Nathan P.

Carson

Value Realism and Moral Psychology: A Comparative Analysis of Iris Murdoch and Fyodor
Dostoevsky

Forthcoming in Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 43 No. 2, October 2019

Abstract. How can metaphysics be a guide to morals? For twentieth-century philosopher and
novelist Iris Murdoch, this was the central question of philosophy, and I argue that her answers to it
converge with those of nineteenth-century writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. For both thinkers, a
transcendent evaluative reality places moral demands on their characters, defines the general terms
of their moral consciousness, and influences their experience of the presence or absence of moral
coherence in a way that shatters self-consoling myths and opens their imaginations toward the
possibility of goodness. Ultimately, both connect transcendent value realism to immanent evaluative
consciousness in surprisingly congruent ways.

In his book Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, Peter Conradi suggests that “a task for critics

today would seem to be to understand the indebtedness of her demonic, tormented sinners and

saints and of the curious coexistence in her work of malevolence and goodness, to the dark tragi-

comedies of Dostoevski.”1 In his 1986 essay “Iris Murdoch and Dostoevskii,” Conradi goes even

further to argue that Fyodor Dostoevsky has been “unnoticed by commentators, a hovering or

brooding presence for at least two decades.”2 Both here and in his book Fyodor Dostoevsky, Conradi

demonstrates “convergence” (as opposed to direct influence) through a number of remarkable

similarities: the parallels between Dostoevsky’s holy fools and Murdoch’s saints, the writers’

mutual obsession over the dreaded “all is permitted” problem in the absence of a theistic grounding

for ethics, Dostoevsky’s “doubleness” of character and motive (à la Mikhail Bakhtin) in Murdoch,

the role of the unconscious and critique of sadomasochism in both, the mutual use of skandal scenes

or “holidays from morality,” the use of fantastic or Gothic realism, their tragicomic play with detail

and contingency that drives the reader against the “intractable detail” of the world, and the way both

writers specialize in depicting the maddening, pernicious character of low Eros.3 Thus does Conradi

add, in his biography of Murdoch, “She was not the heir—as she early and wrongly imagined—to

George Eliot, but to Dostoevsky, with his fantastic realism, his hectically compressed time-

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schemes, his obsessions with sadomasochism and with incipient moral anarchy. Her best novels

combine Dostoevsky with Shakespearian romance and love-comedy: combining myth with realism,

these will last.”4

It is crucial to note that very early on in her career, Murdoch grasped the ethical importance

of Dostoevsky’s treatment of demonic characters. In March 1945 Murdoch called Dostoevsky’s The

Possessed “the greatest novel in the world,” going on to praise the way it “battered its way through

one’s spirit & effects a Copernican revolution in one’s thought. . . . One has to go down into the pit

with the man—It’s no use standing on the brink & peering. . . . If ever I taught ethics to students I’d

make them read that sort of thing” (A Life, p. 208). Somehow the importance of these characters for

ethics was evident to Murdoch. More than thirty years later, Murdoch muses that “one would like to

be influenced by [Dostoevsky], but I think he’s also a dangerous model because these demonic men

are difficult characters; one can just have fun with them without really clarifying them or

understanding them, and they have a kind of charm which is illegitimate.”5

Whatever her hesitations, Murdoch understood these characters and the gravity of the moral

issues surrounding them. In her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she offers a profound insight

into Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov: “The hero of Crime and Punishment was animated by a myth, so

were Hitler’s followers. History and literature are full of stories of men destroyed by myths. The

long knife of morality prises the concept apart. Our relation to myth is subject to moral judgment.”6

In Raskolnikov as well as other pathology-ridden characters, Murdoch recognized, and was perhaps

drawn to, the way they were undone by their own myths and obsessions, including the implied

ethical demand placed upon them by “the long knife of morality” (MGM, p. 136). She did indeed

“understand” these characters.

These and other examples suggest that when Murdoch affirmed that Dostoevsky “fed my

imagination very deeply” (Tiny Corner, pp. 202–3), she surely had some of her most fundamental

questions on morality in mind, trying to grasp how these might be embodied in her fiction. Indeed,

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her repeated denials of being a “philosophical novelist” are qualified by her suggestion that “if I am,

it’s in the same sense in which Dostoevsky is . . . a highly reflective novelist” whose metaphysics

and morals inform the fiction.7 What did she see in these characters that was both so attractive for

moral inquiry and yet in some way possessive of “illegitimate” charm? And how is Murdoch a

philosophical novelist “in the same sense” as Dostoevsky? These are questions I hope to explore in

this article.

While some new avenues beyond Conradi have been explored, no one has yet examined

what seems to be a major point of congruence between Dostoevsky and Murdoch—one that goes

right to the core of their respective projects. Strikingly, both writers posit a view of reality that

includes some type of objective, evaluative, metaphysical reality directly influencing and

intersecting with subjective, evaluative, moral-psychological experience of sensible reality. That is,

both employ what I label an intersecting “transcendent immanence,” hovering around that crucial

question of Murdoch’s: “How can metaphysics can be a guide to morals?” (MGM, p. 146).

Dostoevsky would say, without God, are all things permitted? The same concern is in view. In other

words, both writers allow their philosophical and metaphysical presuppositions to seep into their

novels in such a way that immanence—contingent, sensible reality and human evaluative

experience within it—is never divorced from a transcendent reality beyond the sensible, which

morally supervenes upon and inheres within the immanent.

Is the term “transcendent immanence” either nonsensical or even contradictory? For, is it not

the case that immanence is quite literally defined as nontranscendence? While the label is

admittedly odd and incongruous, potential contradictions likely exist only at a very high level of

generality. Once the paired terms are specified with determinate content, no contradiction need be

implied. For example, if by “immanence” I mean (quite specifically) the experience of particular,

contingent, and often chaotic realities that are frequently of moral significance, in which the

universal “idea” of the good is always present but never fully grasped, there is no contradiction in

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suggesting that a transcendent, ideal reality can be psychologically present as a possibility, while

failing to be fully ontologically actualized, or epistemologically captured. It is therefore initially

plausible to suggest that these terms can coherently cooperate and be defined in terms of a variety of

well-known oppositional, but intersecting, philosophical polarities such as particularity vs.

universality, actuality vs. possibility, and unifying form vs. disparate instantiated contingencies.

In what follows, then, I selectively examine the comparative shape of transcendent

immanence in the thought and fiction of both Dostoevsky and Murdoch. After examining their

thought in general, I will move to their fiction to show the similar impact of transcendent

immanence on their respective characters, who become “puppets of their own emotions” and myths,

are steeped in a value-ridden consciousness, and are subject to the incisions of that “long knife of

morality” (MGM, p. 136). I will also give special emphasis to the role and character of guilt in each

thinker’s fiction. For Dostoevsky, I will focus on Dmitri Karamazov, largely in book 8 of The

Brothers Karamazov, while also drawing connections to Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment.

Turning to Murdoch, I will move through her moral philosophy followed by (in partial dialogue

with Dostoevsky) an interpretive reading of The Sea, the Sea. Along the way I hope to demonstrate

that, while there are substantial differences between Dostoevsky and Murdoch, their similar

attempts to connect transcendence to immanence and metaphysics and morals yield rich interpretive

results, and provides fruitful moral reflection on the human struggle to become good.

