity against impinging disintegration, and by imposing dominion upon his surroundings. The surface narrative, like many of Golding’s novels, is familiar, echoing works from Robinson Crusoe to Golding’s own Lord of the Flies. Golding, however, supplies a twist ending to Pincher Martin, in which the reader learns that Martin never reached the rock at all, as he died shortly after falling into the water: ‘He didn’t even have time to kick off his seaboots’ (208). The implication is that Pincher’s struggle on the rock was not, as it initially appeared, for physical survival, but to maintain his ego after

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death, and to resist his soul’s integration into a greater unity. The terrifying and dark force oppressing him was not Death, but God, presented as an awe-inspiring darkness.ii Eleanor Wikborg, in her essay ‘The Control of Sympathy in William Golding’s Pincher Martin,’ suggests that Golding’s apparent argument – Martin’s battle against dissolution of self into God stems from an unpleasant egotism that has blighted his life and led to outrageously immoral acts – is unlikely to resonate with his readers, as one is more likely to identify with Martin than condemn him for his resistance. The allegorical parallel, she argues, between death on a rock in the middle of the ocean and dissolution into God figures the latter as distinctly undesirable. We can sympathize with Wikborg’s sympathy. Golding’s powerful descriptions of Martin’s suffering do elicit a natural empathy towards Martin. In one particularly startling passage, Martin’s tears of pain mingle with the water around him, suggesting the beginning of corporeal breakdown, and the event is portrayed in horrifically violent language: They were falling freely, dropping on him. One came, a dot, a pearl, a ball, a globe, that moved on him, spread. He began to scream. He was inside the ball of water that was burning him to the bone and past. It consumed him utterly. He was dissolved and spread throughout the tear an extension of sheer, disembodied pain. (145) Even though the phrase ‘disembodied pain’ suggests that the agony is not physical but emotional or symbolic, Wikborg retorts, ‘the physical illusion (or metaphor) of his experiences is so compelling that it is simply impossible not to sympathize with him’ (181). Indeed, the visceral impact of Martin’s literal struggle is so vivid that it threatens to overwhelm its allegorical import. Golding himself appears to invite this result by refusing to distinguish clearly between what is happening literally and what is occurring symbolically. Martin is physically ‘spread’ upon the rock, but, read in relation to the language of consumption, he also appears as a different kind of ‘spread’: the meal of a devouring God. The word ‘past’ – also evoking ‘repast’ – in the phrase ‘to the bone and past’ can be read as both preposition and noun: there is the physical metaphor of being burned ‘past’ the bone, but also the suggestion that he is being symbolically welded to the ‘past.’ Martin’s wept ‘tear’ also tears him; there is no separation

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between the emotional and physical struggle. By refusing to insist on a purely symbolic interpretation, Golding appears to hurt his apparent argument; it is far more difficult, after all, for a reader to understand the positive ramifications of agonizing physical torture than to see benefit in a difficult spiritual struggle. Wikborg goes so far as to suggest that the reader’s sympathy for Martin engenders a strong antipathy for the force that opposes him. She contends that, as the terrifying opposition bears no trace of the familiar image of the compassionate God, it is difficult to see Martin’s subsumption in a positive light: [If] Martin’s struggle on the rock can be read as presenting a fight against blank nothingness, complete obliteration, which I think it can, then in opposition to the Christian elements which condemn Martin for his wilful blindness, there stands a view of his struggle as an existential one, and once more our moral judgement is complicated by an instinctive sympathy. (185) As discussed earlier, an apophatic rendering of God invites the danger of presenting Him as a nothingness, which is how Wikborg interprets Pincher Martin’s deity. Indeed, Martin does see his antagonist as a consuming darkness, a blank and terrifying nothingness. He is also occasionally figured in even more blatantly negative metaphors: a destroyer, a devourer, a ‘black lightning’ (70). He is the last maggot left in a tin, swollen and fat after consuming the others (136). There is truly no trace of the ‘compassionate God’ in these images (Wikborg 182). What Wikborg fails to observe, however, is that the novel is presented from Martin’s perspective, not Golding’s. Despite being a third-person narrative, all the events and images within the novel are products of Martin’s own mind; he is the creator, the pattern-maker, the labeller. His control of events extends beyond the seaweed he arranges unnaturally on the rock, and beyond the naming of the sections of the rock after London landmarks. He is the creator of the rock itself, which he has shaped from a dim memory of toothache, and has formed his own living body, his red chapped hands and freezing feet. Even his identity is entirely created from memory, as it has no place beyond death.

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The purported agony of Martin’s dissolution is solely the result of his attachment to the self beyond death. Of course human beings are attached to self, to life, and the reader will naturally side with a character fighting against his own destruction. By using a familiar survival narrative, Golding actively conditions us to side with Pincher; the sympathy that Golding engenders for Martin is not unintentional. By concealing the truth of Martin’s situation until the final page, Golding forces the reader violently to confront his or her own attachment to self, to question its validity, to inspect its relationship to morality. It is in this way that the novel resists mere didacticism; as Golding said: Anyone can say, ‘Don’t drink and drive. You must drink coffee.’ But then this doesn’t begin to touch the reason why people drink and drive. You know that the only way you can really get hold of somebody who drinks and drives is not by talking about drinking and driving, but by putting him in a position where he understands some kind of process – it may be emotionally understanding, not intellectually understanding. (Qtd. in Biles 66) Human beings, desperate for coherence, fear the unknown; the strangeness of God causes Him to appear dark and terrifying, but He is only dark to a particular kind of perception, one rooted in the self, in rational consciousness. As Golding explained, in reference to Pincher Martin, ‘When you turn away from God, He becomes a darkness; when you turn towards Him, He becomes a light, in cliché terms’ (qtd. in Biles 76). Golding’s narrative does not simply explain this; it forces the reader to confront directly his or her fears before Golding allows the darkness to illuminate. The work functions as an encounter, rather than a lesson; what one takes away from it remains partly beyond the author’s control, as what is imparted is not contained within the text; nonetheless, the experience has a far greater chance of resonating with the reader than a simple sermon. Nonetheless, the fact that Wikborg saw darkness where others saw light reveals the difficulty of Golding’s early apophatic method, which offers little middle ground to readers. A less divisive method would emerge in his later works. The God/darkness parallel exists throughout Golding’s oeuvre, although it is less strictly presented in his other novels. In his first novel, Lord of the Flies, the darkness appears actively to impel or create

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evil, which complicates Pincher Martin’s correlation between the darkness and God/Good. Consequently, critics often read darkness in Lord of the Flies as a more conventional symbol: as the font of the children’s cruelty, representative of evil itself. Arnold Johnston, for instance, insists that ‘darkness’ is used through the novel only as a symbol of man’s ‘inner devil’ (13). However, Golding’s portrayal of darkness in this novel is more complex than Johnston suggests. Jack and his tribe, by the end of the story, appear to have embraced evil, yet they remain uncomfortable with darkness. It remains for them a source of fear and an object of hostility, which suggests that evil and the darkness are separate entities. In Chapter Eight, the darkness appears within the mouth of a severed pig’s head, yet the murder of a pig remains the central act of the boys’ tribal rituals; the hunt for Ralph, too, is punctuated by the chant, ‘Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in’ (229) [his italics]. How can the boy-savages be on the side of evil, and also fear it and desire its destruction? Simon’s confrontation with the pig’s head – the one moment in the allegory that Golding admits got ‘out of hand’ (Golding, ‘Fable’ 99) – is riddled with uncertainty regarding the character of the darkness. The Head, which contains the darkness, speaks to Simon, and appears to have malevolent intentions, scolding and threatening him. However, as in Pincher Martin, the hostility of the darkness can be seen as a projection of Simon’s fears, rather than as a quality of the darkness itself. The fact that the Head ‘spoke in the voice of a schoolmaster’ (178) supports that the malicious voice is the result of Simon’s own fear of a terrible authority. Simon’s relationship to the darkness is complex, and makes little sense if the Head is seen to represent evil alone. When the Head asks Simon ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’ Golding writes only ‘Simon shook’ (177). But does he shake from fear, or is he shaking his head in disagreement? This is followed by a moment of strange union between Simon and the Head: ‘Simon’s head wobbled. His eyes were half-closed as though he were imitating the obscene thing on the stick’ (178). In The Inheritors, discussed later in more depth, Golding shows acts of imitation to be expressions of empathy. Seen in these terms, Simon makes a preliminary connection with the darkness, which, at the end of the chapter, develops into total union: Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread…

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Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness. (178) Mouths and throats feature regularly in Golding’s work, standing as the borderline between the ineffable darkness and the rational mind. Teeth and tongues form words, but behind them lays a passage that leads to a wordless blackness. Simon, in this scene, is pushed past conscious thought into the mouth, but his experience within the darkness is not described. The chapter ends – or runs out of words – immediately after. But soon it becomes apparent that Simon has not succumbed to evil. On the contrary, after being consumed by the darkness, Simon is impelled towards benevolent selflessness; he runs to help the other boys, to show them that their fear of the Beast is misguided. Jack and the rest of the savage schoolboys never integrate the otherness of the darkness, choosing instead to keep it at a distance, fearing its strangeness, and seeking to appease it through ritual and sacrifice. The implication is that it is the fear of the darkness, of the unknown, rather than anything intrinsic to it, which compels evil. A similar argument is put forth in The Inheritors, where the evil New Men keep their deity at bay through blood offerings and sacrifice; they consequently continue to fear the irrational and attempt to suppress it, rather than live comfortably and peacefully within the strangeness like the more peaceful Neanderthals. It is impossible to define fully the nature of darkness in Golding’s novels, especially as it changes throughout his life’s work. However, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor argue, ‘One element remains constant throughout [Golding’s novels]: darkness itself is morally significant’ (32). The unknown represents a profound and everpresent power. One’s relationship to it can impel either good or evil: immersion within it causes the dissolution of self, which, although terrifying, has a positive moral and spiritual benefit, exemplified by Simon, and by characters in Golding’s other novels, such as Darkness Visible’s Matty and Free Fall’s Sammy Mountjoy. Attempting to keep darkness at a distance, to appease it rather than recognize it, can lead to extreme acts of cruelty and sacrifice, demonstrated by Jack’s tribe and the group of the New Men in The Inheritors. Understood this way, the darkness shares characteristics with the mystical characterization of God: evil is the result of one’s distance from Him, and goodness the product of union.

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Consciousness as Original Sin in The Inheritors Golding suggested, in several interviews and throughout his novels, that selfishness and rationality are the source of evil and they are also an inextricable part of human consciousness. ‘Original sin and selfishness,’ stated Golding, ‘the words could be interchangeable’ (Golding, ‘Carey’ 174). Gabriel Josipovici writes: One of the results of the fall, Golding suggests, is the creation of individual character. Indeed, the fall can be seen as man’s sudden consciousness of himself as unique and distinct from other men; and the fall is perpetuated because once this discovery has been made man is at pains to protect and nurse this unique self till all its desires are fulfilled, including the most basic desire of all, the desire to be immortal, to retain our consciousness of ourselves for ever and ever. (253) We are born into consciousness and therefore born into sin. Golding elaborated: [With] our awareness of ourselves as individuals inescapably comes in this other thing, this destructive thing, the evil, if you like. It seems to me that this self-awareness, intelligence, with these come the defect of their virtue.... That will be the last thing which will trip us up, our own intelligence and our own lusts. (Qtd. in Biles 109) Ethical movement is movement away from the isolated rational mind towards mystical unity. ‘The only progress is the progress of the individual towards some kind of – I would describe it as ethical – integration,’ said Golding (qtd. in Biles 41). ‘Somehow or other,’ he said, ‘he has got to bring the whole thing together’ (qtd. in Biles 102). It is the union with God and the acceptance of the darkness, say Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor, that ‘holds the promise and danger of wholeness’ (34). The fall, for Golding, is an allegory that represents the development of the mind’s use of language and other organizing systems. In his second novel, The Inheritors, Golding attempts to link the development of modern consciousness with moral decay, and chooses to do

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so by depicting the confrontation of modern man with individuals from an earlier stage in cognitive development. By juxtaposing the Neanderthals’ primitive minds with the fully conscious New Men, Golding attempted to illustrate the more nefarious aspects of the patterning mind. Golding’s Neanderthals cannot think, or, more specifically, they cannot actively form thoughts; they can only instinctively respond to the immediately perceptible. They have limited memories – they can mentally visualize things that are not present – but these ‘pictures’ remain purely documentary; they cannot reflect upon them, analyse them, or connect them to other ‘pictures.’ They also cannot see relationships between objects if the connections cannot be perceived through their senses. When Lok has an arrow fired upon him, for example, he cannot deduce that the arrow stuck in the tree beside him came from a bow; he immediately sees the arrow as a part of the tree that simply was not there before (96). The same applies to Lok’s inability to connect different moments in time. When Lok lies down to sleep, Golding writes (awkwardly), ‘Tonight was colder than last night though he made no comparisons’ (73). Lok can experience tonight and he can receive a ‘picture’ of last night, but to connect the two would require an active mode of thinking of which he is incapable. This inability to make abstract connections means that Lok cannot understand cause and effect; he wonders ‘what it was that joined a picture to a picture so that the last of many came out of the first’ (96). It is therefore not only analytical thought that is impossible but also the creation of narrative. This limitation firmly lodges the Neanderthals in the moment. They are unable to plan for the future or to learn from the past. Despite the practical problems of this limitation, it has a moral benefit; as Gabriel Josipovici explains, ‘If I can plan ahead then I can also desire what I do not at present have; I can envy what another man has and I have not; I can imagine and desire the embrace of another man’s wife’ (240). The Neanderthals have no desire to covet or horde: Lok comes across a store of gold, which has been collected and treasured by the New Men: ‘Lok saw that it was one of the pretty, bending yellow stones that the people sometimes picked up and played with until they tired of them and threw them away’ (156). The Neanderthals cannot foresee the desire to want to play with the gold again in the future, so they discard it. This animal consciousness exempts the Neanderthals from a certain sort of evil.

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This inability to actively form one’s own interpretation of the world negates the uniqueness of the individual; it means that everyone is experiencing the exact same thing, which leads to less distinction between individuals, which in turn instils a sense of sympathy and understanding among the Neanderthals that verges on unity. When they are following Mal, for example, they blindly and happily adopt his behaviour: The people behind him followed each of his actions easily out of the fullness of their health. Focused on his struggle they became an affectionate and unconscious parody. As he leaned and reached for his breath they gaped too, they reeled, their feet were deliberately unclever. (23) It only appears as ‘parody’ to the distanced reader; the Neanderthals themselves are ‘unconscious’ of it being such, and are in fact responding with the ‘fullness’ of themselves. This sense of holism extends beyond regard for the other Neanderthals; they also refuse to draw boundaries between their group and other species. For example, they do not see snails as a lesser or even a distinct species; they refer to them as ‘snail-people’ (63), mere variations on themselves. The reader may assume distanced and conscious personification of the snails, but the Neanderthals’ ignorance of metaphor refutes this possibility. This sense of connectedness with all life has a moral consequence: their lack of hierarchical distinction leads them to avoid inflicting harm on others, as hurting one another is too much like hurting oneself. They consequently refuse to take life, eating only animals that have died naturally. As the novel progresses, however, the Neanderthals begin to discover active forms of thinking, which changes their worldview. Fa says: ‘“This is a picture of a picture. I am—” She screwed up her face and scowled—“thinking”’ (62). Instead of understanding a picture as an image directly connected to an experience in the world, Fa uses a picture only in relation to another picture; the world, suddenly, is nowhere to be seen. There now exists the possibility of entirely abstract thought; this newly discovered and unanchored second world is the realm of purely subjective thought, of cognition detached from objects, of circular thinking. This, Golding suggests, is the natural end

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result of metaphoric thinking: when ideas are formed entirely in the detached second world, and subsequently applied to the unrelated first, great harm can occur: the danger of fantasy. Golding emphasizes this by having Lok discover metaphor over the course of the novel, through the word ‘like.’ This revelation dramatically transforms Lok’s consciousness, as well as his moral character: ‘Likeness,’ he realizes, ‘could grasp the white-faced hunters with a hand, could put them into a world where they were thinkable and not a random and unrelated irruption’ (194). The New Men are ‘grasp[ed]’; they are in Lok’s selfish possession. His newfound ability to compare brings with it a dangerous propensity to evaluate. In the following scene, Fa states ‘The water is a terrible thing,’ and Lok replies, ‘The water is better than the new people’ (197), a pronouncement he could not have made before his discovery. There are problems, however, with Golding’s depiction of the Neanderthals. Most importantly, he fails to acknowledge properly his own claim, made in an interview with John Carey, that ‘I don’t think there is any language but metaphor’ (Golding, ‘Carey’ 184). As all language relies upon an abstract connection between a word and a thing, the Neanderthals technically use metaphor from the outset of the novel, a fact that Golding chooses to downplay. Lok does, at one point, realize that words can be separated from visual ‘pictures’ of reality – ‘There need not even be a picture with the words’ (96) – but Golding does not explore the implications of this statement. The reason for this is surely practical: he wishes to explore the faults of modern human consciousness, but cannot do so by contrasting it with the unimaginable pre-fallen, pre-linguistic state, as such a state is necessarily beyond depiction.iii The Neanderthals consequently serve only to illustrate an earlier, less developed position in the evolution of consciousness. As such, Golding’s novel delivers an argument regarding the limitations of common thought, but cannot move beyond this; it is an allegory of the fall only, and does not attempt to illustrate or evoke the Edenic state. As such, it is a rational attack on rationalism; it champions supra-rational thinking, but does not engage in such forms of cognition. At this early point in his career, Golding appeared content to work within these limitations, but in his later novels, he grew increasingly uncomfortable with this approach, realizing its inherent paradox, and wishing to transcend it.

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Apophatic Technique in Free Fall Golding’s early novels make few obvious concessions towards realism. They take place in fantastic and historical/mythological settings that, while rendered vivid by Golding’s prose, bear little resemblance to the reader’s world. They are strongly patterned and thematically calculated, and of uniform length and chapter division. They appear, as Golding himself concedes, to lean ‘towards ideas rather than towards people’ (qtd. in Biles 8). To this extent, they appear to be fabulist in nature, as Golding himself admitted in his essay ‘Fable’ (85). Despite their interest in the objective world, they most resemble Murdoch’s disdained ‘crystalline’ novels. And yet, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor have noted, ‘These books, so emphatic in pattern, so exclusive in structure, have as an increasingly dominant theme the limitations of the pattern-maker and the tragic consequences of his vision’ (203). There is no denying this inclination, as we have seen the correlation Golding made between evil and rational thought. But did this distrust of pattern remain only a thematic interest? ‘Basically a Golding novel grows through the tension between its form and his imagination,’ write Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor (204). ‘Tension,’ however, is a misleading metaphor. It would be an apt word to describe Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, in which the form repeatedly adapts itself to apparently contingent events, but this does not occur in Golding’s inflexible fiction. It is more useful to understand the relationship between fiction and reality in Golding’s novels in terms of negative space, through a sculptural metaphor. Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor gesture towards this: We might say that a Golding novel gives the effect of something dedicatedly made, every strain and stress calculated and overcome, so that the final product leads us to think in terms of sculpture. (203) They begin their next paragraph with the words, ‘This however is only half the story’ (203), although they do not elaborate upon the relevance of this phrase in relation to the sculpture metaphor. For a sculpture is only half the story: its shape is as much defined by the space it does not occupy as by the space it does. In Golding’s work, God is not in the text or confined within the structure, but He presses

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upon it, in the space between the lines or pushed against the contours of the form. The limitations of rationality had been a theme in Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, and Pincher Martin, but, in those novels, Golding’s focus was limited to the characters’ own struggles towards or against understanding; he did not overtly recognize his own participation in the endeavour as a writer. In 1959’s Free Fall, Golding makes an implicit connection between individuals’ effort to acquire suprarational knowledge and the artist’s attempt to convey this information, or at least facilitate its acquisition. To achieve this, Golding, like Murdoch, wrote a first-person narrative, allowing the speaker, Sammy Mountjoy, to comment directly upon his attempt to attain suprarational vision and to articulate this experience in a work of art. Sammy Mountjoy is writing to locate the moment in his past at which he lost his ‘freedom.’ Freedom, in Free Fall, is taken to mean the moment in which Sammy’s behaviour became ‘mechanical and helpless’ (131) after intellectual systemization of knowledge and perception began to choke his intuitive awareness of the breadth of experience. To isolate this moment, Sammy attempts to reflect upon the entirety of his life by writing a memoir, but he finds the scope impossible: ‘The mind cannot hold more than so much; but understanding requires a sweep that takes in the whole of remembered time’ (7). This realization causes him to reflect upon the difference between time-as-experienced and time-as-recalled: Time is two modes. The one is an effortless perception native to us as water to the mackerel. The other is a memory, a sense of shuffle, fold and coil, of that day nearer than that because more important, of that event mirroring this, or those three set apart, exceptional and out of the straight line altogether. (6) Free Fall is Sammy’s backward glance at the life behind him, and consequently falls into the second category. He knows he will not be able to recover or relate the sensation of immediate experience: ‘I am not a man who was a boy looking at a tree. I am a man who remembers being a boy looking at a tree. It is the difference between time, the endless row of dead bricks, and time, the retake and coil’ (6). The metaphor of the ‘dead bricks’ implies that time-as-experienced is lost to him; now there is only conscious reflection. Sammy cannot recall

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the value inherent in his past experiences; meaning can now only be applied or deduced consciously, after the fact. He accepts the structure of time-as-recalled for his memoir, rejecting linear chronology to reflect memory’s necessary fragmentation. He hopes that an honest exploration of his memories will reveal something unexpected, while accepting that, to a great extent, his past is lost to him. Sammy is strongly aware of the danger of patterning, and is conscious of his misguided but irrepressible desire to see structures in life. Remembering the lodger who lived with him during his childhood, Sammy writes: As I remember him and his breathing it occurs to me that what he had was lung cancer; and I notice with a certain wry amusement my instant effort to fit that uninformed guess into a pattern…. Do I still expect a pattern? What am I looking for? (25) The form of Mountjoy’s investigation – the written word – necessarily inhibits the achievement of his goal; the limited and delimiting structure of writing, like consciousness itself, does not allow for the full recollection of a life ‘subtle and copious’ (7). On the few occasions that Sammy manages to recall the experience, rather than just the facts, of his childhood, he finds himself unable to describe it; his language breaks down: When he remembers his mother objectively, ‘as a stranger might see her’ (69), he is able to describe her as ‘a massive, sagging creature, mottled and dirty’ (69). But, when he attempts to articulate his early sense of her, he can only describe ‘her hugeness and reality, her matter-of-fact blocking of the view’ (15), so he turns to apophasis: ‘Beyond her there is nothing, nothing… She is the unquestionable, the not good, not bad, not kind, not bitter’ (15). Sammy follows this apophatic utterance with a sculptural image, once again relying on negative imagery to articulate the ineffable: ‘As far as communication goes,’ he writes, ‘there are only the things that surrounded her to be pieced together and displayed with the gap that was Ma existing mutely in the middle’ (16). Despite his limitations, Sammy continues to write, claiming: I may communicate in part; and that surely is better than utter blind and dumb; and I may find something like a hat to wear of my own. Not that I aspire to complete coherence. Our mistake is

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to confuse our limitations with the bounds of possibility and clap the universe into a rationalist hat or some other. But I may find the indications of a pattern that will include me, even if the outer edges trail into ignorance. (9) Sammy accepts here that his investigation will not produce a finite result, but may bring him closer to the suspended awe that characterizes the wordless outer regions. He understands that rational knowledge – ‘our limitations’ – cannot encompass the universe, but he suggests that there is something to be gained by attempting to approach the edges of an ultimate pattern. After his later revelation in the prison-camp, Sammy speaks of ‘a curious reversed beauty … that could only be seen, out of the corner of the eye’ (188). The unexpected comma serves to emphasize the word ‘seen’; it is not just that this beauty can only be seen indirectly, but that it can only be seen, as opposed to remembered, articulated, or explained. Reality remains just outside the realm of Sammy’s knowledge, but, at least at this point in his process of writing, he believes there is a benefit in approaching the edges of his limitations. Sammy’s solitary confinement in the German camp is a direct consequence of his inability to reconcile rational with supra-rational knowledge. Halde, the interrogator, asks Sammy if he has any information regarding a potential prison break. Sammy insists that he knows nothing, believing this to be the truth. He has no concrete information, no empirical facts. Halde accepts that this may be true, but pushes Sammy because of what he calls ‘the gap between “almost” and “certain”’ (145). Sammy does, in fact, know something, although it is unresolving and unstable knowledge that has come from intuitive perception, from an artist’s eye, rather than from concrete information or empirical fact. It is not verifiable knowledge, but it is still knowledge. ‘Day after day,’ Sammy thinks, ‘a complex of tiny indications had added up and now presented me with a picture. I was an expert. Who else had lived as visually and professionally with these faces and taken knowledge of them in through his pores?’ (149). This is knowledge-from-experience, received intuitively (‘through his pores’) rather than through the analytical mind. However, Sammy’s rational compulsion causes him to doubt whether this is knowledge at all; he yells, ‘I don’t know whether I know anything or not!’ (151).

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For his confusion, Sammy is punished by solitary confinement. His experience in the cell facilitates a mystical experience by serving as a via negativa, a dark and painful blow to his rational mind and sense of self that brings him directly towards acceptance of the unknowable. The Christian mystical tradition often figures the path towards God not in terms of ascent and affirmation, but of descent and negation. The via negativa is the path described by Evelyn Underhill in her seminal work Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (1911) as the Mystic Way, a three-stage process towards mystical union with God. It usually unfolds in this way: the mystic realizes their own sin, ego, or their false understanding of the world. This is followed by the difficult and often excruciating purgation of desire and self, which serves to destroy the personal qualities that inhibit objective perception of the world; St John of the Cross described this as the ‘dark night of the soul’ (67). This purification cannot be achieved fully on one’s own: individuals cling too strongly to self, and the endeavour is doomed to fail. However, this failure can serve as the last blow to the now-fragile ego, and, while in this state of despair, the mystic is illuminated by God to the true nature of reality. The via negativa parallels the function of apophatic language: it is only after all affirmative knowledge has been denied that one can confront God. In the cell, Sammy is confronted by absolute darkness. Earlier in the novel, he discusses: [T]he unnameable, unfathomable and invisible darkness that sits at the centre of him, always awake, always different from what you believe it to be, always thinking and feeling what you can never know it thinks and feels, that hopes hopelessly to understand and to be understood. (7) He had previously kept this darkness at bay, like Jack’s tribe in Lord of the Flies, but in prison he is forced into contact with it, now so close it lies ‘against the ball of the eye’ (167). Sammy is first deprived of his sight, his sense of space, and his physical orientation. In order to resist the apparent nothingness, his mind begins to create images to replace what has been lost: ‘Eyes that see nothing soon tire of nothing. They invent their own shapes that swim about under the lids’ (168). These shapes, by placing themselves between the eye and the darkness,

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initially provide Sammy with a comforting but illusory sense of space. He then tries to console himself by giving names to the ineffable horrors: it is just ‘damp,’ just ‘dark.’ The absoluteness of the darkness, however, allows the irrational aspects of his mind to wander unrestrained: his ‘feelings,’ his ‘gross sensuality,’ and his ‘skipping brain’ cannot be eradicated by these labels (183). Despite his attempts to create consoling images and ideas, these shapes cannot solidify in the face of nothingness: ‘I pictured a corridor leading away,’ says Sammy, ‘and this picture had definition and was restful therefore; but then I guessed that at the far end would lie some warped thing…’ (169). Sammy cannot impose stable definition on utter blackness. He finally comes ‘up against an absolute of helplessness,’ and cries out ‘not with hope of an ear but as accepting a shut door, a darkness, and a shut sky’ (184). Accepting this nothingness provides the final step of the via negativa: Everything is stripped away – time and space, self, logic, invention, and, finally, hope – and what is left is the mystical fact. Sammy’s experience in the cell mirrors Christopher Martin’s terrifying confrontation on the rock, but where Pincher Martin ended with the protagonist’s subsumption into God, Free Fall presents Sammy’s consequent re-emergence. Sammy is released from the cell, and sees his surroundings with a detached and mystical eye. He sees ‘the huts as one who had little to do with them’ (186). He refers to his eyes as ‘dead,’ in that they are strictly passive, ‘desiring nothing, accepting all things and giving all created things away’ (186). His self, too, is ‘dead’ (187). He has achieved an objective attention to the world around him, without imposition of self. His rational tendency to delimit perception through language also disappears; he is stunned by the sheer being of shapes that ‘a day before [he] would have disguised … as trees’ (186). His mind does not separate objects into distinct entities, but sees that ‘everything is related to everything else’ (186–7). He speaks of existing in a fourth dimension, one that exists ‘at right-angles to the other three’ (187), a metaphor of geometry where geometry cannot exist. He explains that his consequent cry ‘was directed to a place I did not know existed, but which I had forgotten merely’ (187). This strange statement confounds different forms of knowing: properly, the sentence should read ‘a place I did not know existed, because I had forgotten’ or ‘a place I did not know existed or had forgotten.’ The unexpected ‘but’ suggests Sammy can know or have known something on one level of consciousness, but

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not know it on another. The grammar also destabilizes the usual temporal sense of knowing, so that, illogically, Sammy can have forgotten something he never learned. However, despite the apophatic and paradoxical gestures in the passage, the description of the revelation is primarily composed of familiar religious symbols and material metaphors: for example, Sammy describes the spiritual fire as ‘miraculous and pentecostal’ (188) and then speaks of ‘sceptred kings’ (186), ‘fantastic crystals’ (186), ‘purple glass’ (186), ‘richness’ (186), ‘ten thousand fortunes’ (186), and ‘a burst casket of jewels’ (186): all earthly wonders.iv Sammy may have experienced the ineffable, but when he reflects on the experience, he collapses into the egoistic language of possession and desire. He says that during the vision, ‘the paper wrappings of use and language dropped from me’ (186), but, because the vision can only be related to the reader in words, the passage can do no more than present the ordered and structured memory of it. Sammy cannot present his revelation to the reader. In the prison yard, Sammy is not confronted by sheer ‘being’ (Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor 159), but by a world of ‘vital morality, not the relationship of man to remote posterity or even to a social system, but the relationship of individual man to individual man…. [A] forge in which all change, all value, all life is beaten out into a good or bad shape’ (189). Golding wrote in his 1980 essay ‘Belief and Creativity’ that ‘it is a signature scribbled in the human soul, a sign that beyond the transient horrors and beauties of our hell there is a Good which is ultimate and absolute’ (201–2). Sammy sees morality as absolute, with an ontological existence that transcends the subjective mind; actions are ‘not opportune nor fortunate or illadvised, but good or evil’ (252). True morality, he discovers, enters life through the unknown, the supra-rational. It is not created but discovered, and only by approaching selflessness can this occur, as it does for Sammy Mountjoy in the prison yard. This causes Sammy to reflect upon the difference between the selfless, innocent Beatrice and his own fallen nature. Early in their relationship, Sammy criticized Beatrice’s seeming lack of personality, yelling, ‘Aren’t you human, then? Aren’t you a person at all?’ (121). Her response only serves to frustrate Sammy: she replies to his question, as she does to all his questions, with the word ‘maybe’ (121). Sammy is initially disgusted by this tendency, viewing it as the result

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of what he considers to be an appalling emptiness. It is only immediately after the prison revelation that Sammy realizes: That negative personality, that clear absence of being, that vacuum which I had finally deduced from her silences, I now saw to have been full…. She was simple and loving and generous and humble; qualities which have no political importance and do not commonly bring their owners much success. (191) Beatrice’s mystical selflessness was the essence of her virtue: by refusing to impose her own thoughts and patterns upon others, she remained essentially good, and protected from the fall suffered by Sammy. Sammy’s love was born of a desire to possess Beatrice, to impose his own patterns upon her; he wanted Beatrice to be ‘safely mine beyond doubt and jealousy’ (109). Beatrice’s love for Sammy, in contrast, was pure and detached.

