I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell, the character of James Tayper Pace serves, at one point, as mouthpiece for Murdoch’s ideas about fantasy versus reality, and the need to lose our egos via what she calls unselfing, a term she used in her 1970 work on moral philosophy The Sovereignty of the Good.
James is introduced in a way that makes us like him immediately:
The man was large and broad-shouldered, but a little gaunt and drawn in the face underneath his sunburn. He had an open friendly expression and a wide forehead crossed by rows of regular lines. He had plenty of curly dark brown hair, going grey in places. His heavily veined hands were lightly clasped on his knee, and his gaze shifted easily along the row of passengers opposite, appraising each without embarrassment. he had the sort of face which can look full of amiability without smiling, and the sort of eyes which can meet the eyes of a stranger and even linger, without seeming aggressive, or seductive, or even curious.
The Bell is the story of a newly-formed lay community associated with Imber Abbey, an Anglican convent in Gloucestershire. The laypeople live at Imber Court, a family house owned by the head of the lay community, Michael.
James has been invited by the Abbess of the convent to join the small community at Imber Court, and Michael welcomes him, taking an immediate strong liking to him. “Indeed some ingeniuty would have been required to dislike him, he was a character of such transparent gentleness,” writes Murdoch, from Michael’s perspective. While Michael recognizes that James may make a better leader for the community than himself, James refuses, citing ill health from previous overwork.
Nevertheless, James plays an important role in the community. One Sunday, he gives the sermon at the weekly gathering:
‘The chief requirement of the good life’, said James Tayper Pace, ‘is to live without any image of oneself. I speak, dear brothers and sisters, as one who is most conscious of being remote from this condition.’ It was the next day, Sunday, and James was standing on the dais in the Long Room, one arm resting lightly on the music stand, delivering the weekly talk. He frowned nervously and swayed to and fro as he spoke, tilting the stand with him.
He went on. ‘The study of personality, indeed the whole conception of personality, is, as I see it, dangerous to goodness. We were told at school, at least I was told at school, to have ideals. This, it seems to me, is rot. Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality – when what we need most is just precisely to see reality. And that is something outside us. Where perfection is, reality is. And where do we look for perfection? Not in some imaginary concoction out of our idea of our own character – but in something so external and so remote that we can get only now and then a distant hint of it.[‘]
This is presenting Murdoch’s distinction between fantasy and imagination, though she uses “ideals” and “dreams” here in place of the term she uses elsewhere to represent the ego turned inward: “fantasy.”
I wrote previously of this idea of Murdoch’s:
For Murdoch, fantasy and imagination are distinct activities. Fantasy is self-enclosed; it is imagination turned inward, serving the ego’s needs and stories. It projects your desires, fears, and ideals onto the world. It makes other people into characters in your drama, dream figures. It prevents genuine perception or moral growth.
Imagination, in Murdoch’s sense, is outward-facing and disciplined. It’s a moral faculty that allows you to see beyond yourself. In relationship, it asks what is this person really like, apart from my desires and fears? It’s a creative effort to apprehend reality truthfully. It’s what she sometimes calls attention or unselfing, the deliberate sometimes painful act of clearing away illusion so another being can appear in their full particularity.
While I am only partway through the book – about 43% according to my Kindle reader – I am eager to see how she uses her development of character and plot to further this philosophical idea.
As James continues his sermon, he presents a view of how to be good that seems simplistic:
We should think of our actions and look to God and to His Law. We should consider not what delights us or what disgusts us, morally speaking, but what is enjoined and what is forbidden. And this we know, more than we are often ready to admit. We know it from God’s Word and from his Church with a certainty as great as our belief. Truthfulness is enjoined, the relief of suffering is enjoined; adultery is forbidden, sodomy is forbidden.
Here, this seems a challenge though unknowing to Michael, who has suppressed his homosexuality based on his religious faith. His sexual orientation, as well as his interest in and pursuit of younger men (to young to be pursued), has proved an obstacle to Michael in the past as he attempted to become a priest, a long-held dream of his.
