Imaginary interview with Iris Murdoch
by Charactorium · Iris Murdoch (1919 — 1999) · Philosophy · Literature · 6 min read
Steeple Aston, a grey afternoon in Oxfordshire. In a house where books rise in unstable piles along the walls and the garden spills in through the windows, Iris Murdoch pushes aside a half-filled notebook to receive us. She speaks slowly, as if searching for the right word, and always returns, by detours, to the same question: do we really see what is before us?
—You are sometimes presented as a philosopher, sometimes as a novelist. How do you experience this double label?
I refuse it, quite simply. When The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978, people wanted to classify me once and for all as a novelist, as if writing fiction prevented you from thinking. But from my student days, I felt that these two gestures were not opposed. I once wrote to my friend Raymond Queneau that philosophy and literature are not two separate paths to truth, but two ways of seeing the same thing — the irreducible complexity of the human being. The philosopher constructs an argument, he wants clarity; the novelist, on the other hand, lets contradictions breathe. Yet real people are full of contradictions. That is why a novel can sometimes say more about the Good than a treatise.
The philosopher wants clarity; the novelist lets contradictions breathe.
—You were one of the first in England to read and comment on Sartre. How did this intellectual encounter come about?
Through languages, above all. I read French, German and Russian, and this gave me a curious advantage: I could read Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the original when almost no one at Oxford knew them. Existentialism arrived from Paris as an exciting rumor, and I wanted to introduce it at home. My first book, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, in 1953, was one of the very first in English on him. I immensely admired his force, but already I resisted: his conception of the self, that freedom which creates itself against the world, seemed to me too heroic, too solitary. I saw in it a romanticism disguised as rigor. Man is not alone in inventing his values; he is surrounded by a reality that surpasses him and claims him.
—What exactly did you reproach existentialism for, as you received it from Paris?
One thing above all: it makes choice the center of everything. For the existentialists, man defines himself in the moment he decides, fist raised against the absurd. It's exhilarating, but it's false, or at least very incomplete. Moral life, as I observe it, is not a succession of great dramatic choices. It is made of looks, tiny attentions, the way I perceive my neighbor between two decisions. Sartre taught me a great deal, and his philosophical writing itself has something novelistic about it — that's what I noted in 1953. But in leaving his existentialism, I understood that I was looking for something else: not the freedom that proclaims itself, but the humility that looks. That is the whole distance between Paris and Plato.
Moral life is not a succession of great dramatic choices.
—You often contrast attention with will. What do you mean by this idea of attention to reality?
Everything is there, in that word. In The Sovereignty of Good, in 1970, I wanted to shift the center of morality: no longer the will that decides, but the gaze that sees rightly. I wrote that the foundation of morality is the same as that of realism — that capacity to perceive what is truly before one instead of a comforting fiction. We spend our days wrapped in a fog of egoism: we see others through our desires, our fears, our inner novels. To be good is to dispel that fog. It is to look at a person, or even a tree, until it exists for itself and no longer for me. I call this attention, and I took it from Plato, whose annotated dialogues I always keep within reach.
To be good is to look at a person until it exists for itself.
—Why do you insist on the Good as an objective reality, in an era when so many thinkers saw it as a mere subjective construction?
Because to renounce the Good as a reality is to condemn oneself to see nothing more. The moral subjectivism of my century seems to me an elegant laziness: one declares that values are private choices, preferences, and one thinks oneself lucid. But experience disproves that. When I strive to understand someone I don't like, I clearly feel that I am progressing toward something that does not depend on me, a truth that resists. That is what Plato called the Good, that sun one never looks at directly. I am a secular humanist, I do not ask God to ground morality. But I refuse to reduce it to my moods. There is a moral reality, and our task, slow, is to become attentive to it.
—You traveled through Europe in ruins after the war. What remains within you of that experience?
Faces, above all. In 1945, I worked for the UNRRA, that United Nations organization that tried to help displaced persons. I was sent to Austria, to Vienna, and to Belgium, amidst thousands of refugees whom war had torn from everything. I saw camps, queues, people who had no country, no papers, sometimes no name. It was defeated Europe, and we walked through its rubble as if in a bad moral dream. Nothing shaped me more deeply. All my ideas about evil, about suffering that cannot be redeemed, about the responsibility we have for each other, were born there, in that dust. Philosophy that ignores those faces is merely a salon game.
Philosophy that ignores those faces is merely a salon game.
—Did these refugees directly feed your work as a novelist?
Indirectly, but constantly. I do not write reportage novels about the UNRRA; that would betray what I saw. But the experience of Vienna taught me one thing I never lost: the reality of the other, his opaque suffering, his existence that cannot be reduced to the use I make of it. My characters often wander, like those displaced persons, in search of solid ground. In Under the Net, as early as 1954, I portrayed a man without attachments, who glides from London to Paris without ever truly seeing those he meets. This theme — the inability to see the other as he is — comes to me from the war as much as from Plato. One can pass through thousands of lives without encountering a single one.
—Let's talk about your way of writing. It is said that you refuse the typewriter. Why?
Because the hand thinks. I write all my novels with a pen, in notebooks, and I have never wanted any other instrument than an ink pen. The clatter of a machine puts a wall between thought and the page; the hand, on the contrary, hesitates, crosses out, follows the very movement of the mind. In the morning, after a walk — often by bicycle through the streets of Oxford or the countryside — I sit down and let the sentences come slowly. I immerse myself in my characters to the point of sometimes crying when one of them dies, which must seem ridiculous. But how can you write living beings if you don't let them inhabit you? The notebook is the place where this inhabitation becomes possible, where they exist enough to escape me.
The hand hesitates, crosses out, follows the very movement of the mind.
—Your house is described as a joyful chaos of books and manuscripts. Is this disorder necessary for you?
My husband John Bayley speaks of our house in Steeple Aston as a happy chaos, and he is right. Books grow there like ivy, the garden comes in through the windows, manuscripts sleep on chairs. Some would see negligence; I see the trace of a life entirely turned toward something other than appearances. I have never cared about fashion or gourmet dinners — a good tea, a long conversation, and I am content. This disorder is that of a mind that prefers thinking to tidying. I believe that a certain indifference to material things frees attention for what matters: ideas, people, sentences seeking their form. External order is not always the friend of inner order.
—You devoted an essay to Plato's distrust of artists. Why does this paradox fascinate you?
Because it touches the heart of my life. Plato banished poets from his city, and yet no one wrote more beautiful prose than he. In The Fire and the Sun, based on my inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1977, I tried to understand this fear. He feared art because art can touch the soul at its most vulnerable point, where it is most deeply itself — he knew its power better than most of its defenders. But where he saw a danger, I see an opportunity. Great literature is, I believe, the most educative thing we have: not because it teaches rules, but because it teaches us to see. And learning to see, as we have said, is the whole art of becoming good.
Great literature teaches us to see — and learning to see is becoming good.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Iris Murdoch's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.