From Negation to Suspension Sammy proclaims sadly that his book, through which he sought to transcend the restraints of self and language, has failed to bring the two worlds – the physical and the spiritual – together: ‘There is no bridge,’ he laments. Even his one moment of supra-rational vision in adult life – the experience in the prison-camp – cannot lift his account by its inclusion, as it too has been relegated to time-as-recalled, and draws too heavily on inherited language to facilitate knowledge of the ineffable. We should not, however, feel obligated to take Sammy on his word. As the book itself has repeatedly shown, the admission of failure is a necessary step towards God, and Sammy’s book may know something that Sammy does not. Throughout the novel, each section concludes with a variation upon the following statement: Is this the point I am looking for? No. Not here. (52, 70) Any apparent significance of the preceding scene is undercut by this denial, which uses the lower form of apophasis discussed earlier: the

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‘No’ implies that the last scene did not depict the moment of Sammy’s fall, but it also implicitly affirms that a fall did indeed occur at some other point in time. As the novel progresses, the form of the recurring phrase changes. In Chapter Eleven, for example, it simply reads: Here? Not here. (78) The ‘no’ is elided, as is the long-form of the question, which changes the effect. Despite the presence of the question mark, the effect of the refinement is to place two contradictory phrases upon the page: ‘here’/‘not here.’ The loss of freedom did occur here, but also did not. Now, the phrase does not deny the preceding scene’s significance, but instead signals the impossibility of making any positive affirmation at all. This is a suggestion of a higher form of apophasis, a denial of both affirmation and negation. All knowledge is becoming unstable as language begins to cancel itself out. The recurring phrase provides the reader with a sense of apprehension for the moment in which it will presumably be answered clearly and affirmatively, but the moment never comes. After Sammy writes of his epiphany in the camp, he turns his attention to the moment he decided to get Beatrice by sacrificing ‘everything’ (236). Virginia Tiger suggests that this scene provides ‘the answer to the book’s overriding question’ (135). But at the end of the account, Sammy writes not the expected ‘Here’ but, instead: ‘Here?’ (236). The question mark functions in a manner somewhat similar to the previous ‘not here’: it undermines the word ‘here,’ stopping it from becoming definitive. But it does this, not through apophatic paradox, but through subtle disturbance. This hints at an important evolution in Golding’s thought, which will form the core of his following novel, The Spire: apophasis, the rejection or denial of language, is too definitive. Dichotomous thought, even when presented within apophatic paradox, remains the product of the rational mind. Beatrice knew this all along, as is suggested by her repeated use of the phrase ‘maybe,’ an alternative to the binary options of affirmation and negation. The question mark after the word ‘Here’ indicates not negation but unresolved, suspended thought, the product of a mode of thinking that resists the closure desired by the rational mind.

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Golding emphasizes this more subtle method of denying linguistic authority by providing the novel with two endings, one strictly apophatic, the other suspended and ambiguous. Despite knowing the danger of dichotomous thought, Sammy finds himself, at the end of the novel, unable to shed binary thinking: he cannot see any ‘bridge’ between the rational (language, logic, science) and the spiritual/ moral worlds. The first ‘ending’ of the novel concludes with a pessimistic statement: ‘Her world was real, both worlds are real. There is no bridge’ (253). One must occupy one or the other. This metaphor, however, rests on dichotomous thought, which is the mode of thinking at the root of the problem. Even if there was a ‘bridge,’ one could not occupy both worlds at the same time; but, maybe one could live in both. Golding suggested as much in an interview: We do live in two worlds. There is this physical one, which is coherent, and there is a spiritual one. To the average man – with his flashes of religious experience, if you like to call them that – that world is often very incoherent. But nevertheless, as a matter of experience, for me and I suspect for millions of other people, this experience of having two worlds to live in all the time – or not all the time, (but) occasionally, is a vital one and is what living is like. (Qtd. in Biles 79) Looking again at the last sentence of the first ‘ending’ of the novel, it now appears significant that it does not read, as might be expected, ‘Her world was real, his world was real’; instead, it is ‘both worlds are real’ [my italics]. Sammy does not appear properly to understand the implications of this, but perhaps the novel does. The second ‘ending’ of the novel reverts suddenly and unexpectedly to the moment in which Sammy was released from the cell. The passage is mostly comprised of brief statements made by the liberating commandant. He makes four cryptic comments, one of which elicits a brief and equally mysterious response from Sammy: ‘Heraus!’ […] ‘Captain Mountjoy. This should not be happening. I am sorry.’ […] ‘Captain Mountjoy. You have heard?’

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‘I heard.’ […] ‘The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.’ (253) ‘Heraus’ is German for ‘out.’ As it is spoken in German, rather than English, it is unclear whether or not the commandant is speaking to Sammy. The commandant speaks to Sammy in English in the rest of their communication, making the object of this first sentence ambiguous. This uncertainty lingers in the second two comments. The object of ‘this’ in the second sentence is not defined, nor is what Sammy admits to have heard in the third. Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor suggest that each of these comments can be read in two ways; they write: We must also complete ‘You have heard?’ in two opposite ways at once. Have you heard the good news? that there is no judgement, that you are free, forgiven, have died into a new life? And – we remember the same words on the lips of the lieutenant – Have you heard the bad news? The two indefatigable cricketers have been shot, the weeping Sammy tortured. (169) They suggest that these phrases ‘must mean their contradictions simultaneously. The moment that we “explain” them as meaning one thing, or even one thing or another, we fail the challenge of seeing that they mean both at once. We fall again into pattern, into reduction’ (Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor 168). Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor suggest that these phrases serve to open up the play of meaning, to resist the sense of closure against which Sammy has battled throughout the novel. The very last line of the novel appears at first to serve a purely negative function: ‘The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.’ In a letter to Virginia Tiger, Golding described this sentence as being the ‘handprint on the canvas that changes the whole thing’ (Tiger 160). The implication of this admission is that it is not just Halde who ‘does not know about peoples,’ but also Golding himself. Seeing a ‘handprint on the canvas’ has several effects on the viewer. First, it ties the painting to its creator and stresses its ‘made-ness.’ Second, it emphasizes the flatness of the work: the painter may have employed perspective to create an illusion

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of depth, but a handprint on the surface destroys it. Third, the handprint distorts the image, implying an act of violence or at least a violation of its self-containment. By smearing his novel, Golding shows that its reality is a handmade creation: the reader has not been presented with a world, but with an illusion of a world. Golding uses the last sentence of his novel to negate this illusion. But is this the cynical act it appears to be, performed in a spirit of distaste and disappointment? Does Golding, like Sammy, admit failure with no hope of revelation? Halde, who ‘does not know about peoples,’ has something of the novelist in him. He says to Sammy: ‘I am objective because although I can get inside your skin I can leave it at will.’ He is also not ‘inhibited by conventions and human kindnesses’ (144). Iris Murdoch talked of this sort of disconnection as essential to a novelist’s vision. However, while Halde’s vision is great, it is, like Golding’s, still limited. Halde openly admits this to Sammy: ‘There is a mystery in you which is opaque to both of us’ (145). But, crucially, Halde still manages to facilitate Sammy’s revelation in the cell. Is Golding suggesting that he, like Halde, despite his necessarily limited knowledge and ability, can direct the reader towards revelation? ‘All arts,’ wrote Golding in ‘Rough Magic,’ ‘have necessary conventions, unrealities to which the audience assent in advance so that they may be ushered into the presence of more vivid reality’ (125). These necessary conventions do not present reality but ‘usher’ the reader towards it. And ‘Halde’ means ‘slope,’ which does not have to move in order to usher a free-falling object in a new direction.

The Spire: The End of Allegory Golding followed Free Fall with The Spire (1964), a novel that Virginia Tiger suggests marks ‘the completion of one phase in the novelist’s development’ (146), as it solves the problems raised by the earlier works. Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor write that where ‘Free Fall diagnosed the reductiveness of pattern; The Spire takes up the challenge to see without it’ (201). Like Free Fall, The Spire is a novel about writing a novel (Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor 191). This time, however, the protagonist’s text is not the one held in the reader’s hand, but one described within the novel; it is Jocelin’s spire, a ‘bible in stone’ (51).

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As with Free Fall, the thrust of the novel is provided by the protagonist’s desperation to build a work that climbs upwards and onwards, rooted in the earth but stretching into the spiritual realm. Sammy embarked upon his creative endeavour with hesitancy and doubt, and, in the end, found he could only gesture towards the higher realm. In contrast, Jocelin believes from the outset that his finger-like spire will do more than merely point; he hopes to pin its tip to the sky. The pinnacle of his tower will, he believes, like the holy nail that will eventually be housed within it, pierce the divine Word. It will ‘join … earth to heaven, straight up there, where one day and soon, the geometric lines would leap into a picture of infinity’ (69). In Free Fall, it became difficult to understand where Sammy’s novel ended and Golding’s began. Their goals appeared virtually identical: to move beyond rational language towards supra-rational knowledge. It was consequently difficult not to see Sammy’s admission of failure as Golding’s. The third-person narration of The Spire, on the other hand, allows for a degree of distance through which the reader is more able to separate Jocelin’s creation from Golding’s (at least, as we will see, until the final pages). Free Fall provided the reader with the Murdochian sense that any apparent ‘meaning’ or structure was not intrinsic to the events described within the novel, but was supplied by the patterning narrator. As the reader has no access to the events described in the novel except through Mountjoy’s consciousness, the reader is led to assume that Sammy is imposing meaningful patterns and structures on top of a chaotic reality. Consequently, one cannot comfortably claim that Free Fall is an allegory; the most one can say is that Sammy, like Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, attempts to read his life as such. The Spire, on the other hand, appears, at least initially, to be more traditionally allegorical. While Jocelin, like Sammy, does read meaning into events and objects, the fact that he is not the sole perceiving consciousness causes the reader to see meaning intrinsic to the shape and events of the novel itself. On the surface, The Spire resembles a traditional tragedy: an individual attempts to accomplish a goal he thinks is important, but is so blinded by self-interest that he neglects to see the trouble that he is causing. His eyes are eventually opened to the error, but it is too late: great harm has already been inflicted. The Spire appears to follow this arc closely. It is, as E.C. Bufkin claims, an ‘exploration of the theme

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of pride’ (136). Dean Jocelin receives a vision of a spire that would stand as a physical manifestation of devotion. He embarks upon a quest to have this spire built, despite the protestations of all around him. His master builder, Roger Mason, says that the church lacks the necessary foundations, but Jocelin insists the construction continue regardless: God, he believes, will provide the foundation. ‘At this point,’ says Laurence Lerner, ‘the sophisticated reader … knows what is coming. Everyone is aware that The Spire is a story about Faith v. Reason, Vision v. Common sense’ (5). Superficially, Lerner’s assumption is correct. Jocelin employs workmen who corrupt the sanctuary of the church, as they are eventually revealed to be pagans and devilworshippers. He overlooks an adulterous relationship between Mason and Goody Pangall, the church caretaker’s wife, which leads to her impregnation and death in childbirth. He represses the knowledge that Pangall himself was killed in a superstitious ritual performed to maintain the foundations. Despite all of this, Jocelin maintains a belief that the construction is ordained by God’s will, until the weight of catastrophes add up, the spire becomes unstable, and he comes to realize that he was partly motivated by repressed sexual desire and pride. This theme is emphasized throughout by the evolving symbolic treatment of the spire. Jocelin initially reads the spire as representing a ‘diagram of prayer’ (120) but he is eventually led to see it as a phallus, born of sexual frustration rather than piety. The Dean dies after realizing the errors of his ways, but not before receiving an epiphanic and untainted vision of the objective world. But the allegory, like the spire itself, is unstable. In his essay ‘Fable,’ Golding described the scene in Lord of the Flies between Simon and the Head as a moment in which the allegory ‘bid fair to get out of hand’ (99). Reflecting upon this in the same essay, he wrote ‘May it not be that at the very moments when I felt the fable to come to its own life before me it may in fact have become something more valuable, so that where I thought it was failing, it was really succeeding?’ (100). Despite appearances, symbol and metaphor in The Spire are not used in the conventional one-to-one correlation of traditional allegory. ‘Golding’s symbols,’ writes Richard S. Cammarota, ‘work with the moral significance of the fable, but they also work independently to create a wider range of suggestion’ (152). This is an understatement. In The Spire, symbols are used so freely, their meanings so multivalent, that they become overdetermined and impossible to grasp

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fully. The seemingly endless store of critical readings of the novel’s symbols and themes serves to emphasize this: in Jeanne Delbaere’s article ‘The Evil Plant in The Spire,’ for example, she provides a multitude of symbolic readings, but is unable to draw her interpretations together. The result is that, rather than clarifying the text’s meaning, Delbaere only manages to draw attention to its interpretive flexibility. On the character of Pangall, for example, she writes: Pangall is the link with the past … as a myth he is Balder, the Norse vegetation god who dies with mistletoe between his ribs; as a Christian figure he is Christ with his broom-cross and the pack of men driving him out of his ‘Kingdom’; as an individual he is a mock-Pan, a limping satyr unable to give his wife a child. (109) Delbaere then attempts to focus on the novel’s intertexts, with similarly unsatisfying results: in the eight pages of her short paper, she mentions The Golden Bough, Piers Ploughman, The Ancient Mariner, and The Master Builder as precedents. Hubert Teyssandier’s similar quest for sources mentions The Monk and Notre-dame de Paris as literary influences (93), while Virginia Tiger discusses Barchester Towers. Laurence Lerner, in his essay ‘Jocelin’s Folly,’ mentions Ibsen, Browning, Greek tragedy, Carlyle, T.S. Eliot and Kierkegaard (7). It is only after gaining familiarity with a variety of criticism – or embarking upon such endless analysis oneself – that one realizes the surprising bagginess of Golding’s seemingly intricate construction. Golding makes the dangers of rigid interpretation clear throughout his text by indulging in the same precarious and erroneous acts of symbolic analysis through the characters and his own authorial voice. While Jocelin himself can be seen, at least until his deathbed revelation, to proceed in a linear fashion from a religious to a psychosexual interpretation of symbolic meaning of the spire, Golding complicates the transition by overdetermining the symbol’s resonance: at various points in the novel, the spire itself is described – to mention just a selection of examples – as: ‘a construction of wood and stone and metal,’ ‘Jocelin’s Folly,’ a ‘vision in stone,’ ‘the bible,’ ‘a relic,’ ‘a chimney,’ a projection ‘from between his legs,’ a bride, a sprouting branch, ‘will,’ a ‘forbidden tree,’ a ‘cliff of stone,’ a ‘great finger sticking up,’ ‘the apocalypse,’ a ‘mother,’ a ‘dunce’s cap,’ a ‘stump,’

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a ‘ship,’ an ‘arrow shot into the earth,’ a ‘world,’ a ‘mast,’ a ‘stone hammer,’ a ‘flame of fire,’ ‘the crown,’ a ‘plant,’ a ‘puzzle,’ and a ‘division.’v Jocelin’s motivations are similarly multivalent, despite critical interpretations to the contrary. Betty Jay claims that, on his deathbed, ‘Jocelin’s previous illusions are overturned, his first vision negated and the psychosexual interpretation is confirmed’ (163). But this is not the case, or, at least, it is not the only case. The integrity of Jocelin’s faith is more than once confirmed by the builders, as well as by the Inquisitor himself at the novel’s end. Similarly, the account of Jocelin’s vision, read by Father Adam in the closing chapters, is not recounted ironically, but with conviction. However, Jocelin is also driven by pride, and by a longing to escape the world, by love for his fellow builders, and to compensate for tragedies that have already befallen the construction. John Haffenden suggested to Golding that ‘The reader is enabled to interpret [Jocelin’s] idée fixe in psychopathological terms, for example, or as sexual sublimation, or as complete vaingloriousness. Equally he might be a true mystic or a false mystic, or his obsession might be the product of a psychological illness’ (Golding, ‘Haffenden’ 108). To this Golding replied: The book [The Spire] is on its own…. Whether the character is a psychopath or a dedicated mystic who is chosen – like Ezekiel, if you like – to construct a spire which will stand as a sign to the faithful…. The writer is aware of that whole spectrum [of meaning], but he doesn’t choose between them. What does the right choice matter, so long as the spectrum is there? (Golding, ‘Haffenden’ 108–9) Unlike Free Fall, which functioned apophatically by denying the validity of every claim, The Spire rejects closed definition by kataphatically overdetermining each potential source of meaning. It is no longer that patterns are false; The Spire instead suggests that patterns cannot be seen in isolation, that vision must aspire towards seeing all things as interconnected and infinite sources of wonder. The ‘spectrum’ is not a container of multiple truths, but a truth in itself. Laurence Lerner complains that Golding asks the reader to read more into phrases than ‘small words can possibly bear’ (12). He is correct to notice this, but wrong to condemn it.

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The Spire: Uniting the Spectrum After Jocelin, upon his deathbed, makes the psychosexual interpretation of his own motivations, he has a revelatory vision of the spire: The two eyes slid together. It was the window, bright and open. Something divided it. Round the division was the blue of the sky. The division was still and silent, but rushing upward to some point at the sky’s end, and with a silent cry. It was slim as a girl, translucent. It had grown from some seed of rosecoloured substance that glittered like a waterfall, an upward waterfall. The substance was one thing, that broke all the way to infinity in cascades of exultation that nothing could trammel. (223) ‘Two eyes’ suggests binary vision; the spire is either this or that: either a vision in prayer or a grotesque phallus. As Jocelin’s eyes slide together, such divisive interpretation ceases, and the spire simply is. Paradoxical language rushes into the description of the spire: it is a ‘silent cry,’ ‘still and silent, but rushing upward,’ an ‘upward waterfall.’ The paradoxes do not, however, negate meaning entirely. Single definite meaning is rejected, but its collapse does not lead to nothingness; instead, it creates a vision of complex, supra-rational meaning. The spire contains within itself a ‘spectrum’ of seemingly contradictory significance. Sammy Mountjoy was wrong; if there are two worlds, they are not irreconcilable, but already part of something larger, ‘a Good which is Absolute.’ When Jocelin makes his deathbed claim ‘Now I know nothing at all’ (223), he is not suggesting that the world is nothing, but only that static knowledge is gone, replaced by an unrestrictive and perpetual knowing. Binary analysis has been rejected in favour of a vision that can hold, without contradiction, the complexity and disparity of the world. The lack of interpretive closure in the novel mirrors Jocelin’s final mental state: he has attained a form of knowledge that endlessly unravels and branches out, generating an infinite matrix of significance. ‘Speech was so complex,’ says Jocelin, ‘when you only had access to one mouth’ (218). A person needs ‘three tongues to say three things at once’ (214). The novel itself manages, to a degree, to speak in more than one voice by compounding and accumulating

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contradictory meaning over the course of its narrative. Golding explained: [I] pre-empt the privilege of God by seeing the situation from the point of view of two people, and therefore – since no two people can ever see the same universe – undercut both of them. Once you start to see the universe from more than one point of view, all hell breaks loose: characters start turning over in a great wind – like one of Dante’s circles – and I think, to some extent, that’s the way I feel about life. (Golding, ‘Haffenden’ 104) The lack of a fixed interpretation is the very source of meaning, rather than its adversary. As Betty Jay notes, ‘Golding’s text falls short of embracing the theological implications of Barthes’ antiauthoritarian position, and refuses, in the end, to erase the possibility of the sacred from his work’ (169). Free Fall ended with language versus reality: ‘there is no bridge,’ followed by the author’s violation of his own canvas and pessimistic smearing of the possibility of speaking truth. As Golding himself said, ‘That may be what I feel is unsatisfactory about the book [Free Fall]: we go down and down and we don’t come up’ (Golding, ‘Haffenden’ 117). In The Spire, we receive a more hopeful acquiescence towards language, a ‘gesture of assent.’ Jocelin says, or appears to say, one more thing before he dies; in reference to an earlier vision, he cries out ‘It’s like the appletree!’ (223). The novel has gone to great lengths, as we have seen, to complicate and undercut any simple correlation between signifier and signified. So why does Golding end Jocelin’s life with a simile? Jocelin is referring to an experience that occurred slightly earlier in the novel. In a moment of grief, with his eyes welled with water, he had the following vision: He twisted his neck and looked up sideways. There was a cloud of angels flashing in the sunlight, they were pink and gold and white; and they were uttering this sweet scent for joy of the light and the air. They brought with them a scatter of clear leaves, and among the leaves a long, black, springing thing. His head swam with the angels, and suddenly he understood there was more to the appletree than one branch. It was there beyond the wall,

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bursting up with cloud and scatter, laying hold of the earth and the air, a fountain, a marvel, an appletree; and this made him weep in a childish way so that he could not tell whether he was glad or sorry. Then, where the yard of the deanery came to the river and trees lay over the sliding water, he saw all the blue of the sky condensed to a winged sapphire, that flashed once. (223) The passage relates a religious vision as simultaneous explosion and condensation. It begins, appropriately, with the image of a cloud. A cloud is a between-thing: a vaporous entity, suspended between heaven and earth, hovering on the verge of either releasing or becoming rain or ice or powder (or something in between). The larger clouds become, the closer they are to collapsing, to not being clouds at all. Clouds both cleanse and obscure; they flood and they purify. Jocelin is only able to see the cloud because he has ‘twisted his neck’ in an unusual manner. From this strange angle he sees the strange angels bringing with them a ‘scatter of clear leaves.’ We expect ‘scatter’ as a verb, not a noun; it is an unusual use of the word, one that confuses time and tense. A ‘scatter’ is a still thing defined by the manner in which it was arranged in the past. Can one tell a scatter without knowing it was scattered? Would it cease to be a scatter if it had been carefully arranged? The term equates a present stillness to a past in motion. Its appearance as a noun also serves to draw our attention to the words ‘clear’ and ‘leaves,’ both of which can be transformative verbs, but here are used as an adjective and a noun, respectively. As with the ‘scatter,’ it is the frozen moment that is emphasized: nothing is being cleared, but it is clear; nothing is leaving, but there are leaves. The words themselves could be transformed from stillness to movement without changing a letter, by only altering their surroundings; as such, like all words, they contain latent potential energy, poised just on the precipice of cloudburst. There is more to a word than the way it is first read; there is more to an ‘appletree than one branch.’ ‘Branch’ is yet another transformative verb used as a noun: branches are things, and things branch. An ‘appletree’ – even more so than an apple tree – is sturdy in comparison, yet, as a symbol, it is similarly multivalent, and richly overdetermined. Jocelin sees the branched tree in relation to the journey of interpretation, with each branch leading to more branches, which themselves branch off. It is interpretation as growth, as life. But this,

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of course, is only one interpretation. It is not just a tree, but an appletree, and this cannot help but evoke that first transgression, where God’s own instructions were not sturdy enough. The punishment for that was the fall (yet another transformative verb as a noun), when language ceased to be univocal, when the Word became words. Jocelin revels in the fruit of that first transgression, in the ecstasy of equivocation, and he weeps like a child, as if he had never left the garden at all. He ceases to be able to tell if he is ‘glad or sorry’ – the labels are scratched off his emotions. In the moment of realization, he encounters further condensation, as the very blue of the sky turns to a refracting crystal. It is not a frozen gem, however, but a ‘winged sapphire’ – this compression has in fact given it mobility; its atoms could not be more still, yet it is in motion. Jocelin refers to this vision on his deathbed, looking up at his spire, and declaring ‘It’s like the appletree.’ The italics are Golding’s, emphasizing the instability of his words, which lean like the spire as they plead to be understood. Virginia Tiger claims that ‘In a cryptic cry “It’s like the appletree,” the division between pagan and Christian, the distance between cellarage and sky, the duelling dualities set in motion metaphorically, are brought into essential relationship’ (148). Tiger’s argument may hold up if seen in relation to Jocelin’s initial vision of the appletree (although it is more accurate to describe such dichotomies as being abolished, rather than balanced), but something different is going on during the deathbed exclamation. The significance of the final outcry is not ‘the appletree’ but the suspended ‘like.’ In The Inheritors, Golding presented a negative view of ‘like’: he suggested that similes and metaphors stopped individuals from directly experiencing the world, causing them to move from concrete and unmediated knowledge to a form of abstract thought that was detached from reality. Nothing is truly ‘like’ anything else, he says, except insofar as it is twisted by the human mind; metaphorical thinking or speaking, he suggests, is simply a fancy way of lying. In Free Fall, Golding took this argument further, applying the same criticism to all language. In The Spire, however, language, metaphor, and symbol are treated with greater ambivalence. Metaphorical thinking, he now appears to suggest, can be a form of cognition that, while not directly imparting truth, can open up the way we see the world. Metaphor reveals that what may appear to our rational minds as stable objects are in fact pulsing with potential energy, constantly

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shifting and overrunning definition. Metaphor, as Paul Ricoeur writes, does not so much fashion our perception as emphasize the possibility of re-fashioning it (245). Such thinking is innovative, transformative, deviant; it emphasizes language’s equivocality, but somehow does not reduce it to nothingness. Using metaphor in this way is, in part, an admission that what we actually want to say sits between words, in that ‘like.’ But it is the opposite of apophasis; instead of saying God is not this and not that, Golding is saying God is like this and like that; indeed, He is like everything. This draws all knowledge towards unity, with everything seen in relation to everything else. Closed and finite knowledge (which is always a lie) cannot exist; instead the compound ‘likes’ act as a generator of unresolving meaning. On his deathbed, Jocelin realizes that the spire is ‘like’ the appletree, which, in turn, is ‘like’ the endless act of interpretation (and ‘like’ an endless list of other things). Infinity does not just exist as the vehicle at the end of that chain of comparisons, but also within both ‘likes,’ which, placed side by side, act as infinity squared. Jocelin finally learns to read the spire as we should learn to read The Spire: he realizes that acceptance of ambiguity is not an abandonment of understanding, but an attempt to embrace a greater knowledge. Despite language’s inherent flaws, if it is allowed to unravel, gesture, and contain contradiction, it can impart the knowledge that it more often delimits. To project beyond that [said Golding to John Haffenden] would imply that one had some kind of knowledge of what it is like to perfect a man, and who knows that? The most a novelist can do is to suggest that this process will go on, and my guess is that, if it were carried far enough, you would disappear. (112) Murdoch would have agreed. She suggested, through the character of James in The Sea, The Sea, that complete escape from the fluctuations of language and meaning cannot occur in life. If one does manage to achieve the resolution of meaning in the conscious mind, it is because meaning has become closed and limited, not because it has embraced infinity. Murdoch ended The Sea, The Sea by suggesting that absolute, unchanging knowledge of God can only be gained after death. Golding

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makes a similar intimation at the end of The Spire. The final image of the novel is of the ‘Host on the dead man’s tongue’ (223). Golding returns, once again, to the recurrent image of the mouth, the borderland between the ineffable and unknowable darkness of God and rational, consciously formed words. In the final sentence of The Spire, the body of Christ – the divine Logos, the Word of God – reaches Jocelin’s tongue, but the tongue is now lifeless. Golding has presented two conclusions; the first flawed but in vibrant motion, the last perfect but unimaginable. One may perceive stable and unified meaning once one has shuffled off this mortal coil, but, in life and in language, Golding suggests, the relationship between world and spirit remains in flux. Aporia, however, is not the sin of language, but its potential salvation. Golding slowly approached this realization over the course of five novels. Where Golding ended in The Spire is where Patrick White had begun, a decade earlier.

3 Verbal Sludge: The Ethics of Instability in Patrick White’s Prose

Hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach toward infinity; which nothing can do whilst able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea. Edmund Burke In December of 1951, Patrick White experienced a spiritual awakening. David Marr writes in his biography Patrick White: A Life: White was carrying bowls of slops to a litter of wormy pups. Somewhere between the jacaranda and the old piggery he slipped in the mud. Swearing and laughing he dragged himself to his feet. ‘I stood in the rain, the water up to my ankles, and pouring off me, as I proceeded to curse God.’ But could he curse what did not exist? As he puzzled at this, he had an inkling of the presence of God. ‘Faith began to come to me.’ (281) Or, in White’s own words: During a season of unending rain at Castle Hill when I fell flat on my back one day in the mud and started cursing a God I had convinced myself didn’t exist. My personal scheme of things till 102

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then at once seemed too foolish to continue holding. (White, ‘Herring’ 137) The specific conditions of this conversion shaped the nature of his subsequent belief. Marr explains that while White’s spiritual interest had been latent prior to this experience, he had always held a desire to ‘melt, to merge, to disappear into the landscape’; the moment in which he plunged into the formless mud provided ‘that consummation in his own shabby paddock’ (Marr 282). In the personal correspondence and fiction that followed this experience, White repeatedly suggested that God is found in instants where the ‘purity’ of individual distinctness is lost, and contact with the world beyond the ego can be achieved. Consequently, White’s artistic approach towards the mystical is distinctly different from that condoned by Iris Murdoch and early William Golding. As we will see, White rarely indulged in apophasis and negative theology; in such systems, there can only be self or no-self, language or no-language. White’s obsession with malleability led him to challenge the impregnability of this border between the two poles. Where Murdoch and Golding prior to The Spire used a sculptural method – creating stark and welldefined works in which the mystical existed in the negative space that surrounded their immediate content – White is impressionistic and painterly. As this chapter will illustrate, he attempts to evoke the mystical not by erasing language and metaphor, but, instead, by complicating and destabilizing his prose so that meaning is never allowed to settle, endlessly unwinding itself towards the suprarational. The first half of this chapter will explore White’s prose, and the second will investigate the ways in which his style both shapes and reflects his moral philosophy.

