I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
I am realizing late in life that a novel can better describe life and its meaning than a philosophical essay or nonfiction book because (1) a novel (or fiction in general) can represent the substance and sensation of the physical and moral world in a way that dry expository prose cannot and (2) fiction can express very complex ideas in indirect and thorough ways, perhaps the only way certain ideas and themes might be expressed in their complexity and entirety.
Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell, that I am working my way through slowly and contemplatively this week, shows both of these functions of a novel.
The thinginess of the bell
In the Introduction to the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics version of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, A. S. Byatt writes:
To say that The Bell is a novel of ideas is to misdescribe it. One of Murdoch’s abiding preoccupations was with the complicated, not wholly describable “thinginess” of the physical and moral world, which could be represented in art in a more complex way than it could be analysed in discourse….
Murdoch wrote in her wise book on Sartre that he had “an impatience, which is fatal to a novelist proper, with the stuff of human life”. Her own desire to make a world in which consciousnesses were incarnate, embedded in the stuff of things, might seem to derive from George Eliot, who wrote movingly of her wish to make pictures, not diagrams, to “make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate”.
As I work my way through The Bell, I’m delighting in Murdoch’s many layered and many-perspectived story, along with her use of concrete and sensual details that bring me right to Imber Court in Gloucestershire. Her descriptions of people and, even more, of the Imber estate and abbey provide an immersive experience of rural England. Each evening as I read a chapter or two I feel transported there.
Murdoch is well known for her writing about London; in his blog post Iris Murdoch and London, Miles Leeson writes, “London becomes ‘Murdochland’ in her novels, a distinct territory that serves her unique form of adventurous realism.” I find that the Imber estate, site of The Bell, as well becomes a kind of immersive Murdochland to me, because of her detailed and picturesque descriptions, and the way the characters move through and interact with the landscape and building elements.
Murdoch uses rich detail to tell us who a person is in a couple sentence. Of Dora Greenfield, the young artist and wife who begins the story, she writes:
As a student she grew plump and peach-like and had a little pocket money of her own, which she spent on big multi-coloured skirts and jazz records and sandals.
Young Dora has married Paul Greenfield, a wealthy art historian thirteen years older than she. Here is Murdoch’s description of Greenfield:
That Paul was a violent man had been clear to Dora from the start. Indeed it was one of the things which had attracted her to him. He had a sort of virile authority which her boyish contemporaries could never have. He was not exactly handsome, but had a strong appearance with almost black dry hair and a dark drooping moustache which made Dora think of him as Southern. His nose was too large and his mouth inclined to harshness, but his eyes were very pale and snake-like and had fluttered other hearts at the Slade [Dora’s art school] besides Dora’s.
And here is Dora, later in the novel after making a getaway from Imber Court, greeting her young friend Noel, in every way the opposite of her husband Paul, the exemplar “boyish contemporary”:
Dora looked up at him. She touched his plain, irregular features, pulled his floppy colourless hair, and squeezed his enormous friendly hands. How very large he was. And my God, he was easy on the nerves.
I know it is fashionable in contemporar literature to avoid physical descriptions of people as much as possible, or perhaps to use just one physical detail to stand in for all of their personality. But I very much enjoy how Murdoch makes me able to see and experience the person as a flesh-and-blood character rather than an abstraction.
This is what a novel can do, after all, present an experience of life incarnate rather than abstracted.
The roundabout, inefficient approach of the bell
But not only can fiction better represent the “thinginess” of the world than discourse, fiction can also present much more complicated ideas and philosophies, using inefficient and roundabout ways.
That is something that novelist Haruki Murakami suggested in his book Novelist as Vocation about why we need fiction (which I am quoting again from my previous blog post titled Roundabout and Inefficient Writing):
Novel writing is indeed a most inefficient undertaking, consisting of repeating “for instance” over and over. Say there is a personal theme you wish to develop. So you transpose it into a different context. “For instance, it could be like this,” you say. That transposition or paraphrase, however, is not complete: it has parts that are unclear and fuzzy. So you start a new section that basically says, “Let me give you another ‘for instance.’ ” It can go on and on like that, a chain of paraphrased “for instances” that never ends. It’s like one of those Russian dolls that you open again and again, always to find still another, smaller doll inside. Could there be more circuitous, inefficient work than this? If a theme could be voiced clearly and rationally from the outset, then there would be no need for this incessant round of “for instances.” An extreme way of putting it is that novelists might be defined as a breed who feel the need, in spite of everything, to do that which is unnecessary.
Yet the novelist will claim that truth and reality are entrenched in precisely such unnecessary, roundabout places. I know it may sound pretentious, but it is in this belief that the novelist plies his craft. Thus it is natural that we find, on the one hand, people who believe that there is no need for novels and, on the other, those who maintain that novels are absolutely necessary. It all depends on the time span you adopt and the type of framework through which you view things. More precisely, our world is constructed in a multilayered way, so that the realm of the roundabout and the inefficient is in fact the flip side of that which is clever and efficient. If one or the other is missing (or if one is dominated by the other), then the world is distorted as a result.
[emphasis mine]
I haven’t studied Murdoch’s philosophy thoroughly but I know the basics of what she thinks and who her influences were. Her novel, though, provides a much more immersive experience of what she thinks about people interacting in moral or immoral ways (as her main philosophical preoccupation was delineating what it means to be good).
It all makes me want to spend more time writing fiction myself, as a way to not just share complicated and incarnated experiences and ideas and philosophies, but to better understand them.
But first, must finish this Murdoch novel and then perhaps read another!