Patterned Aimlessness

Book excerpt: The novels of Iris Murdoch are lively journeys across landscapes teeming with ideas. Such texts as An Accidental Man, The Philosopher's Pupil, The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea blend art and philosophy in tales that have intrigued and puzzled readers like few other contemporary novels. In Patterned Aimlessness Barbara Stevens Heusel brings an order and a clarity to the mystery of Murdoch's narrative form. She shows how this writer of many genres came to integrate philosophy, morality, psychology, language, and aesthetics in order to call into question the conventions of the English novel. Following Wittgenstein's lead Murdoch makes palpable the complexities of human experience, the "accidental, idiosyncratic happenings of life." Her fiction and her individual voice, Heusel says, reflect the chaos of existence with all of its contradictions, its paradoxes, its jarring rhythms. Heusel turns to literary theory to point out Murdoch's compatibility with Mikhail Bakhtin's views on the narrative voice in the novel. For both, morality is an utmost concern, and language is inherently a social, historical, and ideological creation: words resonate with centuries of meanings and uses. Answering some common criticisms of Murdoch's novels, Heusel also points out that Murdoch's presentation of female characters critiques societal expectations of women. The study culminates with thoughtful analyses of Murdoch's characters in A Word Child, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea, Nuns and Soldiers, and The Message to the Planet in light of the patterns she has introduced.