Mud, Immersion, and Revelation Versions of White’s experience of self-dissolution in the storm appear again and again in his work; in Voss, where the title character experiences a similar epiphany: ‘he was running into crannies, and sucked into the mouths of the earth, and disputed, and distributed’ (249); during Elizabeth Hunter’s epiphanic moment in The Eye of the Storm: ‘In fact, to be received into the sand along with other deliquescent

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flesh, strewn horsehair, knotted iron, the broken chassis of an upturned car, and the last echoes of a hamstrung piano, is the most natural conclusion’ (425). The first novelistic depiction of White’s conversion appeared in The Tree of Man, the novel that immediately followed the experience and which established White’s reputation: The storm came. It bent the garden. Large flat drops of rain were plastering the leaves and hard earth. Soon the land was shining whenever lightning opened its darkness. That torment of darkness, of lashing, twisted trees, became, rather, an ecstasy of fulfilment. The man who was watching the storm, and who seemed to be sitting right at the centre of it, was at first exultant. Like his own dry paddocks, his skin drank the rain. He folded his wet arms, and this attitude added to his complacency. He was firm and strong… But as the storm increased, his flesh had doubts, and he began to experience humility. The lightning, which could have struck open basalt, had, it seemed, the power to open souls. It was obvious in the yellow flash that something like this had happened, the flesh had slipped from his bones, and a light was shining in his cavernous skull…. In his new humility, weakness and acceptance had become virtues…. As the rain sluiced his lands and the fork of lightning entered the crests of the trees. The darkness was full of wonder. Standing there somewhat meekly, the man could have loved something, someone, if he could have penetrated beyond the wood, beyond the moving darkness. But he could not, and in his confusion he prayed to God, not in specific petition, wordlessly almost, for the sake of company. Till he began to know every corner of the darkness, as if it were daylight, and he were in love with the heaving world, down to the last blade of wet grass. (151) The first image in the passage is of the garden itself bending, becoming malleable; this is shortly followed by Stan himself being permeated by the falling rain: ‘his skin drank the rain.’ Stan’s flesh has ‘doubts’; the deluge challenges his confidence in his own physical integrity. As the hard earth is turned to impressionable and enveloping mud, so, ‘like his own dry paddocks,’ is Stan. This experience in the mud, and as mud, evokes Sartre’s repulsion with slime: ‘I understand the snare of the slimy: it is a fluidity which holds me and which compromises me’ (48). The horror of which Sartre writes came from a philosophic

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worldview that prioritizes will and self, and recoils in horror at the idea of the self being broken down. Santanu Das, writing of soldiers’ understanding of mud in the First World War, echoes Sartre’s claim: ‘Dissolution of this too solid flesh in mud is an absurd image of matter consuming human form’ (36); he continues, ‘it combined disgust and horror with a sense of almost metaphysical bewilderment’ (37). This, however, runs in opposition to White’s mystical sensibility, which, like that of Murdoch and Golding, holds that the impregnable ego is the source of moral and spiritual error. White’s emphasis on the importance of self-dissolution provides a positive and contrary interpretation of the concept of acquiescence to and subsumption in the physical world. For White, ‘metaphysical bewilderment’ is a beneficial step towards relinquishing the dangerous limitations of egoism, and one that does not necessarily preclude initial disgust and horror. If God remains after the destruction of self, after the ‘dark night of the soul,’ the suffering has worth. Das argues that mud is terrifying because it ‘denies a narrative of human transcendence’ (36). It is not difficult to understand how the absurdity and chaos of war invites this understanding, but, for White, transcendence can occur in these moments of physical envelopment and permeation. Transcendence, for White, is not an upward motion: one can transcend the self without transcending the world, moving into, rather than away from, one’s surroundings. In the above passage from The Tree of Man, White draws a link between physical dissolution in the mud and spiritual change: the lightning that ‘could have struck open basalt’ is also opening Stan’s ‘soul.’ As the rain breaks down the protagonist’s rigid corporeal form – his flesh slips from his bones – flashes of light begin to illuminate the interior of his ‘cavernous skull.’ White is careful here not to draw too distinct a line between the physical and intangible elements of the revelation: the light does not penetrate Stan’s mind, but his skull. The physical change does not merely parallel mental or spiritual change; they are one and the same. In the final paragraph, White unexpectedly writes ‘lands’ instead of the expected ‘land’ in the sentence ‘As the rain sluiced his lands’; the reader reads ‘hands’ for ‘lands,’ which further blurs distinction between Stan’s own body and the world that surrounds him. In the midst of all the desolation, when all appears indistinct and porous, Stan reaches out for something permanent, and he finds God.

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Stan finds Him by praying ‘not in specific petition,’ which would imply that desire and self remains, but ‘for the sake of company,’ for connection only. The result is illumination, but, as in Free Fall, it is illumination through darkness: Stan can understand the darkness ‘as if it were daylight’ [my emphasis]. It is not that the darkness becomes light, but that the distinction between light and dark becomes irrelevant. Knowledge of the world is no longer based on sensory information alone. White is careful to suggest that the knowledge Stan earns is not static: he emphasizes that the world continues to ‘heav[e].’ Once the revelatory experience subsides, sound becomes once again ‘distinguishable from sound’; Stan again becomes aware of difference. His isolated self returns, and he finds himself ‘quite distinct in this fuzzy world of sighs and clocks.’ The world, however, remains ‘fuzzy’: time (‘clocks’) and space (‘sighs’ or size) are no longer clearly delimited. The pun on ‘sighs’/size also serves to again collapse the incorporeal into the tangible. This revelation, which Stan is initially unable fully to comprehend, lays the foundation for his final epiphany at the end of the novel: ‘Don’t you believe in God, perhaps?’ asked the evangelist, who had begun to look around him and to feel the necessity for some further stimulus of confession. ‘I can show you books,’ he yawned. Then the old man, who had been cornered long enough, saw, through perversity perhaps, but with his own eyes. He was illuminated. He pointed with his stick at the gob of spittle. ‘That is God,’ he said. (476) In this realization of the divinity apparent in this indistinct fluid, Stan finds that ‘even the most obscure, the most sickening incidents of his life were clear’ (476). Parker’s God is manifest in a ‘gob of spittle’ that was once part of his body; even after its expulsion, it is described as smeared ‘personally’ across the muddy ground. This fluid was generated from drinking water and is necessary for life, which stresses the relation of the individual to the outside world; that the spit can then be ejected only confuses the distinction between inner and outer. The image also challenges discomfort with scatological physical properties, which may itself stem from a Sartrean fear of substances that threatens the subject/object divide, or what Julia Kristeva calls

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‘the abject.’ White, however, felt that the skin of the world must be breached for the world to be understood. The spittle’s consistency relates to White’s wider obsession with viscous properties, with substances that allow immersion. Imagery of this kind pervades White’s post-conversion novels. They are smeared and splattered with mud, oil, paint, clotting blood, spit, and clay. White was no Gnostic; while he may seem sometimes to suggest that the physical world is a cloak behind which God hides, it is more common for him to imply that it is the surfaces or skins of objects – that which emphasizes self-containment, and, consequently, otherness – rather than their unique essences, that are to be overcome. This is why objects that resist a consistent form, such as mud, are most significant to White: rational thought easily grasps things that appear to be still and unchanging; they do not challenge perception and are easily set aside. Part of White’s artistic endeavour is to show that true understanding must refute the comfort of closed knowledge, and move towards active knowing. White achieves this by resisting clear definition in his descriptions of his characters’ experience of the world. This does not mean that White’s prose is vague or without substance, as to paint something without edges is not necessarily to paint a distortion.

Sludgy Style In order to understand God, then, one must be willing to get one’s hands dirty. The same must be said of any critic trying to understand White’s work, particularly his prose. White’s interest in the amorphous, shifting qualities of the physical world is reflected in his prose style; he suggests that the skin of language poses many of the same difficulties as the surfaces of objects. True perception, as Iris Murdoch wrote, is too rich, complex, and ever-changing to be contained in a stable and unreflective language; to sit comfortably within language suggests that active perception has stopped, and one has taken consolation in form that cannot properly respond to the fluctuating world. Mary Hare in Riders in the Chariot likens such conventional use of language to sitting ‘In a kind of tent. You know. When it rains’ (71). As the convict Judd ponders in Voss: All the scraps of knowledge with which he was filled, all those raw hunks of life that, for choice, or by force, he had swallowed down,

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were reduced by the great mystery of words to the most shameful matter. Words were not the servant of life, but life, rather, was the slave of words. (203) As both Murdoch and Golding also argued, pre-defined words, when imposed upon the world a priori, tend to shape and distort our vision rather than provide illumination. As Murdoch contended in ‘The Idea of Perfection,’ perception should be able perpetually to redefine our language in order for one to move towards truth. Considering the importance of White’s style to his artistic enterprise, critics have shown unusual hesitation towards close analysis of his prose. Gordon Collier’s exhaustive survey of White criticism shows that at least half of the critical writing on White contains no reference to style, and 30 per cent of the remaining half ‘have no more than one or two sentences on “style”’ (37). Collier quotes Brian Kiernan, one of White’s more ambivalent critics, to explain this tendency: [White’s novels] are ‘poems’ in the sense that they are extremely complex, ambiguous and ironic linguistic constructs. Paradoxically, by attempting to respond fully to the poetic texture by close analysis of it there is the danger that such detailed examination will fail to establish anything that is convincingly true of the whole dramatic context and will come to seem an attempt … to cut down to a critically manageable size an imagination too rich, subtle and original for conventional critical demands. (Qtd. in Collier 3) Kiernan’s quote reveals a particular understanding of what is expected from a novel, as opposed to a poem – as well as what is expected from a critic. By defining poems against novels as ‘complex, ambiguous, and ironic linguistic constructs,’ Kiernan suggests that ‘poetic texture’ and ‘dramatic context’ stand in opposition to each other. Ambiguity in language, suggests Kiernan, is acceptable in poetry, but it cannot maintain the dramatic action of a novel. There is a certain conservative sense in Kiernan’s appraisal. It can be argued that a narrative that features characters and events needs grounding in a familiar reality; to some extent, the reader likes to know what is ‘going on.’ But, as Michael Wood explains, ‘Literature not

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only reports on what happens and on what may happen, it is itself a “form of lived experience”’ (9). A large portion of human experience involves forms of knowledge that are essentially non-rational, and are, by their very nature, ambiguous. Novels do not just relate empirical facts, but embody this ‘lived experience’ by providing ‘the direct experience of words behaving and misbehaving’ (M. Wood 9). For a text to even begin to approach the spiritual or ethical world, it must reject the suggestion that complexity, uncertainty, and irony are somehow not part of the ‘convincing’ truth. Concrete observable events comprise only a small part of life; unstable language, and unstable knowing, is a central part of ‘lived experience.’ It may be said that Kiernan’s distinction between poetry and the novel is so conservative as to be not worth discussing, but his position was widely shared by White’s early critics and readers, and is indicative of the literary context in which White was writing. White’s most famous and brutal review came from the poet and critic A.D. Hope in reaction to The Tree of Man; it concluded: [White needs to learn that] whatever life may be like, the English language is neither hugger-mugger, nor transient, and that it is never safe to break it into small pieces as a means of writing a novel. When so few Australian novelists can write prose at all, it is a great pity to see Mr White, who shows on every page some touch of the born writer, deliberately choose as his medium this pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge. (215) White took this review very badly, but there is irony in Hope’s attack, most notably in his derisive use of the term ‘sludge,’ as it is the very substance that White uses to suggest the spiritual breakdown of barriers. Hope argues that ‘whatever life may be like’ (i.e. sludgy, disorderly, transient, fractured), language is different. White, unlike Murdoch who believed that words can never reflect the world, believed that language is not different, and it can, and should, reflect what ‘life may be like.’ ‘Words,’ he wrote in The Tree of Man, ‘occasionally will rise to the occasion and disgorge whole worlds’ (23). White’s language is ambiguous, in that it rarely carries a single meaning, but one must be careful to use a word such as ‘ambiguity,’ as it can carry negative implications; to accuse White of lack of clarity should not be to suggest that he is somehow evading his

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responsibility to communicate. White works to show that there are forms of reason-without-reason, types of knowledge – indeed, the most significant types – that cannot be easily contained or expressed in a purely rational manner. As Patricia Morley explains, ‘Suprarational rather than irrational is a far more accurate word to describe White’s response to the reality he perceives’ (60). He utilizes unfamiliar or dislocated syntax not merely to destabilize rational knowledge, but to represent supra-sensible forms of knowledge that resist finite definition and remain in perpetual flux.i Again, to quote Michael Wood, ‘Literature, like doubt, will not let knowledge rest; but not because it loves only doubt or doesn’t care for knowledge’ (6). White cares deeply about knowledge, or, more specifically, about knowing: knowledge cannot be let to rest, as it would cease to be knowledge. An example of how White uses his amorphous prose style to render non-rational sensory experience can be found in a passage from The Tree of Man, in which Thelma Parker experiences a moment of unselfing at a concert. The architecture of the composition could not be destroyed, if its intention. Thelma Parker wandered beneath the dome of music in her best shoes. Get a room somewhere, she said, with her own four-square walls, and perhaps use of kitchen. The clash of her own cymbals could not destroy her privacy. So she mounted farther, on firm steps now; it was possible to follow their winding, however intricate, even doubly spiral, in which were set the little mirrors reflecting the past, of roses, and of fowl manure, even the shattered one in which her silver face was splintered, but quickly shoved behind the flat boards of woodwind. Ah, she sucked the air between her teeth, putting the hot strands behind her ears, then it is in sight. A little farther, across a formal platform, and up, just a little, tremblingly, was the bell of victory. She reached up, so high that her breasts had disappeared, and placed the wreath with her own hands. ‘Is it over then?’ asked Genevieve, for whom there was no other reason to clap. ‘Yes,’ said Thelma, resuming her outward person. (262) The mystical experience for Iris Murdoch stood as a tantalizing but probably unreachable ideal; for White, it is immanent and vividly real,

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constantly present in the environment in which his characters reside, in such forms as light, mysteriously porous objects, and divine sparks. In the above passage, Thelma initially appears to wander as a separate being within the music; she is aware of wearing ‘her best shoes,’ a sign that her ego remains. Her thoughts of past and future – ‘perhaps use of a kitchen’ – that represent her dislocation from the present moment are reflected in mirrors – a reminder of self-consciousness – but are then tucked away into the soundscape.ii Thelma begins to abandon herself to the music. The sound of the orchestra takes care of its guest, tucking the broken, reflected visage away behind ‘boards of woodwind,’ a synaesthetic juxtaposition that renders the sonic cadences of an instrument as solid and tactile as wood. Thelma’s internal ‘cymbals’ then begin to chime in accord with the composition, and she eventually succumbs to the paradoxical possibility of achieving an impregnable ‘privacy’ while immersed in the music. She begins to inhabit the intricate composition, described as ‘architecture’ and rendered visually as a staircase. The nature of White’s prose makes it difficult to read the physical landscape of the music as mere metaphor. The musical experience itself is rendered physically: other than the mention of ‘cymbals,’ ‘woodwind[s]’ and ‘the bell’ – all, notably, physical objects – there is no language of sound in this passage at all. The cymbals/symbols in the passage, such as the sweet-smelling roses and fowl/foul manure, clatter together in juxtaposition, but create an unlikely harmony; this ‘sound’ is the result of the meeting of disparate elements, and is not present in either image taken alone. There is no sound in a single cymbal. White also unsettles the reader’s habitual ways of understanding by refusing the comfort of recognizable syntax, often omitting expected words altogether. This occurs twice in this particular passage: first, in the opening line, ‘The architecture of the composition could not be destroyed, if its intention.’ The ‘architecture’ of White’s own composition is disrupted by this odd ellipsis, but the direct affirmation of the structure’s integrity in the line suggests that any seeming awkwardness in the phrasing should be understood as the result of projected expectations of language. The sentence is achieving what White intended; it is the reader who is forced to overcome his or her limiting expectations of language. The reader’s first instinct is to attempt to fill in the omitted words: ‘if its intention’ is to do what? And what is the subject the ‘it’ refers to? The subject

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of the sentence may be the ‘architecture,’ leading to the assumption that the reader should be looking to discover the architecture’s unstated intention. Considering that Thelma’s experience within or as the architecture takes place due to the destruction of the barrier between subject and object, it is logical that ‘intention’ is nowhere to be found. Alternatively, the sentence can be seen to represent the composition’s attempt to destroy itself, a parallel to mystical self-obliteration; this is proposed, partially enacted, but ultimately refuted within the syntax; the phrase trembles, but does not break. This sentence refuses a distinct reading, evoking a paradoxical sense of simultaneous integrity and instability; the readers’ inability to close understanding forces them to push through the remainder of the passage on faith alone, hoping that the rest of the paragraph will provide a more definite understanding of the events described. Readers must abandon themselves to the unstable language, much as Thelma herself allows herself to accept on passive trust a composition that eludes any rational form of understanding. The other instance of a noticeably omitted word takes place in the form of a syllepsis in the line that reads, ‘Ah, she sucked the air between her teeth, putting the hot strands behind her ears, then it is in sight.’ Here, physically indistinct ‘air’ is inhaled between Thelma’s teeth and then placed firmly behind her ears; sucking becomes tucking, and formless air becomes tangible hair. The moment of transition, however, is omitted, suggesting that, rather than transforming from one into the other, the instable object holds both material and immaterial qualities. White also engages in a synaesthetic breakdown of distinction between senses: the music, in the air, enters Thelma’s body through her mouth, orally not aurally, and it only wraps around her ears; the usual functions of the senses are rearranged as sound is rendered tactile. Then, as the music climaxes, the aural composition is spoken of in visual terms: the end of the music – one assumes White is referring to the conclusion of the piece, as the ‘it’ in the sentence once again has no subject – is ‘in sight.’ The language of inhalation in the passage suggests a near-pun here that once again evokes transgressed physical borders: the music is ‘in sight’ but also, perhaps, ‘inside.’ The frontier of the skin has been overthrown; inside or outside are indistinguishable. This breaking-down of barriers is also suggested by White’s punctuation, or lack thereof: by omitting quotation marks, he refuses to distinguish between the

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omniscient narrator’s voice and Thelma’s own. Thelma, as an objectively observed character, dissolves, and, for a moment, author and character are indistinguishable from each other; it is not just the borders between Thelma and the music that disintegrate.

The Ontology of Words In Voss, White goes so far as to suggest the possibility of stripping language of its referential meaning altogether, and imbuing it with a sheer ontological significance. White often treats language as a physical object; in his essay ‘The Prodigal Son,’ for example, he refers to the ‘rocks and sticks of words’ (16). For Laura Trevalyan in Voss, ‘all words became great round weights. She did not raise her head for those the German spoke, but heard them fall, and loved their shape’ (63). In Voss, White indirectly refers to his strategy of repeating words until they become things, rather than signs: He was singing, too, in his own language, some shining song, of sunlight and of waterfalls. As the words of the song were few, or those with which he was familiar, they would recur, which stressed their shape, and emphasized their mystical errand in the silence of the grey bush. (143) Voss is earlier described as ‘looking at each word as if it were a round pebble of mystical perfection’ (20). White refers to a ‘mysticism of objects,’ but language too has a ‘mystical errand’ (Voss 20). Language is ‘mystical’ because the open and endless act of intuitive understanding with which it can be greeted does not lead to a conception of language’s emptiness and infinite relativism. By treating language as having an ontological significance outside referential meaning, White instils it with a permanent essence despite the potential fluctuations of interpretation. This is similar to how White views the physical world: meaning is endlessly interpretable, but interpretations revolve around the permanence of the object or word’s divine ontology. The infinity of interpretation does not imply weightlessness, but the infinity of God. He makes the case that there is an ineffable truth that persists despite or, more accurately, within linguistic aporia, so that the play of meaning, rather than introducing relativism, can, in fact, lead one to supra-rational understanding. When Laura hears

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Voss recite a poem in German, she declares ‘there was the poem read by Mr Voss, which I did understand in a sense, if not the sense of words.’ Voss asks Laura, ‘If you have not understood the poem by the words, how would you interpret it?’ Laura refers Voss back to his own earlier insistence that ‘Poetry will not bear translation. It is too personal’ (82). The implication is not that Laura rejects that words have meaning, or that she appreciated the poem on a purely sensory or aesthetic level, but that the significance of Voss’s words extends beyond their obvious referents; they cannot be ‘translated’ into other words, they cannot be reduced to their definitions; they ‘are.’ In Riders in the Chariot, Mordecai Himmelfarb receives a divine revelation after a night spent permuting and combining the letters of the Torah. Kabbalist Jews believe that the Torah is not only the word, but the flesh of God, just as Christians held that Jesus, the physical manifestation of God, was also the Word of God. This does not concretize the Torah’s meaning; on the contrary, Kabbalist worship takes the form of endless scriptural interpretation. However, this does not point ‘to an indeterminacy of the meaning of the text, a negation of the possibility of finding the one ultimate sense of a text, as in modern hermeneutics, but rather to the assertion by many Kabbalists of a richness intrinsic to this particular text’ (Idel 83). The divine origin of the scripture means that each one of these infinite interpretations holds truth within it. It is the ‘presence of God as author’ that ‘shows the deep difference between this Kabbalistic type of claim for infinity and deconstruction, which denies any form of metaphysical presence’ (Idel 88). Furthermore, the book, which holds all interpretations, will always hold more meaning than the interpreter can provide it, as he or she is limited to a single reading at a time, which only emphasizes the text’s depth. Moshe Idel explains that the Jewish practice of excluding vowels from the Torah invites the reader to add the vowels when reciting; the reader, however, must choose a vowel sound while reading, immediately delimiting the Torah’s multiple interpretations (84–5). As the fourteenthcentury Italian Kabbalist R. Menahem ben Benjamin Recanati explained, the power of the Torah is that, while the reader must choose one vowel sound, the Torah holds all possible choices within it: ‘It is well known that the consonants have many aspects when nonvocalized. However, when they are vocalized they have one significance, in accordance with the vocalization, and therefore the

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scroll of Torah, which has all the aspects, is nonvocalized’ (qtd. in Idel 87). This understanding of textual uncertainty as a vessel that holds a multitude of potential meaning, rather than nothing at all, can be seen in relation to White’s stylistic technique, particularly his use of ellipsis. While White would certainly not make the claim that his own novels are divinely inspired, his argument for the ontological reality of words, coupled with his belief in the divine essence within objects, provides language with a weight of spiritual significance that persists not despite its indeterminacy, but because of it.

Painterly Technique I: Ekphrasis White was not naïve in regard to contemporary understandings of language. Words, he admitted, are rarely ‘detached from their obligations’ and it takes great discipline to accept linguistic aporia without frustration. Despite White’s claim for the spiritual potential of language, he constantly struggled with the limitations of words, once declaring that ‘I do think composers and musicians come closer to God, also some painters; it is the writer who deals in stubborn, colourless words who is always stumbling and falling’ (Letters 410). Visual and musical mediums, he felt, have more obvious sensory aspects, which allow more readily for non-rational or open contemplation; he once declared: Always something of a frustrated painter, and a composer manqué, I wanted to give my book the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint, to convey through the theme and characters of Voss what Delacroix and Blake might have seen, what Mahler and Liszt might have heard. (Qtd. in Hewitt 36) But how can a writer ‘use writing as a painter uses paint,’ as White claimed? White first directly relates the literary to the painterly in Riders in the Chariot through his depiction of the character Alf Dubbo, an Australian aborigine raised by a white parson, who tries to capture his visions in paint. The central dilemma surrounding Alf’s self-imposed task to capture artistically the non-rational elements of human experience, particularly the sense of the ineffable divine, is brought out in his early attempt to paint Christ in order to please Mrs Pask, his

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Christian caretaker. Alf quickly realizes he cannot achieve his goal, as he is unable to picture Christ, ‘except as an ambitious abstraction, or realistically, as a man’ (371). Alf’s inability to reconcile Christ’s humanity with his divinity evokes the mystery of the Incarnation, a doctrine central to any Christian-influenced artistic attempt to represent God. Christ brought together man and God, not by being partly human and partly divine, but by being entirely both. Indeed, the power of the Incarnation is that Christ is seen not as having a foot in each realm, but as occupying both at once, not simply mediating between God and Man, but uniting them. The historical significance of this mystery to art, both visual and verbal, cannot be underestimated, particularly in relation to White’s own quest to uncover the divine essence of the physical world. Christ represents the ideal artistic form; he is simultaneously a graspable sign and the divine referent, the image of God and God himself. The Incarnated Christ can be seen as the ultimate example of what Gotthold Lessing labelled the ‘natural sign’ (41). A ‘natural sign’ is a sign that resembles its referent; the Incarnated Christ takes this concept to its extreme, going beyond simple resemblance to entirely collapse the sign into its referent. As such, Christ represents the mystery of pre-fallen language; he is ‘the Word made Flesh’ (John 1:14). Of course, we are left to struggle with ‘arbitrary signs’ (Lessing 41); that is, signs that have no innate relationship to their referent, surfaces with no relation to their depths. In the Laocoön, Lessing nuances the relationship between the ‘natural’ and the ‘arbitrary sign’ by suggesting that the signs of visual art are less arbitrary than language, as the painting of, for example, a tree, resembles its referent, while the word ‘tree’ does not resemble a physical tree whatsoever. But, while the signs of visual art may be less arbitrary than words when related to a physical referent, they are usually understood to share the same limitations when related to an intangible, transcendent referent. However, as discussed, Patrick White believed that the physical world has an inherent connection to the divine; it should not be seen as veiling God, but as embodying Him. The presence of the divine within matter means that the physical may indeed resemble its divine referent. Alf Dubbo, White’s painter in Riders, is first drawn to the mystical potential of visual art through an encounter with a painting of a divine Chariot he finds in a book of late nineteenth-century painting.

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He describes the picture as one ‘he would always remember, and criticize, and wish to improve on’ (320). It is, to an extent, the correctible failings of the work that attract Dubbo: ‘“My horses,” the boy claimed “would have the fire flowing from their tails. And dropping sparks. Or stars. Moving. Everything would move in my picture. Because that is the way it ought to be”’ (320). The desire for a static painting to contain movement may appear to be an illogical wish for a work of visual art, yet Alf’s aspiration evokes a central tension between the verbal and visual arts. Murray Krieger explains the opposition by stating that painting has space, but no movement; movement occurs over time, and painting has no temporal dimension. Language, on the other hand, is a medium without capacity. It functions entirely within time, having, literally, no space. While Krieger’s argument is simplistic – one cannot experience a work of visual art outside time, and words on a page certainly have a physical reality – it captures a common argument. As Krieger explains in his book, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, ‘The aesthetic dream of our culture has long been of a miracle that permits the two opposed impulses [time and space, fixity and flow] to come together’ (6). It is tied, he explains, to ‘the romantic quest to realize the nostalgic dream of an original, pre-fallen language of corporeal presence’ (6), a comment that again evokes the mystery of the Incarnation. Alf claims that he will eventually complete this ‘romantic quest’ by creating a painting in which ‘everything would move.’ But is this possible? Can a painting ‘move’? And if so, how? One can perhaps consider the way in which the viewer’s understanding of a work of art ‘moves,’ as he or she begins to draw connections and offer interpretations that unravel in the mind over a period of time. We have already discussed open-ended textual interpretation in relation to both the Kabbalah and White’s work itself, but, in both cases, the analysis depended on words treated as infinitely interpretable signs, despite the fact that the transcendent centre itself does not move. Once the viewer starts reading a work of art as a sign, the significance of the strictly representational and ‘sensible’ dimension of a painting dissolves, as the viewer begins to treat the image as metaphor, iconography, or allegory; in other words, as a text. But is there a way for a painting to move without being ‘read’ in this way? The painting of the heavenly chariot that so interests Alf, while never explicitly identified within the text, appears to be inspired by

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a work by Odilon Redon, entitled ‘Apollo’s Chariot.’ While White embellishes and alters the appearance of the work in his description within the text – he supplies it with more intricate realistic detail, and describes four riders within the chariot – he has stated, in his letters, that he included the chariot image in his novel after an encounter with Redon’s painting in a Bond Street gallery (White, Letters 93). The use of this particular work is revealing, as Redon himself was concerned with the question currently under consideration: How does one put, in Redon’s own phrase, ‘the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible’ without resorting to symbols or iconography that function much like language? (23). How can a picture of, say, a chair suggest, reveal, or embody the divine essence without the chair being anything but a chair? Redon argued in his book To Myself: Notes on Life, Art, and Artists that we generally perceive in a ‘closed’ fashion; we bring our expectations to bear on the things we see, categorizing objects and people as types, in order to avoid confrontation with their uniqueness. Redon insisted, in a parallel to Weil’s idea of attention, that art should be made ‘in the forgetfulness of what one knows, with the desire to approach, as closely as possible, what one sees’ (29). This, he argued, will produce ‘a firm document, rich, fruitful, inexhaustible in resources and of which one will never tire’ [my emphasis] (29). This evokes Murdoch’s interpretation of Kant’s sublime, as described in her work ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited.’ When we relinquish our natural compulsion to intellectually reduce and categorize, we will be confronted with the world as it is; it will swamp and overwhelm the mind, and one will be struck by the seemingly infinite nature of what is more often considered to be a finite world. By pushing past the closed borders of conventional observation, the vast interconnected structure of reality reveals itself, and the sense of awe and terror that arises from this is tantamount to mystical ecstasy. While Kant famously denied the possibility of receiving a sense of the sublime from artistic creations, Redon argued, like Iris Murdoch, that a work of art could impart the sublime if it refused to allow the viewer’s understanding of the presented image to become final. The meaning – if it can be called a meaning – that one encounters through this type of perception is what twelfth- and thirteenth-century exegetes called anagogic meaning; that is, the highest spiritual understanding of an image or holy scripture, through which the interpreter is elevated to the light and face of God (Didi-Huberman 39).

