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Additional info for Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction
Example text
Language does not represent the external world, but constitutes that world: to attempt to describe external reality is always already to interpret it. Now, Murdoch's conviction that bad art ultimately tells a lie about reality depends upon there being an alternative, one she finds exemplified in great writers like George Eliot and Tolstoy. The logic comes ultimately from Plato, who says that language can also be used to mystify and falsify as well as telling the truth. Yet the poststructuralist approach to language insists that this is in fact all language can do: truth is never more than an effect of language, and even if it is 'out there' it eludes the grasp of signifying practices.
Quite naturally for one who began writing at more or less the same time the term 'postmodernism' enters the theoretical vocabulary, the question of representation, in its complex late twentieth-century form, is central to Murdoch's approach to fiction. While this is not the impression we get from her writings on literature, her philosophy suggests otherwise. This book does not pretend to be a thorough analysis of her philosophy, but a consideration of her philosophical position casts some vital light on her particular reconceptualization of realism.
The compatibility between the Murdochian and the postmodern sublime is testimony to how firmly she is situated in a late twentiethcentury context. Murdoch has, not unexpectedly, expressed her disapproval of postmodern fiction. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she identifies 'a new sensibility in art, an attack on traditional art forms' which she calls 'structuralist' or 'deconstructionist' literature, a major characteristic of which is 'a search for hidden a priori determining forms, constituting an ultimate reality' (MGM 6).