Dostoevsky’s conception of a transcendent order of reality was wholly aesthetic, in that he

saw beauty as the primary transcendental, as that which was most “real,” also taking up into itself

the true and the good.8 Although Dostoevsky was partial to the German idealist aesthetics of

Friedrich Schiller and F. W. J. von Schelling, he was also profoundly influenced by Plato’s

understanding of ideal beauty and the Neoplatonic philosophy of his close friend Vladimir

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Solovyev.9 For her part, Murdoch rejects German idealist aesthetics as an illegitimately consoling

and deterministic metaphysics, yet her well-known intellectual debt to Neoplatonism provides

fruitful, overlapping grounds for comparative analysis with Dostoevsky’s metaphysical aesthetics

and its Neoplatonic influence through Solovyev.10

Dostoevsky views the need for art, as well as the ideal of beauty to which it points, as

embodying the unifying ideals of humanity. In his famous “Mr. –bov and the Question of Art,”

widely considered the centerpiece of his aesthetics, Dostoevsky says that when a man is at the point

of greatest dissonance, disharmony, or struggle with reality, “he feels within himself the most

natural desire for everything harmonious, for tranquility, and in beauty there is both harmony and

tranquility. . . . And therefore beauty is immanent in everything healthy, that is, to that which is

most alive, and is a necessary need of the human organism. It is harmony; in it lies the guarantee of

tranquility; it embodies the ideals of man and mankind.”11 This aesthetic suggests an interpretive

register for grasping how and why it is that many of Dostoevsky’s most pathological characters are

stretched out, as it were; they are men living in contradiction, since, precisely at the point of greatest

pathology, a “natural desire” for beauty and transcendent order is most poignantly felt. What is

more, their dissonance with the transcendent order also puts them at odds with the immanent one,

since humanity’s best ideals, morality included, are embodied in that higher order.12

Dmitri Karamazov provides a telling example. Throughout the first several books of The

Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri is embroiled in obsessive conflict with his father Fyodor, and his

desperately disordered “Karamazov nature” tosses him about in a frenzy of trying to secure, against

his rival father, Grushenka’s favor. In a crucial moment of insight he admits to his brother Alyosha

that he persistently inhabits existential contradiction, pulled between what he sees as two opposed

forms of beauty, which leaves him longing for order:13

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 Here the shores converge, here all contradictions live together. . . . Beauty. Besides I can’t

bear it that some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the

ideal of the Madonna and end with the ideal of Sodom. It’s even more fearful when someone

who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna

either, and his heart burns with it, verily, verily burns, as in his young blameless years. No,

man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down. (Karamazov, p. 108)14

Elsewhere Dmitri equates the “beauty” that he finds in “Sodom” with his “insect-sensuality” of the

Karamazov nature (Karamazov, p. 107), a beautiful “storm” (p. 108) tossing him about in the fury

of his unbridled passions, making him an “evil insect” who “loved vice” as well as “cruelty” (p.

109). From ferocious anger and beating down his father to his frittering away of Katerina’s money

and dragging a captain by the beard, Dmitri is a puppet, a slave of his passions. Thus does he

experience profound inward contradiction, because while he embodies the “insect” life in which

there is “no order, no higher order,” he also longs for “a higher order” (p. 405), which is somehow

already implicit within him as the “ideal of the Madonna” (p. 108).

When Dmitri commits a crime against his father’s servant Grigory in book 8, however, he

becomes an even greater puppet of his own emotions, utterly encased in a catatonic and obsessive

world. He appears to Pyotr Ilyich to be in a daze, speaking carelessly while wholly oblivious to

either the blood covering his hands or the three thousand rubles he holds (Karamazov, p. 403). His

trancelike state is juxtaposed with an intense emotional guilt, as he suggests the need to “punish

himself” for his “whole life” and kill off the “insect” (p. 406).15 At the same time, however, his need

for a transcendent order of harmony, in which he somehow already participates, intensifies as well.

This is the thrust of his crucial comment to Pyotr Ilyich that “I’ve never liked all this disorder. . . .

There is no order in me, no higher order. . . . My whole life has been disorder” (p. 405). Then, quite

unexpectedly, Dmitri bursts out with a verse that, in direct tension with his disordered state,

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captures his turmoil as a man in contradiction: “Glory to the highest in the world, glory to the

highest in me!” (p. 405).

Dmitri’s crime, and indeed his entire life of “insect sensuality,” is so disordered and in ugly

dissonance with the ideal bBeauty of the Madonna that he concurrently grasps for “higher order”

and desires to “punish” himself. By allowing his passions to smother that bBeauty, which is “a

necessary need” of humanity, Dmitri is subjected to a painful, and indeed moral, judgment vis-à-vis

the divine order of aesthetic harmony (“QA,” pp. 41–42). Notably, however, this judgment is not

imposed “from above,” as it were, but is rather achieved simply by letting his Sodomite nature be

what is already is, in wholly unnatural dissonance with transcendent bBeauty, and thus also with

immanent human aesthetic and moral ideals, which are formally and metaphysically embodied in

this bBeauty. This uncovers the radically ethical nature of Dostoevsky’s ideal bBeauty, in which is

found not only “harmony and tranquility” (“QA,” pp. 41–42) but also truth and goodness that define

ideal human morality and demand moral rectitude simply by virtue of its own reality.16 Here we see

the connection in Dostoevsky between metaphysics and ethics, clarified as we look more closely at

the results of crime itself.

The unraveling of Dmitri in the wake of his crime against Grigory finds many parallels with

that of Raskolnikov, the main character of Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov is a cool-headed

rationalist, enamored of the aesthetic myth of Napoleon, seeing the latter as the heroic achiever of

triumphant and remorseless violence, and for whom “all is permitted.”17 Murdoch, we may recall,

mentions the myth that holds Raskolnikov captive, saying that such human myths are cut open by

the “long knife of morality” and “subject to moral judgment” (MGM, p. 136). Notably, having

committed a brutal double murder, Raskolnikov’s “punishment” is not neither legal nor juridical; it

is but rather moral and psychological, as “unexpected and unanticipated feelings” begin to “torment

his heart.”18 While the sensualist Dmitri is not like this rationalist murderer, parallels do exist. After

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committing the crime, Raskolnikov’s rational faculties are increasingly suspended, he is utterly

isolated from and oblivious to others, he bears an enormous burden of guilt and mental agony, and

his storming emotions fling him around like a puppet. Finally, like Dmitri, he is drawn “like a moth

to a flame,” under such duress that he is utterly compelled to confess his guilt.19

In Dmitri’s case, his long-sought confession happens after numerous thoughts of suicide, a

roiling skandal scene in Mokroye, and repeated longings to know about “the blood, that blood!”

(Karamazov, p. 437). So great is the moral burden bearing down upon and welling up within Dmitri

that when he is finally confronted by the authorities (for the wrong crime) the pressure within him

explodes in cathartic confession: “He exclaimed loudly, at the top of his lungs: ‘I un-der-stand!’ . . .

‘The old man!’ Mitya cried in a frenzy, ‘the old man and his blood . . . ! I un-der-stand!’ And as if

cut down, he fell more than sat on a chair standing by” (p. 443). In Dostoevsky’s 1865 letter to M.