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Anagogic meaning is unlike literal, allegorical, or tropologic meaning, as the exegete knows there is no single intended referent for the image or text in question, accepting, instead, an unending matrix of significance. White’s character Alf Dubbo eventually paints his ideal image of the Chariot. White describes Alf’s depiction of the horses that pull the Chariot: The latter could have been rough brumbies, of a speckled grey, rather too coarse, earthbound might have been a legitimate comment, if their manes and tails had not streamed beyond possibility, and the skeins of cloud shed by their flanks appeared at any point to catch on the rocks of heavenly gold. [His italics] (458) Alf’s horses are painted in gritty, unromantic detail. They are ‘rough brumbies,’ Australian slang for a wild horse, which suggests that they have not been broken or contained by man’s influence. This can perhaps be extended to the understanding of the horses as readable but elusive symbols: They remain impervious to the viewer’s control, natural and untamed. White states that the horses would appear ‘earthbound,’ if their manes and tails did not ‘stream … beyond possibility,’ or, again, beyond containment. However, White remains insistent on the palpable reality of Alf’s horses. Although he states that the term ‘earthbound’ is not, ultimately, a ‘legitimate comment,’ he italicizes the word, allowing it to stand out on an otherwise un-italicized page, thereby maintaining its emphatic presence even after its suppression. Through these italics, White emphasizes the physicality of language. This mirrors a technique used in the (imaginary) described image: it is only the periphery of the horses (their manes and tails) that signifies their divine quality; their centres (their bodies) remain distinctly earthly. White’s description also insists that the cloud-like dust driven up by the horses only has the ‘potential’ to ‘catch on the rocks of heavenly gold.’ Again, the still image refuses attachment to an end; consequently, the image remains realistic, yet evasive. This refusal of closure is also utilized in Dubbo’s depiction of the Chariot: Where he cheated a little was over the form of the Chariot itself. Just as he had not dared completely realize the body of the Christ, the Chariot was shyly offered. But its tentative nature became, if

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anything, its glory, causing it to blaze across the sky, or into the soul of the beholder. (458) Dubbo’s refusal to ‘completely realize’ the Chariot suggests that he will not commit to the lie of finite visual comprehension; perception becomes an unending process, but one that blazes, not frustrates. The art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, in his book on the Italian painter Fra Angelico, describes this technique as dissemblance. Dissemblance, he writes, ‘by marring the aspect, by forbidding strict [closed] representation definitions, opened up the image to the play of associations, so that it became the privileged place for all exegetical networks, for all displacements of the figure’ (9). By refusing to represent an image as finite, this technique leads the viewer towards its anagogic meaning. It is misleading, however, to discuss Dubbo’s chariot painting as a painting, and not as what it actually is: an ekphrastic description of a painting that, in fact, has never physically existed. In treating this character’s attempt to represent the divine, one neglects White’s own effort. Indeed, it is through White’s description of Dubbo’s painting where Murray Krieger’s ‘miracle that permits the two opposed impulses [fixity and flow] to come together’ is overcome, or, to be more accurate, is given the best illusion of being overcome. Ekphrasis, the act of describing a work of visual art in prose, purports to bring together the spatial and sensible strength of visual art with the temporal and intelligible power of the written word, by introducing, in Krieger’s words, ‘a moment of being into a work in the process of becoming’ [his italics] (8). Krieger argues that ‘the Western imagination has seized upon and used the ekphrastic principle … [in order] to merge the two impulses – to comprehend the simultaneity, in the verbal figure, of fixity and flow’ (6). That White is employing ekphrasis for this very reason is suggested in the last passage of his description of the finished chariot painting: From certain angles the canvas presented a reversal of the relationship between permanence and motion, as though the banks of a river were to begin to flow alongside its stationary waters. The effect pleased the painter, who had achieved more or less by accident what he had discovered years before while lying in the gutter. So he encouraged an illusion which was also a truth. (458)

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It is not Dubbo who has achieved this illusion, but White himself within this and the other ekphrastic passages that occur throughout the novel. White then ties this illusion of the reconciliation of a paradox through ekphrasis to the central mystery of the Incarnation. When Dubbo paints his picture of Christ, he paints Him, His cross, and the women around His feet with what White describes as a ‘panegyric blue’ (436). The word ‘panegyric’ means specifically ‘A public speech or piece of writing in praise of someone.’ So it is not through descriptive language or physical paint alone in which Christ is finally depicted, but through this mysterious tool of panegyric blue that is both word and hue. It is ultimately through ekphrasis that White is able to encourage the illusion (which is also a truth) of stillness in motion, and, by extension, of the divine in man, of God in the world, and of the Incarnation.

Painterly Technique II: Colour Another way in which White attempts to mix the painterly with the literary in his novels is through his use of colour-words. Some critics have treated White’s use of colour-words, but most have made the error of discussing ‘colour symbolism.’ Peter Wolfe, for instance, in his book Laden Choirs, writes that Ellen Roxburgh’s green shawl ‘symbolizes her repressed eroticism, green being the colour of both the jungle and the sea’ (204), and A.M. McCulloch writes that White uses purple because ‘it is the colour of mourning; it is the colour of an end and a beginning’ (175). While this symbolic use of colour is certainly present to an extent in White’s work, his technique is far more complex and intuitive than is usually understood. As White explained in a 1961 letter to Geoffrey Dutton: Symbols must certainly work on an ‘imaginative rather than intellectual level,’ as you say. Surely one must deal with any detail of a work of art firstly on the ‘imaginative level,’ and that is what is wrong with most Australian critics. Their lack of intuition makes them rush to dissect intellectually. Or am I saying this because I am stronger in intuition than in intellect? (White, Letters 193) One of White’s most prominent ‘imaginative’ techniques is to endow a particular colour-word with a sense of importance, and then relate

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it to such diverse and seemingly un-relatable physical objects that any clear or simple symbolic reading is pushed beyond rational grasp. This is a more refined version of Golding’s attempt to overdetermine meaning in The Spire. Golding, through his characters, provided overt symbolic interpretations of the tower so heterogeneous and often contrary that it became impossible to locate any single or simple meaning. White, on the other hand, oversaturates his colour-words with implicit meaning without suggesting any direct interpretations at all. Consider the uses of the colour blue in Riders in the Chariot: At times, the colour appears vested with the ‘symbolic’ relevance ascribed to it by Peter Wolfe, who says that it refers to ‘faith, religion, and loyalty’ (144). Alf Dubbo renders ‘the divine tree in its intensity of blue’ (409), and Himmelfarb and his wife, Reha, during their wedding, feel ‘sucked out of themselves into an infinity of blue’ (126). Yet White also applies this colour to characters and moments that seem to resist this reading: the conniving Mrs Flack’s eiderdown is ‘pale blue’ (293), the ignorant Miss Jolley has ‘a blue eye that would see just so far and no farther’ (44), and Himmelfarb’s Pilate at the mock-crucifixion is named Blue. The reader wrestles to reconcile these uses. This process of reflection causes the reader to question the initial correlation that he or she made between blueness and spirituality; a second examination of the relevant passages reveals that this connection was never made explicit by the text. Blue has been imbued, by its repetition and placement, with a sense of significance; it cannot be dismissed as a purely aesthetic visual term, but its symbolic connotations are too unstable to treat it as a simple signifier.iii As Carolyn Bliss explains, White’s ‘modulations overrun categories, they imply the impossibility of polarizing good and evil, positive and negative… Imagery thus corroborates our sense that the world as portrayed by White is beyond his or anyone’s power to analyze, catalogue, order or control’ (197). Wittgenstein was intrigued by our use of colour-words because, he argued, it reveals more about habits of thinking and perceiving than the practical or scientific nature of colour. Close analysis of colourlanguage has the potential to illuminate the complex link between subjective perception and external objects. He wrote, ‘Lichtenberg says that very few people have ever seen pure white. So do most people use the word wrong, then? And how did he learn the correct use?… [S]uch a construct may in turn teach us something about the way we in fact use the word’ (Wittgenstein, Remarks 2e). For example,

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we can conceive of pure blue in our minds as a thing, rather than a quality, despite the fact that it does not exist in nature: there is no blue in the physical world, only blue things. White uses colour-words in order to take advantage of colour’s status as a physical property that has a very different character within the realm of abstract thought. He uses colour-words with great frequency, yet he uses a remarkably limited pallet. For the most part, he paints in pure primary and secondary colours: yellow, blue, red, and green, as well as white, black, and gold (he occasionally uses grey, purple, orange, and pink, but with far less frequency). With the exception of indigo, which plays a significant part in The Vivisector (as an anagram for ‘God-In-I’), White usually avoids complex colour-words such as mauve, amber, vermillion, scarlet, etc. Nor does he often use object-comparison in his descriptions of primary and secondary colours; for instance, there may be yellow mustard in White’s work, but there are no mustardyellows.iv In the nine-page first chapter of The Tree of Man, we encounter no fewer than thirty colour-words, and, with the exception of ‘pale-blue’ and, arguably, ‘reddish,’ all are ‘simple’ colour-words. Of these thirty, only nine different variants are used: red (6 times), yellow (5), blue (4), white (3), black (3), gold (3), grey (2), green (1), and pink (1). White’s plain and repetitive use of only a handful of colour-words endows them with a great deal of implied significance. We encounter green everywhere, and it does not seem like there are many different greens. By using only the word ‘green,’ and failing to distinguish precise hues, White suggests that this one thing/quality is everywhere. This prevalence relieves green of being seen as an incidental quality attributed to an object. By allowing green to develop a character independent from green objects, White blurs the distinction between physical and mental understanding: we could not conceive of green without having initially seen it, but we could not understand green as a thing independent from an object without our imagination. As Steven Connor explains, ‘Colour, which is never a mere object in the world, and can never be seen immediately and in itself, is represented as the strongest indication that things seen and their seers participate in each other’s natures’ (Connor, Book 275). In 1810, Goethe produced Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours), a work which argued that any study of colour must take into account human perception. He argued that it is illogical to speak of colour as a mere play of light on surface, as Newton did, because colour only

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exists when the reflected light is received by the perceiver’s eye, and mentally interpreted. As Arthur Zajonc explains: The sighted eye requires more than the input of natural light; it also requires Empedocles’ inner, ocular light of intelligence. If we neglect the animating light of coherent intelligence that illumines and flows through all our senses, then the glory of the world stands mute before our inquiring spirit. Goethe emphasized the importance of a light that is within. In his words, ‘if the eye were not sun-like, how could we perceive the light?’ (205) Colour, then, involves the subject, both physically and mentally, and, as Goethe’s follower Rudolf Steiner has argued, the experience of colour represents a union of surface (matter), light (God), and the senses (man). Without all three elements, colour does not exist. This claim resonates with the scene in Iris Murdoch’s A Word Child in which Hilary Burde realizes, while looking at a kettle, that ‘colour was not really in the kettle… I could see the waves. The kettle was glowing and vibrating rhythmically and I was glowing and vibrating with it’ (297). This scene similarly emphasized the central importance of the subject in any act of attention, suggesting that there is the possibility of ‘truth’ in subjective perception. This complex idea is central to the work of Saul Bellow, and will be addressed in more detail in the following chapter. White further complicates the connection between mental and physical colour in the following passage from Voss: Green, too, was growing in intensity, as the spears of grass massed distinctly in the foreground, and a great, indeterminate green mist rolled up out of the distance… There was the good scent of a rich, recent, greenish dung. Over all this scene, which was more a shimmer than the architecture of landscape, palpitated extraordinary butterflies. Nothing had been seen to compare with their colours, opening and closing, opening and closing. Indeed, by the addition of this pair of hinges, the world of semblance communicated with the world of dream. (259) Here, greenness completely overflows, emanating beyond the objects of which it is a property. White presents ‘green’ as an independent

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quality before suggesting its relation to the grass, mist, and dung. He suggests green’s constancy despite its connectedness to a changing physical form by ascribing it as a quality of both the ingested grass and the expelled dung; grass becomes dung as it is passed through a living body, but greenness remains. This independence of colour from form is further emphasized by its appearance in the mist; mist cannot properly be green, but it can refract, blur, and carry greenness away from the objects it envelops. Colour becomes an abstract ‘shimmer,’ rather than a property of the ‘architecture of landscape.’ Again, White complicates the claim that green can only exist in isolation as a mental concept; there appears to be some indication that colour exists and endures despite fluctuations in the objects to which it is attached. White captures this mystery of perception in the metaphor of the ‘extraordinary butterflies.’ Again, he distinguishes colour from object; his phrasing implies that it is not the butterflies’ wings that are opening and closing, but the colours themselves. In the flickering of wings, colour appears and disappears from the physical world, perceived by the senses and then remembered by the mind. This fluctuation occurs and recurs with such rapidity that sense, thought, and world become intertwined, and ‘the world of semblance’ is able to communicate with ‘the world of dream.’

The Australian Wilderness White offered the recurring images of blurred boundaries and malleable objects to challenge the prevalent rigid thought structures that he felt served to dangerously suppress intuitive knowledge of ineffable reality. His derisive opinion of rational thinking formed the basis of his frequent criticisms of Australian society and culture. He considered his nation to be engrossed in a farcical and dangerous attempt to import and impose a misplaced foreign civility upon an unreceptive land; Australians, he said, are raised to think ‘Only the British can be right’ (‘Prodigal’ 13). He felt that this resistance to the unique character of the Australian landscape was reflected in the nation’s literary output, which had, up to that point, been primarily concerned with celebrating man’s success in conquering, rather than understanding, the inhospitable wilderness. White’s novels challenged this trend, which led many critics to dismiss him as un-Australian: Ian Turner, for example, claimed that ‘A rational realism is much more characteristic

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of our way of thinking than is the contemplation of infinite mysteries’ (36). In his essay ‘The Prodigal Son,’ White responded by painting an unflattering image of Australia’s ‘rational realism’: The Great Australian Emptiness in which the mind of man is the least of his possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means steak and cake, muscles prevail and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from average nerves. It was the exaltation of the ‘average’ that made me panic most. (15) Here, to describe a culture inhabiting a land that is both great and empty, White uses a language that evokes a paradoxical sense of both dominance and dislocation. Ownership does not imply knowledge of the possessed, eyes can stare but not see, one can be beautiful with no understanding of beauty, and wisdom is didactic or documentary. The Australian mind can control, but it cannot see. White suggested, through his novels, that this desperate and unrefined attempt to dominate the contingent natural world is ultimately futile. He illustrates this in The Tree of Man and Riders in the Chariot through the two grand mansions – Glastonbury and Xanadu, respectively – that sit as absurd travesties upon the bush. Both mansions are named in reference to lavish palaces, one Western, one Eastern, but both creations of Romantic British minds. The mansion of Glastonbury in The Tree of Man is given that name because its owner, Mr. Armstrong, absurdly considers his home ‘not unlike the place of that name, of which nobody else had heard, in the old country’ (158). These formations of Australian stone and mortar into structures that resemble creations of foreign minds, ‘created in the first place for its owner’s pleasure’ [his italics] (Riders 19), are eventually undone. Both homes are devoured by the landscape from which they were forged, losing their man-made distinction from the natural world. In Xanadu: ‘On one side of the dining-room, where weather had torn the slates from an embrasure in the course of some historic storm, an elm had entered in. The black branches of the elm sawed’ (Riders 42). The entrance of the tree is subtly figured in the language as a siege upon a fortress. The phrasing of the last sentence suggests a pun on

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sawed/sword, causing the sentence to be read ‘the black branches of the elm-sword.’ The branch enters through an ‘embrasure,’ a term which refers to an opening in a wall designed to facilitate a weapon. In this case, the intruder capitalizes upon the fortress’s opening; the palace is destroyed by a weakness inherent in its own aggression. The shifting ownership of the embrasure that this implies causes a typically Whitean confusion of barriers; it is difficult to tell whose wall it is. The wall is like the horizon: the place where sky and sea meet is not a thing itself, but it is also neither sky nor sea; the presentation of this embrasure, this unpossessed and doubly-possessed hole, serves to undermine an arbitrarily imposed dichotomy. Later in the novel, this wall between nature and Xanadu is further compromised: That summer the structure of Xanadu, which had already entered in a conspiracy with nature, opened still farther. Creatures were admitted that had never been inside before, and what had hitherto appeared to be a curtain, loosely woven of light and leaves, was, in fact, seen to be a wall. […] A whole victorious segment of light had replaced the solid plaster and stone. Leaves were plapping and hesitating, advancing and retreating, in whispers and explosions of green. Walls were revealed mottled with chlorosis. The scurf of moss had fallen from an oaken shoulder on to the rags of Italian damask. And dust, dust. (Riders 289–90) Again, the image of warfare is prevalent – ‘conspiracy,’ ‘victorious,’ ‘advancing and retreating,’ ‘explosions’ – but the battle is no longer between nature and Xanadu. Now, the material aspect of the mansion has become complicit with the entropy of the natural world, allowing it to enter. By suggesting that light can become a wall, and that the fabric of moss can sit upon the damask, White is again questioning the impenetrability of the distinction between natural and man-made; despite the attempt to forge the stone into an unnatural form, it will eventually return to its natural state: ‘dust, dust.’

God as Wilderness Carolyn Bliss has argued that White’s presentation of Australian wilderness sometimes stands ‘as a metaphor for his [man’s] confrontation

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with the unexplored and terrifying depths of self’ (4–5). Bliss likens White’s depiction of the outback to a ‘Conradian heart of darkness,’ and, in relation to his more pessimistic later works such as A Fringe of Leaves, this comparison is apt. Elizabeth Roxburgh’s experience in the outback amongst the aborigines, with whom she is led into an act of cannibalism, is arguably figured in these terms. Yet, the comparison to Heart of Darkness seems less apt when viewed in relation to White’s more complex mid-period novels. In The Tree of Man, Voss, Riders in the Chariot, and The Solid Mandala, White appears to liken the mysterious and often terrifying wilderness to God, rather than to evil: When Judd, for example, dies in the Australian desert in Voss, he understands it as God taking him ‘in to His rocky bosom’ (426). As such, it provides an echo of William Golding’s treatment of ‘darkness’: The wilderness is not the source of evil; rather, evil occurs when one resists it or attempts to control it. However, while Golding used ‘darkness’ in a strictly symbolic sense, it is hard to describe White’s treatment of the wilderness as mere metaphor, as Bliss suggests. White believes that God is present in the mysterious physical world as well as in man’s soul, so that immersion in the physical world is not a metaphor for spiritual union: it is spiritual union. White once again thwarts a conventional dichotomy by refusing to distinguish between physical and metaphysical dimensions. White’s 1957 novel Voss is loosely based on Ludwig Leichardt’s exploration of the Australian inner continent. It depicts the travels of the German Johann Ludwig Voss, and his unshakeable and egoistic drive to conquer the impossible landscape through the sheer force of will. For Voss, ‘all that was external to himself he mistrusted’ (21). He claims early on, ‘I do scarcely meet a man here … who does not suspect he will be unmade by his country. Instead of knowing that he will make it into what he wishes’ (50). White suggests that Voss’s character is related to his Germanic background; his attempt at willed domination and apotheosis is both Nietzschean and fascistic, but, as the character Radclyffe states, Voss’s confused spirituality is the result of ‘a battle between German precision and German mysticism…. I wonder which will win?’ (104). Voss’s error is that his personal spiritual longing is compromised by a profound rational egoism. He wrongly understands God in terms of power, arguing that ‘Atheists are atheists usually for mean reasons…. The meanest

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of these is that they themselves are so lacking in magnificence they cannot conceive the idea of a Divine Power’ (88–9). Voss sees God as a deity that lords over men, rather than within them; God controls, rather than inspires, and in such a conception, there is little difference between God and Devil. Consequently, Voss does not humble himself towards God, choosing instead to identify with his confused image of divinity, like the evil Sophie in Golding’s Darkness Visible. He is criticized for this tendency by Brother Müller, who says, ‘Mr Voss … you have a contempt for God, because he is not in your own image’ (50). White suggests, over the course of the narrative, that one approaches the ‘magnificence’ of God not by relating to His power, but by abjuring one’s own sense of pride; the path towards God is not one of apotheosis, but of humility. Voss struggles against this throughout the novel, stating, in no uncertain terms, ‘I detest humility… Is man so ignoble that he must lie in the dust, like worms?’ (151).v He later writes in a letter, ‘I do not intend to stop short of the Throne for the pleasure of grovelling on lacerated knees’ (217). This path of will and domination is eventually shown to be in error. As Laura Trevalyan explains, ‘When man is truly humbled, when he has learnt that he is not God, then he is nearest to becoming so’ (386). Carolyn Bliss centred her 1986 work Patrick White’s Fiction: The Paradox of Fortunate Failure upon the notion that it is through a fall, either personal or spiritual, that one begins to approach the mystical, and Bliss is correct to see this in relation to the mystical via negativa (11). Laura explains to Voss that, in order for them to be united, with each other and with God, they must both relinquish their pride: ‘Two cannot share one throne’ [his italics] (239). The unforgiving wilderness slowly breaks down Voss’s isolated self and his messianic self-image. As Voss moves towards his death at the hands of the aborigines, Laura says to him, through their psychic link, ‘Do you see now?… Man is God decapitated. That is why you are bleeding’ (364). Voss rejects this suggestion, claiming, ‘They cannot kill me… It is not possible’ (365). Eventually, immediately prior to his literal beheading, he realizes: He himself … had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive

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knowledge in the eyes of mules, of the innocent eyes of good men, of the elastic nature of the passions, even of the devotion he had received from some men, and one woman, and dogs. Now, at least, reduced to the bones of manhood, he could admit to all of this and listen to his teeth rattling in the darkness. (390) In order to deify himself, Voss rejected the unknown, the mysterious, and the irrational. He was afraid of ‘instinctive knowledge,’ ‘innocent eyes,’ and ‘devotion,’ the simple manifestations of a God he falsely believed he understood. He had resisted the ‘elastic nature’ of the soul – another Whitean image that challenges physical integrity – as he wished to maintain a rigid understanding of himself, but he eventually abandons this image so that he can finally ‘listen’ to himself. The novel, however, is concerned with more than personal spiritual development. Voss’s awakening is linked throughout to larger political, national, and interpersonal ethical issues. Voss’s final pages comprise a treatise on Australian identity, arguing that the path of spiritual humility can aid the nation to raise itself from its evil ‘mediocrity’ (447), a phrase White once again applies to his home country. The composer, Topp, says, ‘If we do not come to grief on our mediocrity as a people. If we are not locked for ever in our own bodies. Then, too, is the possibility that our hates and our carnivorous habits will unite in a logical conclusion: we may destroy one another’ (447). Mediocrity is described as a prison that traps one between spiritual ascension and ascetic descension. The phrase ‘locked for ever in our own bodies’ may appear to suggest a Gnostic leaning, although that would be at odds with his insistence on God’s immanence; more likely, the phrase refers to a restriction placed upon empathy, to an individual’s inability to understand that another’s existence is as real as his or her own. White suggests, through Topp, that the limitation of movement, both inward, towards God, or outward, towards others, will end in cruelty; such separation necessarily leads to opposition. It is only through unrestricted movement – physical, perceptual, interpretive, empathic, moral – that one is able to escape this prison. Willie Pringle agrees with Topp: I am confident that the mediocrity of which he speaks is not a final and irrevocable state; rather is it a creative source of endless

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variety and subtlety. Common forms are continually breaking into brilliant shapes. If we will explore them. (447) Pringle is suggesting that Australia’s so-called mediocrity only exists insofar as it is treated as a ‘common form’; once again, a metaphor of movement is employed, here figured as exploration in relation to Voss’s quest. Active investigation of the so-called mediocre will reveal an ‘endless’ complexity; by relinquishing the imposition of mediocrity as a concept, the image of Australia will break open. Voss’s experience in the outback should have revealed these ‘brilliant shapes,’ but his own perceptual prison blinded him, for the most part, until his death. Patrick White himself claimed to have eventually found these colours within the ‘Great Australian Emptiness’; he learned, by the end of his own life, to see ‘the extraordinary behind the ordinary’ (‘Prodigal’ 15), but only when he began to humbly accept the nature of his country. In ‘The Prodigal Son’ he wrote that the weakness of his first two novels, Happy Valley and The Living and The Dead, was due to his own foolish adherence to the British notion of creating with ‘a polished mind in civilised surroundings’ (16). Only by accepting the reality of the ‘refreshed landscape’ of Australia did he find creative rejuvenation. He explained his method: Certainly the state of simplicity and humility is the only desirable one for artist or for man. While to reach it may be impossible, to attempt to do so is imperative. Stripped of almost everything that I had considered desirable and necessary, I began to try…. [It] became a struggle to create completely fresh forms out of the rocks and sticks of words. I began to see things for the first time. Even the boredom and frustration presented avenues for endless exploration; even the ugliness, the bags and iron of Australian life, acquired a meaning. (‘Prodigal’ 16–17) White’s own creative endeavour is figured in similar terms to what is posited as Voss’s ultimate goal: to reach a state of humility in which the images of mediocrity, ‘boredom and frustration’ are overcome. Once this new mobility of vision is achieved, even the shattered cell becomes worthy of ‘endless exploration.’ Rocks, sticks, and words – things that appear impenetrable and fixed – can, if viewed with eyes that look towards the infinitely unravelling horizon, come to life, and

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reveal. The idea of mediocrity is yet another cloud that inhibits proper vision, and White frequently suggests, in a parallel to Iris Murdoch, that these perceptual inhibitions are the source of moral deviancy.

White’s Phenomenology: Patrick White and Merleau-Ponty White was markedly reserved about naming any of his influences; he wrote in the semi-autobiographical Memoirs of Many in One (1986), ‘I have studied practically nothing beyond my own intuition’ (54). So, while direct inheritance is impossible to establish, White’s worldview has unmistakable affinities with the writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas: White’s thought appears to share aspects of the former’s phenomenological vision of the world, and the latter’s ethical philosophy. Understanding White in relation to these thinkers can valuably illuminate the ways in which his thought departs from Murdoch’s, which was primarily influenced by Plato, Wittgenstein, and Weil. The first notable difference is that while Murdoch primarily relied on a visual metaphor of perception, White’s phenomenology, like Merleau-Ponty’s, involves the entirety of one’s being and one’s experience, and, as such, moves towards dissolution of the subject/object divide. (This difference is related to Murdoch’s insistence that one cannot shed the mental constructs of language and metaphor, which will be discussed in relation to Merleau-Ponty shortly.) As discussed, White often used colour-words in order to illustrate that an object and the subject’s mental image of the object are not two separate entities. Merleau-Ponty discusses colour in an identical way: [A] naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only null or total, but is rather a sort of strait between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open… Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things. (Visible 132–3) Merleau-Ponty insists that vision binds the ‘sensing and the sensed’ (‘Eye’ 162). ‘Truth,’ he wrote, ‘does not “inhabit” only the “inner

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man,” or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself’ (Phenomenology xi). The concept of apparent empty space being comprised of a ‘tissue’ of light is similarly figured in White’s novels: He often presents illumination as a vision of light, rather than caused by light. Light’s ultimate revelation is its revelation of itself, which causes a collapsing or destruction of space or distance. In Voss, White writes: ‘It was the light that prevailed, and distance, which, after all, was a massing of light, and the mobs of cockatoos, which exploded, and broke into flashes of clattering, shrieking, white and sulphur light’ [my italics] (172). And, in The Tree of Man: The winter dog’s dusty plume of tail dragged after the old man, who walked slowly, looking at the incredible objects of the earth, or at the intangible blaze of sunlight. It was in his eyes now. […] I believe, he said, in the cracks in the path…. The sky was blurred now. As he stood waiting for the flesh to be loosened on him, he prayed for greater clarity, and it became obvious as a hand. It was clear that One, and no other figure, is the answer to all sums. (477) In this passage, Stan Parker ‘sees’ both physical objects and intangible light. But they are not presented as separate objects: the dangling ‘it’ in the second sentence serves to destroy the distinction between the two, and, by placing this ‘it’ in Stan’s eyes, rather than before them, collapses the subject into the object. ‘Cracks,’ too, are not absences, but things that can be seen and believed in. ‘The flesh,’ writes Daniel Primozic, ‘covers both idea and body, inner and outer, Being and Nothingness, subject and object, essence and fact: all are part of the flesh of the world’ (63). The passage’s final phrase – ‘It was clear that One, and no other figure, is the answer to all sums’ – again evokes Merleau-Ponty, who was explicit that his holistic conception of the world does not reduce particulars to sameness, but that, ultimately, everything is part of a single flesh. So that, to elaborate upon White’s metaphor, different numbers exist, but, when seen in relation to one another, they will reveal their part as a single whole. White’s constant imagery of immersion, overflowing, and permeation is drawn from a vision of being that understands all elements of

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existence to be stitches in a common tapestry, a concept similar to Merleau-Ponty’s image of ‘the fabric of the world.’ One way in which Merleau-Ponty undermines the subject/object distinction is through the concept of ‘reversibility.’ We are not only perceiving subjects, but also objects that are perceived by others. Furthermore, we experience ourselves as both object and subject: Merleau-Ponty uses the image of someone clasping their hands together, so they are simultaneously touching and touched. Most pertinent, however, to White’s novels, is Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the importance of the mirror to one’s experience of reversibility. He writes: The mirror appears because I am seeing-visible [voyant-visible], because there is a reflexivity of the sensible; the mirror translates and reproduces that reflexivity. My outside completes itself in and through the sensible…. The mirror itself is the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things, myself into another, and another into myself…. [It enacts] the metamorphosis of seeing and seen. (‘Eye’ 168–9) As discussed earlier, White uses the moment of confrontation with oneself in the mirror as a pivotal moment in one’s spiritual development. In Riders in the Chariot, Mordecai Himmelfarb’s moment of mystical revelation occurs when he sees himself in a mirror: For, by now, Himmelfarb had taken the path of inwardness. He could not resist silence, and became morose on evenings when he was prevented from retreating early to his room… Mostly he remained at a level where, it seemed, he was inacceptable as a vessel of experience, and would fall asleep, and wake at cockcrow. But once he was roused from sleep, during the leaden hours, to identify a face. And got to his feet, to receive the messenger of light, or resist the dark dissembler. When he was transfixed by his own horror. Of his own image, but fluctuating, as though in fire or water. So that the long-awaited moment was reduced to a reflection of the self. In a distorting mirror. Who, then, could be saved? (136–7) Himmelfarb’s longing for transcendence has caused him to deny the world, and his place in it. He has chosen isolation and retreat, and

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denied the validity of his own immediate experience because of his own desire to reject selfhood and the world. The mirror revelation offers him the possibility of seeing himself as both subject and object, but he misinterprets it. This is rectified later: Himmelfarb prays and, ‘from behind closed lids, from the innermost part of him, the face began again to appear in the divine likeness, in the clouds of the little mirror’ (399). Here, Himmelfarb again confronts a ‘little mirror’ and, in it, sees, not ‘his’ face, but ‘the face’ in the ‘divine likeness.’ He is able to see his own face as object in the world, not as something he possesses, and is consequently able to relate it to his conception of the divine, bridging the divide between them. Suddenly, he is able to see that the space between objects is not vacant, but is filled with light, and the light takes on a physical character: ‘And the light was poured into the four corners of the room … the purest leaf touched the Jew’s eyelids; his lids were shaped in gold’ (399). The word ‘shaped’ suggests that his eyelids are both gilded by and comprised of light; by seeing himself in the mirror, Himmelfarb destroys the subject/object distinction, understands the flesh of the world, and subsequently experiences ‘complete union’ (400). One implication of the mirror passage is that one can embrace one’s role as a perceptual centre without succumbing to the desire to be an authoritative centre. One is a subject, a self; this cannot be denied (‘No form of being can be posited without reference to subjectivity’ [Merleau-Ponty, Visible 215]), but, as one is also an object, an acceptance of one’s subjectivity does not mean that selfhood must become dominant. Consider the following passage from MerleauPonty’s ‘Eye and Mind’: Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body. This way of turning things around, these antimonies, are different ways of saying that vision happens among, or is caught in, things – in that place where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself by virtue of the sight of things; in that places where there persists, like the mother water in crystal, the undividedness of the sensing and the sensed. (163)

