Adapting a Genre
BEREK, PETER
Adapting a Genre THE NICE AND THE GOOD By Iris Murdoch Viking Press. 378 pp. $5.75. Reviewed by PETER BEREK Assistant Professor of English, Williams College The news is out: Iris Murdoch's...
...As Lionel Trilling pointed out in a recent essay about Joyce's letters, it is by now a commonplace that the "real" world in which most men and women live is something to be evaded, not embraced...
...But the real delight of the novel, if we may turn our minds back on and swim against the current for a moment, is not its undoubted wealth of character and incident...
...The stock complaint about Miss Murdoch's earlier novels was that she fa"led in the goals she herself proclaimed for the novelist, that she did not create "a house fit for free characters to live in...
...and only in a comic "romp" could an author postpone until the end asking a question the reader has been wondering about since chapter one...
...Miss Murdoch has managed in The Nice and the Good to write an allegorical novel with the internal qualifications and complications necessary to keep from oversimplifying human relationships...
...It is even easier to follow the title's hint and classify characters as either "nice" or "good...
...The Nice and the Good has its faults...
...Yet if one is unwilling to make grandiloquent claims about the future of prose fiction, one can at least state that the present news about Iris Murdoch is good...
...And just as Shakespeare teases the Romance genre in As You Like It, so Miss Murdoch teases the detective story...
...These are not the phrases we are accustomed to finding in assessments of serious fiction by philosophical novelists...
...the Sunday New York Times Book Review said the book was "un-put-downable...
...that is, it is either a small quasi-allegorical object portraying the human condition and not containing 'characters' in the 19th-century sense, or else it is a large shapeless semi-documentary object, the degenerate descendant of the 19th-century novel, telling, with pale conventional characters, some straightforward story enlivened with empirical facts...
...even an academic like John Thompson, in Commentary, described his encounter with it as an old-fashioned "good read...
...In As You Like It (to choose a familiar example), the action begins with a society inadequate to the fulfillment of the personal and social natures of its members and moves through comic reversals and surprises to a final, celebratory grouping—a new society where every Jack has his Jill, vice is punished or expelled, and virture is rewarded...
...it is the author's use of a literary genre that enables her to handle her pet philosophical ideas and enrich them by their fictional transfiguration...
...Yet the terms of praise used in some reviews have been curious...
...Not completely...
...the book is perhaps too long...
...The novel's ultimate affirmation of complexity comes from the ironic juxtaposition of philosophical "insight" and most unphilosophically ridiculous action...
...The serious novelist can hardly devote himself to placing free characters within this world, and must turn to symbolism or allegory in order to transcend dailiness...
...The limitations of allegory as a device for portraying the variousness and contingency of human personality are obvious...
...The explanation, of course, is transparently obvious...
...was not concerned with 'the human condition," it was concerned with real various individuals struggling in society...
...It is easy to cull passages from her philosophical and critical essays that are precise and accurate glosses on characters in the novel, on such solemn issues as the nature of freedom and the role of love in human affairs...
...The 20th-century novel is usually either crystalline or journalistic...
...John Ducane, the hero, discovers twice in the course of the action that he has fallen in love with a woman he has known for years?a different woman each time...
...But the significance of these abstractions is qualified by the comedy: One's notions of the absolute truth of a character's insights change when the story in which he acts ends in a series of pairings-off analogous to the dance, feast, or wedding that concludes a typical comedy...
...Problems disappear when a letter arrives in the nick of time...
...only a worse fool would claim to be doing more by invoking Shakespeare than finding a handy reference for making a point...
...On the opening page a shot rings out...
...Much of the subsequent action is devoted to John Ducane's effort to discover why a minor government official committed suicide in his office...
...Harper's called the novel "a romp...
...Miss Murdoch sometimes works perilously close to the line between teasing parody and simple sloppiness...
...For readers aware of her past successes, that ought to be praise enough...
...A similar vocabulary of devices works toward comparable ends in Iris Murdoch's novel...
...She does this by adapting the devices of a genre not usually associated with prose fiction—The Nice and the Good reminds one less of a 19th-century novel than of Elizabethan stage comedy...
...Although this implies that the contemporary novelist should return to the mode of Dickens or George Eliot, Miss Murdoch is too bright not to realize that one can write of free men finding their places in a meaningful society only in a world where there is far more agreement about the very existence of free men and meaningful societies than there is in our own...
...The clear movement of Iris Murdoch toward allegory and her flatness of characterization have been puzzling in a writer who, in the essay "Against Dryness," intelligently defined the plight of the contemporary novel as compared to the great works of the last century: "The 19th-century novel...
...Reviewed by PETER BEREK Assistant Professor of English, Williams College The news is out: Iris Murdoch's latest novel is a success...
...After the lean years of The Italian Girl, The Red and the Green, and The Time of the Angels, The Nice and the Good at last fulfills the hopes of those who admired The Bell and A Severed Head...
...The Nice and the Good combines suspense, sex, Mod London, English country gardens, black magic, and a cute pair of nine-year-old twins for good measure...
...Only a fool would herald the discovery of a whole new fictional genre on the basis of one novel...
...instantaneous love and sudden repentance are part of the vocabulary of comedy, and they work to affirm the importance of contingency in human affairs and the limits of the isolated intellect...
...Miss Murdoch's use of comic techniques does not mean that The Nice and the Good is not "serious...
...For if the members of your aunt's literary club read Miss Murdoch's new novel after finishing the latest Meyer Levin, even they won't complain about the tip...
...Have critics relaxed, turned off their minds, and floated downstream, as the most attractive version of the New Sensibility tells us to do...
...just as obvious is the usefulness of allegory for the novelist of ideas...
...The Prime Minister himself awaits the answer as Fleet Street threatens to cry scandal, since a "security question" is involved...
...She manipulated people to fulfill the demands of abstract ideas instead of permitting them to develop according to the logic of their own inner lives...
...there is some planting of shape and color symbolism that never quite comes off...
...No one worries about probability or consistency in the comic world of the play...
...Unlike a Renaissance playwright, Iris Murdoch cannot affirm a cosmic order in her comedy's concluding dance...
...she uses the stock emblem of order as an ironic way to point up the limitations of man's ability to understand his world...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 9
