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Murdoch, Derrida and The Black Prince

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Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts

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Abstract

In this essay I intend to place a chapter of Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writing alongside one of her novels, juxtaposing her piece on Derrida and Structuralism’ from her book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, with her novel The Black Prince, published in 1973. Though Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals was published in 1992, some 19 years after her novel, Murdoch tells us that she read Derrida’s early book Writing and Difference when it was published in 1967, and was ‘impressed and disturbed by it’ (MGM, p. 291). As will become clear, since that time she continually reflected on his works, which she calls ‘brilliant’ and ‘difficult’ (MGM, p. 291), and so it is not an anachronism to suggest that there is some echo of Derrida’s thought in her 1973 novel.

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Notes

  1. In her Romanes lecture (1976) Murdoch discusses Derrida in relation to the issue of voice and writing, which I suggest that The Black Prince illuminates: see Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 31–2. References to structuralism (which Murdoch later oddly attributes to Derrida) are also to be found in the 1970s: see EM, pp. 22 and 249.

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  2. Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953; London: Collins Fontana, 1967), pp. 68–72; Murdoch, MGM, pp. 52–3.

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  3. Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1915), trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1995), pp. 65–70.

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  4. Jacques Derrida, ‘La Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 6–15;

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  5. cf. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D.B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 135–41.

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  6. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak (1967; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 60.

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  7. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 26.

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  8. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 230.

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  9. For example Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. T. Dutoit (Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 80–4;

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  10. Jacques Derrida, Rogues (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 80–90.

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  11. Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 207–72, especially pp. 236–9.

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  12. Murdoch, The Black Prince (1973; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 19.

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  13. Jacques Derrida, ‘Afterward’, in Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 148. Cf. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 36: following Husserl, no clear boundary can be drawn between the linguistic and non-linguistic.

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  14. Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 75–80. Murdoch comments on this in The Fire and the Sun, pp. 31–2; see note 1 above.

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  15. See Murdoch’s conversation with John Haffenden in Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 191–209.

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  16. Bran Nicol, ‘Philosophy’s Dangerous Pupil: Murdoch and Derrida’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47(3) (2001), 591. Like me, Nicol brings Murdoch’s account of Derrida into interaction with a novel (in his case, The Philosopher’s Pupil), but his purpose is different from mine; he aims to examine the relation between philosophy and literature in Murdoch’s writings.

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  17. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 461; Murdoch, MGM, pp. 154–5.

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  18. See Murdoch, ‘Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee’, in EM, p. 5; Murdoch, ‘Salvation by Words’, in EM, pp. 239–40; Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good’, in EM, pp. 205–20 (pp. 215–16 and 219). For a discussion of ‘attention’, see my study of Murdoch in Paul S. Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue between Literature and Christian Doctrine (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 173–204.

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  19. Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), p. 533.

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  20. Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980), p. 292.

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  21. Murdoch in interview with Michael Bellamy, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’, Contemporary Literature, 18 (1977), 129–40.

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  22. This interpretation was first promoted by Freud’s disciple, Ernest Jones, in Hamlet and Oedipus (London: Gollancz, 1949). Richard Todd, in ‘The Plausibility of the Black Prince’, Dutch Quarterly (1978), 82–93, notes how difficult it is to identify Bradley with Hamlet following an Oedipal theme.

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  23. See also Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 41.

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  24. Murdoch identifies Apollo both as the god of art and the Black Eros in JeanLouis Chevalier (ed.), Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch, Centre de Recherches de Littérature et Linguistique des Pays de Langue Anglaise, Université de Caen, 1978; see SA, p. 238.

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  25. Jacques Derrida, ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy’, trans. J. Leavey, in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 54–5 and 64–7.

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  26. See also Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1987), p. 66.

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  27. Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de L’Autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 35 and 160–1.

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  28. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 52–6;

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  29. cf. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 100–10 and 306–13.

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Authors
  1. Paul S. Fiddes
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Kingston University, London, UK

    Anne Rowe (Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre of Iris Murdoch Studies) & Avril Horner (Emeritus Professor of English) (Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre of Iris Murdoch Studies) &  (Emeritus Professor of English)

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© 2012 Paul S. Fiddes

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Fiddes, P.S. (2012). Murdoch, Derrida and The Black Prince. In: Rowe, A., Horner, A. (eds) Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271365_7

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