N. Katkov, editor of The Russian Messenger, he explains the main idea for an upcoming book,

Crime and Punishment. Here he explicitly reveals the magnetic relation between immanent moral

choices—indeed human nature itself—and the moral demand of a transcendent order that impinges

upon, and irrupts within the criminal:

This is the psychological account of a crime. . . . Insoluble questions confront the murderer;
unsuspected and unanticipated feelings torment his heart. Divine truth and justice, the earthly
law, claim their rights, and he ends by being compelled to give himself up. . . . The feeling that
he is separated and cut off from mankind, which he experienced immediately upon the
completion of the crime, has tortured him. The law of justice and human nature have taken their
hold. . . . In my story there is, moreover, a hint of the idea that the criminal is much less
daunted by the established legal punishment for a crime than lawgivers think, partly because he
himself experiences a moral need for it. (“LK,” pp. 272–73, emphasis in the original)

How, for Dostoevsky, can metaphysics be a guide to morals? In light of his view of a

transcendent yet immanent order of divine beauty, Dostoevsky’s answer is embodied in his myth-

mongering, fantasy-ridden sensualists and criminals who become, to quote Murdoch, “puppets of

their own emotions” (Tiny Corner, p. 74). In either the embrace of pseudo-beauty or the

construction of Napoleonic myths, Dmitri and Raskolnikov are subject to moral judgment. They are
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undone simply by virtue of their immanent deviation from a transcendent order of beauty and truth

that makes a moral claim upon them, itself embodying the fullness of human nature. In a very

tangible way, then, one could say that, as in Murdoch’s novels, the fantasy, myths and madness are

the moral judgment experienced by these characters.

But Dostoevsky parts with Murdoch by adding moral culpability. Although guilt and

remorse are “natural” consequences of moral failure, they also operate in the characters under a

burden of culpable sin. Thus does guilt also play a constructive role in driving Dmitri and

Raskolnikov out of madness and toward a restoration of their humanness through confession and

expiatory suffering. Dostoevsky’s answer to the question of how metaphysics guides morals, is a

robust transcendent immanence, in which all of these pieces (and more) come into play. With these

in hand, and before turning to Murdoch’s fiction, I now examine Murdoch’s philosophical account

of transcendent immanence, while looking for points of congruence with and divergence from

Dostoevsky.

II

In a crucial comment regarding the heart of her philosophical project, Murdoch evidences

immediate connections to Dostoevsky’s transcendent immanence: “One of the greatest problems of

metaphysics is to explain the idea of goodness in terms which combine its peculiar purity and

separateness (its transcendence) with details of its omnipresent effectiveness in human life. This

problem (as Kierkegaard contended) ‘gets lost’ inside Hegel’s system, where it is . . . dissolved”

(MGM, p. 408). This comment captures what is for Murdoch the intractable difficulty of relating

universals to particulars, the one to the many, the transcendent to the immanent, and of course,

metaphysics to morals. Contending for an utterly transcendent reality beyond metaphysics that is

magnetically linked to immanence, Murdoch’s vision of the Good is neither reduced to immanence

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nor cut loose from it as a metaphysical totality.20 Murdoch sees the Good as “the certain unfailing

pure source and perfect object of love” which “is not and cannot be an existing thing (or person)

and is separate from, though magnetically connected with, contingent ‘stuff’” (p. 479).21 However,

in the same breath Murdoch can say that reality isn’t “located elsewhere,” it is rather “all here” (pp.

182, 297). The transcendent Good is both beyond being and, through Eros, an immanent magnetism

within ordinary human experience and consciousness, the latter of which is never neutral and

perennially “soaked in value” (pp. 167, 479–80, 496–97).

What is now coming clear is that for Murdoch, a reciprocal relationship exists between

transcendence and immanence. The ceaseless moral activity of “ordinary” human consciousness

and a commonsense discerning between “good” and “bad” simply compels a “larger picture” and

demands moral progress; thus the transcendent moral requirement is “proved by the world” and by

human experience itself (MGM, p. 297). But reciprocally, this demand is rooted in the magnetic pull

of that reality of the transcendent Good, which is beyond the contingent and the sensible (p. 301).

Murdoch draws this vision together on one of the closing pages of Metaphysics as a Guide to

Morals: “We experience both the reality of perfection and its distance away, and this leads us to

place our idea of it outside the world of existent being as something of a different unique and

special sort. Such experience of the reality of good is not like an arbitrary and assertive resort to our

own will; it is a discovery of something independent of us, where that independence is essential” (p.

508).22 For Murdoch, it seems, neither transcendence nor immanence is dispensable, as both are

integral parts of her vision of the moral life. Nonetheless, it is quite clear that the transcendent

reality of the Good cannot be seen as wholly collapsible into the immanent; it remains sovereign,

pure, separate.

Having stated this, it is quite evident that, owing partly to Murdoch’s own comments on the

matter, much criticism on Murdoch (especially postmodern criticism) explicates her novels as

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celebrations of immanent contingency. For instance, commenting on Murdoch’s own assertion that

“form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe,” Heusel

adds, “If this statement describes the kind of reality she conveys in the novels, then Murdoch is

obliged to discover forms for displaying and depicting such aimlessness in the universe and in

human personality. Perhaps she is comfortable remaining in a condition of ambiguous suspension,

creating temporary forms out of the chaos around her. . . . That some of her characters insist on the

sovereignty of good over other concepts—and do good while having so little power and prestige—

points toward a horrific reality: the ubiquitous powerlessness of good in the universe.”23 In the same

vein are critics like Stanley Hauerwas and Sante Maletta, who argue that Murdoch leaves us bereft

of the means for being good in a chaotic universe without God, or Alasdair MacIntyre, who

suggests that the “magnetic” aspect of Murdoch’s Good wholly disappears within the ubiquity of

her contingency.24

While Murdoch’s emphasis on chance, chaos, and the unpredictable vicissitudes of

contingent reality can hardly be contested, especially in her novels, what are we to make of her

repeated claim that our experience of contingency and the “fact” of value-saturated consciousness

forces “a larger picture” (MGM, p. 297)? How can we account for her assertion that “the unique and

special and all-important knowledge of good and evil is learnt in every kind of human activity,” and

that “the question of truth, which we are indeed forced to attend to in all our doings, appears here as

an aspect of the unavoidable nature of morality”? (MGM, p. 418, emphasis in the original). How are

we to understand that metaphysics is a guide to morals if the transcendent Good amounts, as Heusel

argues, to “ubiquitous powerlessness”? What are we to make of the role of bBeauty, its connection

with high Eros making this Good partly visible?

Evident in much of the aforementioned criticism is an errant collapsing of Murdoch’s

transcendent conception into her immanent one, or a sharp divide placed between the two.

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However, if both are upheld as interpenetrating realities, as Murdoch clearly intends, we may see

the connections between her own account and Dostoevsky’s, wherein a metaphysical reality of

goodness not only remains “pure,” mysterious, and transcendent, but also magnetically places a

moral demand upon her characters, indeed defining the very terms of their conscious moral

distinctions.

In recent criticism, some do seek to make sense, in Murdoch’s fiction, of both aspects of her

philosophy. Positing a “two-way movement” in Murdoch’s philosophical prose between

metaphysics and empiricism, between unifying form and particularizing contingency, Maria

Antonaccio rightly applies this movement to Murdoch’s novels as well.25 However, while initially

showing how these two elements relate to individual persons in Murdoch’s philosophy, Antonaccio

later imposes a false dichotomy on the novels, relegating the unifying impulse to the novels’ form—

plot, structure, setting—while consigning the particularizing impulse to the characters themselves.

