Under the net

Taught Iris Murdoch's Under the Net in my undergraduate class on postwar British literary culture. As far as I am concerned at least, it worked surprisingly well. I was a little apprehensive since I'd never taught it (or any other Murdoch novel) before, and had no idea how her sensibility and style would strike 20 something young Americans. But they liked it. And from a teacherly point of view what's great about teaching this book is that it's not so much a novel of ideas as a novel about theory in something like the current sense. It sets into play the choice: Wittgenstein or the New Left (before that term was current of course).

As I have said elsewhere, Murdoch is the new-left intellectual who first makes the call for 'theory' to invigorate socialism in the mid-fifties but I hadn't realised that the background for that call is spelled out in her first novel. In a sense Under the net is a novel which argues for theory against spectacle (which it sees like the Situationists as colonising public life). But this only pushes the problem away a remove since Murdoch also recognises that politics are always involved in spectacle and that to enter politics requires a certain break with theory. The novel does begin to make the case for 'theoretical practice' (that is, the binding of politics to theory) but the hero doesn't abide by it. In the end what's celebrated here is literary practice: writing, living, reading literature.

The difficulty with Murdoch (of this period) is that she's a light novelist of serious intent. Like most of her contemporaries, who were formed in the depression and the war, she turns her back on modernism and the Bloomsbury cult of aestheticism, sensitivity and 'personal relationships'. Her optimism about Britain and its promise after 1945 means that she wants to connect to the population at large, which prevents her from any kind of hermeticism. But hermeticism is the lifeblood of academicisable literature, and she loses out. Certainly she does not offer the same kind of literary pleasures as does Elizabeth Bowen for instance (at her best), of a slightly different generation, and a much more traditional, Jamesian fictionalist as well as a more challenging or at least suprising one.

Then too Murdoch's own writing practices change from the late fifties taking something of a 'Shakespearean' or baroque turn (this is a topic I should explore since I really don't know her oeuvre well at all) and she becomes (regarded as) as a serious and overly established middlebrow writer, outside the currents of cultural politics or the development of novel form and style.