Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Another novel you have chosen is Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince.
Iris Murdoch had been an Oxford don in philosophy and then became a very well respected novelist. A preoccupation with philosophical questions runs beneath her wonderfully inventive plots. With Eliot it’s Spinoza who is looming behind the fiction, and with Murdoch it’s often Plato. And Plato also had no use for the life of the imagination. Like Spinoza, Plato is another chauvinist on behalf of reason. He banished the poets from his Utopia. He is very suspicious of enchantment of all sorts, and art is a profound form of enchantment, as is romance. So he’s wary of both of them, but also he is torn, sometimes allowing himself to entertain the thought that there are truths that one can only get at through both aesthetic and erotic enchantment, and he argues with himself. (I love a philosopher who can argue with himself.) In The Black Prince, Murdoch is carrying forth this Platonic argument.
The Black Prince is about a very ambiguous character, an aging tax collector, who feels himself to have always been a great novelist, even though he’s never written the great novel. He retires, he’s about to write the great novel, but he falls in love with an inappropriately young woman. It is not clear if he is a dirty old man or if he is showing us the path to redemption. Murdoch maintains this ambiguity, which is a very Platonic ambiguity, throughout the whole book.
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein graduated from Columbia University, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her PhD in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship. As well as her teaching work she is also a writer whose novels and short stories dramatise the concerns of philosophy. Goldstein’s writings emerge as arguments for the belief that in our time fiction may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence. She says imaginatively inhabiting other lives, which is what we do in literature, can induce a great moral growth.