This mistakenly pairs the metaphysical aspect of Murdoch’s thinking—the transcendent, unifying

element—solely with the structural form of the novel, and the empirical or particularizing aspect

with the actual characters and their experience of reality.26

Against this is a sense in which, as I will demonstrate shortly, Murdoch’s characters are

subjected to participation—through high Eros and the reality of a value-saturated consciousness—in

both the unifying impulse that is the Good and the particularizing element of exposure to the

contingent reality of others, to chaos and to chance. As Murdoch herself affirms, a true

understanding of reality, whether in art, philosophy, or ordinary life itself, involves a “double

revelation of both random detail and intuited unity.”27 She does indeed work this twofold revelation

into the content of her characters’ lives, specifically in their experience of the negative and positive

sublime, as well as, I will argue, in the experience of guilt and remorse that cuts into their encased

myths and opens imagination toward perfection and the Good.28

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 I was initially surprised that Murdoch—only moments after positing the need for a godless

theology—concludes her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals with Paul Tillich’s quotation of Psalm

139, which of course underscores the inescapable omnipresence of Yahweh: “whither shall I flee

from thy presence?” (MGM, pp. 511, 512). Later on, her ironic use of the sacred text becomes clear.

For Murdoch, the “omnipresent effectiveness” of the transcendent Good replaces God; it is indeed

as utterly inescapable as it is for Dostoevsky’s characters. As we turn to Charles Arrowby in

Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, I take her own words as an interpretive gateway: “With or without

avatars, we are perpetually reminded of our natural selfishness and led to see our thoughts and acts

as under a judgment which is not a natural part of ourselves. Can we think away the idea of ‘the

moral,’ the idea of the authority of good, from human life?” (p. 509).

III

In considering the moral state of protagonist Charles Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea, we must

recall yet again Murdoch’s commentary on Raskolnikov, about how people are “destroyed” by

myths like his, which are subject to the incisive “long knife of morality” that “prises the concept

apart” (MGM, p. 136).29 Among the countless aspects of Charles’s mythic fantasy world that are

subjected to such moral incisions, I will focus first on his view of Hartley. In a discussion over A

Fairly Honourable Defeat, Murdoch mentions her interest in the concept of arene, “in which human

beings can be seen as puppets of their own emotions.” Elaborating on this, she adds that “people

very often elect a god in their lives, they elect somebody whose puppet they want to be,” and in A

Fairly Honourable Defeat several characters elect the manipulative, Machiavellian Julius King as

the god to whom they will submit (Tiny Corner, p. 74). In the context, however, Murdoch is

speaking off the cuff, eliding the concept of being a puppet of one’s own emotions with that of

being the puppet of another’s manipulation. If these two ideas are kept distinct, she seems to

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indicate that people, without being manipulated by a demonic King, can and do create mythological

gods in such a way that they become puppets of their own emotions in the context of these myths.

In the story of Charles and Hartley, then, Murdoch’s use of arene can be applied in several

ways. Charles is certainly a puppet of his own emotions as a direct result of constructing the

totalizing myth of Hartley as a god.30 He conceives of Hartley as “evidence” of “some pure

uncracked unfissured confidence in the good” that has eluded him ever since (The Sea, p. 84),

suggesting Murdoch’s own account of the great temptations of both art and metaphysics to become

a consoling “false unity.”31 In a parody of Murdoch’s well-known account of “unselfing” attention,

Charles determines that he and Hartley must find a way to “be absolutes to each other” (p. 121).

Elsewhere, he puts his idea of Hartley through a process of mythic deification whereby she becomes

in his imagination the surety of his virtue (p. 138), his Beatrice (pp. 52, 85), the Jesus of his youth

and a eucharistic “real presence” (p. 245) as well as his god, an “alpha and omega” (p. 186). His

love for Hartley becomes an exclusive “supreme value” in the light of which all other loves are

measured and found wanting (p. 334).32

So strong is this myth that even after Titus’s death and immediately following Charles’s own

admission of fabricating the “image” of Hartley himself (The Sea, p. 428), he persists in seeing her

as a “source of light” and his love for her “an end in itself” (p. 430). At times his construction of the

myth is very difficult work, calling upon all his deepest passions to solidify his own encasement in

fantasy, until the myth seems complete, and perhaps unassailable:

Ever since the recognition scene, physical passion, roused, disturbed, confused, had twisted
and turned in me, my senses in dialogue with my thoughts, because, as I worked and worked
to join together her youth and her age, I so much desired to desire her. . . . Now, I realized, it
was done; and my desire was like a river which has forced its channel to the sea. She made
me whole as I had never been since she left me. She summoned up my whole being, and I
wanted to hold her and overwhelm her and to lie with her forever, jusqu’ a la fin du monde;
and, yes, to humble myself and to let her, in the end, console me and give me back my own
best self. For she held my virtue in her keeping, she held it and kept it all these years, she was
my alpha and my omega. It was not an illusion. (The Sea, p. 186)

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If we take the psychology implicit in this quotation at face value, it may seem that my analysis of

Charles is quite univocal; he is certainly anything but a man in contradiction, whose errant passions

and mythic constructs are prised apart either by immanent experience or the transcendent demand of

the Good. However, although the narrative voice and the retrospective form of the novel set his

conflicts at a greater distance than the emotional immediacy of Dostoevsky’s narrative, Charles is

indeed a man in contradiction: he is torn between puppet-like slavery to his subjective passions and

mythological constructs, while also being indicted by an external reality of truth that wells up

within his own mind and heart.

Indeed, a close reading of the novel demonstrates the “long knife of morality” (MGM, p.

136) persistently at work in Charles’s consciousness, eventually making his myth crack under the

pressure of its own self-evident distance from the evaluative truth of reality. He is indeed “led to

see” his “thoughts and acts as under a judgment which is not a natural part” of his enclosed egoism

(MGM, p. 509). Early in the novel, when Charles meets Hartley in the church, he refuses to believe

her own account of a happy marriage to Ben. Then, however, he says that “something black seemed

to threaten me from a little way above my head” and he begins to think that perhaps she had been

happy after all (The Sea, p. 117). The blackness then dissipates when Charles willfully repeats to

himself his refusal to believe she had been happy, followed by his internal determination to be

“ingenious” and avoid suffering at all costs (p. 118). Immediately after this moment he is desperate

to see her again and records that “vistas of madness opened beyond these words” (p. 118). In a

similar way, Charles’s desire to envision Ben as a jealous tyrant brings “lurid vistas and fiery

hollows,” and this time he momentarily sees the need to resist such a caricature of Ben (p. 136).

Later, however, after Charles’s eavesdropping at Nibletts, his resistance dissolves into a disordered

mass of passions: “Hatred, jealousy, fear and fierce yearning love raged together in my mind” (p.

157). While these moments clearly depict Murdoch’s typical tension between high and low Eros,

15
the narrative also expresses a sense that the buoyancy of high Eros, its excess in the ordinary, its

truthfulness unfolding ever upward in relation to the Good, is being deliberately suppressed by

Charles.