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Comparable passages occur in both Voss and The Tree of Man. The passage from Voss reads: At his host’s side, on the rudimentary veranda, which was splinters, just as it had been split, stood the German… Whereas the first man was composed of sensual forms, intended to be touched, flesh to be rubbed against flesh, it would not be presumed to use the second except in a moment of absolute necessity and then with extreme caution… [H]e was drawn closer to the landscape, the seldom motionless sea of grass, the twisted trees in grey and black, the sky ever increasing in its rage of blue; and of that landscape, always, he would become the centre. (169) Voss’s image of himself as a centre of the landscape might be seen as an allusion to the above passage from ‘Eye and Mind,’ particularly when read in relation to the Merleau-Pontian images of ‘flesh to be rubbed against flesh’ and the description of the synthesis of positive and negative space: ‘splinters, just as it had been split.’ The connection is made more compelling when seen in relation to this excerpt from The Tree of Man: Out there at the back, the grass, you could hardly call it a lawn, had formed a circle in the shrubs and trees which the old woman had not so much planted as stuck in during her lifetime. There was little of design in the garden originally, though one had formed out of the wilderness. It was perfectly obvious that the man was seated at the heart of it, and from his heart the trees radiated, with grave movements of life, and beyond them the sweep of a vegetable garden, which had gone to weed during the months of the man’s illness, presented the austere skeletons of cabbages and the wands of onion seed. All was circumference to the centre, and beyond that the worlds of other circles, whether crescent of purple villas or the bare patches of earth, on which rabbits sat and observed some abstract spectacle for minutes on end, in a paddock not yet built upon. The last circle but one was the cold and golden bowl of winter, enclosing all that was visible and material, and at which the man would blink from time to time, out of his watery eyes, unequal to the effort of realizing he was the centre of it. (474)

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Voss holds the world in a circle around himself, seeing himself as the centre, but is unable to understand that there are other centres, in which he is an object, rather than subject. Stan Parker rises above this delusion: ‘All was circumference to the centre, and beyond that the worlds of other circles … on which rabbits sat and observed some abstract spectacle for minutes on end’ [my italics]. Stan is the centre of his circle, but there are other circles, and not only ones created by human perception. Some circles enclose smaller circles: The spiritual world, beyond the sphere of winter, is one; the physical world is not separate to it, but enclosed within it. White presents the image of a vast interrelated web of perception, so that being a subject does not mean one denies the world, providing that one is also able to see oneself as an object. Murdoch usually rejected the possibility of such being-in-theworld, insisting that one cannot overcome the restrictions of language and metaphor. She consequently talked of attention as a process in which language works in tandem with vision, with both components working to refine and redefine each other. While Murdoch lamented the existence of this organizing mental world, and suggested ways to reduce its impediment, she could not reject its existence. Merleau-Ponty, in his attack on Sartre, insisted that such thinking originates from an inability to reject properly the Cartesian cogito. Language, wrote Merleau-Ponty, does not exist on top of our sensible or super-sensible experience, but is a product of it. It is a ‘bond between flesh and the idea … that is not contrary to the sensible’ (Visible 149). Humankind did not create words to control or manipulate thoughts; they have their origin as embodied thoughts. As Merleau-Ponty argued in The Phenomenology of Perception, ‘It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger, to kiss in love, than to call a table a table’ (189). This is not to say that language can become increasingly disconnected from these origins as we inherit sedimented language from society, but that words will always be more than constructed intellectual signifiers because they grew from bodily/sensory experience. Consequently: Each time we want to get at it immediately, or lay hands on it, or circumscribe it, or see it unveiled, we do in fact feel that the attempt is misconceived, that it retreats in the measure that we approach…. Thus it is essential to this sort of ideas that they

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be ‘veiled with shadows,’ appear ‘under a disguise.’ They give us the assurance that the ‘great unpenetrated and discouraging night of our soul’ is not empty, is not ‘nothingness’; but these entities, these domains, these worlds that line it, people it, and whose presence it feels like the presence of someone in the dark, have been acquired only through its commerce with the visible, to which they remain attached. (Visible 150) This is directly evocative of White’s claim, discussed earlier, for the ontology of language. Meaning may be slippery and signs may not match up cleanly with the signified, but this does not make language weightless or ‘nothingness.’ Words have their origins in the flesh, and are developed out of relationships with the flesh of the world. Words therefore remain meaning-full, even if that original meaning is not immediately apparent to the rational mind. Merleau-Ponty could answer the question Voss asked Laura: ‘If you have not understood the poem by the words, how would you interpret it?’ (82). He would reply with the words he wrote in The Visible and the Invisible: ‘The meaning is not on the phrase like the bread on the butter … it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain’ (155). This is not to say that individuals do not try to forget this, and attempt to carry language away from its origins. Merleau-Ponty writes that, as children, individuals live in a pre-reflective, pre-cognitive state, in which they directly experience the world and their place in it. As people age, they become acclimatized to the Kulturwelt, the constructed world of rational thought; they are taught to see, although Merleau-Ponty insists that their vision actually becomes increasingly distorted. In this process of adaptation to the rational world, people are taught that their initial impression of reality is wrong; reality is beyond what can be known through the senses. This leads to a separation of mental and physical processes; individuals are taught not to trust their immediate perceptions. People develop mental processes of decoding or ascribing meaning to their sensory experiences, rather than accepting that the experience is the meaning. Science and philosophy, suggests Merleau-Ponty, in their search for objectivity, have disconnected themselves from the world: ‘High places attract those who wish to look over the world with an eagle-eye view. Vision ceases to be solipsistic only up close’ (Visible 78). Such vision causes

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individuals to split mind from body, good from evil, and lose sense of the intrinsic wholeness of the world. From an ethical perspective, rational reduction of the complexity of the universe compels one to feel a sense of control and power over it, as it no longer appears as rich, and real, as oneself. When all is treated as comprehensible and manageable, morality becomes predicated on rational notions, such as law and duty. There is no compulsion to act morally; goodness, a mysterious, metaphysical property, is rejected in favour of rightness. Characters who have resisted the influence of the Kulturwelt are prevalent in White’s novels, and are often considered by others to be mad. Arthur Brown in The Solid Mandala, for example, is ‘not impressed by reason’ (31), and claims ‘Words are not what make you see’ (57); he is consequently described by others as ‘mad’ (208) and ‘not all that bright’ (16). Miss Hare in Riders in the Chariot is said to be ‘quite mad, quite contemptible, of course, by standards of human reason, but what have those proved to be?’ (37). White makes a connection between this primal perception and goodness. Miss Hare’s uncivilized mind, for example, allows her to see ‘that same lovingkindness which might redeem’ (299), and Bub Quigley, in The Tree of Man, is described as having ‘an implicit simplicity’ and being ‘obviously good’ (51). By comparison, the more rationally minded of White’s characters are the most cruel. Of the evil Flack and Jolley in Riders, who cannot see ‘beyond texture-brick and plastic’ (300), White writes, ‘it was only to be expected that two ladies of discretion and taste should produce their knives and try them for sharpness on weaker mortals’ (75).

The Good as an Active Agent: Patrick White and Emmanuel Levinas It is one thing to be good or to know good, but quite another to do good. Thomas Busch has argued that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is ethical insofar as it accords ‘as much place to the other as myself,’ but it sidesteps the issue of moral action, as Merleau-Ponty suggests no way in which one is obliged to the other. Iris Murdoch also had great difficulty reconciling moral vision with moral action. For her, the problem remained enigmatic, or, sometimes, unimportant. Her philosophy was based upon the concept of unselfing, in which one suppresses or destroys the self in order to unite with the good, and the removal of the agent necessarily brings with it the collapse

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of agency. Action requires will, will requires the self, and selfhood implies limitations upon one’s knowledge of the good. This led her to believe that any willed action is detached from the good, and, even if one could bring together goodness and action, contingency could still undermine the intended outcome. Consequently, she was more inclined to discuss ethics in terms of perception and contemplation alone. Patrick White was not content to do this. In a 1982 speech delivered at Sydney’s Palm Sunday peace march, White said: Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. I personally feel that the dangers and suffering those who choose to practise passive resistance are bound to encounter are preferable to the moral seepage and contaminating ashes which will overwhelm those who passively accept the nuclear-holocaust their political leaders are preparing for them. (‘Letter’ 110) The concept of passive resistance vs. passive acceptance is a complicated matter in White’s work, and, indeed, for mystical ethics as a whole. Passive resistance, taken literally, is an oxymoronic term. Gandhi did not, in fact, practise passive resistance, but non-violent resistance; to express disapproval, or to perform strike action, sit-ins, or hunger strikes, is not strictly passive. White, however, appears to support these sorts of action, suggesting that total passivity is amoral. White believed strongly in the importance of moral action, but he shared Murdoch’s suspicion of the human will as an instigator of moral action. His most extensive investigation of this dilemma occurs within Riders in the Chariot in which he presents Mordecai Himmelfarb, a man considered by his family to be a potential zaddik [redeemer], but who is repeatedly criticized for forsaking action in favour of mystical or intellectual contemplation: ‘But what can we others hold in our minds to make the end bearable?’ [asks Reha] ‘This table,’ he replied, touching it gently. Then his wife put down her knitting. ‘Oh, Mordecai,’ she whispered, ‘I am afraid. Tables and chairs will not stand up and save us.’ ‘God will,’ he answered. ‘God is in this table.’ (142)

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Knowledge of God’s immanence may invite a vision of the Good, something to ‘hold in our minds,’ but there appears to be no connection between this and moral agency; regardless of whether or not ‘God is in this table,’ Reha appears correct to say that ‘tables and chairs will not stand up and save us.’ After Himmelfarb’s inadvertent betrayal of his wife, he attempts to redeem himself by imposing martyrdom upon himself. This action, however, is partly motivated by a strong personal desire for both selfpunishment and apotheosis, and therefore impelled by his personal conception of goodness, rather than by Goodness itself. Before, he was able to perceive the Good, but not act upon it; now, he attempts to engage in moral action but has lost contact with the source of goodness. He chooses to redeem himself by walking towards first the concentration camp, and later towards the cross. As Hedda BenBassat notes, Himmelfarb is ‘unable to resist the temptation of a possible sacrifice’ (340). He has been paying attention only to his own personal wish for penance and to become a redeemer, but his ego has limited his attention; he does not realize that his act of self-sacrifice is unnecessary. Mary Hare is shocked by his attitude, saying, ‘One meets with too many knives by the way, without going deliberately in search of one’ (93). The selfishness of his martyrdom is figured ironically. When Himmelfarb arrives in Australia, he chooses the most humble and rundown home available, but takes an absurd pleasure in the trappings of his supposed asceticism: This man of ascetic and selfless aspirations had so far diverged from his ideals as to hanker after physical seclusion…. He could only think of his house, and was always returning there…. Until, finally, spirit was seduced by matter to the extent that he rushed and payed a deposit. (199) Thomas Merton – a major influence on White – made a similar criticism of certain forms of monastic life, which he felt were ‘almost “materialistic” (emphasis on walls, grilles, veils, withdrawal, mutism)’ (134). Later, during the final crucifixion scene, White emphasizes the absurdity of Himmelfarb’s willing martyrdom by paralleling his actions with those of a performing clown. As Himmelfarb makes his way towards his end, a circus enters the town. On the back of one

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of the trucks, a clown is acting out a scene that grimly parodies the events to come: ‘Most comical was one of the clowns who pretended to enact a public hanging on the platform of a lorry. Nothing but the jolting and his own skill prevented him from adapting his head to the noose. He would totter, and fall – wide’ (404). The comic absurdity of a figure attempting to hang himself, in a situation in which all factors resist the act’s completion, mirrors Himmelfarb’s attitude towards his desired mortification. This foreshadows that Himmelfarb’s willing martyrdom will be ineffectual, and, later, as Himmelfarb’s dying body is carried away from the factory, he realizes ‘it had not been accorded to him to expiate the sins of the world’ (418). Earlier in the novel, on the occasion of Himmelfarb’s wedding, an elderly Jewish dyer confronted the groom in an attempt to elucidate the connection between passive knowledge of the Good and moral agency: ‘There is no secret,’ the dyer appeared to be saying, or shouting back. ‘Equanimity is no secret. Solitariness is not secret. True solitariness is only possible where equanimity exists. An unquiet spirit can introduce distractions into the best-prepared mind.’ ‘But this is immoral!’ Mordecai protested, shouting, ‘And on such an occasion! It is a denial of community. Man is not a hermit.’ ‘Depending on the man, he is a light that will reflect out over the community – all the brighter from a bare room.’ (128) This dyer is voicing a complex idea, which, in Jewish mystic circles, is called ‘the paradox of solitude and communion’ (Scholem 343). As Gershom Scholem explains: He who has attained the highest degree of spiritual solitude, who is capable of being alone with God, is the true center of the community, because he has reached the stage at which true communion becomes possible… To live among ordinary men and yet be alone with God, to speak profane language, and yet draw the strength to live from the source of existence, from the ‘upper root’ of the soul – that is a paradox which only the mystical devotee is able to realize in his life and which makes him the center of the community of men. (343)

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This ‘paradox’ suggests that one must acquiesce to God in order to be instilled with His moral power. If a state of selfless spiritual solitude is reached, the Good will act through its vessel of its own accord. Moral agency, then, is not a function of the human will, but of the Good. This concept reflects a third major difference between White and Murdoch. White does not understand the Good to be reflected in the physical world, but present within it. Murdoch maintained the image of the Good as a transcendent object that illuminates the world from afar, but White rejected this idea because it implies a divide between world and spirit. For Murdoch, actions are responses formed by knowledge of the good, but they cannot be good in themselves. White’s refusal to separate goodness from the physical world means that goodness can act. White’s strange but saintly characters that resist the compulsion towards closed knowledge rely instead on a perpetually amorphous, intuitive, and sympathetic sense of the world. While there are moments in White’s novels in which the characters are granted a totalizing vision of the natural world, White is hesitant to depict his mystics looking in such a way at another human being. Stan Parker, for example, admits to being more familiar with the ‘contours of the landscape’ than ‘the faces of men’ (Tree 277). White often returns to this image of the unknowable face: Mordecai Himmelfarb speaks of his vision of the Chariot in this way: ‘It is difficult to distinguish. Just when I think I have understood, I discover some fresh form – so many – streaming with implications…. [T]he faces of the riders. I cannot begin to see the expression of the faces’ (135–6). This indistinctness is not due to the supernatural character of the riders, as even the faces of the simple are described as being ultimately unknowable: Bub Quigley’s face, for instance, is described at one point as a ‘long blurred form’ (Tree 51), and, later, as ‘shadowy’ (Tree 462). In Riders in the Chariot, Alf Dubbo makes an active effort to resist the compulsion towards ‘closed’ perception of Mrs Godbold’s face: upon meeting her for the first time, he put his arm in front of his face, ‘not to protect, rather, to see better’ (283). He blocks his view of half of Mrs Godbold’s face, and says, ‘That is how I want it. The faces must be half turned away, but you still gotta understand what is in the part that is hidden’ (283). The concealed half of the

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face remains unseen, but can still provide knowledge, although this knowledge is constantly deferred, and not rationally verifiable. Amy Parker, in The Tree of Man, eventually comes to the conclusion that ‘Lives … can only touch, they do not join. Even on the fiery staircase, they lie along each other fitfully, the eyes do not see farther than the veins in the eyeballs’ (434). This seeming tragedy, which implies that union with another can never take place, is, in fact, White’s foundation for interpersonal moral action. White’s constant use of the term ‘face’ in an ethical context evokes the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’ ethical philosophy was predicated on the moral importance of absolute otherness, of destabilized knowing. Levinas considered any philosophical system, such as ‘pure’ mysticism, that views the world and other people as ultimately knowable as being amoral because it eliminates otherness. As Levinas explained to Philippe Nemo, ‘Absolute knowledge … consists of making the other become the same’ (Ethics 91). Despite White’s interest in mysticism, he resisted introvertive or totalizing forms of mystical knowledge, and his interest in Merleau-Ponty does not contradict this. As T.W. Busch argues: On the one hand, while Levinas insists upon the absolute transcendence of the Other, he never poses this transcendence/difference as a néant, a contradiction of Being. And Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, while stressing the gathering of phenomena in Flesh, never for a moment claims to reduce differences. (200) Both Levinas and Merleau-Ponty understand the other as that which cannot be held still in the mind or in the eye of the perceiver. White’s characters never gain absolute knowledge, except, perhaps, in death. The experienced world can never be fully known, but we can approach a perpetual knowing, or, more properly, an infinite and endless attention, made with the whole of our being, to obscurity and otherness. ‘Motion,’ as White wrote in Riders in the Chariot, ‘became an expression of truth, the only true permanence’ (487). White suggests, following Levinas’ lead, that positive ethical behaviour between individuals is the product of confrontation with overflowing information that causes disruption of totalizing knowledge. The true light of the world, White insists, is ‘dappled’ (Voss 127), because total ‘illumination is synonymous with blinding’ (Riders 23).

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Goodness, too, remains beyond comprehension, but this does not mean it is distant. Levinas adopted many elements of the Platonic philosophy that influenced Iris Murdoch, but he rejected the notion that the Good is an ideal endpoint towards which individuals move. Levinas wished to remove the concept of desire for the Good from morality. As Levinas explains, if the Good is the transcendent goal, and, in the act of approaching it, we create or encounter various goods, these goods are seen only as by-products of a greater mission; these ‘goods’ are not, in fact, related to the Good at all, but an ‘obstacle to freedom, intelligibility or perfection’ (Otherwise 15). Any striving towards a transcendent Good implies that the goal is absolute unity, which causes individuals to treat strangeness as an unpleasant imperfection. Levinas refigured the Platonic conception of the Good by reversing the movement of agency: We do not approach the Good; the Good approaches us through its strangeness: ‘its resistance to assemblage, conjunction and conjuncture, to contemporaneousness, immanence, the present of manifestation, signifies the diachrony of responsibility for another’ (Otherwise 19). Levinas was able to effect this change by making the Good partially present in the face, although, as he makes clear, Goodness never fully appears, as ‘The Good cannot become present or enter into a representation’ (Otherwise 11). When we encounter the mystery of the Good, it calls upon us to be responsible. In order to receive properly this demand for responsibility, we must reject the desire to contain, control, or know the other. Maintaining an awareness of the face’s otherness requires an extreme passivity; attention is not given wilfully, but demanded. White agrees with Levinas that the indeterminate character of the face forces responsibility towards the other upon the perceiving subject: Levinas wrote that ‘I understand responsibility as responsibility for the Other, for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me; or which precisely does matter to me, is met by me as face’ (Ethics 95). This statement is echoed in Miss Hare’s claim that, despite her inability to know other people fully, she feels compelled towards responsibility for them: she says to Himmelfarb: ‘I am not interested in you! Not what you are, think, feel. I am only concerned for your safety. I am responsible for you!’ (Riders 303). She is content to reject totalizing knowledge of the other in exchange for moral responsibility. Levinas’ Good, while ‘beyond being,’ has an immanent disruptive effect; it forces itself into the world. The implication is that goodness

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exists not in personal choice or self-willed action, but as an active moral presence that enters into the world, and calls us to action. This is an essentially religious argument, and has been seen as such by Levinas’ critics, such as Jacques Derrida, who claimed that Levinas was, in fact, more concerned with holiness than ethics (84). But, for Levinas, ethics and religion are inextricable from each other. White also saw mystical vision and ethics to be connected: humility and the suppression of a strictly defined self removes the controlling and rationalizing mind that limits perception of the world. The world is then able to be perceived, not as an empirically knowable ‘thing,’ but as a mysterious, active, constantly changing and shifting presence that is conducive only to an unending, infinite ‘knowing.’ When Himmelfarb achieves his spiritual revelation, his eyes are described as ‘visionary rather than fixed’ (Riders 412). The short final chapter of The Tree of Man, which follows Stan Parker’s death, concentrates on Stan’s grandson, as he sits amongst the natural world and tries to understand how to respond to his grandfather’s passing. The passage is packed with imagery of death and rebirth: of maggots in a dead dog (479), of ‘root fibres and decomposing leaves’ (479), of ‘the white, and the ashen’ trees (479), of a lizard reclining near a rotting dog, of living bark and wood shavings. The boy ponders creating a poem that will show that ‘death is faintly credible because it is still smelling of life’ (480). The potential artistic creation of the boy is likened to the growth of trees: he is ‘putting out shoots of green thought. So that, in the end, there was no end’ (480). The possibility of ultimate destruction or death is eliminated by the natural world’s regenerative ability. The world itself is passively active, rebuilding itself as things fall away. White suggests that this natural progression is linked to the natural agency of the Good. One might suggest that rebirth is not intrinsically good, nor is death bad, or evil; it simply is. White, however, often figures these occurrences in ethical terms: he writes, at the end of Riders in the Chariot, that ‘goodness must return, like grass’ (467). Mrs Godbold, in the same novel, realizes that she overcomes evil by naturally creating offspring, who she describes as her ‘arrows’: Finally the woman sitting alone in front of the deserted shed would sense how she had shot her six arrows at the face of darkness, and halted it. And wherever her arrows struck, she saw other

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arrows breed. And out of those arrows, others still would split off, from the straight white shafts. So her arrows would continue to be aimed at the forms of darkness, and she herself was, in fact, the infinite quiver. ‘Multiplication!’ Mrs Godbold loudly declared, and blushed, for the nonsense it must have sounded.’ (489) Similarly, in Voss, Le Mesurier explains to Harry Robarts that ‘Dying is creation. The body creates fresh forms, the soul inspires by its manner of leaving the body, and passes into other souls’ (361). Voss queries, ‘Even the souls of the damned,’ to which Le Mesurier replies, ‘In the process of burning it is the black that gives up the gold’ (361). White suggests that we see the Good in the world not because the physical world reflects a transcendent light, but because the world itself is good. Passive moral actions are those that stem naturally from the world, from the fact the Good, or God, produces, regenerates, and loves. One becomes good not by stepping outside the world, but by aligning oneself with nature and realizing one’s place in the active moral flesh of the world. Natural creation itself, White suggests, whether artistic or procreative, is a moral act that redeems.

4 Bliss from Bricks: Saul Bellow’s Moral Phenomenology

If you want to reach the infinite, explore every aspect of the finite. Johann Wolfgang Goethe The Bellovian hero: Bored, blind, and dying of heartbreak, his foot in his mouth, his heart and runny nose on his sleeve, and his tobaccostained fingers clasped around his own neck. He is bound in red tape (usually divorce settlements with aggrieved ex-wives), manipulated by shysters, gangsters, and tricksters, blighted by personal failures, and weighted down by thousands of years of intellectual history. Each of Bellow’s protagonists is mired in the congestion of the city, of modern life, of inherited ways of thinking, but also motivated by an intuitive suspicion of a spiritual reality, the belief that there is knowledge available beyond that condoned by the accepted scientific worldview. ‘The soul wanted what it wanted,’ states Artur Sammler in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). ‘It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly’ (1). Despite, or because of, this confusion, Bellow’s heroes long to take flight in search of truth. Bellow’s flapping birds stand at odds with T.S. Eliot’s thrush who declared that humans cannot stand too much reality; the lion-like Henderson retorts, ‘How much unreality can it stand?’ (Henderson 318). Bellow’s reality-seekers are tired of the false world they have been taught to see: Mr. Sammler becomes fascinated by the prospect of flight, longing new planets and new worlds; Tommy Wilhelm puts his faith and life in the hands of Tamkin, a charlatan reality-instructor; Henderson 148

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escapes to Africa; Charlie Citrine stands on his head and performs anthroposophical meditation. However, as James Wood writes: Bellow’s characters all yearn to make something of their lives in the religious sense; and yet this yearning is not written up religiously, or solemnly. It is written up comically: our metaphysical cloudiness, and our fierce, clumsy attempts to make these clouds yield rain, are full of hilarious pathos in his work. (255) Unlike the other writers considered in this study, Bellow is more interested in the human than in the divine. While he never downplays the significance or the possibility of an individual attaining mystical perception, he does not aspire to or fret about the possibility of imparting such a vision in his own novels. Instead, he concerns himself with a compassionate and humorous exposition of the human condition in an attempt to elucidate and unravel the complexity of the relationship between the blundering subject and the spiritual/physical world. This chapter will begin with an exploration of Bellow’s own thoughts on the relationship between intuitive and rational knowledge, in relation to the writing of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Rudolf Steiner on the subject/object divide. The remainder of the chapter will move beyond Bellow’s own thoughts in an attempt to understand how his fiction thinks: how his novels participate in, rather than explain or critique, the human struggle towards a vision of reality.

Against ‘Head-Culture’ Saul Bellow often discusses his distaste for ‘head-culture’: for academia, philosophy, psychology, or, indeed, any explanative intellectual system with aspirations to totality. When asked whether Freudian psychology was an influence on his writing, he responded, bluntly, that ‘if I was sitting on some grand metaphysical steam roller, I would be glad to run [Freud] over’ (Bellow, ‘Boyers’ 93). As discussed earlier, he felt that ‘It’s very difficult to escape from any system of metaphors which successfully imposes itself upon you…. Once you’ve given yourself over to one of these systems, you’ve lost your freedom in a very significant degree’ (Bellow, ‘Boyers’ 93). Bellow’s novels are concerned with this ‘freedom’ to see without reductive systemization. ‘Natural’ vision, for Bellow, means to inhabit the

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intuitive and sensory perceptions that exist prior to rational explanation (Bellow, ‘Nobel’ 93). As he stated, ‘Baudelaire says that genius is a power to recover our childhood voluntarily. You can go back at will to the earliest years of your life, before “education” had enclosed you in its patterns and representations’ (‘Roudané’ 160–1). Bellow is aware of the difficulty of escaping these ‘patterns,’ even for a moment. Much of his work’s comedy comes from his characters’ well-intentioned but wrong-headed allegiances to attractive but absurd philosophies that attempt to free them from their captivity, but succeed only in relocating their prison. Seize the Day’s (1956) wide-eyed Tommy Wilhelm, so desperate to understand, becomes taken with the ham beliefs of the shyster Tamkin. Despite his logical suspicion of the man, he hands over his last seven hundred dollars to him as a gesture of his ‘faith.’ Tommy’s naïveté is made clear by his reaction to Tamkin’s comically clichéd assertion that there are ‘only two classes of people… Some want to live, but the great majority don’t’ (99). Tommy thinks to himself, ‘How does he know these things? How can he be such a jerk, and even perhaps an operator, a swindler, and understand so well what gives? I believe what he says. It simplifies much – everything’ (99). Tommy compels himself to believe the doctor’s ramblings as they provide him with consolation. As Tommy himself admits, it is not that Tamkin understands the world, but that he understands ‘what gives’ (99). His system provides comfort, rather than truth. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), the eponymous protagonist of the novel exclaims: ‘Arguments! Explanations!… All will explain everything to all, until the next, the new common version is ready. This version, a residue of what people for a century or so say to one another, will be, like the old, a fiction’ (14). Sammler suggests that ‘explanations’ are created by and shared between individuals, rather than drawn from ‘natural’ knowledge of the world itself. ‘Explanation’ is the imposition of created patterns of reductive thought upon a complex reality, an opinion shared by Murdoch and Golding. To ‘explain,’ then, is to explain away, impelled by a longing for comfort. Sammler’s friends Wallace and Feffer initiate a new business that offers aerial maps to landowners wishing to know the names of the bushes and trees on their property. Wallace says to Sammler, ‘I’m convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up’ (90). They classify the world while soaring above it, rather than by immediately experiencing it. Wallace relates the process to psychology, echoing

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Bellow’s own claims about Freud; he says, ‘I’ve gone to shrinkers for years, and have they cured me of anything? They have not. They have put labels on my troubles, though, which sound like knowledge. It’s a great comfort, and worth the money’ (90). Mr. Sammler suggests that explanation must be rejected, in favour of ‘distinguishing’: ‘It was distinguishing not explanation that mattered. Explanation was for the mental masses…. But distinguishing? A higher activity’ (51). Part of ‘distinguishing’ is to become aware of each external person and thing’s unique reality, without ideological imposition. To this extent, Bellow’s use of the term ‘distinguish’ has much in common with Iris Murdoch’s concept of ‘attention.’ However, there is a significant difference: Murdoch considered the act of attention to be useful only as when directed outwards, towards the external world; introspection, she felt, invited solipsism and selfdelusion. In ‘On “God” and “Good,”’ she wrote: It is an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism, and not a scrutiny of the mechanism itself, that liberates. Close scrutiny of the mechanism merely strengthens its power. ‘Self-knowledge,’ in the sense of a minute understanding of one’s own machinery, seems to me, except at a fairly simple level, usually a delusion. (65–6) She argued that one must ‘unself’ to attend properly to the world. The difficulty of her position is that she could not offer a suggestion of who or what is engaged in the act of attention once the ‘self’ is gone. She did not so much eliminate the subject/object distinction as attempt to be rid of the subject altogether. Bellow, by contrast, did not reject the subject; he felt that individuals have a ‘natural’ knowledge – innate, intuitive, sensory – that is separate to rational knowledge, and is sympathetic or inherently connected to the external world – that is, there is objectivity in subjectivity. He shared with Patrick White a belief in discovering truth through subjectivity, as the subject does not stand apart from the world, but within it. It is only false (rational, intellectual, systematic) forms of knowledge that should be rejected. Consequently, one should also learn to ‘distinguish’ between one’s inner processes, to locate the parts of experience that connect one to the world. This concept will be discussed in more detail later, in relation to the writing of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Rudolf Steiner. The immediate relevance of this concept

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to Bellow’s fiction is that it stresses the validity of investigating human thought structures and experience; Bellow believes that an understanding of reality must involve the study of the individual.

