The Bell

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a b Conradi, Peter J. (2001). The Saint and the Artist: a Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (3rded.). London: Harper Collins. ISBN 9780007120192. The book has a low-key ending where all the ends are tied up. The two main characters Dora and Michael are the only two remaining at Imber, since the community has broken apart. The Staffords have taken Catherine to a psychiatic clinic in London. Although the two get on well, Michael then leaves, making Dora the last person at Imber. Dora decides not to return to Paul, but instead to go and stay with her friend Sally. Thus the reader is left with Dora's experience and feelings in confusion, much as the novel had started, While diving in the lake in which the legendary Gabriel had supposedly landed, Toby thinks he finds the submerged bell. Delighted, Dora insists that Toby conspire with her to secretly retrieve the old bell and situate it in the bell tower instead of the new one. Dora finds the notion romantic. I've seen your love life in the woods, tempting our virtuous leader to sodomy and our delightful penitent to adultery. What an achievement! So young and so extremely versatile!" Funny, sad, and moving . . . The Bell is a novel about people who have ideas, people who think, people whose thoughts change their lives just as much as their impulses or their feelings do.”—A. S. Byatt

Dora is a young former art student. She is in a tumultuous and estranged marriage with Paul. She is also an outsider to the Imber community. Paul's domineering nature causes her to feel trapped. The events of The Bell lead to Dora's growth as she gains an individual sense of self beyond any male character. She even attempts to save Catherine from drowning, despite not knowing how to swim. By the end of the text, Dora has her own new life. Both sorts of mischief take place in The Bell, one silly, one mean-spirited. Both have reverberations throughout the lay community. Madness, despair, damaged lives and suicide result. Saintliness and sin Morals and spirituality are linked for many of the characters in The Bell. People go to Imber Court, a secluded, religious community, to escape modern society. This is one of the key aspects that attracts Toby to the community, for example. Members feel they can be more in touch with their morals and values in this spiritual place. The good man, in Michael's view, is one who has great self-knowledge, so that he can avoid temptation and direct his spiritual energy towards doing God's will. God requires us to know ourselves and our imperfections, so that we can perfect ourselves. Although what differentiates us makes each of us imperfect, Michael argues that we need such moral imperfection so that we can overcome it. Everyone has a different experience of reality and of God. We obtain moral perfection through our strength, arising both from self-knowledge and our varying experiences of reality, giving us the strength to live as spiritual beings, to act correctly and to perfect ourselves. Like James, he uses the bell to illustrate his moral conception, Catherine is the mezzo-soprano and, innovatively, the prima ballerina of the piece who is immediately identified by Dora as a rival. Catherine is imminently to become a postulant in the convent; or, as her twin brother perceives the situation, to be swallowed alive by the institutional monster of religious passion. Toby, Catherine’s male sexual counterpart, is the the pious, virginal counter-tenor. He is the unsure novice, spiritually as well as sexually unformed.I suspect that no modern novelist would be able to take up such material without an edge of irony or a framework of skepticism. In today’s intellectual universe, belief, particularly religious belief, isn’t taken seriously.

Murdoch’s characters in The Bell do just that. The only problem is that they are still the same people with the same messy lives. We cannot escape ourselves. An immature religion wants to project evil onto others — evil is always external, always outside the walls, and never within. In The Bell Murdoch warns us that a certain kind of “violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.”

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In that lowness, Murdoch found the subject of her novels, each to a greater or lesser degree peopled by delusionals and lunatics. Often, those who are compelled by the attempt to be good are the most dangerous, particularly when they have covered themselves in the cloak of mysticism, a recurring trope that allows Murdoch to study – in common with Muriel Spark – the devastating power of charisma.

