Transcendence And Disunity: A Study Of Iris Murdoch’s “void”

Iris Murdoch(1919-1999)was a distinguished British writer.She was a Booker Prize winner,and the last first-class writer in Britain according to Harold Bloom.Murdoch writes in the intermediacy between moral philosophy and literature.Murdoch sets her fiction against the backdrop of postwar Britain,an era marked by degraded institutional religion and absent conventional morality.She successfully construes a variety of characters that are bogged down in the muddles of philosophical thinking and moral reflection.In the penultimate chapter of her philosophy treaties,Metaphysics as a Guide to Moral,Murdoch brings forward “void”,a term initially coined by Simone Weil,who defines it as “absence of Good”,“the pain,the evil”,“lack of balance” and “emptiness”.But the chapter seems to be unfinished.This Ph D dissertation centers on the recons connotation of void in Murdoch’s fictions including The Times of the Angels,The Sea,the Sea,The Book and the Brotherhood,The Message to the Planet and The Green Knight.The dissertation argues that Murdoch’s void in fictions not only conforms to its philosophical counterpart,but also embraces more possibility in elaboration – transcendence standing for moral ascendance,spiritual pilgrim and religious!revitalization.The dissertation argues that Murdoch’s “void” is paradoxical,featuring both transcendence and disunity.On the one hand,void displays the wicked and nihilistic aspects of spiritual life,and thus emphasizes the importance of reality in avoiding traps of fantasy and ego during moral ascendance;on the other hand,void plays the role of ultimate moral goal,zenith of spiritual progress and transcendence of religious practice.To Murdoch,void is the epitome of corrupted spiritual world and also the ground zero of ethical elevation.To demonstrate the complicated and paradoxical void,Murdoch interweaves reification,dynamics and conversation with void in her fictions.Starting with Christian mysticism,she presents her readers a picture of “the dark night of the soul” and reveals a path from “detachment” to “attention”;Then she turns to realistic life and dynamically orchestrates individual amorality and the loss of public ideology;Regarding Buddhism,she constructs the exchange and convergence between Buddhism and Christianity in her fictions,where both nirvana in Tibetan Buddhism and shunyata in Zen Buddhism find their forms;Technically Murdoch initiates trans-spatial dialogues with different texts through intertextuality,unleashing more potential in interpreting.Murdoch’s void is comprehensive,covering all characters and narrations.She stresses both the unavoidability of transcendence in morality and practical moral efforts under the prerequisite of distinguishing fantasy from reality.The void the dissertation discusses here is not merely spiritual trauma or moral degeneration,because the contemporary Western spirit sphere is an amalgam of Christian traces,war traumas,national identity and yearning for Oriental enlightenment.Thus only a comprehensive discussion of the above elements can transmute void into a new philosophical debate,moral understanding and religious reflection.The endeavor made in this dissertation enriches the realm of void in the field of literary studies and cultural criticism.Some previous studies on Iris Murdoch’s void have discussed void as a term of moral philosophy term,but there is still a lack of study focusing on the reified definition of void and its extension and metamorphosis in fictional context.The dissertation argues that Murdoch originally defines void in her fictions rather being a docile apprentice of Weil.Murdoch’s void shows pursuit of transcendent and supreme spiritual life,as well as the wicked,suffering and traumatized aspects of people’s real life.Additionally,the whole picture is displayed after intricate experience of confusion,fantasy,degeneration,and death or awakening.The spiritual pilgrim is not a linear ascendance;but fulfilled with regression and circulation,which accentuate the authenticity of Murdoch’s void.The dissertation explores transcendence and disunity of Murdoch’s void from the following four dimensions,namely,“Mystical Traces: Void Transcending Boundaries”,“Zeitgeist Tracker: Dynamic Void”,“Oriental Enlightenment: Buddhist Void” and “Experimental Forms: Intertextual Void”.The first chapter displays that Murdoch’s reflection on the past and the remnants of Christian mysticism enriches the connotation of void with images and symbols.Expostulating St John of the Cross’ s “the dark night of the soul” in The Time of the Angels and Simone Weil’s notion of “graviton”,“attention” and “void” in The Green Knight,Murdoch illumines the partial applicability of mysticism in postwar era and removes the extreme mythological traces from void.“Zeitgeist Tracker: Dynamic Void” reveals Murdoch’s pondering of the present and the shifting of void from individual morality to public ethics.After exploring disunity in transcendence as the common ground of the spiritual pilgrims of two protagonists in The Sea,The Sea,the loss of public political ideology,and destruction of political Utopia and concerns of feministic ethics in The Book and the Brotherhood,Murdoch orients “void” as the joint point of individual moral and public ethics.“Oriental Enlightenment: Buddhist Void” works on Murdoch’s construction of future and the interpretation of Buddhist teaching in fictions.The chapter interweaves Tibetan Buddhism into The Sea,the Sea,and Zen Buddhism into The Green Knight,and thus accentuates the religious connotation of void and its conformity in modern context.The last chapter is Murdoch’s attempts at literary techniques and reification of void in intertextuality.By intertextual reference between The Times of the Angels and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed,and dual intertextual references between The Message to the Planet and Primo Levi’s “the Auschwitz Tribology” and The Bible,Murdoch enriches the spiritual and moral connotations of void in conversations.The five novels,with their rich connotation,are comprehensive reconstruction of Murdoch’s void and reflective of Murdoch’s ever deepening moral thoughts on spiritual life in a contemporary context.