Further intimations of truth continue to carve away at Charles’s self-delusion, many of them

involving his own “ordinary” grasp of what is good and what is not. After convincing Titus to lure

Hartley to Shruff End, Charles has one of many thoughts. He asks himself whether, by intruding

upon the mystery of Ben and Hartley’s marriage, “was I not perhaps meddling with something

dreadful?” (The Sea, p. 263). Here his optimism over the dream of him, Titus, and Hartley together

in the south of France holds his resolve. When Hartley arrives, her initial encounter with Titus

makes Charles realize how naïve his vision of the future had been, as he is “jerked back into the

present” with “an alarmed confused sense of what I had brought about” (p. 267).33 Later, Hartley’s

statement to Charles—“You can only make things worse. And you have done so tonight”—sounded

“terrible” to him, “like a calm judge pronouncing a fatal sentence” (p. 277). The intuition is only

momentary, however, as Charles interprets her calmness as a hidden desire to stay.

Bran Nicol’s insight is helpful here, as he notes Charles’s twofold strategy for suppressing

one pole of the tension between two inner voices. On the one hand, he externalizes his own faults

and imposes them on other characters, such as Ben’s (alleged) jealous self-deception (The Sea, p.

223), Hartley’s fear of leaving her cage, or James’s and Lizzie’s conspiracy of lies, devaluing of

speech, and spoiling of the past (p. 410). On the other hand, Charles deliberately suppresses (as in

his intuition of the “fatal sentence” above) one voice in the inner moral dialogue and reduces it to a

strict and fantasy-ridden monologue. To make any moral progress, Nicol observes, Charles must

begin to acknowledge the competing voice instead of shutting the dialogue down.34 In agreement

with but extending beyond Nicol, as the story progresses it is not clear whether Charles can restrict

things to a monologue, and here the invoking of Murdoch’s “magnetism” and moral “demand”

16
seems appropriate. While recognizing the dominant place Murdoch gives to accident, chance, and

the “unselfing” negative sublime—a vision or experience of overwhelming contingency (of which

the sea is a metaphor)—the reinstating of the mental dialogue owes a great deal to Murdoch’s view

of the Good which, through the ministrations of high Eros, somehow places a moral demand upon

and inheres within ordinary human consciousness.35

Can Charles restrict things to a monologue? As the story progresses, he seems less able to

do so, as the role of both shame and remorse exponentially increase. When Hartley hears of

Charles’s nefarious eavesdropping, her utterly painful and hysterical invective—equating his

actions with murder—leaves Charles horrified and ashamed:

How can you—you don’t know what you’ve done—how could you push in, spy on us like
that—it was nothing to do with you—how could you intrude into secret things which you
couldn’t possibly understand—it’s the wickedest vilest most hurtful thing anybody’s ever
done to me. . . . I’ll never forgive you, never, it’s like, it’s like a murder, a killing—you
don’t understand—Oh, it hurts so much, so much—. (The Sea, p. 302)

Unlike his easy passing off of her words of silent “judgment” before, Charles has nowhere to hide:

I felt that the most violent assault was being made on my spirit, on my sanity. I had
witnessed hysterical screaming before, but nothing like this. . . . To touch her had become
terrible. She was shuddering rigidly with a dreadful damaging electricity. . . . I felt horror,
fear, a sort of disgusted shame, shame for myself, shame for her. . . . I shall never forget the
awful image of that face, that mask, and the relentless cruel rhythmic quality of that
sound. . . (p. 302)

What we see here is that the dialogue, or rather the demand of morality, is no longer simply prising

Charles’s myth apart; it is splitting it wide open. Nonetheless, true to Murdoch’s defense of the

gravitational strength of the relentless egoistic capacity for moral regress, Charles is able to

“recover” and seek new means of preserving his fantasy world (MGM, p. 331). His new strategies

involve the continued attempt to pass off his faults and remorse onto others in order to avoid facing

the horror and pain of what he’s done.

Thus we see that even after Titus’s death (at the hands of that horrifically sublime sea),

Charles has fresh intimations of remorse and guilt, which he either converts into a new fantasy or
17
simply suppresses. Nonetheless, this remorse and guilt—along with his horrified shame at the

incident with Hartley—subsist as new and ineradicable elements of self-awareness in his mental

landscape; the magnetism of the Good is at work. Thus, while stewing over his plan to kill Ben, the

dialogue is far more pronounced: “I was in a state which I knew well was close to a sort of madness,

and yet I was not mad” (The Sea, p. 391). What is more, Charles seems to have, even in his fury, a

clearer intimation of his proclivities for self-deception than he previously did: “I was sane enough to

know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain

agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I

was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even desire to do so. I wanted to kill

Ben” (p. 391). The irony of this comment is that while Charles restricts both his intellect (“could

only think”) and will (“could only run”) to his obsession, a seemingly complete puppet of its

“mechanical movement,” he does inhabit a metacritical understanding of himself as obsessed.36

Shortly after this comment he even admits that “in truth the basis of my madness was sheer grief”

over Titus’s death (p. 391).

A similar passage comes soon after this one, in which Charles again tries to collapse the

dialectical inner conflict into a monological stasis. Here he fully realizes that he, like his former

depiction of Hartley, is trapped in a mental cage in which freedom has no attractive power.37 He

adds, “I knew, in the midst of it all, that some unexamined guilt of my own was driving me into

further hatred; but this was no moment to be confused by guilt” (The Sea, p. 394). Like Dmitri

Karamazov’s struggle between Sodom and the Madonna, Charles is increasingly aware of, and

unable to extract himself from, the two competing internal forces of high and low Eros. While he

attempts to embrace the disorder of his obsession and consolation, the “higher order” that is the

truth of his required moral task continues to assert itself and lodge within him ever more stubbornly.

While Charles deftly resists this moral task in these passages, one might hope that over time, the

18
cognitive and volitional dissonance will take deeper root in a way that leads to moral transformation

of the sort experienced by Dmitri Karamazov.

Here, then, I return to several of Dostoevsky’s insights. First, recall that for Dostoevsky, as

was evident in both Dmitri and Raskolnikov, it is precisely at the point of greatest tension and

roiling disorder that a “natural desire” for beauty and transcendent order is most urgently felt

(“QA,” pp. 41–42). Second is the reminder that for Dostoevsky, a transcendent order of divine truth,

justice, and earthly law wells up within the criminal so that “he himself feels the need” for the

punishment (“LK,” pp. 272–73; emphasis in the original). And, while Murdoch sharply diverges

from Dostoevsky’s strident themes of both the need for punishment and the primacy of expiatory

redemptive suffering, the parallels between the two on transcendent immanence at the threshold of

the consciousness of moral failure are striking.

After James exonerates Ben, no one is left (for the moment!) for Charles to blame (The Sea,

p. 397). He realizes that his “burden of sin” had been shifted to Ben, who “had carried my guilt”

and provided consolation (p. 402). The same is true of Charles’s thoughts that perhaps Titus,

through his death, had redeemed or taken away the guilt of Ben and Hartley, though he quickly

adds, “I knew that I was surreptitiously attempting to ease my own remorse and guilt” (p. 429).

Having recognized the role of his own vanity in Titus’s death, Charles sees himself as a murderous

criminal, foreshadowed in Hartley’s accusation but concretized in his admission of guilt and

experience of clear-sighted remorse over Titus (p. 402). Notably missing, however, is Dostoevsky’s

emphasis on the moral need for a punishment that harbors the possibility of redemption. In a

moment of profoundly truthful awareness of and remorse over his own moral failures, Charles does

not long for absolution or cry, like Dmitri, that he must “punish” himself for his “insect” life.

