Murdochtober (a few days late)
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch’s, Under the Net, is described on the front cover as “a comic novel about work and love, wealth and fame,” and it’s hard to sum it up more succinctly than that. Luckily I have never been in the business of brevity.
This is the story of Jake Donahue, a wayward writer, though at the moment he’s mostly doing translations for a prolific but untalented French novelist. At the opening of the novel, Jake and his man, Finn, have been turned out of the house on Earls Court Road. Madge, the woman who occupies the house, sometime lover of Jake’s, is getting married to another man, and it just won’t do for Jake and Finn to be in the attic room. With only a few pounds to his name, Jake must decide where to go and what to do.
So begins as series of mishaps, serendipities and adventures that fill the pages of the novel—and frankly keep the reader engaged in what could only be described as a highly non-linear narrative. If you think you know what Murdoch is going to do next (read: what she’s going to put Jake through next), you don’t, but I’ll give you a preview.
After confronting Madge and understanding that yes, he really must ship out, Jake’s first stop is Mrs. Tinckham’s newspaper shop, which is “dusty, dirty, nasty-looking” and full to the brim of cats, but a soothing place for a “medicinal drink,” from the bottle Jake keeps stashed behind the counter. It is in the peaceful haze and murmur of Mrs. Tink’s shop—under her beaming glance—that Jake decides to go stay with his philosopher friend Dave. Dave doesn’t think it would be a good idea for them to be “two nervous wrecks living together,” and suggests Jake try the ladies. Finn has a specific lady in mind: Anna Quentin. Unlike Madge who Jake didn’t really care for deeply, Anna’s name causes him some pain to hear. Reflecting on their history, he thinks, “Dave once said to me that to find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love, so perhaps I loved Anna.”
It is really from here that things start to roll along. Jake does find Anna nestled in a room full of colorful scarves at a theater where strange puppets move silently across the stage. She directs him to her movie star sister, Sadie, who needs a flat-sitter. Sadie wants Jake to guard her apartment from a man who’s troubling her (because he’s in love with her). This man turns out to be Hugo Belfounder, an old friend of Jake’s. But he’s more than that—he’s a kind of mythical creature in Jake’s mind, uninterpretable and unimaginably wise. They haven’t spoken in years, since Jake published a dialogue based on their conversations and then was too humiliated by it (the bastardization and commodification of personal exchanges that he found truly profound) to ever speak to Hugo again.
But now he must find Hugo—once he can free himself from Sadie’s apartment, where he’s inexplicably been locked in by the little minx. Upon freeing himself with Finn and Dave’s help, he tracks down Hugo’s address but when he gets there, no one is home except hundreds of starlings. He devises a plan to visit every pub in the area until he finds Hugo. Unfortunately he chooses the wrong direction to start in and meets Lefty Todd, the leader of the New Independent Socialist Party, instead. They proceed to have a big old night, which includes a dip in the Thames.
One odd circumstance leads to another and then another. Jake, again with Finn’s help, steals a German Shepherd named Mister Mars from a retired bookie who helped him win more than six hundred pounds betting on horse races. He’s a movie star (the dog is) though he’s fourteen years old now. Together they end up at one of Lefty’s big NISP meetings, held on a movie set of Ancient Rome. That’s where he finally finds Hugo, but when the police arrive on the scene, they lose each other again. Jake ends up in Paris briefly, spends a few weeks depressed in bed, then out of the blue, takes a job as an orderly at the hospital.
These are the turns that make the novel so entertaining, and Murdoch’s voice (I guess Jake’s voice) is so compelling. She’s the type of writer that you read and then inadvertently find that you’re speaking like her. She gives Jake a wry and observant nature, and he’s often making deductions and pronouncements that sound very sage. Nonetheless—through all the adventures, he displays a lack of curiosity when it comes to the inner lives of those he interacts with. He just cannot imagine it any way but his own way, and that’s really the crux of the novel.
Early on, Jake recounts a conversation he and Hugo had early on in their acquaintance regarding what it means to describe a feeling or state of mind (i.e. create art). Hugo rather simply doesn’t understand. He believes that any such description is dramatic, inherently inaccurate. If one describes oneself as feeling “apprehensive,” it doesn’t actually capture the feeling of that moment, it’s just something to say afterwards. Hugo says, “the only hope is to avoid saying it.” Jake finds this hard to accept—if true, then everything other than very plain statements of fact are lies. Hugo believes it to be so.
Imagine my delight at stumbling upon this, my most favorite theme in all of prose and poetry, when I really was least expecting it! And it doesn’t stop there. this conversation is one that Jake reproduces in his dialogue, The Silencer, and his sense that he failed to convey the real experience of the original conversation with Hugo is what makes him so embarrassed. In trying to recount the experience, he tells a lie. If he could actually internalize the ideas he’s writing, he wouldn’t be so embarrassed because he would understand that all attempts at translating experience will always be failures. Perhaps on the scale of failures, his is actually not such a bad one.
It proves to be so at the end of the novel when Jake finally gets the conversation with Hugo he’s been yearning for, and they discuss the book:
‘Do you mean The Silencer?’ I asked.
‘Yes, that thing,’ said Hugo. ‘Of course, I found it terribly hard in parts. Wherever did you get all those ideas from?’
‘From you, Hugo,’ I said weakly.
‘Well,’ said Hugo, ‘of course I could see that it was about some of the things we’d talked of. But it sounded so different.’
‘I know!’ I said.
‘So much better, I mean,’ said Hugo. ‘I forget really what we talked about then, but it was a terrible muddle, wasn’t it? Your thing was so clear. I learnt an awful lot from it.’
This is a shocking moment to Jake, and along with several other revelations that take place in the course of the conversation that follows, it forces a revelation. That Hugo could have read his book and thought it was “so clear”—an improvement on their discussions rather than a degradation was previously unfathomable. It is in part so difficult to translate experience or feeling into words because we are alone in our experiences and feelings. Our perception of events and of the larger world is ours alone and originates in a place that no one else can get to. This is true for every single person in the world, so what are we then to do?
I haven’t read any of Murdoch’s philosophical works—this is the first thing I’ve read by her at all—but I did read an essay a couple months ago that spoke to her perspective on morality and love. In short, Murdoch believes loving attention to others, which inherently draws us away from self-centeredness, is the key to morality. By the end of the novel, Jake has realized (and maybe begun to accept) that the world is full of impenetrable surfaces. This notion ceases to be agonizing and begins to be amusing. Giving up on understanding allows him, at last, to see more clearly.
I was inspired to read Under the Net by —fearless leader of Murdochtober! Thank you, Mike!!