I’m wondering if, in this part of the sermon, James is reproducing Murdoch’s religious views. I imagine not, as she was a philosopher of great nuance and subtlety, bringing together diverse threads of thought including the British analytic tradition in which she was trained, existentialism as developed by Sartre, Simone Weil’s concept of attention, and Plato’s moral realism. James’ idea that we can know moral rules with certainty seems a little coarse for Murdoch.
I am wondering to what extent did Murdoch escape the fantasy and apparent simplicity of Christian religion for the reality and complexity of human life? Is James actually a mouthpiece for Murdoch here?
This novel was published in 1958 and was Murdoch’s fourth novel. I have not read the introduction in the entirety, as I wanted to approach the book without foreknowledge of how it might be interpreted. I want to construct my own interpretation and approach it as textuality. But I did see a comment in the introduction mentioning this was her first novel that included specifically religious subject matter.
A very different book I’m reading
At the same time as I’m reading The Bell, I’m reading Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts. I picked it up because one or another of the AI chatbots I use suggested it might serve as a model for a book I’d like to write, one which weaves together my personal experience of midlife transformation with philosophical ideas that make sense of what I’ve gone through, and what I’m going through.
Nelson’s book brings together personal narrative and critical theory as she shares the story of her pregnancy alongside the female-to-male transition her partner Harry undertakes.
I confess I find the book difficult and not very engaging. It doesn’t even have chapters to help me know when I might take a break! While I am reading The Bell very closely and slowly, I am more apt to bring my usual reading style to The Argonauts: quick skimming to get the gist. Much of the critical theory goes over my head. There is too much anal sex in it for my tastes, but I grant that particular act does provide a hook for Nelson to reflect on the right and desire of mothers to improvise beyond the maternal script. It seems the one part of the book that actually landed with me! Good to note that something may have a place in a memoir not because it is pleasant but because it is meaningful, and jarring too.
Nelson refers to the work of Roland Barthes again and again, but not in a way that made me remember what he was about, or made any sense to me. I blogged about his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” last August. This brings me back to the textuality of Nietzsche, and his philosophical perspectivism which says that there are many potentially incompatible perspectives we can take on the world, and they don’t relate to some underlying truth (Murdoch, with her neo-Platonism would disagree; she believes in the Real).
In his essay Barthes writes:
A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.
So my reading and understanding of The Bell is necessarily going to be an interpretation rooted in my history, biography, and psychology, as is my reading and understanding of The Argonauts.
I suppose Nelson’s book is an example of what I don’t want to write: something so deeply personal and so philosophically inaccessible that the ideas it shares remain locked up for a reader like me, who didn’t study critical theory in college. Like The Bell, The Argonauts weaves together personal philosophy with narrative story, but Murdoch’s story is easygoing and light (so far), while Nelson’s is (to me) strange and offputting. I recognize that much of my reaction is rooted in a culturally inculcated discomfort with some elements of Nelson’s transgressive approach to life. With de Beauvoir, I don’t seek freedom just for myself but also for other people. Interesting that the questioning and concerns I feel is a theme in The Bell too, but in a way that is of the time it was written (the 1950s).
Learning to read literature
This has been a very interesting post to write, and I’ve very much enjoyed reading The Bell closely to understand what Murdoch is doing with plot and character to advance her philosophical program.
As a college student, I was steeped in logic and philosophy, and also the systems-style thinking of my economics classes. The one literature class I took — Russian literature — proved to be my worst class, both in terms of enjoyment and the grade I walked away with. I didn’t know how to read a novel, what to look for, how to take my time with it. This is a new experience for me, to not just read quickly for the plot, but rather to take my time with the characters and what they’re saying and thinking, and what it means.
As I’ve been working on my writing practice, I’ve considered that I could use fiction writing techniques to make any memoir stories I might write more compelling and meaningful. I did that with my Things Men Gave Me essays (now on pause, but ready to be incorporated into a book on midlife transportation).
I feel like I’m starting too late — like I’ve missed out on decades of reading literature slowly and contemplatively. But perhaps this is just pointing me to a new joy, one which only arrived in my field of view when I was ready for it. It’s another aspect of my midlife transformation, I suppose.