A ‘Refreshed Phrenology’ For Bellow, the goal is to attain a level of perception in which meaning is found within the world, rather than imposed upon it. Sammler, again: All metaphysicians please note. Here is how it is. You will never see more clearly. And what do you make of it? This phone booth has a metal floor; smooth-hinged the folding green doors, but the floor is smarting with dry urine, the plastic telephone instrument is smashed, and a stump is hanging at the end of the cord. (8) Sammler ‘makes’ nothing of the dilapidated telephone booth. He distinguishes the specific objects, but this is not a dissection; he does not lose sight of their connections, drawing attention to hinges, to cords, although without elaborating upon their significance. The specificity and strength of Bellow’s prose imbues the booth with significance, while his refusal to allow Sammler to elaborate on his observation leaves the precise nature of the phone booth’s importance elusive. Sammler answers his question (‘And what do you make of it?’) through description alone. Consequently, any metaphoric significance the telephone booth may have becomes secondary to the value of its sheer presence. There is evidence of destruction and of degradation in the phone booth: a smashed handset, a urine-covered floor. In the hands of another novelist, this might remain mere symbolism: severance of communication, the breaking-down of public and personal space. But here, while this symbolism is not eliminated, the context and texture of the passage renders it secondary to the resonance of the tangible phone booth itself. As Bellow writes in Humboldt’s Gift (1975), ‘the blue of the sky was the theory’ (362). There is little depth in Bellow, but his surfaces are bottomless. This mode of perception is better illustrated through his intricate character portraits, which are usually entirely comprised of physical description, rather than psychology. His characters’ outer appearances, however, are not masks that conceal their essence; their flesh

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reveals their inner self. Cynthia Ozick has described Bellow’s character portraits as providing a ‘refreshed phrenology’ (xvi), although she is careful to insist that it is ‘not a retreat or a regression to an archaic psychology,’ but ‘an insight that asks us to trust the condition of art, wherein the higher consciousness can infiltrate portraiture’ (xvi). While Ozick’s qualification is understandable, she is wrong to suggest his ‘phrenology’ is merely an artistic convention. In fact, Bellow’s portraits are tied directly to his spiritual phenomenology. It is in this context that James Wood writes: Bellow’s way of seeing his characters also tells us something about his metaphysics. In his fictional world, people do not stream with motives; as novelists go, he is no depth psychologist. Instead, his characters are embodied souls. Their bodies are their confessions, their moral camouflage faulty and peeling: they have the bodies they deserve. (254) While Wood, like Ozick, refers to Bellow’s ‘fictional world’ and ‘as novelists go,’ he also recognizes that the technique is not a purely artistic conceit, but an extension of Bellow’s ‘metaphysics.’ Bellow is suspicious of the notion of veils, masks, a person behind a person, a world behind the world; he rejects such dualistic thinking. As Peter Witteveld insists, Bellow believed that ‘the flesh … ultimately knows what the soul intuits: if man will only listen, his salvation is immanent and all around him, and the higher consciousness says real things about At-one-ment and the human heart and about authentic being’ (21). Bellow elaborated on this idea in a 1990 interview in Bostonia: I think that when I was a very small child it wasn’t what people said, the content of what they said, so much as the look of them and their gestures, that spoke to me. That is, a nose was also a speaking member, and so were a pair of eyes. And so was the way your hair grew and the set of your ears, the condition of your teeth, the emanations of the body. All of that. Of which I seemed to have a natural grasp. That is to say, this is the way things are seen by me when they are most visible. (‘Half’ 298) In Henderson the Rain King (1959), King Dahfu explains to the protagonist, ‘You are in the flesh as your soul is…. Body and face are

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secretly painted by the spirit of man’ (268). Henderson’s final revelation, while reflecting on his childhood experience with Smolak the bear, is that ‘corporeal things are an image of the spiritual and visible objects are renderings of invisible ones’ (338). This insistence on the immanence of spirit recurs throughout Bellow’s work; he appears to reject the notion of the veil of Maya, suggesting instead that the world is comprised of more than dead matter. Bellow’s literary endeavour is concerned with recovering a vision of the spiritual qualities of the physical world. Consider the following description of the shyster Tamkin in Seize the Day: What a creature Tamkin was when he took off his hat! The indirect light showed the many complexities of his bald skull, his gull’s nose, his rather handsome eyebrows, his vain mustache, his deceiver’s brown eyes. His figure was stocky, rigid, short in the neck, so that the large ball of the occiput touched his collar. His bones were peculiarly formed, as though twisted twice where the ordinary human bone was turned only once, and his shoulders rose in two pagodalike points. At midbody he was thick. He stood pigeon-toed, a sign perhaps that he was devious or had much to hide. The skin of his hands was aging, and his nails were moonless, concave, clawlike, and they appeared loose. His eyes were as brown as beaver fur and full of strange lines. The two large brown naked balls looked thoughtful – but were they? And honest – but was Dr. Tamkin honest? There was a hypnotic power in his eyes, but this was not always of the same strength, nor was Wilhelm convinced that it was completely natural. He felt that Tamkin tried to make his eyes deliberately conspicuous, with studied art, and that he brought forth his hypnotic effect by an exertion. Occasionally it failed or drooped, and when this happened the sense of his face passed downward to his heavy (possibly foolish?) red underlip. (62–3) There is an effort here on Tommy Wilhelm’s part to decode or understand Tamkin, but much of Bellow’s precise language suggests that Wilhelm is erring by probing for depth. There are no hidden recesses: ‘here is how it is, you will never see more clearly.’ Wilhelm can be a very good perceiver, and also a very bad one, depending on the extent to which he brings his own personal projections to bear upon his subject. Bellow’s narrative technique in many of his novels – notably

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Seize the Day and Mr. Sammler’s Planet – is to employ an omniscient narrator who occasionally and subtly adopts the voice of the protagonist when the character becomes most mired in self. When thinking clearly, the characters’ voices are mostly indistinguishable from the omniscient voice. Tommy’s name and voice appear explicitly in the passage only when his observation of Tamkin becomes confused, when he begins to doubt the veracity of the revelations of Tamkin’s physical presence. In an earlier passage in the novel where Tommy meets Mr. Perls, the initially harsh description of the elderly man begins in quotations, to suggest Tommy’s critical internal voice: ‘Who is this damn frazzle-faced herring with his dyed hair and his fish teeth and this drippy mustache?’ (31). However, once Tommy begins to ‘relent a little’ the quotations marks are dropped, and a more sympathetic description is given in which character and authorial voice are less clearly separated. While the passage describing Tamkin is written entirely without quotations, Tommy’s own voice still appears when unsteady readings intrude upon the purely sensory observation. The overt value judgements of Tamkin – his eyes ‘looked thoughtful’ and ‘honest’ – are both questioned by Wilhelm: ‘but were they?’ and ‘but was Dr. Tamkin honest?’ We also glimpse Tommy’s analytical mind through the suggestion that Tamkin’s pigeon-toed stride is a ‘sign,’ but Tommy is unable to offer a concrete explanation of what it signifies; he eventually qualifies that it is only ‘perhaps’ a sign. There is very little overt simile in the lengthy description of Dr. Tamkin, other than the eyes ‘as brown as beaver fur,’ and the terms ‘pagodalike’ and ‘clawlike.’ Even these latter descriptors appear less like similes than descriptive adjectives because of the omission of the expected hyphen. Bellow wants to deny the reader the usual distance between appearance and meaning, and uses metaphorical language so tightly wound – ‘twisted twice,’ like Tamkin himself – that the objects of description seem to collapse into their referent. Consider the initial stockpiling of description: ‘his bald skull, his gull’s nose, his rather handsome eyebrows, his vain mustache, his deceiver’s brown eyes.’ The sentence begins close to the literal, although it is not, of course, his skull that is bald, but his head. The phrase does not feel like a drastic synecdoche, however; there is, after all, no head without a skull, and it is Tamkin’s skull, Tamkin’s head. Tamkin’s nose is also ‘his’, but it is also a gull’s. Not a nose like a gull, or a gull’s nose, but ‘his gull’s nose,’ a collision that is further accentuated through

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the internal rhyme with ‘his … skull.’ There is a quick entrance of Wilhelm’s subjective value judgement in the phrase ‘rather handsome eyebrows’ – the ‘rather,’ like the later ‘perhaps,’ implies a hesitant weighing-up, an evaluative process in Wilhelm’s mind – but this quickly disappears into the oddly objective observation of Tamkin’s ‘vain mustache.’ Vanity should seem a subjective judgement, but the phrasing does not suggest that Tamkin is vain – it is not the sort of a mustache grown by a vain man, or a vain man’s mustache – it is a ‘vain mustache,’ and this does not read as metonymic: the physical attribute does not reflect character, but has character, is character, as if Tamkin should not be held responsible for his mustache’s vanity. The phrase ‘his deceiver’s eyes’ similarly endows a physical characteristic with a personality of its own. At these moments, Wilhelm is distinguishing, rather than explaining, Tamkin’s characteristics, and he does not allow any one feature to provide a final unified summation of Tamkin’s personality. The last sentence of the passage confirms that the ‘sense of his face’ does not reside in any one feature. The parts of Tamkin’s face each reveal something, and must be distinguished, although not divorced from context.

The Influence of Goethe and Rudolf Steiner Bellow’s rejection of dualism, his belief in the meaningful/spiritual dimension of the physical world, and his insistence upon the importance of supra-sensible perception is strongly indebted to the work of Goethe, and his follower Rudolf Steiner. However, the precise nature of the influence, particularly that of Steiner, has divided critics. Roger Shattuck, for example, is insistent that the direct references to Steiner’s anthroposophy in Humboldt’s Gift were intended ironically; in his opinion, a writer as intelligent as Bellow could not possibly take Steiner seriously (although he makes the back-handed qualification that he is ‘not prepared to call Steiner a quack’) (24). Similarly, Pearl Bell states that she finds it difficult to accept that Bellow’s ‘skeptical intelligence can be in agreement with Steiner’s pompous elaborations of the invisible’ (20). Leaving aside, for now, the dubious claim that Steiner provided ‘elaborations of the invisible’ and the similarly questionable assertion that Bellow’s intelligence is sceptical by nature, it appears that most critics who reject Steiner’s influence on Bellow have based their argument on little more than incredulity.

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Bellow, however, showed no hesitancy in declaring his unqualified respect for Steiner: [In Humboldt’s Gift,] no disrespect was intended [towards Steiner]. Steiner was a very great man indeed. Whether he was an Initiate I am not qualified to say. Hostile critics who attacked Humboldt were not qualified to say, either. They had not found it necessary to read Steiner to try and learn why he had made so great an impression on Charlie Citrine. They might have discovered that he was a great visionary – they might even have been moved by his books. (‘Gray’ 222) In 1982, Bellow went so far as to provide an introduction to a new printing of Steiner’s 1920 book The Boundaries of Natural Science, in which he interprets Steiner as a spiritual phenomenologist, one who insists that we must ‘learn how to set conceptual thinking aside and to live within the phenomena’ (xii). This admiring introduction even overturns the minor reservation in the above quotation (‘Whether he was an Initiate I am not qualified to say’) as Bellow claims, to a presumably more sympathetic audience, that Steiner ‘is more than a thinker, he is an initiate’ (xii). This is not to say that Humboldt’s Gift itself serves to condone Steiner’s theories, but that these ideas appear to have genuinely interested its author. Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual-phenomenological theory was inspired by his early work on Goethe’s science. Goethe, as briefly discussed in the previous chapter, sought to maintain the intellectual rigour of the scientific method, while arguing for the importance of subjective impressions in the process. Peter A. Obuchowski argues that Goethe ‘eschewed the prevailing scientific notion, still regnant in twentieth-century science, that the scientist must eliminate himself from his experiments as much as possible if objective knowledge is to be achieved’ (28). Goethe felt that there was truth in personal impressions, that they were not mere fantasies, and that forms of knowledge existed that could not be approached without allowing these impressions to take on their necessary significance; he stated, ‘Let man seek nothing behind the phenomena, for they themselves are the doctrine’ (qtd. in Steiner, ‘Goethe’ 55). As Charlie Citrine explains in Humboldt’s Gift, paraphrasing Goethe, ‘a thought in my head is also a thought in the external world’ (261). The ego can

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distort, but we can teach ourselves ways of seeing and thinking that reveal that ‘in the subjective there lives the truest and deepest objectivity’ (Steiner, ‘Goethe’ 48–9). As Henri Bortoft contends: The problem for us is that we think of a way of seeing as something entirely subjective. As victims of the Cartesian confinement of consciousness to the purely subjective, we cannot believe at first that what Goethe experienced as a way of seeing could be an objective feature of the world. (34) Both Goethe and Steiner argued that it is possible, despite the Cartesian assertion, for one’s own senses, emotions, and intuitions to receive ‘true impressions.’ As Steiner wrote: The essential point is not that the truth appears in one man in a different form than in another, but that all the individual forms that make their appearances belong to one single whole, the uniform ideal world. In the inner being of individual men truth speaks in different tongues and dialects; in every great man it speaks a particular language communicated to this one personality alone. But it is always the one truth that is speaking. ‘If I know my relationship to myself and to the external world, I call it truth. And so each one can have his own truth, and it is nevertheless always the same.’ – This is Goethe’s view. (‘Goethe’ 50) Henri Bortoft argues that modern science attempts to remove what it considers to be the distorting bias of personal experience by translating ‘the contents of sensory perception into quantitative values and establishing a relation between them’ (21). Goethean science, on the other hand, upholds the validity of the initial experience, rejecting the notion that it must be intellectually translated into empirically measurable data in order to be understood. The imposition of distorting intellectual constructs upon an already revealed phenomenon can only tarnish the received data. In Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm makes a similar criticism of scientific systems, saying that modern science leaves us no more apples but the idea, the pomologist’s reconstruction of what an apple once was, no more ice cream but the idea, the recollection

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of something delicious made of substitutes, of starch, glucose, and other chemicals, no more sex but the idea or reminisce of that, and so with love, belief, thought, and so on. (218) As Ernst Cassirer explains, ‘The mathematical formula strives to make the phenomena calculable, that of Goethe to make them visible’ (qtd. in Bortoft 75). Part of Goethe’s appeal for Bellow is the way in which his understanding of science calls for a form of vision more commonly associated with the artist than the scientist. Charlie Citrine argues in Humboldt’s Gift: Goethe simply wouldn’t stop at the boundaries drawn by the inductive method. He let his imagination pass over into objects. An artist sometimes tries to see how close he can come to being a river or a star, playing at becoming one or the other – entering into the forms of the phenomena painted or described. Someone has even written of an astronomer keeping droves of stars, the cattle of his mind, in the meadows of space. The imaginative soul works in that way, and why should poetry refuse to be knowledge? (262) Henri Bortoft writes: ‘Goethe did not examine the phenomenon intellectually, but rather tried to visualize the phenomenon in his mind in a sensory way – by the process which he called “exact sensorial imagination”’ (22). We must meet the world with a mind both rational and imaginative. This required a redefinition of imagination as ‘a valid faculty of cognition and not as a vague entity of … speculative selfindulgence’ (Obuchowski 31). Indeed, Bellow considered that his own imagination provided special access to irrational truths: ‘[There is] some evidence that I enjoyed some “clairvoyant powers,”’ he claimed. ‘It may not be clairvoyance, but I have sometimes definitely sensed that it’s a little more than a natural process. Something beyond positivistic, rationalistic common sense, or the clear light of day’ (Bellow, ‘Brans’ 101–2). In his 1975 essay ‘A World Too Much With Us,’ he wrote: As we now understand knowledge, does imagination know anything? At the moment the educated world does not think so. But things have become dreary and humankind tired of itself because the collective fictions of alleged knowledge are used up. We now

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bore ourselves by what we think we know. Either life has already given up its deepest secrets to our rational perception and become tedious or we have developed a tedious sort of rationality by ruling that certain kinds of knowledge are illegitimate. (6) Imagination, he suggests, is a legitimate form of ‘natural knowledge,’ and can perceive meaning that is intrinsic to forms, rather than invented. As King Dahfu explains to Henderson in Henderson the Rain King, ‘Imagination is a force of nature…. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!’ (271). Rudolf Steiner agreed, writing: ‘The reality accessible to mere perception is only the one-half of the whole reality; the content of the human spirit is the other half’ (‘Goethe’ 49). Steiner based his life’s work on Goethe’s scientific theory, but attached it more explicitly to spiritual concerns. In his book Mystics after Modernism (1923), Steiner addressed the connection between Goethean science and mysticism. Goethe proposed that an accurate understanding of the world can, and indeed must, be found through subjective vision, but one must possess a profound self-knowledge that can discriminate between true vision and delusion. Self-knowledge, as Steiner used the term, does not mean knowledge of a unique and isolated self, but of a self embedded in the fabric of the world: Knowledge of the world is born from self-knowledge. Our own limited individuality assumes its spiritual place in the grand, interconnected web of the world because something comes to life within us that reaches beyond our individuality and embraces everything in which our individuality participates. (Steiner, Mystics 26) In Herzog (1964), the protagonist’s abandoned academic opus shared a similar concern: to show ‘how life could be lived by renewing universal connections, overturning the last of the Romantic errors about the uniqueness of the Self’ (39). In Mystics after Modernism, Steiner sought to prove that Goethe’s understanding of perception had its origins, or at least precedence, in mystical thought. Steiner suggested that what he and Goethe consider self-knowledge is the same as what the mystics considered self-extinction: ‘The external senses [when used separately to the intuitive senses] and the ordering intellect

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separate the individual being from other things; they create an independent being in space and in time who also perceives other things in space and in time’ (Steiner, Mystics 44). It is this ‘independent’ ‘I’ that must be eliminated, and this is done by gaining knowledge of the true self that is intrinsically connected to the external world, rather than by becoming a non-self. Steiner was careful to separate his understanding of mysticism from that espoused by certain early Christian mystics, who, he suggested, were restricted by their era’s limited knowledge of science, and by the influence of Christian dogma. These mystics, he argued, were comfortable when talking of God or of introspection, but uneasy when discussing the physical world. Steiner saw a form of Gnosticism, rather than the desired monism, in these ‘one-sided mystics.’ He wrote: ‘Many one-sided mystics have practically the same view as Kant of the clear Ideas of Reason. They consider that these clear Ideas of Reason lie outside the sphere of the creative whole of Nature and that they belong exclusively to the human intellect’ (‘Goethe’ 57). Despite this, Steiner believed that Goethe’s natural science would have appealed to these mystics, if they could have had access to it: ‘Meister Eckhart – as well as Johannes Tauler, Jacob Boehme, and Angelus Silesius – would feel profoundly at home contemplating natural science…. They would agree entirely with those who look for the reality of spirit not at the root of nature, but in its fruit’ (Mystics 127). Steiner’s methods and epistemology appealed to Bellow because they provided a means of reconciling his belief in the existence of the soul with the importance of providing attention to the external world. Steiner couched, in semi-scientific language, an argument for the veracity of the qualitative aspects of perception: meaning, morality, and the sense of purposeful connection between disparate objects and oneself. This marries well with Bellow’s conviction that the artist can approach truth in a way that contemporary science cannot; the artist does not understand the world through objective and systematic evaluation, but through a kind of groping for the original sense of being, a being that precedes social shaping. Perhaps that is the difference between scientific writing and art. Art assumes that it faces mysterious being. Science assumes that it deals with intrinsically knowable, ultimately knowable being. (Bellow, ‘Roudané’ 163)

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The most overt use of Steiner in Bellow’s work is in Humboldt’s Gift, although his influence is apparent in several of Bellow’s other novels. Charlie Citrine, the protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift, is Bellow’s most unapologetic spiritual quester, and turns directly to the work of Steiner, with largely comic effect. Importantly, the comedy of Citrine’s interest in anthroposophy is not, for the most part, derived from anything intrinsically amusing in Steiner’s writing, but from Citrine’s misunderstanding of his work.i Citrine, like many of Bellow’s protagonists, is misguided in his obsession with escape. He often wrong-headedly attempts to use anthroposophy to remove himself from the physical world, from involvement with people. His mistress, Renata, calls Charlie’s attention to the beauty of the landscape, and he responds by saying, ‘I looked out, and she was right. Beautiful was indeed there. But I had seen Beautiful many times, and so I closed my eyes. I rejected the plastered idols of the Appearances’ (16). Charlie often speaks of ‘another place’ (89) beyond the physical, and at one point claims, ‘Anthroposophy was having definite effects. I couldn’t take any of this too hard. Other-worldliness tinged it all and every little while my spirit seemed to disassociate itself’ (231). Some critics have made the error of thinking that Bellow condones Charlie’s escapism. Michael K. Glenday suggests that ‘Charles Citrine succeeds in doing what Joseph sought: to dismiss the distracting world and to get down to his business, conducted pretty much in his own head,’ but makes the error of seeing Citrine as a representation of Bellow himself; he continues, ‘Bellow’s latest art has suffered, I think … because he is abstract, having lost interest in the physical world that supplied rich detail’ (136). In fact, Charlie is berated for this escapism several times in the novel; by Renata, who declares, ‘you don’t spend years trying to dope your way out of the human condition’ (430), and, most importantly, by Humboldt, who yells, ‘This is life, Charlie, not literature!’ (289). Citrine reflects on Humboldt’s criticism, in relation to Steiner’s more esoteric claims: ‘when Humboldt cried, “Life!” he didn’t mean the Thrones, Exousiai, and Angels. He only meant realistic, naturalistic life’ (289). Citrine’s mistake is that he has maintained a belief in dualism, in a world of spirit that exists separately from a world of matter. As Robert F. Kiernan argues, ‘Charlie wishes to escape from the insufficiency of ego into a world of spirit’ (170). This results from Charlie’s misreading of Steiner, which is a common error that stems from an occasional

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ambiguity in Steiner’s own language. Citrine asks himself, ‘when, I wondered, would I rise at last above all this stuff, the accidental, the merely phenomenal, the wastefully and randomly human, and be fit to enter higher worlds?’ (291). There are, properly, no higher worlds in Steiner’s work, despite the fact that the title of his most read work is often translated as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment (1904–5). The actual word in the title is ‘höheren,’ which translates literally as ‘higher,’ but is generally used to suggest promotion or evolution. When Steiner speaks of ‘higher worlds,’ he speaks not of other worlds, but of a richer understanding of the immediate world. He is (usually) clear on this matter: ‘If the Divine concealed itself behind the phenomena of nature, although it is at the same time the creative element within them, it could not be perceived; man would have to believe in it… You adhere to belief in God, I to vision’ (‘Goethe’ 54). Both Goethe and Steiner believed that goodness forms part of the fabric of existence. The natural order is not amoral; due to the breakdown of subject and object, one’s innate sense of morality – as opposed to one’s intellectually constructed ethical beliefs – is part of the physical world. Julie D. Prandi describes Goethe’s natural ethics as ‘a morality that is intended to be an expression of the deepest human needs and impulses; that therefore asserts itself naturally, even where other [imposed] standards of morality prohibit or vilify it’ (x). Bellow claimed a similar understanding of morality; he said that his novel Herzog ‘can be explained simply by the implicit assumption that existence, quite apart from any of our judgments, has value, that existence is worth-ful’ (Bellow, ‘Harper’ 61). He elaborated in a 1978 interview with Henrietta Buckmaster: I myself am innately convinced that my life wouldn’t make any sense at all if there were no moral interpretations, and I think that most human beings are like that…. They live by something quite unknown to themselves, some kind of moral intuition which they can’t apparently get rid of but which they rely upon without acknowledgment. (131) This argument resonates with William Golding’s claim that his father’s generation lived by a moral sense that stood at odds with their rational beliefs: they were unable to see ‘that the morals by which they lived were not deducible from the system which they held to apply’ (qtd. in

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Biles 85). In order to improve one’s sense of morality, one must learn to distinguish the innate intuitions from those intellectually adopted or imposed. Bellow claims: The great danger that lies in wait for so many people who have an honest heart and really good intuition, is that they allow someone else to do their basic thinking for them…. [I]t’s very hard for beginners to insist on making their own distinctions and on obeying their own instincts, on achieving their own discriminations. Something like a revolution will be necessary. (‘Buckmaster’ 134–5) It is for these reasons that Goethe rejected Kant’s notion that morality is linked to duty and will. As Friedrich Paulsen explained of Goethe: The Kantian morality philosophy with its sharply pointed antithesis of duty versus inclination … must have sounded to Goethe as empty and dead talk, yes even as presumptuous and wicked talk, as blasphemy against God and nature. (Qtd. in Prandi 2) Goethe felt that rational reasoning separates the individual from their natural ‘inclination,’ and it is this inclination that unites people to the natural moral order. Intellectual systems, such as Kant’s, only create divisions, from the world and from each other: ‘The estrangement of human beings from one another is a fact of life, no longer a hypothetical matter,’ said Bellow. ‘The price you pay for the development of consciousness is the withering of the heart’ (‘Roudané’ 152). In order to combat this ‘withering,’ one must embark upon ‘a mental-moral project to understand your surroundings, yourself, and the society you live in, etc’ [my italics] (Bellow, ‘Pinsker’ 97).

Subject and Object in the Contemporary Novel While Goethe and Steiner’s ideas were important to Bellow, they are still explanative systems; as such, they restrict one’s freedom, and Bellow’s awareness of this led to his ambivalent and light-hearted treatment of Steiner in Humboldt’s Gift. Much of the negative criticism of the novel resulted from a mistaken belief, first, that Charlie’s view of the world is an accurate reading of Steiner, and, second, that Bellow was using his novel to press these ideas upon his readers.

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However, while Bellow’s spiritual, metaphysical, and phenomenological philosophy colours his fiction, he does not use his artistic creations as vehicles for his ideas and opinions. To understand better the way Bellow artistically incorporates his spiritual-phenomenological ideas, it is necessary to move beyond an exploration of Bellow’s thought as it appears in his interviews and essays towards an investigation into the way Bellow’s fiction thinks. It took Bellow many years to develop a style and technique through which he could explore his ideas within fiction, and he rejected the direct or didactic approach for many reasons, both personal and historical. As discussed earlier in the introduction, Bellow felt that, in the early twentieth century, the novel had discarded its interest in the world, in both its physical and spiritual aspects, in favour of a solipsistic Idealism. As he wrote in his 1960 essay ‘The Sealed Treasure’: Disappointment with its human material is built into the contemporary [modernist] novel. It is assumed that society cannot give the novelist ‘suitable’ themes and characters. Therefore the important humanity of the novel must be the writer’s own. His force, his virtuosity, his powers of poetry, his reader of fate, are at the centre of the book. (61) One’s personal truth became the only truth; the object existed only so far as it existed for subject. Bellow argued in his Nobel lecture that this loss of interest in the world, and, more importantly, in other people, had reached its peak in the existentialist fiction that appeared after the First World War. He claimed that ‘Hemingway’s youthful readers were convinced that the horrors of the 20th century had sickened and killed humanistic beliefs with their deadly radiations’ (89). He went on to paraphrase Robbe-Grillet’s claim that, as a consequence of the horrors of the twentieth century, ‘in great contemporary works, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ The Stranger, or Kafka’s The Castle, there are no characters; you find in such books not individuals, merely entities’ (89). Iris Murdoch made a similar diagnosis, writing that ‘the real individual has tended to disappear from the novel, and his place has been taken by the symbolic individual who is the literary work itself’ (‘Sublime’ 280). Bellow believed that lack of interest or belief in the reality of other people had led to a genuine impoverishment in the novel; it undermined what George Lukacs

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saw as the central paradigm of the novel form: ‘the antagonistic duality of soul and world,’ the tension between subjective perception and objective reality (88). In his Nobel lecture, Bellow recalls how, in his youth, he had read the preface of Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), and was struck by the author’s claim that the novelist must reach towards ‘what is enduring and essential’ (Conrad 145). He admits that, in his early works, he was too influenced by the cynical nihilism of the existentialists to admit sympathy for Conrad’s argument; he told himself ‘that Conrad’s rhetoric must be resisted. But I never thought him mistaken’ (89), as if, at the time, metaphysics were best not discussed out of sheer decency. Bellow’s first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), reflect the restricting influence of his predecessors. Both novels are short, tightly constructed, philosophical works – Murdoch would describe them as ‘crystalline’ – that feature little of the vibrancy of character and freedom of voice which would later come to be described as ‘Bellovian.’ Eusebio L. Rodrigues argues that these early novels were written with ‘a borrowed sensibility’ (77), and Bellow himself admits that he was fighting against his instincts in the creation of these works. However, over the course of his career, Bellow eventually developed enough confidence to declare that while ‘there is a violence [in contemporary life] … we are not absolutely dominated by it. We are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense. Not yet’ (‘Nobel’ 92). He argued, in his Nobel lecture, that critics, eager to define an age, had signed the ‘death notice’ (91) of the individual too quickly. His first significant break from the dominant style was his 1953 novel, The Adventures of Augie March, in which Bellow threw off the rigid form of his early work in favour of a sprawling picaresque that had few reservations about using the language rejected by Hemingway and others; Augie bellows: ‘Truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony!’ (454). He described Augie’s writing process as free and purely instinctual: ‘It just came to me…. The great pleasure of the book was that it came easily. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it. That’s why the form was loose’ (qtd. in Breit 273). The Nobel lecture goes on to explain how the breakthrough of Augie March allowed him to return to Joseph Conrad’s argument in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus without reservation. Conrad

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had argued that ‘art was an attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe’ (145), but that focusing on the external world is not done at the expense of the spiritual, the emotional, and the moral; on the contrary, it is only through attention to the physical world, and to one’s own mode of perception, that these aspects can be known. Conrad wrote: Fiction – if it at all aspires to be art – appeals to temperament. And truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the time and place. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way…. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. (146) Conrad’s aesthetic theory strikes a distinctly Goethean balance between subject and object. In his book Conrad and Impressionism (2001), John G. Peters argues that Conrad’s style was a response to scientific positivism; he sought to demonstrate that ‘reason and science alone are insufficient for analyzing human problems and human existence,’ and that ‘reality comes through the medium of human subjectivity’ (13). However, Conrad did not disappear entirely into Idealism either, opting for a style that ‘mediates these extremes and posits the necessary existence of both subject and object – not from a dualist position; rather, the two merge such that their outlines blur’ (18). Impressionism, argues Peters, ‘presents subject and object in constant change through their mutual influence’ (18–19). Bellow argues that an author must embrace his or her intuitive perceptions, distinguishing them from rational modes of thought, in order to join the world. The role of the novelist is to recover ‘true impressions’ of reality – a phrase Bellow borrows from Proust – and these impressions are recovered through attention both to one’s internal processes and to the external world. Unlike Murdoch, Bellow directs his attention towards a rich and full understanding of human experience, rather than the objective world alone; he is not interested in ‘truth’ but in ‘true impressions.’

