The Nice and the Good (2 page)

The figure with whom Ducane most obviously contrasts is that of Radeechy, the colleague whose mysterious suicide in the office one summer afternoon he is asked to investigate. If Ducane does his best to be a good man, Radeechy, it appears, did the opposite. Already known to have had interests in necromancy and magic, he also dabbled, it turns out, in the occult. A trip to the vaults beneath the government department where he worked – one of two such visits to the underworld in the novel – reveals all the paraphernalia of satanic ritual: bell, book, candle and all. Here Ducane finds the inverted crosses, demonic cryptograms, priestly vestments and dead pigeons of previously celebrated black masses, and these lead him, in turn, to a murky underworld of vice and crime. Radeechy is clearly an evil counterpart in whose studied inversion of the good, Ducane distressingly confronts his own opposite. Yet for all this the moralities of the two men are strangely alike, the one a parodic mirror-image of the other. Radeechy’s amateur dramatics have something in common with Ducane’s theatre of conscience for both rest to the same degree on the power of the human imagination. Radeechy’s posturings recall those of Dr. Faustus who rejects God in return for the supernatural powers that are granted him by magic: “But his dominion that exceeds in this/Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man” (
Dr. Faustus
, I.i.60-61). Faustus’s rhetorical flourish is meant to imply infinitude – the infinite reaches of the human mind. The trouble is that the human mind doesn’t in fact stretch all that far and Marlowe’s play is dedicated to showing up its pathetic limitations. This is one reason why Faustus’s demonic antics are, like
those of Radeechy, so unimaginative, so derivative, in the end so downright silly. There is nothing supernatural here, only a pathetic reaching for the extreme. Paltry, dreary, and depressing are exactly how Ducane, when he gets to the bottom of the affair, finally judges Radeechy’s goings-on. But there is also a judgement of himself in this assessment. It is not that Ducane’s morality is bad. It’s rather that his goodness – fussy, humane, managerial as it is, a thing to be worked at and practised, a busyness that’s prone to ineptitude and self-consciousness – shares an essential quality with Radeechy’s evil. In both cases, good and evil are an inspiration, something to ‘become’, to be enacted and
willed
. This good and evil can be spoken and spoken about. It can be decided on and planned – arranged as deliberately and carefully as the artist disposes his characters or orders his creative material. Good and evil here have a familiar, homely, man-made quality. They are all too human – not other, not divine. They represent small evil and small good – opposite to one another, for sure, but, for all that, equal in scale.

The figure with whom Ducane contrasts more subtly is that of Uncle Theo – an enigmatic man whose uncertain past is divulged only at the very end and who is virtually the only character not to be paired off in the multiple couplings that make up the novel’s positively Shakespearean ending. Inscrutable from the beginning, Theo succeeds in deflecting others’ interest and curiosity in himself: ‘this lack of interest seemed to be caused in some positive way by Theo himself, as if he sent out rays which paralysed other people’s concern about him. It was like a faculty of becoming invisible’. Pointless, undetectable and distinctly uncharismatic, Theo is either a very boring man or, as one of the other characters shrewdly suspects, someone who has, in the course of his undisclosed life, been through the inferno and arrived on the far side of despair. With his odd canine features and marked bond of mutual empathy with the family pet, Mingo, Theo appears to the others as a kind of dog-man. But this is not some demonic, Radeechy-style reversal of God. Rather, Theo embodies the paradoxical non-god of a resolutely godless world. ‘All metaphysics is devilish,
devilish
’, he says to the refugee scholar, Willy Kost:

‘There is no good metaphysics?’

‘No. Nothing about that can be
said
’.

‘Sad for the human race, since we are such natural prattlers.’

‘Yes. We are natural prattlers. And that deepens, prolongs, spreads and intensifies our evil’.

