Iris Murdoch's Under the Net

This current post was meant to be written as a continuation of this post, but with the packing and a lot of other things coming up, I just had to push it off for several months now!  I'm not sure if I will ever get through the whole of Iris Murdoch (or Muriel Spark for that matter), but I was told that her first book, Under the Net, was a particularly strong one to start with.  And it is a fairly fun romp, though every now and again, you want to give the main character Jake Donaghue, a good shake for being so stubborn or short-sighted.  I think in particular his decision to stop translating books by the French author Jean Pierre Breteuil once Jean Pierre actually went and wrote a decent book was petty and small.

While it is hardly a new insight, I did like the way Murdoch expressed the idea that a person really can't know how others see him or her and that these others have internal lives in which the observer may play only a fairly small role.  Given how I have continually uprooted myself from family and potential friends, this is not news to me.  On the flip side, because I identify so closely with academics, they all scattered anyway, and even if I had stayed in Toronto or Chicago (both places where I went to grad school), they would have moved away from me.  Even now that I am moving back to Toronto, I believe I will only be near two or three people that were in my Masters program, and a couple of people in the transportation world that I know reasonably well from conferences. I've actually written before on rootlessness and how Simmel argued that for some people, their ties were not primarily geographic.  That is certainly true of me.

But back to the point at hand, back in January I finally read Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen, and it expressed this same view that Donaghue has, i.e. that we are only fairly minor actors in other people's dramas, though this role can expand and shrink based on how much we interact with others.

Anyway, here are the passages from Under the Net:
We all live in the interstices of each other's lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything. (p. 50)

Donaghue realizes he had been mistaken about Anna's true feelings: "I had no longer any picture of Anna. She faded like a sorcerer's apparition; and yet somehow her presence remained to me, more substantial than ever before.  It seemed as if, for the first time, Anna really existed now as a separate being and not as a part of myself.  To experience this was extremely painful. (p. 268)

I hope or at least think that I am bigger than Donaghue in that Under the Net is reasonably close to the kind of novel I hope to write some day -- some amusing episodes, some tolerably profound sentiments passed back and forth (though hopefully I can at least give different characters  different voices rather than being uniform).  I even was going to have an escape out the window which occurs in Under the Net (fortunately such escapes are common enough that one cannot be accused of plagiarizing any particular one).  So I could choose to mope or at least feign unhappiness about being scooped (which is more or less Donaghue's reaction to Jean Pierre's good fortune in finally writing a well-received book), or I can just get on with the business of writing.

As far as that goes, I clearly need to clean out more of the basement before I can really have a productive space conductive to creative writing.  It is past time to shut down the blog for the day (though I am feeling reasonably satisfied about the last four posts or so) and spend some time unpacking and sorting and reshelving.