Is it more important to have a clear vision of moral absolutes or an understanding of human complexity? Nietzsche saw Plato’s dialogues as the first form of the novel, and there is a sense in which all Iris Murdoch’s novels contain Platonic dialogues, in which knotty problems of the nature of truth, goodness and beauty are worked out. The two leaders of the lay community attached to the Abbey at Imber, James and Michael, represent two different attitudes to the moral and the spiritual life. James sees these as a matter of simple duties, attention to rules, practical goodness. Michael sees them as a matter of imagination and romantic desire. Both make persuasive cases in their sermons, which both rely on different aspects of the symbolism of the bell which is to be installed in the Abbey. Michael, like many of Murdoch’s most attractive heroes, is trying to convert eros into agape, earthly love into spiritual wisdom. In her essay “Existentialists and Mystics” (1970) Murdoch contrasts the existentialist hero— “powerful, self-assertive”—with the mystical hero—“an anxious man trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself”. “The chief temptation of the former is egoism, of the latter masochism.” Murdoch was fascinated by what she repeatedly called the “machinery” of Freud’s description of human behavior, which she treated with respect and suspicion. He presents us, she says in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’ ” (1969) with “a realistic and detailed picture of the fallen man Freud takes a thoroughly pessimistic view of human nature. He sees the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or control. Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings.” Elsewhere she says that Freud’s description of the machinery of masochism shows how fantasy can produce imitations or parodies of the spiritual denial of the self up to the highest level. Michael Meade is her first extended study of spiritual masochism and its unpredictable effects. He tells himself stories of the spiritual life (fantasies), and learns from the Abbess across the water a lesson many of Murdoch’s characters learn in extremis, that the true spiritual life has no story and is not tragic. One of the other main characters is a gay man who initially saw no conflict between his Anglican religion and his sexuality – they seemed to come from the same source -- until he decided he wanted to become a priest. “He was conscious of such a fund of love and goodwill for the young creature [young man] beside him. It could not be that God intended such a spring of love to be quenched utterably.” The novel has a fairly frank discussion of male homosexuality given that it was published in 1958. This Anglo-Catholicism provides a great deal of the dark green, cotton wool, comfort of The Bell. The enclosed convent of Anglican nuns in Imber is not an antithesis to the repressed erotic desires of the characters who fetch up together across the lake in a half-derelict country pile of Imber Court; it is a spiritual celebration of the erotic (One is reminded of Teresa of Avila and her swooning for Christ, her Spouse). I know of at least three similar communities within 15 minutes drive of Oxford. And I lived in one of these while I wrote my doctoral dissertation.*Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.' The novel begins with the journey of Dora Greenfield from London to Imber by train. Dora is a young former art student who is married to the difficult and demanding Paul Greenfield, an art historian who is staying at Imber Court as a guest while studying 14th-century manuscripts belonging to the Abbey. Dora left her husband six months earlier, but he has persuaded her to return to him. On the same train are Toby Gashe, an 18-year-old boy who has just finished school and is going to spend a few weeks as a guest at Imber Court before starting university, and James Tayper Pace, a community member who formerly ran a settlement house and led youth groups in the East End of London. Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination. Think of the Russians, those great masters of the contingent. Too much contingency, of course, may turn art into journalism. But since reality is incomplete art must not be afraid of incompleteness. Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images; and what it requires now is a much stronger and more complex conception of the former.” Why does Dora believe that secretly substituting the old bell for the new one will be “a magical act of shattering significance, a sort of rite of power and liberation” (p. 196)?

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ - Shakespeare, Hamlet Fletcher, John; Bove, Cheryl Browning (1994). Iris Murdoch: a descriptive primary and annotated secondary bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing. ISBN 0824089103.A new bell is commissioned to be installed in the Abbey. The book follows the story of the two bells, old and new. The old bell is discovered by Toby when, curious, he dives to the bottom of the lake. He has a crush on Dora, and, confused, he eventually shares the knowledge with her. The two of them then decide to lift the bell from the lake and substitute it for the new one as a prank. Everyone appears to have secrets. Two of the community feel they are in love with others, there is a failed marriage, there is a snatched kiss, there is subterfuge. Yet we are almost always directed to feel that every individual is attempting to act by their conscience.