Rather, he quietly comes to acknowledge that “remorse contains guilt,” but it is a “helpless hopeless

guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite” (p. 447).38 As Murdoch suggests in The Good

19
Apprentice, “remorse must kill the self, not teach it new lies.”39 In this Charles echoes James’s

remorse over the death of his Tibetan sherpa (p. 447): “He died because he trusted me. My vanity

destroyed him. It is a matter of causality. The payment for faults is axiomatic. I relaxed my hold and

he lay dead” (p. 457). Later Charles would see this “causality of sin” connecting with the sins of his

whole life, all the way back to his taking of Rosina from Peregrine (p. 471).40

Here we can see how for Murdoch, much like the immanent demand of a transcendent

reality in Dostoevsky, the reality of guilt and remorse are functions of the transcendent magnetism

of the Good, established by the mere fact of relentless causality, and connected subjectively to

Charles’s own awareness of failure. The “long knife of morality” (MGM, p. 136) is still at work

here, revealing to Charles his sheer distance from the Ggood. In other words, both guilt and

remorse, though not tied to culpability, do not simply issue from the exposure of Murdoch’s

characters to the intractable contingencyt; guilt and remorse are connected to her insights regarding

the Ontological Proof. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch notes how the mere

“consciousness of failure” sets up in our minds the idea of perfection by means of the sheer

recognizable “distance” between our failures and the good itself (MGM, p. 430; p. 507).

In this way we can see that for Murdoch, the mere fact of guilt and remorse, like the

encounter with art, can “kill the self” and function as a form of knowledge that may open the

imagination to the reality of the Good:41 “The proof of the necessity or unique status of good runs

through our grasp of an idea of perfection which comes to us in innumerable situations, where we

are trying to do something well or are conscious of failure. What is perfect must exist . . . not as

contingent accidental reality but as something fundamental, essential and necessary. . . . Our

consciousness of failure is a source of knowledge” (MGM, p. 430).42 Existing as both a transcendent

demand through sin’s causality and an immanent insight into the Ggood, guilt, remorse and

20
awareness of failure can indeed interrupt the puppetry, cut into the myth, and open a space for moral

progress.43

Like Dmitri and Raskolnikov, Charles’s own consciousness is indeed “soaked in value,” full

of both his myth-mongering illusion and intimations of the Good. The very fact two opposing

impulses of Eros are at work in his consciousness is suggestive of Murdoch’s transcendent

immanence; the Good is magnetically connected with and working within ordinary consciousness

and moral distinctions. And, while Charles’s quick and consistent relapses into his myth suggest

Murdoch’s resistance to Dostoevsky’s deterministic undertones—it is almost necessary and

unavoidable that Raskolnikov and Dmitri should unravel and “pay”—Charles is indeed utterly

unable to escape the ubiquitous claim of moral judgment; if he goes down to the depths, the Good is

apparently there.

IV

I have argued for a new approach to reading Dostoevsky’s deep influence on Murdoch from

the bird’s-eye view of their respective metaphysics of transcendent immanence. Why did Murdoch

see Dostoevsky’s The Possessed as indispensable reading for philosophical ethics? What was it

about Dostoevsky’s account of human darkness, amoral impulses, and rampant wallowing in

disordered passions that most attracted Murdoch? At the outset I mentioned that she saw the ethical

importance of going “down to the depths” with a person, exploring how personal fantasies and

myths were “prised apart by the long knife of morality” (MGM, p. 136). Indeed, in “feeding”

Murdoch’s imagination “very deeply,” as she herself claims, Dostoevsky may also have offered a

novelistic language of contingency whereby Murdoch could depict the value-ridden aspects of

consciousness (Tiny Corner, pp. 202–3). Dostoevsky’s characters, such as Dmitri and Raskolnikov,

are never neutral, ever subject to the tensions of moral contradictions, their minds utterly “soaked in

21
value,” as Murdoch puts it (MGM, p. 167). What is more, Dostoevsky’s connection of aesthetic-

moral failure—from sensuality to murder—to the moral judgment of a transcendent order and a

violation of human nature itself is something with which Murdoch would certainly resonate.

If nothing else, however, I hope to have demonstrated, without ignoring their differences,

the substantial continuity between these two thinkers whose depictions of contingency and

immanence, of the dark human depths of evaluative and mythic subjectivity, is never divorced from

a transcendent evaluative reality that impinges from without. Both offer a deep fictional depiction of

the human proclivity for constructing totalizing myths that enslave them. Both created characters

with an inescapably value-saturated consciousness, women and men in contradiction for whom

every moment becomes an entrance into good or evil. Finally, both are masters at depicting the way

in which the “long knife of morality” (MGM, p. 136) relentlessly undermines these fantasies,

without wholly eclipsing the role of human resistance or agency. And on the function and shape of

guilt and remorse, I have only touched upon the tip of the icebergsurface of a far deeper issue.

There is indeed remarkable congruence between Dostoevsky and Murdoch on the constructive

moral importance of remorse, guilt, and especially the simple awareness of failure. For both

thinkers, a transcendent reality demands such an awareness by immanent means. From here their

roads diverge between attention and redemptive expiation, and a comparison between the two on

this matter is a rich avenue for further exploration, most notably between Dmitri Karamazov and

Edward Baltram of The Good Apprentice. That, however, is another project altogether.

