The Nice and the Good Read Free Page A

bad, to exercise the same magical powers, black or white, as a Joseph Radeechy or a John Ducane.
    The novelist cannot speak of the Good any more than the philosopher can. Given that she has opted for speech rather than silence, moreover, she condemns herself to the vain human prattling that is at bottom only falsehood or nonsense: ‘just gassing’. She shares the same fallen human world as her characters, joining in their jostling, moody, generally unsatisfying existence. She can only write of the nice and the bad, in effect. But there is one important difference – and it is a crucial one. The novelist is no closer to speaking of goodness than anyone else, but this does not cancel or negate her art. She has one unique advantage over the philosopher. She is able to show the Good by means of her carefully implied comparisons – the nice and the bad versus the good, the conspicuous versus the inconspicuous, the interesting versus the uninteresting. To this extent the novelist is able to rise above her characters. As they tie themselves in knots or go wrong or get absolutely nowhere she is able to show – without of course saying it in so many words – that language creates misunderstandings and that human efforts to organise, improve upon, and simply make sense of life offer only the false consolations of fantasy – of hopefully-cast narratives, of pre-existing role-models (caricatures for the most part) into which we’d like to see ourselves fit. It’s all hopeless. Being good doesn’t lie that way. But the novelist is able to reveal this in a uniquely truthful and even didactic way by virtue of her comparisons. Indeed, unnoticed, absent, ‘for-nothing’ as it is, the Good can be indicated in no other way.
    This is where the novelist has the edge over the philosopher. The philosopher will not speak what cannot be spoken, but the novelist speaks it in the only way that’s left open to human beings – through the force of negative example. For Iris Murdoch this is infinitely preferable to not saying anything at all. Indeed, it’s a kind of having it both ways. Art knowingly speaks falsehood. It acknowledges – even celebrates – the familiarhuman mish-mash and recognises that we are sinners all. When art points towards the transcendental or the sublime, therefore, it does so without spiritual pride. This is why, for Murdoch, the compromises of art ultimately win out over the purity of philosophy: ‘For both the collective and the individual salvation of the human race art is doubtless more important than philosophy and literature most important of all’ (‘“of God” and “Good”’). Literary fiction is perhaps the most morally compromised of all the art forms. But, in the tumble of novels that speak so eloquently of her decision to opt for fiction over everything else, Iris Murdoch has bequeathed one of the most seriously examined oeuvres in the English language, and for that if for nothing else she has given her readers something most profound to be grateful for.
    CATHERINE BATES 2000
    1 Iris Murdoch, ‘ Crest of a Wave ’, Daily Mail , 23 November 1978.
    2 Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus (1921), trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (1961), 6.421.
    3 Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann , ed. Brian McGuinness (1979), pp.68–69.
    4 Paul Englemann, ed., Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (1967), p. 143.

One
    A HEAD of department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and indubitable sound of a revolver shot.
    At one moment a lazy fat man, a perfect sphere his loving wife called him, his name Octavian Gray, was slowly writing a witty sentence in a neat tiny hand upon creamy official paper while he inhaled from his breath the pleasant sleepy smell of an excellent lunch-time burgundy. Then came the shot.
    Octavian sat up, stood up. The shot had been somewhere not far away