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The Limits of Fiction In his book Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), Lionel Trilling states that, after modernism, an author cannot allude to abstract principles or objective realities beyond that established and defined within the confines of the novel. This is not necessarily to say readers no longer believe in the reality of goodness, for example – ‘As householders, housekeepers, and parents we maintain allegiance,’ says Trilling – but as ‘readers, as participants in the conscious, formulating part of our life in society, we incline to the antagonistic position’ (41). In his book, Trilling directly criticizes Saul Bellow for what he considers to be his misguided attempt to allude to or represent these principles in fiction. He claims that, when Herzog speaks metaphysically, ‘we respond with discomfort and embarrassment’ (41). And it is not only the reader that squirms: Bellow himself, argues Trilling, reveals an embarrassed awareness of his own ‘philistinism’ in trying to approach these abstract realities through fiction (42). What Trilling fails to notice is that Bellow is self-conscious of his self-consciousness. Despite Bellow’s interest in Conrad, we should not see his work as a regressive attempt to return to the impressionist mode as if high modernism never existed. Bellow may have wished to reveal the same things as Conrad, but he had to find a new method in which to do so. As John Bayley astutely notes in his essay on Mr. Sammler’s Planet, it is ‘difficult not to believe that Bellow, who in his time has tried out almost every style of fictional approach, did not here intend the signs and symbols of fictional earnestness to act as self-born mockers of fiction’s enterprise’ (92). Bellow does not try to contain reality in his fiction; on the contrary, he draws constant attention to the ways in which fiction limits and distorts our lives: how we compulsively explain and rationalize our sensations, how we wrongly see our lives as narrative, and how we think in consoling metaphors and pictures. In Henderson the Rain King, for example, the frequent symbolic allusions, particularly to the Bible, mainly serve to demonstrate Henderson’s own attempt to fictionalize his own life, to provide false meaning, which accelerates the rate of his own disconnect from reality. Henderson has many significant moments with animals in the novel – he tries to remove the frogs from the Arnewi village, and confronts a lion with King Dahfu – which leads him to refer to ‘the prophecy of Daniel which I had never been able

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to shake off – “They shall drive you from among men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field”’ (89). But this is Henderson’s allusion, not Bellow’s. Similarly, in Henderson’s first encounter with the Bunam he thinks to himself, ‘Something about his figure struck me as Biblical, and in particular he made me think of the man who Joseph met when he went to look for his brothers and who directed him along toward Dothan’ (116). These fictional impositions that serve to aggrandize Henderson’s experience come to hinder his perception and his freedom. Bellow claimed in a 1976 interview in the New York Times Magazine that ‘All my books are about education… Bring characters to the conclusions of their errors and leave them prepared to make the first step’ (qtd. in Rodrigues 211). These ‘errors’ are their reliance on imposed thought systems, and the ‘first step’ is the realization of other modes of perception which bring one into contact with the intrinsically valuable world. But, crucially, Bellow never attempts to depict this ‘first step’ in his novels. Seize the Day, for example, ends when Tommy Wilhelm is finally liberated from his false but blinding impressions of the state of his own life: ‘He … sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need’ (117). Upon ‘consummation’ the novel ends, and the ‘ultimate need’ is left un-defined. M. Gilbert Porter considers this as a weakness of the novel: ‘we do not see Wilhelm transcending the weight of the world in pursuit of Truth and spirit in accordance with his real soul’ (27). Porter is right to note that the abstract revelations are not ‘in’ the text, but wrong to assume that Bellow’s novel is actually concerned with defining Wilhelm’s ‘need.’ The content of Tommy’s revelation does not appear in the novel, because it cannot appear in a novel; one cannot present reality in a fiction, so, as Wittgenstein insisted, it must be passed over in silence. Bellow’s novels pull themselves apart at the same rate as the protagonists’ own delusory creations. Herzog, like Seize the Day, ends at the precise moment when the protagonist frees himself from his own fictions – in this case, Herzog’s own compulsion obsessively and neurotically to compose letters. The last line of the novel is, ‘At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word’ (341). Henderson also culminates with liberation that leads to a Wittgensteinian ‘silence’: ‘I guess I felt it was my turn now to move, and so went running – leaping, leaping, pounding, and tingling over

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the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence’ (34). Mr. Sammler also eventually realizes ‘the terms which, in his own heart, each man knows’ but Bellow does not attempt to articulate them, ending the novel with only the words ‘we know, we know, we know’ (260).

Depicting Living Thought: Mr. Sammler’s Speech William Golding’s Free Fall also engaged in a similar movement of shedding fictions towards silence, but, in that novel, the struggle with language and fiction was depicted as painful; as a tragedy. Golding, like Murdoch, saw spiritual progression as a movement away from self, so that language and subjectivity are both prisons to be broken. Bellow, however, saw potential in the refinement of human thought and speech; a subtle exploration of the experience of sensing and thinking, of speaking and stuttering, of clear thoughts and confusion, can only aid one’s understanding of reality. Bellow consequently chose to present subjective human experience as a living entity that enters into a fluid and mutable relationship with a complex reality, rather than as a limiting and limited ‘truth.’ Many of Bellow’s novels, particularly his post-1960s work such as Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Humboldt’s Gift, feature lengthy philosophical meditations that appear to echo arguments he had made in interviews. This has led certain readers to criticize Bellow for using his novels as clumsy outlets for his own opinions, as platforms to deliver the very ‘explanations’ that he so derides. Charles T. Samuels, for instance, suggests that the eponymous protagonist of Mr. Sammler’s Planet ‘is a thinly veiled mask for his creator and … Mr. Sammler’s Planet lives less powerfully as a novel than as an angry meditation on modern libertarianism’ (180). M. Gilbert Porter agrees that Sammler ‘emerges not so much a fully realized character with a life of his own as much as he does a thinly disguised mouthpiece for the author’s didacticism’ (5). Alfred Kazin writes: Artur Sammler … is so openly Bellow’s mind now, in its most minute qualifications, that I am torn between my admiration for the man’s exemplary intellectual style and my amazement that Bellow’s hero should lack opacity in every side of life except his relations with other human beings. […]

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There is a brilliantly immediate, unsparing knowledge of other human beings’ limitations and appearances which in its moral haughtiness becomes as audible to the reader as sniffing, and is indeed that. (175–7) Kazin has made the same mistake as Michael K. Glenday by assuming perfect congruence between author and character, and this leads him to suppose Mr. Sammler’s failings are also Bellow’s. However, as Rodrigues has argued, Sammler ‘is not a mere mouthpiece (as many critics have claimed) for Bellow’s attitudes and opinions. At this stage of his career, Bellow was too canny a writer to make such a mistake’ (209). While Bellow has stated that Mr. Sammler’s Planet was his ‘first thoroughly nonapologetic venture into ideas’ (qtd. in Hoggatt 3), this should not lead one to believe Bellow shares all of Mr. Sammler’s ideas, nor that it should be considered a didactic tract. As Sammler himself claims, ‘You had to be a crank to insist on being right’ (1). While Mr. Sammler’s ideas can be said, at certain points, to echo Bellow’s, the author is careful to present Mr. Sammler as a human being, rather than as a prophet. Mr. Sammler’s Planet, like most of Bellow’s novels, is bursting with ideas, some convincing, some confused, but, more importantly, it is, as Bellow himself states, an exploratory venture into ideas: how ideas live within us, how we think, how our thoughts construct the world, how ideas can remain fluid and free us, and how ideas can stubbornly stay the same and bind us. Mr. Sammler’s Planet does not merely relay these notions; the novel itself thinks, enacting the process of human thought, helping the reader to learn to distinguish their inner processes as well as the external world. Malcolm Bradbury suggests that Bellow uses the novel form as ‘the testing place where the ideal is perpetually forced to mediate with the contingent and the real, where ideology meets “the hum and buzz of culture,” where history and individual are compelled into encounter’ (Bellow 28). Bellow’s novels do not settle upon conclusions, but reflect a process of living thought that exists between the rational and the real. As Bellow says of Sammler, ‘The novelist never feels he’s got anything until he has it in all the density of actual experience. Then he looks at a piece of criticism, and all he sees is the single outline of thought…. You can’t deal with a phenomenon that way’ (‘Brans’ 155). It is significant that in both Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Humboldt’s Gift the ideas that obsess the protagonists appear to sit

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closely to Bellow’s own opinions, yet remain subject to great scepticism and irony. Charlie Citrine’s misunderstanding of Rudolf Steiner in Humboldt’s Gift, discussed earlier, does not serve only to dramatize Charlie’s own naïve credulity, but also illustrates, not just the problem and certainly not the solution to ignorance, but the nature of living with explanatory thought systems. We have seen how Charlie’s understanding of Steiner evolves and changes over the course of the novel, and not in any particularly linear fashion. That his apparently ‘correct’ readings of Steiner are often replaced by ‘incorrect’ readings suggests that a ‘correct’ reading, if immutable, is not a truth. Rigid thought is the danger, and Bellow takes great pain to disrupt any convincing idea espoused by his protagonists. As Charlie Citrine eventually realizes, ‘Mankind must … recover living thought…. Humboldt, faithful to failed ideas, lost his poetry and missed the boat’ (250). The climax of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, in which Sammler speaks ‘his full mind’ in the form of a lengthy monologue to Govinda Lal, has been criticized for being an awkward insertion of Bellow’s own ‘single outline of thought’ into a work of fiction (Kazin 176). The speech, however, does not function as a convincing tract, and it is not designed to; it serves instead to enact Sammler’s process of living thought in all its ‘density of actual experience.’ The character of Govinda Lal provides the reader with the best advice on how to understand Sammler’s monologue. Sammler hesitates to share his thoughts, stating, ‘I am extremely sceptical of explanations, rationalistic practices. I dislike the modern religion of empty categories, and people who make the motions of knowledge’ (186), to which Lal replies, ‘View it as a recital rather than a lecture… Consider the thing from a musical standpoint’ (186). There is play in this exchange on the word ‘motion.’ Sammler uses the phrase ‘the motions of knowledge’ in a colloquial fashion, as in ‘to go through the motions,’ to speak out of habit with no proper consideration of what is being said. Lal, by referring to music, evokes a second meaning of the word as it relates to technical composition: motion, in a musical sense, refers to the way in which a piece progresses and builds, when a single voice moves to a new pitch, or, more usefully in this context, when two or more harmonic voices begin to move in relation to one another. The word ‘lecture’ carries with it the connotation of an attempt to convince, or even scold or rebuke; a lecture has a firm structure, is delivered from a rooted lectern, and is still and unwavering. A recital, on the other hand, evokes

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the contradictions, counter-points, lifts, and shifts that occur in real thought. In his 1992 essay on Mozart, Bellow explained that [the] musical mode of speech is different from the semantic one that allows us to specify or denote. We feel moved to go beyond such speech, either in the direction of the pure exactness of mathematics or in the direction of the higher affects of sound or sight. The latter, the affects, are all the more powerful because they go beyond the definitions of speech, of intelligible discourse. (12) Musical speech, said Bellow, is ‘the characteristic signature of a person, of a soul’ (‘Distracted’ 168). The revelations of Sammler’s ‘musical’ speech do not spring from his argument, but from the mysterious expanse of the human character revealed by its incongruities and complexities. As Hegel wrote: What constitutes the real depth of the note-series is the fact that it goes on even to essential oppositions and does not fight shy of their sharpness and discordance. For the true Concept is an inherent unity, though not a merely immediate one but one essential split internally and falling apart into contradictions. (927–8) Sammler’s speech contains uncertainty, change, speculation, confusion, and self-doubt, but still displays a picture of an evolving and living inner life. Although Sammler is not deliberately providing revelations of character through his confused argument – he is certainly attempting to make a serious point – he is aware that what he is about to pass on to his audience will constitute a reflection of an inner state composed of both thoughts – confused and sound – and emotions. He states, ‘I am tempted to pass on some of my views,’ but then corrects himself, ‘Or impressions’ (186). Later he qualifies further: ‘And I have not stated my arguments, for I argue nothing. I have stated my thoughts’ (195). Sammler’s speech is coloured by his awareness of the human inclination towards play-acting. Outward speech is necessarily performative, and its inherited character means that it adopts patterns and forms that are not unique to the speaking individual: ‘the internal state is so chaotic, such a hodgepodge of odi et amo,’ says Sammler, ‘[b]ut now we live in a social and human sea’ (187). Sammler discusses

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this danger in depth – ‘when people had found a name for themselves, Human, they spent a lot of time Acting Human’ (193) – but he also enacts it. In his monologue, he states: ‘Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder’ (193). The reference to ‘that instrument,’ coupled with the fact that Sammler’s speech is directly referred to as a musical ‘recital,’ leads the reader to understand his lengthy monologue as a loud and wild performance of his own ‘composed’ character. Sammler frequently qualifies his opinions by insisting they are not truths, but reflections of mood, history, and character. Throughout the speech, he refers to his ‘weakness in the head’ (187), his ‘chaotic’ internal state (187), his sense of being ‘disembodied’ (188), his ‘abnormality’ (189) and ‘deformity’ (190). At one point he states, ‘I am not thinking clearly. I am very sad and torn today’ (189). He admits that he ‘suspect[s] his own judgments’ and that his ‘sense of connection is faulty’ (192). His rambling and seemingly irrelevant account of the mad Jewish King Rumkowski suggests that the subject of his talk is impelled largely by a mysterious and unstated emotional influence. The precise role of the Rumkowski story within his argument is unclear, even to Sammler; after Sammler tells the story, Lal himself admits ‘I have failed to make this connection’ (191). But Sammler is unable to shake the strange sense of importance the story holds on him. When he attempts to elucidate its relevance, he finds himself unable to articulate himself, and the first ellipses appear in the text. He then attempts to become academic about the matter, but eventually falters into complete silence: ‘…As Marx pointed out…’ But he did not say what Marx had pointed out. He thought, and the others did not speak. His food had not been touched. ‘I understand that old man was very lewd,’ he said. ‘He fingered the young girls. His orphans, perhaps. He knew all would die.’ (193) This excerpt contains the first significant appearance of the authorial voice in eight pages, the rest of which is in Sammler’s voice and presented in quotation marks. This intrusion signals – and leaves unexplained – Sammler’s sudden shift from the logical argument – ‘As Marx pointed out’ – to the seemingly random and shocking personal reflections upon Rumkowski’s immoral behaviour. The ideas

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Sammler is able to articulate are only part of his complex inner processes; they are just the thoughts, or the parts of his thoughts, that stand closely enough to the surface of public discourse to be shared. Sammler ends his speech in two movements. He first attempts to actively summarize his confused argument, as if in a lecture – ‘I think we may summarize my meaning in terms like these’ (194) – but the summary ends up slowly drifting into tangential areas, introducing new ideas, new points. He then retreats into an acceptance of the impossibility of articulating his theories: ‘There is no knowledge…. There is also strangeness, implicit. There is also adumbration…. All is not flatly knowable… I have nothing to argue’ (195). Sammler has failed to articulate rationally a convincing image of the world. It remains too large, too resistant to philosophy; it overflows. His rational argument has been dragged, pushed, saturated, and partially formed by other elements of his experience: by his memory, his emotions, and his intuitions. In the course of this speech, Bellow demonstrates the ways in which one’s ‘impressions’ are the product of more than the rational mind. Mr. Sammler, by allowing his speech to unfold ‘musically,’ has allowed these elements to surface, and it is through this realization of the hitherto repressed aspects of his experience that he – and the reader – is able to see beyond his intellectual asceticism towards his intuitive relationship with the world.

Mr. Sammler’s Moral Knowledge Sammler, with his damaged left eye, has felt ‘somewhat separated from the rest of his species … not so much by age as by preoccupations too different and remote, disproportionate on the side of the spiritual, Platonic, Augustinian, thirteenth-century’ (34). Sammler, wounded physically and mentally by his wartime experiences, speaks of himself as ‘not necessarily human’ (95); he has retreated from the physical world in an attempt to achieve an ascetic mysticism, one that rejects ‘the bondage of the ordinary and the finite’ (95), and that understands the goal as release ‘from Nature, from impressions, and from everyday life’ (95). Sammler believes this is an anti-rationalistic stance, but, as Rudolf Steiner claimed, any ideas that ‘lie outside the sphere of the creative whole of Nature … [b]elong exclusively to the human intellect’ (‘Goethe’ 57). Sammler, in his old age, desires to read nothing but Meister Eckhart, the most ascetic of mystics; he

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reads: ‘See to it that you are stripped of all creatures, of all consolation from creatures. For certainly as long as creatures comfort and are able to comfort you, you will never find true comfort’ (209). Bellow suggests the absurdity of Sammler’s longing through its parallel to Govinda Lal’s comical wish to rehabilitate humanity by fleeing the world for another planet; as Robert Kiernan explains, Sammler’s ‘subsequent choice to read only thirteenth-century mystics like Henry Suso and Johannes Eckhart is escapist – analogous to the attempt of scientists to escape what he calls the “spatial-temporal prison” [space travel]’ (152). Sammler’s longing for complete disconnection is largely predicated on fear and distrust of the tangible world and of people; he admits he wants to be free from ‘ordinary life…. Its low tricks, its doggish hind-sniffing charm’ (95). He admits that he finds Eckhart’s ideas comforting, rather than truthful: ‘Mr. Sammler could not say that he literally believed what he was reading. He could, however, say that he cared to read nothing but this’ (209). Sammler’s overtly rational mind is unable to understand the saintly, the divine, in the everyday. The dangerous concept of abstract and otherworldly perfection inclines him towards seeing the physical world as tainted and unpleasant. Despite this, Sammler finds himself unwillingly lured back into the realm of the human, the sensuous. In his most creaturely moments, he receives ‘Bliss from his surroundings…. Bliss from bricks, from the sky! Bliss and mystic joy!’ (95–6). But his pessimism towards the modern psyche, stemming from his war experiences and his general sense of the paucity of the contemporary soul, darkens his understanding of these moments. When he experiences an unwelcome epiphany through a suddenly lucid vision of crowd – Goethe wrote that a properly distinguishing mind will become aware of ‘all manner of things crowding in upon us’ [my italics] (32) – Sammler thinks, ‘By a convergence of all minds and all movements the conviction transmitted by this crowd seemed to be that reality was a terrible thing, and that the final truth about mankind was overwhelming and crushing’ (232). He admits that he ‘could not swear that this was really accurate, but Broadway at Ninety-sixth Street gave him such a sense of things’ (232). In the war, Sammler experienced a loss of his own humanity that inhibited his ability to connect with the world around him. In a conversation with Wallace, Sammler discusses a scene from War and Peace in which Pierre Bezukhov is sent to the firing squad by General

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Davout, but is spared on account of a ‘human look’ exchanged between the two men. Sammler explains: ‘Tolstoy says you don’t kill another human being with whom you have exchanged such a look’ (155). This idea is at the heart of mystical ethics, but Sammler is unable to accept it. He states: It’s not an arbitrary idea. It’s based on the belief that there is the same truth in the heart of every human being, or a splash of God’s own spirit, and that this is the richest thing we share in common. And up to a point I would agree. But though it’s not an arbitrary idea, I wouldn’t count on it. (155) This leads Sammler to reflect upon his own experience of murdering a man during the war. He recounts that he felt no guilt, no pity, ‘for he was dispensed from pity’ (115). It is implied that, at the moment of murder, Sammler cut all ties to his humanity. The description of the strange ecstasy he experienced at the moment of murder supports this: ‘His heart felt lined with brilliant, rapturous satin…. There was a flash, a blot of fiery white’ (155). The flash does not illuminate, but blots, and his heart becomes ‘lined,’ protected. The mistaken feeling of bliss is actually one of numbness. Sammler has come to confuse the feeling of nothingness, of whiteness, with spiritual and moral perfection, as it made the horror of his experience bearable, which explains his misguided sympathy with the ascetic mystics. Sammler’s speech to Govinda Lal emphasized to him the limitations of his rational worldview; in the scenes that follow, Sammler is slowly brought back into ‘a return match with the persistent creature’ (95). While in a taxi, on his way to visit the dying Elya Gruner, Sammler sees Feffer in a fight with the pickpocket who had earlier exposed himself to Sammler. Sammler leaves the taxi with Eisen, and approaches the fight, and is suddenly shocked into a realization of his own impotence: It was a feeling of horror and grew in strength, grew and grew… He was old. He lacked physical force. He knew what to do, but had no power to execute it. He had to turn to someone else – to an Eisen! A man himself very far out on another track, orbiting a very different foreign center. Sammler was powerless. To be so powerless was death. And suddenly he saw himself not so much

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standing as strangely leaning, as reclining, and peculiarly in profile, and as a past person. That was not himself. It was someone – and this struck him – poor in spirit. (240) As Douglas Hoggatt rightly notes, ‘This moment represents Mr. Sammler’s epiphany in which he realizes that the disinterestedness he practices throughout the novel has rendered him powerless’ (15). In the previous chapter, Sammler read aloud from Eckhart: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ (209). Here, for the first time, Sammler suddenly understands the state of being ‘poor in spirit’ as negative. Sammler looks to the crowd for help, but realizes that they are only voyeurs, what Rodrigues calls ‘neutral witnesses enjoying the spectacle but refusing the get involved’ (217). They are observers, such as Sammler has been, who have rejected their intrinsic connection to the external world. Recognizing himself in their passivity, he at first tries to defend himself by figuring their behaviour in a positive light, stating comically that ‘what united everybody was a beatitude of presence … blessed are the present’ (239). But this does nothing to save the beaten pickpocket. While most critics recognize Sammler’s moment by the bed of Elya Gruner on the last page of the novel as the site of his final revelation, it is, in fact, the preceding conversation with Angela Gruner in which Sammler first puts into practice his newfound understanding; he has realized that complete ascetic withdrawal is incompatible with moral behaviour, that morality is found through one’s innate and intuitive connection with the world: And now, confronted by all that superfeminity, sensuality, he saw everything with heightened clarity. As he had seen Riverside Drive, wickedly illuminated… To see was delicious. Oh, of course! An extreme pleasure! The sun may shine, and be a blessing, but sometimes shows the fury of the world. Brightness like this, the vividness of everything, also dismayed him. The soft clearness of Angela’s face, the effort of her brows – the full mixture of fineness and rankness he saw there. And the sun was squarely at the window. The streaked glass ran with light like honey. A barrage of sweetness and intolerable brightness was laid down. Sammler did not really want to experience this. It all rose against him, too dizzy, too turbulent. (247)

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Riverside Drive was the site where Sammler experienced the previously discussed moment of lucidity in the phone booth, where ‘the clear light made all objects so explicit, and this explicitness taunted Mr. Minutely-Observant Artur Sammler’ (8). The ‘barrage’ of brightness again overwhelms Sammler’s analytical eye, and he is able to experience, in Angela’s physical presence, her ‘fineness and rankness,’ her full, unidealized self. He is unable to analyse or control the situation, only to see. This is not the ‘indirect’ light that confused Tommy Wilhelm’s vision of Tamkin; here, the sun is ‘squarely at the window.’ Sammler realizes that ‘To go with quantities of ideas and purposes there were quantities of people’ (248); people cannot be included amongst ‘ideas and purposes,’ but are entities in their own right. So he listens to Angela for the first time: ‘He heard and remembered everything, every drab fact, every crimson touch. He didn’t want to listen, but she told him things. He had no wish to remember, but he remembered it all. And Angela really was a beauty’ (248). This is in stark contrast to his earlier meeting with her, in which Sammler ‘received her confidences in a disinterested way’ (131). This heightened awareness does not lull him into a selfless passivity, but into action. He now knows intuitively, not intellectually, what to do, and responds to Angela with the totality of his being. Sammler’s previous problem was that he could make no connection between his internal conception of morality and its place in the world. His compassion was not gone, but his ability to make a ‘compassionate utterance’ had disappeared. He had lost the natural connection between morality as an idea and morality as an action: ‘Forms as signs were absent…. [T]here was a terrible dumbness’ (215–16). He realizes now that a ‘compassionate utterance was a mortal necessity. Utterance, sounds of hope and desire, exclamations of grief…. About essentials, almost nothing could be said. Still, signs could be made, should be made, must be made’ (215–16). He makes an effort to appeal to Angela at the moment of her father’s death; ‘He needed no victory over Angela. He only wanted to persuade her of something, and didn’t know whether even that was feasible’ (250). He makes his ‘sign,’ and encourages her to do the same, saying, ‘If you love him [Elya], make some sign’ (253), in order to discover the relation between internal moral knowledge and the external world. Angela’s father dies before Sammler’s request can be acted upon, but this moment comes to bear upon his final reflection on the

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deathbed of Elya Gruner. Sammler comes to the conclusion that Elya lived, properly and decently, by an intuitive knowledge of a suprarational moral ‘contract,’ despite his flawed humanity. Gruner was a surgeon, and Sammler reflects upon this: ‘Surgery was psychically peculiar. To enter an unconscious body with a knife? To take out organs, sew in the flesh, splash blood? Not everyone could do that’ (235). This image of entering another person in order to help them stands in strong contrast to Sammler’s previous disconnection, his passive moral judgement from afar. Sammler also notes that Gruner’s behaviour was not linked to a reciprocal agreement, to a passing of goodwill and action between two individuals; it was entirely altruistic, and, as such, implied no distinction between subject and object: ‘He was the sort of individual from whom help emanated. There were no arrangements for return.’ Importantly, Elya Gruner’s character is not painted as traditionally saintly; Sammler, even as he praises the dying Gruner, says ‘He’s touchy, boastful, he repeats himself. He’s vain, grouchy, proud. But he’s done well, and I admire him’ (251). The final lines of the novel gesture again to this intuitive ‘human contract.’ Sammler had mentioned this idea to Angela in relation to Elya in the preceding scene, saying: We have our assignments. Feeling, outgoingness, expressiveness, kindness, heart – all these fine human things which by a peculiar turn of opinion strike people now as shady activities…. Anyway, there is Elya’s assignment. That’s what’s in his good face. That’s why he has such a human look…. He had an unsure loyalty to certain pure states. (251) Angela responded by saying, ‘I thought everybody was born human,’ to which Sammler replied, ‘It’s not a natural gift at all. Only the capacity is natural’ (252). Gruner’s gift was his ability to hear and abide by his moral intuition, a sense of the intrinsic value of and in the world. ‘[H]e [Elya] did meet the terms of his contract,’ says Sammler. ‘The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it – that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know’ (260). As Douglas Hoggatt writes, Sammler comes to learn that ‘human life is intrinsically valuable, that this idea is part of the natural knowledge of the soul (“we know, we know, we know”), and that we appreciate the value

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of human life only when we are in a state of communion with the world around us’ (4). This ‘communion’ is hindered when rationality claims dominance, but the link can be rediscovered by allowing natural knowledge to manifest without a mission. This natural knowledge cannot be contained in language, but words can operate as a sign or ‘compassionate utterance’ that communicate beyond their immediate content; Ellen Pifer argues that Sammler’s final statement is an utterance of this sort, as it ‘appeals neither to reason nor to scientific objectivity’ and is couched in the ‘ancient cadences of prayer’ which ‘is the soul’s acknowledged form of discourse’ (25). Bellow knew that ‘about essentials, almost nothing could be said. Still, signs could be made, should be made, must be made.’ The ‘almost’ is key. The moral world is not separable from the external world. Connections have been lost as the emphasis on rationality claimed dominance. But the link can be rediscovered, by distinguishing between rational and natural knowledge, by using language and literature evocatively and musically, in order to challenge the reader’s reliance on stable and rational knowledge. As Bellow wrote in a 1990 essay on the subject of distraction: There are moments when they [the essences] appear to be lost beyond recovery. But then we hear or read something that exhumes them, even gives them a soiled, tattered resurrection… A small cue will suffice to remind us that when we hear certain words – ‘all is but toys,’ ‘absent thee from felicity,’ ‘a wilderness of monkeys,’ ‘green pastures,’ ‘still waters,’ or even the single word ‘relume’ – they revive us for moments of emotional completeness and overflowing comprehension, they unearth buried essences. (‘Distracted’ 168)

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Conclusion: Drawing Circles in the Sea: Un-Defining the ‘Mystical Novelist’

[A]nything that tries to establish itself as a real or positive, or absolute system, government, organization, self, soul, entity, individuality, can so attempt only by drawing a line about itself, or about the inclusions that constitute itself, and damning or excluding, or breaking away from, all other ‘things.’ …[I]f it does not so act, it cannot seem to be; …[I]f it does so act, it falsely and arbitrarily and futilely and disastrously acts, just as one who draws a circle in the sea, including a few waves, saying that the other waves, with which the included are continuous, are positively different, and stakes his life upon maintaining that the admitted and the damned are positively different. Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned It is the artist’s job, said William Golding, to ‘scrape the labels off things,’ but it is usually the critic’s job to do the opposite. In this case, though, it seemed contrary to the sensibility of the subject to engage in anything so egregious as overt categorization. I have consequently attempted to try and share these authors’ own resistance to exclusive classification yet without denying them their unique existence; in doing so I hope, at the very least, to have brought into question the recurring narrative that considers the mid-century novel form to be bifurcated into either documentary realism or solipsistic experimentalism. This has inevitably involved the drawing of 183

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some new circles in the sea, but hopefully the ripples will misbehave enough to balance out any gross punctiliousness. To say that the ‘mystical novelists’ were realists, experimentalists, modernists, or postmodernists is to exclude the ways in which they diverged from each of these hazily defined ‘movements’; to say they were none of these things only places them back into that characterless hinterland. To take the middle road is to say they were not entirely resistant to certain aspects of what has come to be called ‘postmodernism’ (insofar as one can attempt to define that movement’s nebulous characteristics) because they shared a view of language as an opaque structure that rests upon, but does not touch, a world that remains unknown to rational thought; they were also similarly sceptical of metanarrative, or, indeed, of any form of rationally imposed meaning. These ‘postmodern’ tendencies, however, did not lead them to exclude the possibility of something existing beyond language, or even of the potential of knowing this mysterious ‘something.’ To that extent, they maintained a belief in a telos, a conviction more often associated with modernism, but they differed by placing little faith in reason as a method of pursuit. But this approach is unsatisfactory, mere language games. In attempting such a definition, one can only equivocate, qualifying every statement until it offers nothing at all, and constantly deferring responsibility with unattributed quotation marks. Golding spoke of the ‘infinite regression’ that occurs when one tries rationally to approach the irrational (qtd. in Biles 103), and we should not risk going infinitely backwards now we have almost reached the end. A more progressive approach, perhaps, is to adopt the language of the ‘mystical novelists.’ These writers were sceptics, questioners, and analysers, but they did this not to establish new definitions, but to broaden, to the widest degree, the field of exploration. One can say, to use their own apophatic language, that they undermined knowledge to expand knowledge, seeing in aporia not chaos, but an infinite inclusiveness. Their scepticism existed to tear down barriers, to destabilize established forms of thought in order to render them too unstable to serve as effective floodgates upon the endless expanse of human knowledge. With barriers compromised, one sees connections, rather than compartments. Seen in these expansive terms, one begins to realize just how widely these circles could be drawn. To see these strange and spiritual novels as an unusual deviation from an otherwise linear progression

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in the twentieth-century novel from an atheistic existentialism to the relativistic and nihilistic postmodernism is to deny the undercurrent of supra-rational or extra-linguistic thinking that ran throughout the century, and is once again bubbling to the surface today. One can easily invert the inherited paradigm, and see the secular postmodernism that dominated critical discussion in the 1980s and early 1990s as the deviation in an otherwise unbroken line of non-dogmatic spirituality that runs from the post-war period (if not before) through to what is increasingly being described as our own ‘post-secular’ era.i Indeed, there is a great deal of contemporary critical writing committed to this very inversion, intent upon revealing that secular postmodernism – that which Murdoch defined as ‘a network of meanings … under which there is nothing’ (Metaphysics 187) – was based upon a misreading of its major texts. The recent ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology, for example, is less of a turn than an attempt at historical revisionism, as it contends that the unstated foundations of the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, as well as their inheritors such as Derrida and Levinas, have always been essentially religious. Mark C. Taylor, Bernard Stiegler, John D. Caputo, and Hent de Vries, among others, have attempted to see Derrida’s entire body of work as essentially religious, due to the implications of his later, more overtly theological texts.ii Stiegler, for example, has argued that Derrida’s mysterious conception of the aporia of origin is confirmed as explicitly transcendental by his late essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (259); de Vries argues that, in Derrida’s later texts, ‘God’ is the best name for the trace or aporia of origin (355). Indeed, even Derrida himself has said that the nihilistic readings of his work that pervaded the academic world in the 1980s were misguided: ‘I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language … it is, in fact, saying the opposite,’ although he stops short of declaring it to be religious (123–4). Philip Blond’s introduction to the influential collection Post-Secular Philosophy (1998) contains a diagnosis of society’s spiritual impoverishment at the turn of the millennium, and his argument is, at points, a strange echo of Murdoch’s own prognosis of society at mid-century. Blond argues that the secularism that has pervaded society ‘since Kant’ has destroyed ‘moral realism [as] the good cannot possess any actuality outside the conditional and conditioning nature of the human mind’ (2). Blond states that man can only respond either by

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‘dominat[ing] nature through elevating his own subjectivity’ or by ‘deny[ing] himself by positing his consciousness as a consequence of other less human structures’ (4). His vision of the response to this state of affairs is also very similar to Murdoch’s, and, indeed, to that of each of the novelists under consideration in this study; he argues that contemporary society has not become angry or resigned to this impoverishment, but overcome by ‘a strange kind of silence. A silence moreover whose dreadful acquiescence impels one to speak about it’ (4). This silence exists, he says, because society finds itself unwilling to separate ‘intuition from concept’ or to see ‘where the intellectual begins and the phenomenal ends.’ This lack of definition, rather than destroying these concepts, actually ‘affirms them both as participation and as culmination of God’ (54). By ‘colour[ing] in the adumbrations and transcendent shapes of the invisible,’ says Blond, ‘we see the phenomenal presence of the ideal in the real’ (58). The millennial condition, as Blond sees it, is strikingly similar to Murdoch’s view of the post-war condition, and his solution runs parallel to that posited by the novelists of the mystical turn. An attempt to redefine postmodern and millennial fiction in similar terms is also underway. John A. McClure’s Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007), for example, attempts to recast writers such as Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo as ‘postsecular.’ He argues for the re-emergence of religious belief in philosophy and fiction in the decades preceding the turn of the millennium (which, in McClure’s view, starts as far back as the 1970s) and defines it as a ‘partial’ belief, one that resists the certainty of rational dogma, and subscribes to a ‘strategy of perhaps’ (14). The post-secular writer, says McClure, ‘does not speak in the totalizing language of dogmatic theology’; instead, ‘its promptings are partial, or plural, or only imperfectly decipherable to human ears’ (16). Again there are striking parallels with kataphatic utterances of the ‘mystical writers’; they accept that language cannot contain their ineffable beliefs, yet they find ways to fashion language to reflect their partial and impartial expressions. However, if we have learned anything from the preceding study, it is that such parallels tend to buckle once any pressure is applied to them. To demonstrate: the mystical novelists (who were not mystics) occupied the post-war period (although we are never really post-war), and were post-modern, but pre-postmodern. Their work either shares similarities with the current era or is part of it. This era is post-secular

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(although we were, apparently, never truly secular), post-postmodern (although postmodernism may have been a form of postsecularism, in which case we are still in the middle of it), and perhaps contiguous with the pre-postmoderns. We are drawing circles in the sea. As the authors in this study recognized, all attempts at understanding are based on exclusion – by saying something is this and not that – but the goal of understanding is to recognize connections: that all things are, in fact, continuous. This paradox sits at the root of all the work considered in this study. These writers attempted to overcome this problem by creating novels that did not make claims, but served as conduits of understanding; instead of creating definitions, they broke them down, and, then, they opened them up. Their techniques differed towards this end, but they shared a desire to be conducive, rather than conclusive: Iris Murdoch destabilized the narrative voice in order to relax the illusory grasp of word upon world. Her novels refused to present themselves as windows into false worlds, but they did not crystallize into self-contained objects either: instead, she formed ‘porous’ texts, through which another reality steadily flows. William Golding, in The Spire, embraced linguistic aporia as a generator of meaning, so that ambiguity became not a vessel, but a spring. Saul Bellow sought to collapse the subject/object divide, so that significance is discovered to be writ in the flesh of the world, rather than pressed upon it. Patrick White used the recurring images of mud and slime as simultaneously symbol and thing, stressing the malleability and movement of meaning and physicality. He does not deny difference, but suggests fundamental interconnection: as Paul Eluard’s epigraph to The Solid Mandala reads, ‘There is another world, but it is in this one.’ These novelists developed a literary style that capitalized upon their era’s cynicism in order to usher their readers towards forms of knowing that did not seek to reduce the totality of experience. Any critical approach to their work must function in a similar manner. We end, then, only with a web of connections – hopefully one that glitters like Dean Jocelin’s appletree, or that shoots into the darkness, like Mrs Godbold’s infinite quiver – but with very little truth to tell. It is unnecessary, and perhaps even dangerous, to ask for much more. At the very least, by speaking of these writers, we rescue them from nothingness; by stopping short of definition, we do the same. It is perhaps best to heed the words of St Augustine: ‘What says any man when he speaks of Thee? And woe to him who keeps silent.’