Fresno Pacific University

Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p.
22.
2
Peter J. Conradi, “Iris Murdoch and Dostoevskii,” in Dostoevskii and Britain (Anglo-Russian
Affinities), ed. W. J. Leatherbarrow (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995), p. 277. This Conradi’s paper
22
was originally read at a symposium on Murdoch on October 21–22, 1986, at Free University in
Amsterdam.
3
Conradi, “Iris Murdoch and Dostoevskii,” pp. 277–82. See also Peter J. Conradi, Fyodor
Dostoevsky (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 129–33.
4
Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 596;
hereafter abbreviated A Life. Taking Conradi’s lead, other critics (especially Heusel) have drawn out
Bakhtinian carnivalesque—the sensational breakdown of order—in Murdoch. Heusel in particular
expands also on the similarities between Murdoch and Dostoevsky on density of characters and
emphasis on the contingent. See Barbara Stevens Heusel, Patterned Aimlessness: Iris Murdoch’s
Novels of the 1970s and 1980s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
5
Michael O. Bellamy, “An Interview with Iris Murdoch,” June 23, 1976, in From a Tiny Corner in
the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 2003), p. 51; hereafter abbreviated Tiny Corner.
6
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 136; hereafter
abbreviated MGM.
7
Tiny Corner, p. 58. To say this of course presupposes, as will the whole of this article, a great deal
of cross-pollination between Murdoch’s moral philosophy and her fiction. This is by no means a
novelty in current Murdoch criticism. See, for example, articles by Michael Levenson, Bran Nichol,
and Alison Denham in the Murdoch special issue of Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 3 (Fall 2001).
In part, my justification for not only examining the cross-pollination patterns but also probing the
moral and metaphysical similarities between Murdoch and Dostoevsky in particular arises from the
larger context of the quotation in view. While Murdoch denies being a “philosophical novelist” like
Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, she does say that, like Dostoevsky, she is a “highly
reflective novelist” whose philosophy informs but doesn’t dominate her fiction: “Of course, any
seriously told story may have metaphysical aspects and will certainly have moral aspects. And
morality does connect with metaphysics; so, in this sense, any novelist has got a kind of
metaphysic” (Tiny Corner, p. 58).
8
While I cannot develop this here, Dostoevsky would eventually see this divine order of beauty
embodied and made visible in Christ himself, who is both the beauty of God and the beauty of man,
the singular “figure of absolute beauty” in the world. Cited in Marlene Chambers, “Some Notes on
the Aesthetics of Dostoevsky,” Comparative Literature 13, no. 2 (Spring 1961): 119.
9
For a helpful intellectual genealogy of Dostoevsky’s aesthetics, see Robert Louis Jackson,
Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (Bloomington: Physsandt, 1978).
For Murdoch’s critique of metaphysical determinism, see MGM, pp. 479–80.
10
In “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” Murdoch mentions Dostoevsky as one of the great
nineteenth-century novelists who seem to overly capitulate to Romanticism. The potential result, for
Murdoch, is that they “give the impression of externalizing a personal conflict in a tightly conceived
self-contained myth” (Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” in Existentialists
and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi and George Steiner
[London: Penguin, 1999], p. 272; hereafter abbreviated EM). This is generally her critique of
23
“crystalline” novels as well. However, in her late interviews she lauds Dostoevsky’s ability to create
diverse, dense, and “real” characters, which indicates a shift, as Conradi suggests, from reservations
to admiration. I still find in Murdoch’s overall work, however, an affinity between her critique of
Schopenhauer’s latent determinism and Dostoevsky’s debt to German idealism, which may have led
to the same. Notably, however, Murdoch is indebted to Schopenhauer’s insight that all
consciousness is “soaked in value” (MGM, p. 167), an affinity she also shares, I argue, with
Dostoevsky.
11
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Mr. –bov and the Question of Art,” quoted in Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest
for Form, pp. 41–42; hereafter abbreviated “QA.” Strikingly similar to Murdoch, though perhaps
suggesting the “false unity” she saw as a temptation in art, Dostoevsky also states in this passage
that “the need for beauty and the [artistic] creation which embodies it is inseparable from man.”
12
W. J. Leatherbarrow, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), p. 43. For a full analysis of the tense contradiction between higher and
lower modes of being in Dostoevsky’s characters, see Nicolas Zernov, Three Russian Prophets:
Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Soloviev (Gulf Breeze: Academic International Press, 1973).
13
Jackson rightly argues in Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form that Dmitri’s suggestion of the ambiguous
character of beauty is his own, and not Dostoevsky’s. Jackson claims that “it is not beauty which is
ambivalent, but man who experiences two kinds of beauty” (p. 41, emphasis in the original).
Dmitri’s words immediately preceding this quotation proves this point: “And whenever I happened
to sink into the deepest, the very deepest shame of depravity (and that’s all I ever happened to do), I
always read that poem about Ceres and man. Did it set me right? Never! Because I’m a Karamazov.
Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even
pleased that I’m falling in just such a humiliating fashion, and for me I find it beautiful” (p. 107,
emphasis added). I could add here the strong affinities between Dmitri’s Sodom and Murdoch’s
Black Eros.
14
All citations for The Brother Karamazov are taken from The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in
Four Parts with Epilogue, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, First Vintage Classics
(New York: Vintage Books, 1991). For this section of the article, all parenthetical citations by page
number refer to this translation, hereafter abbreviated Karamazov.
15
Here, all the way up to Dmitri’s initial confession at the end of book 8, are uncanny similarities
between him and Edward Baltram in Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice (New York: Penguin
Books, 1986); hereafter abbreviated GA. Edward also comments on the need to “punish” himself
(GA, p. 46), seeing himself as a “stinking corpse” (p. 44) that is also “full of spiders” (p. 382) and
“crawling with cockroaches,” stinking of “misery and evil” and a “raw rotting wound” (p. 511).
Like Dmitri, Edward desperately seeks absolution and longs for “a pain of purgatory by which in
time he could work it all away, as a stain which could be patiently worked upon and cleansed and
made to vanish” (p. 12). While he does not share Dmitri’s love of beauty and of God amidst his
torment, Edward’s “lacerations of the soul” (p. 49) and obsession with “the shame, the loss of
honour that can never come back” (p. 68) recall Dmitri’s similar obsessions, though the latter holds
out hope for the restoration of his honor.
16
At the level of the transcendentals, here is where Dostoevsky and Murdoch fundamentally
diverge, as of course Murdoch gives primacy to the separate and utterly transcendent reality of the
24
Good, while allowing Beauty a kind of intermediary status as the Good made visible to us and the
object of high Eros. For Dostoevsky, as I have suggested above, transcendental Beauty is made
visible in the person of Christ.
17
W. J. Leatherbarrow, “The Aesthetic Louse: Ethics and Aesthetics in Dostoevsky’s ‘Prestupleniye
i nakazaniye,’” The Modern Language Review 71, no. 4 (October 1976): 861–62.
18
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Letter to Katkov” (September 1865), quoted in Konstantin Mochulsky,
Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1967), p. 273; hereafter abbreviated “LK.”
19
I am indebted to Conradi (Fyodor Dostoevsky, pp. 44–47) for this list of Raskolnikov’s maladies.
See also Nicholas M. Chirkov, “A Great Philosophical Novel,” in Twentieth Century
Interpretations of “Crime and Punishment,” ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-
Hall, 1974), pp. 56-57ff.
20
In what may be a “magic bullet” argument, Murdoch seems to posit a meta-metaphysical place
for the Good, which is “above” metaphysical totalities in the position of their judge, remaining “free
and untainted beyond them.” Thus does Murdoch seek to avoid the tempting determinism that
“haunts” metaphysics, when “an alien material” is posited “which we cannot transcend and where
morality and personal responsibility, as it were, stop” (MGM, pp. 479–80).
21
Although in context here Murdoch is arguing against metaphysical pictures that detach a “higher
reality” from its rootedness in the contingent, her argument that the Good is not limited to the
sensible or the contingent is equally clear, and evident elsewhere in her work.
22
Here I note that A. S. Byatt’s well-known characterization of Murdoch’s “transcendent” to mean
“comprehensiveness and ubiquity” is insufficient (quoted in Barbara Stevens Heusel, Iris
Murdoch’s Paradoxical Novels: Thirty Years of Critical Reception [New York: Camden House,
2001], p. 22). Murdoch’s transcendence includes, but is not limited to, self-transcendence, and
indeed not even limited to the sensible world. In several places she vehemently insists that not only
is the Good an utterly separate reality, it is somehow beyond the metaphysical totalities that she
critiques so heavily in MGM (see, for example, pp. 479–80). However, for Murdoch we can only
know of our “supersensible destiny” (Kant’s words, but seemingly endorsed by Murdoch) in and
through loving attention to sensible particulars, primarily to other individuals but also to the
particularity of nature (EM, p. 282). It appears that for Murdoch, the Good is beyond being, while
magnetically connected to contingent, sensible reality, right down to the particular judgments of
individual experience and consciousness.
23
Murdoch’s provoking comment is in Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark
Paperbacks, 1985), p. 86. Responding quotation is in Heusel, Patterned Aimlessness, p. 225.
24
Sante Maletta, “Moral Life and the Experience of Beauty: Iris Murdoch’s Pilgrimage from
Fantasy to Reality,” in Neoplatonic Aesthetics: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts, ed. Liana de
Girolami Cheney and John Hendrix (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 103–11. Stanley Hauerwas,
“Murdochian Muddles: Can We Get Through Them If God Does Not Exist?,” in Iris Murdoch and
the Search for Human Goodness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago:

