Thoughts Rhetoricalizing

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was a well-known post-war British novelist who produced twenty-six novels in almost four decades of writing. However, she was not only a novelist, but more importantly, a thinker with her own moral and philosophical viewpoints. Literary practice and philosophical meditations over human life are never apart in her novels; she spent her whole life in applying artistic imagination and literary exposition to the demonstration of human being's moral life and the discovery of the nature of reality: characters are "thinkers" in disguise; meaning is implied in complicated human associations; and the formalized plot, typological characters and settings provide a "non-historical" situation for her thoughts. A sound interpretation therefore must examine how her thoughts are dramatized by the artistic representation. Following these considerations, this paper, on the basis of researches of Murdoch's novels, is intended to have an exploration of her literary creation from the perspective of "type".Besides introduction and conclusion, this dissertation consists of five chapters.The introductory part has a critical review of studies of Murdoch's novels, and then draws on the Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, theory of value, etc., to make a cultural and textual analysis, with the aim of presenting the motive of her literary creation and its significance.Chapter One, Origin of Type, starting with an examination of Murdoch's theory of novel, has a theoretical study of reasons which lead up to the appearance of type in her novels. For Murdoch, contingency as the nature of both human beings' and the world's existence is an authentic mode free from the imposition of any form; and what the novel should display is this contingency of human beings and the world. Nevertheless, such a contingency is nothing but that of moral world abstracted from other social factors, since consciousness, for Murdoch, is the fundamental mode of moral being and the resultant contingency is mainly represented as that of human consciousness on the level of morality. The contingency of human being in her novels is thus assumed to be various types of moral consciousness; and the fictional world full of contingency is merely a "simplified" moral society. Moreover, Murdoch's portrayal of modern man's moral situation as the cave-like dilemma further limits readers to a comprehension of the character's moral consciousness on the level of "expecting to be liberated". In the light of the evidence referred to above, the philosophical contemplation intrinsic to Murdoch's theory of novel can be seen as the primary reason of her literary creation of type.The studies from the second chapter to the forth will concentrate on the investigation of the thematic effect of her novels, aiming at revealing the embodiment of type on the level of "thought", i.e., with the character's "consciousness type" as the aesthetic object of our study to cope with the process of how the unenlightened psyche is liberated from the predicament. With Plato's theory of Forms as theoretical framework and the Cave metaphor as the standard to classify characters' consciousness types, each of these chapters begins with a section of theoretical investigation of Murdoch's understanding of modern man's moral situation to provide the theoretical background, against which a clear understanding of the motive of her portrayal of certain consciousness type and its moral and ethical significance can be achieved. And the following sections are textual illustrations of more subtypes for the explanation of the consciousness type.Chapter Two deals with the topic of man trapped in illusion for form. By taking her critiques of contemporary novelists as the point of departure, this chapter attempts to explore reasons implied in man's situation of being trapped. According to Murdoch, the desire of the novelist for form stems from the demand of human consciousness, which is shown in life as sorts of fear of contingency, tending to seek consolation from a certain form. This form is actually a depiction, or an "imitation", of human life. In a broader sense, all theoretical discourses in human life belong to such activities of reading the world with "forms". Like the prisoners in Plato's Cave metaphor mistaking shadowy images for the real, man of the world are trapped in "form", and their interpretation of life is but the image of life. In Murdoch's novels, such as The Bell and A Word Child, this consciousness type of being trapped is always described as a tendency to think of life as a fixed form, and then to impose upon it either the religious form or the philosophical form for the sake of his own purpose. Through an exhibition of the liberation from illusion of form, Murdoch questions any general form of discourse in human life, and in the meantime endeavours to disclose the ultimate reason for human being's moral dilemma.Chapter Three, with an elaboration of Murdoch's critiques of the overemphasis laid by contemporary moral theorists on power, elucidates the nature of man's enchantment by the specialized power in its relation to her moral practices. Moral theorists since the Enlightenment, according to Murdoch, have often been characterized by an affirmation of the power of human autonomy, and such theories of power have been overstated by some contemporary thinkers, say Nietzsche and Sartre, whose affirmations of the human agent's power are consequently at the price of the rejection of religious and metaphysical beliefs. It is due to the rejection of religion and reason as heteronomous constraints that man becomes "superman" beyond social reality. Theoretically, these thinkers' overemphasis on human being's power places man in a situationless world, and morality is accordingly severed from history and tradition. In practice, their views are overused by men like Hitler insofar as the concretization of this theoretical power in actual life eventually results in the disdain of other people's existence. This type of human consciousness which stresses the significance of human power is critically treated by Murdoch as the "self-consciousness" possessed by the people of the Cave who see the fire, by whose light they can distinguish the shadow from the object. However, though enlightened by the fire with recognition of power, they are still in the Cave inasmuch as they unconsciously overstate the power that man is endowed with. Through analyses of the power figures in Murdoch's novels, The Flight from the Enchanter, A Fairly Honourable Defeat and The Time of the Angels, we discover that the power figures are driven by the need of their specialized power to impose the understanding of life as "truth" upon others, while the others are identified as objects, rather than real and free individuals. Murdoch, for one thing, exposes the nature of enchantment by power, and for another, further discloses the plight in which the trapped reside, arguing that their fantasies for a power figure can only be broken by directing their attention on reality, and on the existence of others.In terms of Murdoch's display of modern man's moral dilemma in the preceding two chapters, chapter four focuses on the idea of the good in her moral thoughts and the consciousness type of the good man in her novels. To achieve a good relationship between man and the world, for Murdoch, depends upon our awareness of how to show the "good" to others. But the good that Murdoch proposes is neither the ultimate truth upheld by Plato, nor the weakened or neutralized concept of the good, but the ability of being an un-self and paying loving attention to the existence of other people. Seeing that the image of the sun in Plato's Cave metaphor is an illuminating point for Murdoch, the good comes to be perceived as the source of knowledge, by whose light the good man is provided with the faculty of sight to see the others' existence. Man of enlightenment, girls of innocence and man of humility are three subtypes of this consciousness type categorized from her novels The Green Knight and A Fairly Honourable Defeat, presenting what the ideal good man is like in Murdoch's thought.Chapter Five, Narrative as Rhetoric of Thoughts, aims to reveal how the type is embodied as a narrative feature of Murdoch's novel on the ground of three respects: plot, characterization and an "unhistorical" setting. Firstly, "changelessness" and "change" as two main traits of plot serve well for both the illustration of thematic concepts, where Murdoch's moral thoughts meet literature, and the purpose of her artistic creation, where form meets contingency. Through the allotropic repetition of character and plot, each of her novels offers one road to knowledge of the confrontment of man with the contingent world. Secondly, with respect to characterization, conflicts and dialogue not only justify the dialogue of "thoughts" between characters, but also ensure the intimated association between "I" and "the other" on the dimension of existence. Thirdly, the exhibition of an unhistorical setting is by force of elusiveness and plausibility originated from the device of temporal and spatial dimensions, which further promotes Murdoch's thoughts on broader and deeper levels. In the conclusion part, it first draws a brief conclusion on discussions of type as the rhetorical features, and then positions it in the context of the current novelistic writing, thus summarizing the moral and ethical significance and the creative significance of such a rhetorical creation of type. In view of the analysis of Murdoch's outlook on type by way of her moral thoughts, this paper points out that with dramatic representations of the Cave metaphor Murdoch delineates a special picture of modern man's moral situation with an artistic mode. This is a kind of writing of value, by which Murdoch attempts to emphasize ethical and moral functions. The allotropic presentation of this rhetorical creation presents readers similarities and differences between various moral conditions with the multi-points of view and multi-levels.