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Notes Introduction: The Middle is Everywhere i.

See Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Tyrus Miller, Late Modernisms: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (London: University of California Press, 1999). ii. Kristen Bluemel lists three defining characteristics of the intermodernists: ‘intermodernists typically represent working-class and working middleclass cultures…. [They] are often politically radical, “radically eccentric” … [and] are committed to non-canonical, even “middlebrow” or “mass” genres’ (1). iii. See David Lodge, ‘The Novelist at the Crossroads,’ Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel, and Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950–1960. iv. Murdoch also mentions Muriel Spark (1918–2006) and Graham Greene (1904–91), who, while not without interest, will not be considered in this study. A large part of this book will be devoted to the authors’ understanding of mysticism as a pure phenomenon untouched by dogma – ‘no (conventional God), no Church’ – as well as their attempts to find new symbols and structures to clothe it; Spark and Greene’s religious background (both were converted Catholics) was entrenched in an established and complex theology which did not allow them the same freedom. This is not to say that Spark and Greene were unquestioning or conventional in their beliefs, only that their religious background invites particular theological questions that do not usefully resonate with the other writers under consideration. These aspects merit a lengthy study of their own, but will not be considered in the present work. v. In a 1940 letter to Paddy O’Regan, Murdoch wrote ‘I am obsessed with my soul’ (Conradi, Life 249). vi. The anthropological study of comparative mysticism arose in the early twentieth century, initiated by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James’ work sought to remove the mystical experience from its theological trappings in order to rescue it from charges of esoteric obliquity, and suggest its universal occurrence and relevance. James, in particular, chose to define mysticism primarily as a form of heightened perception. For James, all religious systems, theologies, and symbols were after-effects or rationalizations of a core mystical experience: ‘The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition’ (74). James used four ‘marks’ to define its character, although he insisted that only the first two are mandatory 189

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viii.

ix. x. xi. xii.

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aspects: first, the mystical experience is ineffable. Second, James argued that there is a noetic quality to the mystical experience (380). Despite the fact that the states seem ‘more like states of feeling’ they carry with them a weight of significance that transcends former states of conscious knowing (299). The mystical experience is not irrational, but supra-rational. James’ third and fourth marks are related to each other: transiency and passivity (381). Mystic states do not last indefinitely, and they cannot be triggered by any act of will. The significance of the third and fourth marks is that the mystical experience operates independently of the will and of the ego. The path to mystical awareness therefore is one of unselfing, or, at least, humility; one cannot embark upon it through the application of willed consciousness. As James insisted, it is objective reality that is perceived in the mystical experience, but this is not to say that the mystic sees nothing but sheer matter. The noetic aspect of the mystical experience stretches beyond knowledge of material substance towards metaphysical realities: meaning, goodness, and spirit. These aspects are not consciously imposed trappings, but discovered truths. ‘True’ meaning is not derived from self and society, but has an ontological reality. For a good overview of the critical response to James’ argument, and the problems of the connection he draws between mystical experience and moral behaviour, see James R. Horne, A Moral Mystic (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983). See James Naremore, ‘A World Without a Self: The Novels of Virginia Woolf,’A Forum on Fiction 5.2 (Winter 1972) 122–34; Julie Kane, ‘Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia Woolf,’ Twentieth Century Literature 14.4 (Winter 1995) 328–49; and Stephanie Paulsell, ‘Writing and Mystical Experience in Marguerite d’Oingt and Virginia Woolf,’ Comparative Literature 44.3 (Summer 1992) 249–67. This is not to say that Woolf does not have mystical overtones to her work, only that her mysticism has more affinities with the ecstatic visions of the seventeenth-century mystics who approach God through the self, than with the austere and self-abnegating asceticism that, as will be seen, influenced the novelists at the centre of this study. See Shira Wolosky, Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). See Jean-Michel Rabat, ‘Joyce’s Negative Esthetics,’ Beckett, Joyce, and the Art of the Negative (New York: Rodopi, 2005) 181–96. A similar point is made in Augustine’s much-quoted, ‘What says any man when he speaks of Thee? And woe to him who keeps silent.’ Paul Tillich, reaching for a more rational ‘positum’ in his Systematic Theology, wrote that one ‘completely unsymbolic statement … is possible[:] God is being-itself or the absolute’ (1.239). In describing God as a synonym for the absolute, Tillich is drawing upon the Ontological Proof: because we see everything as imperfect, it must exist in relation to a concept of perfection. One of the characteristics of the perfect must be its existence, as non-existence would be an imperfection. Therefore, the absolute, and, by extension, God, must exist. Tillich’s argument is flawed,

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though, on at least three levels: first, the Ontological Proof can never really be more than an expression of faith, as Kant showed through his rejection of existence as a property in the Critique of Pure Reason; the leap from conceiving a concept (even a perfect one) to asserting its existence will always be one of faith, which means that Tillich’s ‘rational’ approach is actually identical to Blond’s assertion. Second, terms such as ‘absolute,’ ‘perfect,’ and ‘being-itself’ are not univocal, despite Tillich’s insistence to the contrary, and cannot, therefore, provide a truly stable foundation for subsequent equivocal statements. Third, even if one can accept the existence of the ‘absolute,’ there is nothing to stop it from being conceptualized as an absolute nothingness, rather than of absolute substance. The ‘positum,’ therefore, cannot exist on the statement level, but only on the level of belief, or on first-hand extra-linguistic experience. xiii. White’s only post-1980 novel was the uncharacteristically postmodern Memoirs of Many in One (1986); Bellow won the Nobel Prize in 1976, and the novels that followed were generally less well received; Murdoch’s later work most often revisited and reworked themes from earlier works; Golding’s only post-1980 works were The Paper Men (1984) and his historical-nautical Sea Trilogy (1980’s Rites of Passage, 1987’s Close Quarters, and 1989’s Fire Down Below).

1 Towards an Ideal Limit: Linguistic Authority in the Work of Iris Murdoch i. Although manuscripts of Wittgenstein’s Brown and Blue Books were being disseminated throughout Cambridge, the writings that stemmed from this shift had remained largely unpublished. Murdoch’s clear fascination with the Tractatus which Wittgenstein had largely disowned, may go some way towards explaining Wittgenstein’s rather curt refusal to engage in a conversation about philosophy with the young Murdoch: he told her, ‘What’s the point of having one philosophical discussion? It’s like having one piano lesson’ (Conradi, Life 266). ii. When Murdoch continued her studies at Oxford, her peers, including Isaiah Berlin, declared themselves ‘allergic’ to her deeply unfashionable Platonism (Conradi, Life 302). iii. In her later works, she also turns her attention to the structuralist inheritors of the analytical school, such as Saussure and Derrida. In Metaphysics, she writes that Saussure and his successors ‘made a further step, not made by Wittgenstein, in deciding that therefore the signified, whether thought of as external entity or mental datum, was otiose, and that meaning was entirely enclosed in a self-referential system of language. This is the crucial move which, in the structuralist theory, separates meaning from truth, outlaws the idea that truth rests on some kind of relation with a non-linguistic reality, and in effect removes the concept of truth altogether’ (193).

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iv. The title of her novel is a direct reference to Wittgenstein’s description in the Tractatus of language as an organizing ‘net’ lain upon language (175). v. This appears to be a typical Murdochian straw-man claim, as she does not attribute this quote to anyone in particular. vi. Angela Downing has written an interesting paper cataloguing this tendency in one of Murdoch’s first-person narratives, entitled ‘Recursive Premodifications as a Literary Device in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.’ However, Downing’s claim that Murdoch’s awkward habit is an indication of Murdoch’s attempt to lead a ‘return to eloquence’ (79) is questionable. vii. Under The Net (1954), A Severed Head (1961), and The Italian Girl (1964) each used a first-person narrator. viii. One could also consider there to be three different ‘realities’: John’s belief, the speaker’s belief, and the empirical fact that it is raining, although the last could only be accessed through the former. ix. From Murdoch, Metaphysics 93: ‘Real life is not tragic… Strictly speaking, tragedy belongs to literature. Tragedies are plays written by great poets.’ x. It is significant that he uses the phrase ‘drowned my book,’ as it foreshadows the fact that it will eventually be his writing, his application of literary form on a contingent and complex reality, that will form and foster his illusion, and that it will be Titus’ death by drowning that partly destroys it. xi. It is perhaps not insignificant that Charles begins his account of Hartley shortly after realizing that ‘I could write all sorts of fantastic nonsense about my life in these memoirs and everybody would believe it!’ (76). xii. Murdoch appears well aware of the problematic inhumanness of the mystic, and emphasizes James’ misty character when Charles explains that James has ‘not a very coherent face … as if a fuzzy cloud hangs over it’ (171).

2 From Apophasis to Aporia: William Golding and the Indescribable i. See Gunnel Cleve, Elements of Mysticism in Three of William Golding’s Novels (Turku: Turun yliopisto, 1986) 5–6. ii. Golding is not always comfortable with the word ‘God.’ In his 1980 essay ‘Belief and Creativity,’ he stated ‘I believe in God,’ but, in a journal entry written only nine years later, he stated ‘my own theology omits God’ (Carey 490). His belief in the existence of a meaningful extra-linguistic reality, however, did not waver. iii. Of course, the Bible tells us that the Garden was not, technically, prelinguistic (see Genesis 2:19–20). The connection (if any) of this perfect language (ursprache or the Word) to language as we know it will be discussed in more depth in the next chapter.

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v.

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In his biography of Golding, John Carey notes that this passage in Free Fall was inspired by the Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne (228). As Gunnel Cleve has shown, Golding was more drawn to the medieval mystics than their seventeenth-century counterparts, but the sensual nature of the passage is indeed evocative of baroque mysticism. This is a possible indication that Golding was already trying, in his reading, to push beyond the harsh lines drawn by the earlier mystical texts. Page references are 7, 20, 21, 51, 55, 72, 90, 93, 95, 97, 101, 104, 108, 108, 112, 119, 120, 143, 147, 148, 158, 183, 191, 193, 194, 199, 223, respectively.

3 Verbal Sludge: The Ethics of Instability in Patrick White’s Prose i.

ii.

iii.

iv.

Rodolfo Delmonte has argued: ‘[White’s] is a poetic prose, whose traits are detectable in its complex syntax, a frequent use of the conditional mode to suggest hypothetical possibilities beyond the mere gesture, of broken sentences; the tenseness and concentration of meaning are acquired by the reduction of logical nexus and by a network of interwoven images expanded in all their possible inferences through a symbolic technique that continually shifts from a naturalistic to a symbolic plane, investing the objects with a mysterious life and meaning’ (‘Various Types of Ambiguity in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot,’ LiNQ 3.3–4 [1974] 42). Thelma experiences an unsettling of self-identity when she confronts her ‘silver face’ within an imperfect mirror. The image of the shattered or distorted mirror is a common metaphor in White’s work: for example, in Riders in the Chariot, Himmelfarb’s first dispiriting religious revelation climaxes with him confronting his image in a warped mirror. This, as Hedda Ben-Bassat writes, is, according to Kabbalistic lore, ‘a legitimate stage on the road to mystical experience’ (336). This will be discussed in more depth later in this chapter, in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the mirror. In On Being Blue, William Gass quotes the following passage from Farmer and Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues on the colour blue: ‘Expressive alike of the utmost contempt, as of all that men hold dearest and love best, its manifold combinations, in every varying shades of meaning, greet the philologist at every turn. A very Proteus, it defies all attempts to trace the why and wherefore of many of the turns of expression of which it forms a part.’ Qtd. in William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1979) 7. The colour-words are: ‘white chips,’ ‘black pattern of sweat,’ ‘red dog’ (three times), ‘yellow eyes’ (twice), ‘white sky,’ ‘black limbs,’ ‘black and brooding scrub,’ ‘reddish horse,’ ‘green wood burning,’ ‘gold-rimmed spectacles,’ ‘watery blue eyes,’ ‘pale-blue gentleness,’ ‘elders grew … yellower,’ ‘red fire,’ ‘yellow grass,’ ‘grey parings of hoof,’ ‘yellow mounds of

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manure,’ ‘nose grown thin and pink,’ ‘pink tongue,’ ‘grey hunks,’ ‘This was gold,’ ‘white silence,’ ‘golden body,’ ‘white scales of thirst,’ ‘blue distance,’ ‘blue air.’ Voss’s error is emphasized through this simile; Dionysius the Areopagite compared God to an earthworm, in order to suggest that total humility is equivalent to divinity.

4 Bliss from Bricks: Saul Bellow’s Moral Phenomenology i.

If Bellow had wished to make Steiner the subject of ridicule, he would have had little difficulty. There are bizarre aspects of Steiner’s writing – his late essays on Atlantis, for example, or on the existence of gnomes – that Bellow chooses to exclude, presumably so that it is Citrine who remains the comic figure.

Conclusion: Drawing Circles in the Sea: Un-Defining the ‘Mystical Novelist’ i.

ii.

And there is no reason to begin there, either, of course: while Camus and Sartre were writing proclaiming the will as the single source of meaning, Eliot was composing his mystical Four Quartets; while Nietzsche was proclaiming the death of God, Yeats was meeting at the Theosophical Society. The circles are never wide enough, and never small enough. See Arthur Bradley, ‘Derrida’s God: A Genealogy of the Theological Turn,’ Paragraph 29.3 (2006) 22.

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Index abject, the, 107 Accidental Man, An, 46–8 Adventures of Augie March, The, 25, 166 ‘Against Dryness,’ 33, 35 Amis, Kingsley, 6 allegory, 74, 76, 79, 91–3, 117 anagogy, 22, 118–20 Anselm of Canterbury, 39–40 anthroposophy, 156–62 apophasis, 20–2, 27–28, 53, 68, 82, 87–91, 100, 184 Attridge, Derek, 17, 19, 24 Aunt’s Story, The, 25 Austen, Jane, 41 Austin, J.L., 21 Australia Patrick White’s critique of, 125–6 post-war climate, 9 relationship with Great Britain, 9, 125 wilderness, 127–32 Badiou, Alain, 49 Balzac, Honoré de, 15 Barth, John, 4, 5 Baudelaire, Charles, 150 Beckett, Samuel, 20, 22, 27, 47 ‘Belief and Creativity,’ 86 Bellow, Saul, 3, 8, 12, 13, 20, 25, 29, 187 Adventures of Augie March, The, 25, 166 Dangling Man, 25, 166 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, influence of, 29, 149, 156–64, 167 Henderson the Rain King, 148, 153–4, 168–9 Herzog, 160, 163, 168, 169

Humboldt’s Gift, 152, 156, 157, 159, 162–3, 170, 171 Holocaust, 11 imagination, on 159–60 morality, theory of, 14 Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 11, 148, 150, 155, 168, 170–81 realism, on, 15 religious belief of, 13 Seize The Day, 149, 150, 154–6, 158–9, 169 Steiner, Rudolf, influence of, 26, 29 Victim, The, 25, 166 war-time experiences, 11 Benjamin, Walter, 19 Between The Acts, 5 Black Prince, The, 46, 49, 56–7 Blake, William, 115 Blond, Philip, 22, 185, 191 Boehme, Jacob, 161 Booth, Wayne, 42–3 Bradbury, Malcolm, 1, 171 Buddhism, 21, 39, 62–3 Cabbala, see Kaballah Camus, Albert, 3, 165, 194 Carlson, Thomas, 22 Centuries of Meditation, 193 Christian mysticism, 69–70, 161, 175–6, 161 Clement of Alexandria, 20 Close Quarters, 191 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 6 Connor, Steven, 123 Conrad, Joseph, 128 Nigger of the Narcissus, The, 166–7 Conradi, Peter J., 32, 45, 62 Cooper, William, 6 Crombie, Ian, 23 205

206

Index

Dangling Man, 25, 166 Darkness Visible, 75, 129 Das, Santanu, 105 De Bolla, Peter, 18, 19 deconstruction, 114 Delacroix, Eugène, 115 Delillo, Don, 186 Derrida, Jacques, 146, 185, 191 Dickens, Charles, 15, 16 Diamond, Cora, 42 Dionysius the Areopagite, see Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite dissemblance, 120 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 15 Eckhardt, Meister Johannes, 11, 175, 178 ekphrasis, 28, 115–21 Eliot, George, 41 Eliot, T.S., 27, 148, 194 Four Quartets, 5, 21, 23, 194 ethical turn (in literary criticism), 16, 24, 42–3 existentialism, 3, 5, 6, 8, 39, 165, 185 ‘Existentialists and Mystics,’ 7–8, 11–12, 33 ‘Eye and Mind,’ 134–5 Eye of The Storm, The, 103 Finnegans Wake, 21 Fire Down Below, 191 Flaubert, Gustave, 16, 47 Fort, Charles, 183 Four Quartets, 5, 21, 23, 194 Free Fall, 28, 69, 75, 80–91, 92, 97, 99, 170 Freud, Sigmund, 149, 151 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 24, 25 Gandhi, Mohandas, 140 Gass, William, 22, 193 gnosticism, 107, 130, 161 God, depiction of, 72–3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Bellow, Saul, influence on, 29, 149, 156–64, 167

ethics, theory of, 163 Zur Farbenlegre [Theory of Colours], 122–5 Golding, William, 3, 8, 12–13, 20, 25, 27–8, 67–101, 103, 105, 108, 122, 128, 150, 163, 183, 187 ‘Belief and Creativity,’ 86 Close Quarters, 191 Darkness Visible, 75, 129 ethics, theory of, 14, 69, 75, 76 Fire Down Below, 191 Free Fall, 28, 69, 75, 80–91, 92, 97, 99, 170 Inheritors, The, 75, 76–80, 99 Lord of the Flies, 25, 28, 70, 73–5, 81, 84, 93 Murdoch, Iris, opinion of, 26 Original sin, on, 76–9, 99 Paper Men, The, 191 Pincher Martin, 70–4, 81, 85 realism, on, 16 religious belief of, 13 Rites Of Passage, 191 ‘Rough Magic,’ 91 Spire, The, 28, 88, 91–101, 122 ‘Through the Dutch Waterways,’ 11 war-time experiences, 10 White, Patrick, opinion of, 26 White, Patrick, meeting with, 26 Good (The), 3, 13, 39–41, 47, 69, 86, 96, 141, 143, 145, 147 Great Britain, post-war climate, 9 Greene, Graham, 5, 16, 189 Gregory of Nyssa, 70 Happy Valley, 25, 131 Hardy, Thomas, 15 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 15 Henderson the Rain King, 148, 153–4, 168–9 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 173 Hemingway, Ernest, 165 Herzog, 160, 163, 168, 169 Holocaust, 8, 9, 13 Humboldt’s Gift, 152, 156, 157, 159, 162–3, 170, 171

Index

Hume, David, 33 Husserl, Edmund, 15, 185 ‘Idea of Perfection, The,’ 36, 108 Incarnation, 116, 121 Inheritors, The, 75, 76–80, 99 Intermodernism, 2, 189 Iser, Wolfgang, 17, 19, 24 Italian Girl, The, 192 James, Henry, 43 James, William, 189–90 Jewish mysticism, 22, 114–15, 140–3, 193 John of the Cross, St., 84 Johnson, B.S., 5 Joyce, James, 5, 15–16, 27 Finnegans Wake, 21 Kabbalah, 22, 114, 193 Kafka, Franz, 165 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 6, 118, 161, 164, 185, 191 kataphasis, 20, 22–5, 28–9, 95–101 Krieger, Murray, 117, 120 Kristeva, Julia, 106–7 Laocoön, 116 late modernism, 1, 22 Lawrence, D.H., 4, 27 Lessing, Gotthold, 116 Levinas, Emmanuel, 19, 24, 26, 28, 132, 144–6 Life of Moses, 70 Liszt, Franz, 115 literary criticism ethical turn, 16, 24, 42–3 literature-as-cognition, 16–19, 29 literature-as-event, 16–19 Living and the Dead, The, 25, 131 Lodge, David, 1, 7 logical positivism, 3–4 Lord of the Flies, 25, 28, 70, 73–5, 81, 84, 93 Lukacs, George, 6, 41, 165–6 Maher, Gustav, 115 Markson, David, 22

207

Melville, Herman, 15 Memoirs of Many In One, 191 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 15, 26, 28, 132–9, 185 ‘Eye and Mind,’ 134–5 Phenomenology of Perception, The, 137 Visible and the Invisible, The, 132, 135, 137–8 Merton, Thomas, 141 metafiction, 21, 48–52 Metaphysics as a Guide To Morals, 31, 32, 34–5, 38, 49 modernism, 27, 33, 165, 168, 184 emphasis on subjectivity in, 4–5, 16 late modernism, 1, 22 mysticism in, 4–5 monism, 161 Moore’s paradox, 50 ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’ 16 Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 11, 148, 150, 155, 168, 170–81 Mrs. Dalloway, 5, 16 Murdoch, Iris, 3, 5, 8, 20, 25, 27, 31–66, 91, 100, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 118, 132, 139–40, 145, 150, 151, 165, 166, 185, 187 ‘Against Dryness,’ 33, 35 Accidental Man, An, 46–8 Black Prince, The, 46, 49, 56–7 ethical philosophy of, 35–41 ‘Existentialists and Mystics,’ 7–8, 11–12, 33 ‘Fire and the Sun, The,’ 34 ‘Idea of Perfection, The,’ 36, 108 Italian Girl, The, 192 Metaphysics as a Guide To Morals, 31, 32, 34–5, 38, 49 ‘On “God” and “Good,”’ 13, 40, 151 Plato, influence of, 32, 34 realism, on, 15 Religious belief, 13 Sea, The Sea, The, 46, 49, 56–65, 80, 100, 192

208

Index

Murdoch, Iris – continued Severed Head, A, 192 state of the novel, on the, 33, 41–2 ‘Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, The,’ 33, 41, 64, 118 theory of art: early 41–4; late, 44–56 theory of the Good, 35–41 Under The Net, 25, 33, 192 White, Patrick, meeting with, 26 Wittgenstein, influence of, 26, 31–7 Word Child, A, 46, 48–56, 124 Mysticism Buddhist, 21, 39, 62–3 Christian, 69–70, 161, 175–6, 161 definition, 14–15, 189–90 historical canon, 19–18 Murdoch, Iris, on, 37 Jewish, 22, 114–15, 140–3, 193 Steiner, Rudolf, on, 160 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, on, 31–2 narrative, 21 nazism, 13 negative theology, 20–2 Nietszche, Friedrich, 194 Nigger of the Narcissus, The, 166–7 nineteenth-century realism, 6, 15, 41, 44 nuclear weapons, 8, 9 Nussbaum, Martha, 42–3 ‘On “God” and “Good,”’ 13, 40, 151 ontological proof, 39–41, 190–1 Original sin, 76–9, 99 Paper Men, The, 191 pathetic fallacy, 50 phenomenology, 15 Phenomenology of Perception, The, 137 Philosophical Investigations, 37, 50, 55–6 Pincher Martin, 70–4, 81, 85

Plato, 13, 27, 32, 34, 40, 43, 132, 145 postmodernism, 1, 2, 3, 22, 27, 184–5 post-secular, 185–6 ‘Prodigal Son, The,’ 126, 131 Proust, Marcel, 43, 167 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 20, 23, 194 Pynchon, Thomas, 186 Ramsey, Ian T., 23 realism, 2, 4, 15–19 Redon, Odilon, 118 Ricoeur, Paul, 24, 100 Riders in the Chariot, 13, 107, 114–21, 122, 126, 128, 134, 139, 140–4, 146, 193 Rites Of Passage, 191 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 165 Robinson Crusoe, 70 Rosen, Stanley, 34 ‘Rough Magic,’ 91 Russell, Bertrand, 23, 31–2, 33 St. Augustine, 21, 175, 187 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 104–5, 106, 137, 165, 194 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 191 Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg, 6 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 39 Scott, Walter, 41 scriptural interpretation, 114–15, 118–19 Second World War, 8 Sea, The Sea, The, 46, 49, 56–65, 80, 100, 192 Seize The Day, 149, 150, 154–6, 158–9, 169 Severed Head, A, 192 Silesius, Angelus, 161 Snow, C.P., 6 Solid Mandala, The, 128, 139 Spark, Muriel, 189 Comforters, The, 52

Index

Spire, The, 28, 88, 91–101, 122 Steiner, Rudolf, 124, 172, 175, 194 Bellow, Saul, influence on, 26, 29, 149, 156–64 sublime, 118 ‘Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited, The,’ 33, 41, 64, 118 Tauler, Johannes, 161 The Comforters, 52 ‘Through the Dutch Waterways,’ 11 Tillich, Paul, 22, 190–1 Tolstoy, Leo, 15, 41, 176–7 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3–4, 15, 27, 31–3, 35–6, 50, 53, 192 Traherne, Thomas Centuries of Meditation, 193 Tree of Man, The, 25, 104, 109, 110, 126, 128, 133, 136–7, 139, 143–4, 146 Trilling, Lionel, 168 Under The Net, 25, 33, 192 Underhill, Evelyn, 84 United States, post-war climate, 9 via negativa, 21, 84–5 Victim, The, 25, 166 Visible and the Invisible, The, 132, 135, 137–8 Vivisector, The, 123 Voss, 103, 107–8, 113–14, 128–32, 133, 136–7 Weil, Simone, 35, 118 White, Patrick, 3, 8, 13, 20, 25, 28–9, 151, 187 anti-nuclear campaigning, 9–10 Aunt’s Story, The, 25 Bellow, Saul, opinion of, 25–6 colour symbolism, 121–5 conversion, 102–3 critique of Australia, 125–6

209

Eye Of The Storm, The, 103 Golding, William, meeting with, 26 Happy Valley, 25, 131 Living and the Dead, The, 25, 131 Memoirs of Many In One, 191 Murdoch, Iris, meeting with, 26 ‘Prodigal Son, The,’ 126, 131 realism, on, 15 religious belief, 13 Riders in the Chariot, 13, 107, 114–21, 122, 126, 128, 134, 139, 140–4, 146, 193 Solid Mandala, The, 128, 139 style of, 108–13 Tree of Man, The, 25, 104, 109, 110, 126, 128, 133, 136–7, 139, 143–4, 146 Vivisector, The, 123 Voss, 103, 107–8, 113–4, 128–32, 133, 136–7 war-time experiences, 9 Williams, J.P., 20 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3–4, 6, 15, 17, 23, 27, 31–7, 35, 50, 53, 58, 122, 132, 169, 191, 192 Murdoch Iris, influence on, 26, 31–7 Philosophical Investigations, 37, 50, 55–6 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3–4, 15, 27, 31–3, 35–6, 50, 53, 192 Wood, Michael, 24, 108–9, 110 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 16, 27, 190 Between The Acts, 5 ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,’ 16 Mrs. Dalloway, 5, 16 realism, on, 16 Word Child, A, 46, 48–56, 124 Yeats, William Butler, 4, 194 Zur Farbenlegre [Theory of Colours], 122–5