‘Again the only real virtue is sincerity’.

‘The ordinary traditional picture of personality’ is rejected. There is no transcendent reality, there are no degrees of freedom’. ‘Again, the individual is pictured as solitary and totally free. Miss Murdoch sees a similar portrait of human personality emerging from Sartre’s philosophy.

The virtue which is fundamental to him is sincerity.’ His rationality exposes itself in awareness of the facts, whether about the world or about himself. ‘He is morally speaking monarch of all he surveys and totally responsible for his actions. These two views of human nature support each other and create the typical modern personality as it conceives itself:

This she sees as ‘the joining of a materialistic behaviourism with a dramatic view of the individual as a solitary will.’ Hume’s ‘materialistic behaviourism’ she sees as combining with the notion of ‘the individual as solitary will’ stemming from Kant. Miss Murdoch announces her theme in the first paragraph: ‘We have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality’-and she examines the picture of human personality offered by modern philosophy. The argument of Against Dryness is so concentrated that it is not easy to follow. It fails not because it is ‘dry’ in her sense, but because its symbolism has collapsed into a private fantasy. A Severed Head strikes me as the romantic or symbolist novel run badly to gristle. If Against Dryness is directed against A Severed Head, then the polemic seems mis-directed. I believe that Irish Murdoch’s novels are basically of this kind, and want to defend them against the self-structures implied in Against Dryness. The specific tendency which Miss Murdoch isolates as ‘dryness’ is that which makes the 20th century novel look more and more like a symbolist poem, opaque in language, constructed around internal symbols and using people as if they were images. This is not Miss Murdoch’s story but she implicitly assumes it. Romanticism, it is sometimes said, has turned increasingly upon itself and offers self-sufficient images and symbols as a consolation for the loss of the real world which had been the exclusive concern of the 19th century novel. Yet Against Dryness is rather specifically an attack on romanticism. I have always thought of Iris Murdoch as a romantic novelist. T his article began as a review of A Severed Head, and got mixed up with my re-reading of a short essay that Irish Murdoch wrote just over a year ago for Encounter, called Against Dryness.

The bell iris murdoch analysis