Theo, it is gradually revealed, has indeed progressed past good and evil into the Nietzschean beyond. And into the Freudian yonder, too – beyond the pleasure principle of a great copulating Nature which, in the animal as well as the human kingdom, he sardonically observes rutting all around him, out into the blankness and galactic silence of the death drive. Here, in the nothingness of Zen, Theo has confronted ‘the other face of love, its blank face’. All is vanity, and the pointlessness of existence is grasped – if emptiness can be said to be grasped – for what it is. At this point, the busy, self-justifying chatter of human ethics drops quite naturally away. From this beyond has nothing whatever to do with goodness, at least not with a goodness that can be spoken about, prayed for, or even made into art. It defies language, thought, and self. ‘The Good has nothing to do with purpose’, wrote Iris Murdoch in ‘“On God” and “Good”’, indeed it excludes the idea of purpose, “All is vanity” is the beginning and the end of ethics. The only genuine way to be good is to be good “for nothing” in the midst of a scene where every “natural” thing, including one’s own mind, is subject to chance, that is, to necessity. That “for nothing” is indeed the experienced correlate of the invisibility or non-representable blankness of the idea of Good itself’. This is quite different from the homely, practical, well-meaning – in a word, ‘nice’ – ethics of a John Ducane. How small and insignificant they seem by comparison!

We may think we all know what goodness is and that we’d have no trouble in recognising it if we saw it. But the concept of the Good is, it turns out, difficult to understand, the more so for being haunted by a host of false doubles – power, freedom, purpose, reward, judgement – all of which, with Murdoch’s love of chiastic pairings, doubles and opposites, offer themselves as not-so-shadowy surrogates for a more obscurely grasped virtue.
The Nice and the Good
is, like all her novels, full of characters earnestly trying, hoping, and not infrequently praying to be good, all (sometimes comically, sometimes tragically) to no avail. For goodness is not a matter of will – or, as soon as it becomes so, it ceases to be goodness and becomes self. ‘Mystics
of all kinds have usually known this’, she writes in another essay, ‘and have attempted by extremities of language to portray the nakedness and aloneness of Good, its absolute for-nothingness’ (‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’, 1967). By comparison with their noisier, self-justifying, and generally more meddlesome cousins, Murdochian saints are usually recognised by their quietness and inconspicuousness. Unlikely (and often unlikeable) characters, they tend to exist unparticipatingly at the very edges of the plot, and they frequently turn out to have some kind of discreet mystical leanings. Uncle Theo, though not quite a saint, is the nearest thing to it in
The Nice and the Good
, and only at the very end do we learn of his youthful adventures in a Buddhist monastery in India.

The unspeakability of the Good – an article of faith in the mystical traditions of both the east and the west – also makes its appearance in western philosophy, or, more properly, in that branch of philosophy most concerned with questions of goodness, namely ethics. Wittgenstein enunciated it most austerely, perhaps, when he said that ‘ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental’.
²
The only things which language can meaningfully express are the propositions of natural science – verifiable statements of fact, in effect. Anything else – any statement of value, any ‘ought’ or ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘that is good’ or ‘that is bad’ – has no verifiable status and is therefore strictly nonsensical or, as Wittgenstein would prefer, unsayable. This unsayability is indeed the very condition of ethics. ‘This running up against the limits of language is
ethics
… In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter’.
³
The philosopher’s most eloquent statements are, consequently, what he does not say. ‘My work consists of two parts: the one presented here [in the
Tractatus
] plus all that I have
not
written’, Wittgenstein wrote to Ludwig Ficker in 1919:

‘And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY
rigorous
way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where
many
others today are just
gassing
I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it’.
⁴

The indefinability, ineffability and mysteriousness of the Good – the fact that it lies “beyond”, is uninteresting, invisible, will-less and not there to be “experienced” – is a topic to which, in her philosophical writings, Iris Murdoch reverts again and again. It creates something of a problem for the writer, however. If you cannot speak of the Good, how are you supposed to write moral books? The problem is rather different depending on whether you look at it as a moral philosopher or a moral novelist. Basically, the philosopher won’t and the novelist can’t. Enjoined to speak truth, the moral philosopher is bound not to utter falsehood or nonsense and so can only, when it comes to the unsayable, lapse into silence. The moral novelist, however, is not so enjoined. On the contrary, she is busy saying the unsayable. She has made her business that special realm of discourse in which propositions are neither true nor false because they are fiction. This is a most dangerous realm, as Plato warned, for, liberated from strict truth-content, words can do anything you like. The writer is free – as free to create the bad as the good, the false as the true. As Murdoch wrote in her long essay on Plato’s aesthetics, ‘we are able meaningfully and plausibly to say what is not the case: to fantasise, speculate, tell lies, and write stories … for truth to exist falsehood must be able to exist too’ (
The Fire and The Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists
, 1976). As far as philosophy is concerned, all art is morally compromised and fiction in particular suffers an irredeemable taint.