25
University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 190–208. MacIntyre’s critique is cited in Heusel,
Paradoxical, p. 59.
25
Maria Antonaccio, “Form and Contingency in Iris Murdoch’s Ethics,” in Antonaccio and
Schweiker, Search for Human Goodness, p. 112.
26
In her otherwise excellent treatment of Murdoch, Antonaccio moves from a false dichotomy to a
false unity, saying that ultimately “it is not a matter of doing away with one or another pole of the
tension, but rather finding a way to encompass both elements in a certain kind of unity”
(Antonaccio and Schweiker, Search for Human Goodness, p. 125). It is difficult to see here how
Antonaccio avoids making Murdoch’s whole project Hegelian, which Hegel certainly would have
abhorred. Oddly enough, Antonaccio concludes her article by giving the final victory to the
particularizing element, that is, to the individual. In her defense, it may be that this constant
vacillation between the universalizing impulse of Hegel and individuation of Kierkegaard is built
into Murdoch’s whole project.
27
Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, p. 96.
28
For Murdoch, an experience of the sublime can be either positive or negative and is both special
and ordinary (Heusel, Paradoxical, p. 87). The positive-negative distinctions can be seen in
swimming versus drowning, or unselfish versus selfish loving. On the sometimes ordinary character
of Murdoch’s sublime, Conradi says it is not “elevated into a despotic metaphysical truth” as it is in
Sartre. In connection with our my emphasis on the way morality “prises” personal myths apart,
Conradi characterizes Murdoch’s negative sublime as “exposure to the world’s particulars . . . in
which the box-like enclosure of the self is attenuated and opened out” (Conradi, Saint and Artist,
pp. 107, 109). One such exposure, I will argue, is the phenomenon of guilt or remorse, which is
meant to “kill the self” (see Murdoch, The Good Apprentice, p. 511).
29
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (London: Penguin Books, 1987); hereafter abbreviated The Sea.
30
Charles fits beautifully into Murdoch depiction of Sartre’s “Totalitarian Man”: “Sartre’s man is
like a neurotic who seeks to cure himself by unfolding a myth about himself” (EM, p. 268). As we
will see, however, Charles is not, like Sartre’s man, utterly alone.
31
See MGM, chap. 1.
32
Spear nicely summarizes Charles’s utter self-delusion: “The Hartley of his imagination represents
the only purely unselfish love he has known, a spiritual love without carnal possession. Through his
memory of this love, Charles is striving to return to innocence, to wipe out the evil and corruption
that has intervened and to become morally ‘Good’ again” (Hilda D. Spear, Iris Murdoch [New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007], p. 98).
33
Charles’s erratic and usually self-deceived relation to time is an extended theme in this book.
Spear notes that the shifting of tenses corresponds to Charles’s utter inability to distinguish the past
from the present. She notes the irony of Charles’s question to Hartley: “Have you no sense of the
present tense . . . ?” (Spear, p. 95; The Sea, p. 329). I would add to this observation that Charles also
has an aberrant relation to the future, which becomes for him as much an object of falsified unity as
does his idealized past with Hartley.
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34
Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004), p. 72.
35
Conradi, Saint and Artist, p. 107.
36
We must keep in mind here that for Murdoch, true freedom means “love of good which enables a
unity of thought and desire” (MGM, p. 457). Charles does not love good, and thus his thoughts and
desires remain dichotomized. While Murdoch considers a distinction between intellect and will
“misleading” (MGM, pp. 300–301), she still sees moral progress as a slow purification of desire (pp.
330–31). In a fascinating connection between this novel and her moral philosophy, at nearly every
moment in which Charles’s egocentric fantasy is monologically dominant, both his thoughts and
desires seem unified and mutually operative, his myth a calcified whole. However, whenever he has
an insight into goodness, however temporary, it remains an intellectual insight, and thus short-
circuits. We are reminded of Murdoch’s well-known insight that “will cannot run very far ahead of
knowledge, and attention is our daily bread” (“The Idea of Perfection,” EM, p. 335).
37
Murdoch’s treatment of the imagination, of the slow development of new moral horizons, is
informative here: “we cannot see the point of being moral beyond a certain level, we cannot
imagine it except in terms of pure damaging disadvantage” (MGM, p. 331).
38
In what seems to me an explicit allusion to Dmitri Karamazov (of which The Good Apprentice
seems full), Edward Baltram asks Stuart if he should “punish myself” (GA, p. 46). In Murdochian
fashion, Stuart tells him to attend to the needs of Mark’s mother, who might suddenly need him.
While we do see the need for this movement from inward remorse to outward, other-focused
goodness in Dostoevsky, his account of guilt involves not just recognition of causality but the
burden of culpability, which for him needs purgation through redemptive suffering.
39
GA, p. 510. The connection between the truthful function of guilt, interestingly, ties in with
Murdoch’s understanding of art when it consoles in the right way: “Oh, I think art consoles, I don’t
see why not. The thing is to console without telling lies. One tries to be truthful—I think the word
truth is very important here—art must be connected with truth in some sense a truthful picture”
(Tiny Corner, pp. 118–19). The same, it seems, can be said of guilt and remorse.
40
This admission is in marked contrast to Charles’s feeling on the matter early in the book. There he
notes how Peregrine’s kindness to him keeps him from feeling any guilt, with the result that
“although I saw objectively that I had behaved badly, I felt practically no guilt.” He then adds, in
what is a substantial reversal of Dostoevsky’s view, “Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations
rather than from crimes” (p. 74).
41
Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice, in its emphasis on guilt and pathological responses to it, is full
of insights that suggest this. For example, when Edward asks Thomas if he should “specialize in
feeling guilty,” Thomas responds: “Your feeling of guilt, if you can isolate it, can provide the place,
and the ‘style’ if I may put it so, by which you can get it into your mind and heart that it [Mark’s
death] has happened—and start from there” (GA, p. 69).
42
Antonaccio puts this well: “Murdoch’s claim is that perception is not only carried out against a
transcendental background of value, but also is progressive in its attempt to make discriminations of
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value in relation to an implicit ideal of perfection. . . . In this respect, the whole of our cognitive
experience furnishes us with evidence of the idea of perfection” (Search for Human Goodness, p.
133). This largely captures what I am trying here to argue. However, I would change Antonaccio’s
final clause and render it thusly: “the whole of our cognitive experience furnishes us with evidence
of the reality of perfection.”
43
Here I hope to have begun to show that the phenomenon of guilt cannot be reduced to the
accidents of contingency, though these may be its catalyst. I would contend that guilt is not a
disposable concept in Murdoch. Guilt or remorse is a function of the magnetic connection of the
sensible world with the transcendent Good. Remorse brings recognition of failure; failure then
opens up the idea of perfection by way of distance, and the possibility of knowing the Good.

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