Iris Murdoch: Muddles and The Mixture as Before

"I do love the way you talk, you're so precise, not like my father. He lives in a sort of rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King all chasing round and round dressed up as people in Chelsea."

This is Julian the daughter of Baffin the popular novelist of the quasi deep Murdochian sort. The author in the mirror of her characters writes against herself. Bradley Pearson the ever so serious, not many words but true ones, in a review of Baffin’s latest, writes:

Arnold Baffin's new book will delight his many admirers. It is, what readers often and innocently want, "the mixture as before." It tells of a stockbroker who, at the age of fifty, decides to become a monk. His course is thwarted by the sister of his abbot-to-be, an intense lady returned from the East, who attempts to convert the hero to Buddhism. These two indulge in very long discussions of religion. The climax comes when the abbot (a Christ figure he) is killed by an immense bronze crucifix which accidentally (or is it accidentally?) falls upon him while he is celebrating mass.

This is all in The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch which I haven’t finished and mightn’t. It’s the insolence of being too successful, too prolific and not allowing the creative energy to gather itself that irritates. It’s Murdochshire on a warm summer’s day and the general sense of ‘muddle’ that confounds. A favourite word of Oxford philosophy which occurs 16 times in ‘Prince’ ,17 times in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, 42 times in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. I include muddles, muddler, muddling etc in this count – it’s the concept that counts, you know.

What does it mean? What could it mean? It ought to have an entry in a dictionary of philosophy. Let me attempt a prolegomena to a sense of it.

a mix up, taking something to be that which it is not, a categorical error, a state of affairs as a false framing (not really love), an unwitting masquerade, misapprehension, confusion, mistake, misprision, misplaced soul searching (solution: keep one in every room), stultification by intent ……..

Murdoch in many places is saying ‘Iris put down that pen, take the dogs for a walk, become more chaste and elegant, cut like a hated editor and for God’s sake don’t strain so much'.

‘I for one;, when did people stop saying that, have reverted to reading again Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Now that’s a novel, not a toy.