As a philosopher Murdoch is enough of a puritan and a Platonist to share this view. But as a novelist she doesn’t hold back. She is down there in the world with her characters – the unsaintly ones, that is – right in the thick of it, saying the unsayable, getting her hands dirty, and getting fascinatedly caught up in the web of words, irresistibly intrigued, charmed –
tempted
is perhaps the word – by all that is most false. Moreover, she shares her medium with her characters who are busy doing exactly what she is doing – dreaming up plots, setting things in motion, manipulating others, acting parts, making things happen, ordering people around. In the embroiled and complicated histories of those characters who use language and the structures of art for their own worthy or unworthy ends, the novelist looks critically, quizzically at her own procedures. Her vision of the corrupting power of words reflects necessarily
upon her own practice. There’s a sense in which she is no better than her characters, no closer than they are to speaking or realising the Good. She is on a level with them – the level of ego, art, and lies which makes for so busy, justified, sentimental, just plain
interesting
a world. Down there in the human muddle of compromise and untruths she is able equally to create good and bad, to exercise the same magical powers, black or white, as a Joseph Radeechy or a John Ducane.

The novelist cannot speak of the Good any more than the philosopher can. Given that she has opted for speech rather than silence, moreover, she condemns herself to the vain human prattling that is at bottom only falsehood or nonsense: ‘just gassing’. She shares the same fallen human world as her characters, joining in their jostling, moody, generally unsatisfying existence. She can only write of the nice and the bad, in effect. But there is one important difference – and it is a crucial one. The novelist is no closer to speaking of goodness than anyone else, but this does not cancel or negate her art. She has one unique advantage over the philosopher. She is able to
show
the Good by means of her carefully implied comparisons – the nice and the bad versus the good, the conspicuous versus the inconspicuous, the interesting versus the uninteresting. To this extent the novelist is able to rise above her characters. As they tie themselves in knots or go wrong or get absolutely nowhere she is able to show – without of course saying it in so many words – that language creates misunderstandings and that human efforts to organise, improve upon, and simply make sense of life offer only the false consolations of fantasy – of hopefully-cast narratives, of pre-existing role-models (caricatures for the most part) into which we’d like to see ourselves fit. It’s all hopeless. Being good doesn’t lie that way. But the novelist is able to reveal this in a uniquely truthful and even didactic way by virtue of her comparisons. Indeed, unnoticed, absent, ‘for-nothing’ as it is, the Good can be indicated in no other way.

This is where the novelist has the edge over the philosopher. The philosopher will not speak what cannot be spoken, but the novelist speaks it in the only way that’s left open to human beings – through the force of negative example. For Iris Murdoch this is infinitely preferable to not saying anything at all. Indeed, it’s a kind of having it both ways. Art knowingly speaks falsehood. It acknowledges – even celebrates – the familiar
human mish-mash and recognises that we are sinners all. When art points towards the transcendental or the sublime, therefore, it does so without spiritual pride. This is why, for Murdoch, the compromises of art ultimately win out over the purity of philosophy: ‘For both the collective and the individual salvation of the human race art is doubtless more important than philosophy and literature most important of all’ (‘“of God” and “Good”’). Literary fiction is perhaps the most morally compromised of all the art forms. But, in the tumble of novels that speak so eloquently of her decision to opt for fiction over everything else, Iris Murdoch has bequeathed one of the most seriously examined oeuvres in the English language, and for that if for nothing else she has given her readers something most profound to be grateful for.