Comedy And Tragedy But Comedy

Thoughts on Iris Murdoch and that list of comic and satirical novels we made.

Last year at this time I was in London, reading Under The Net and thinking about why it seemed like people still read Murdoch but did not teach her in creative writing classes. I don’t have any data on this other than anecdata as it were, so I can’t back it up. But as my co-teacher from last fall,

Katherine Angel

, was also reading the novel and also had this sense of Murdoch being under-taught, we decided to add this novel, her first, at the last minute.

The title is something that doesn’t make a lot of sense until you see this, the first edition cover. But even that’s a bit of a sleight of hand. The image describes a scene involving the narrator, Jake, who has found himself very drunk and in the London theater of an old flame, alone. He is in the props room, having come to find her to see if she might have a place for him to live after having just lost his last one. The need for a new home is the animating principal of the novel, each attempt at getting one resulting in a new complication. Such as the young man in question, early into the adventure and wrapped in a bear rug, in a prop room, wearing it like pajamas. A terrific image in the novel, and the masks are there also. But there is no net in that scene.

Pure tragedy belongs to the theatre, I think—the novel is essentially tragicomic.

—Iris Murdoch

The title of Murdoch’s novel is a phrase from a book within a book, philosophical dialogues taken from real conversations between Jake and his friend Hugo, who has become a powerful and rich man and as is increasingly apparent, the novel’s antagonist. Under The Net is one of those phrases that becomes a title, flashing by near the end of chapter 6, in the dialogues, when Jake finds a copy of the book he published many years ago, carefully wrapped, in his friend’s sister’s apartment, much to his surprise. That is where he goes next, by the way, after this theatre. The moment is something you could easily miss:

What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

It’s a good description of the struggle to write fiction, to my mind, but maybe not the best title. You may feel differently, that’s fine. I think of titles as structural elements, teaching you something about how to read the novel as you open it, the first music of the novel as it begins. This one is a risky title for a first novel and it is a risky first novel also, it should be said. A literary shaggy dog story with a literal shaggy dog in it, funny and foolish as a way to sneak up on all that is wise and sharp about literary drunks making their way through the London night, trying to make their fortunes. A down on his luck literary translator whose translation may be made into a film by unscrupulous friends and he sets out to put an end to it or at least get his fair share. It feels incredibly alive.

The cover made the title’s philosophical gesture literal, I think, a net strung above the hero as he sleeps in his bearskin rug, making it a part of a visual pun, adding to it. The resulting cover is comic but also a bit like a comic book cover too. This is all conjecture on my part about the artist working on the cover, to be fair. Though I’m now interested in finding out the truth. Where, I don’t know, but I do have faith in Murdoch fans and scholars to help me find this out. It may be that someone has written a history of the cover of Iris Murdoch’s first novel, for example, and I just haven’t seen it yet.

*

What did we hope to teach the students by introducing Murdoch? Well, her physical descriptions of people, their faces, their hair, their general atmosphere, is part of what I think is so enjoyable about her novels. Here’s an example of Jake’s description of Anna, whose theater he falls asleep in:

Yet I had found Anna deep. I cannot think what it is about her that would justify me in calling her mysterious, and yet she always seemed to me to be an unfathomable human being. Dave once said to me that to find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love, so perhaps I loved Anna. She has a husky-speaking voice and a tenderly moulded face which is constantly lit by a warm intent glow from within. It is a face full of yearning, yet poised upon itself without any trace of discontent. She has heavy brown hair which is piled up in curving archaic coils, or was when I knew her first. All that was a long time ago. Anna is six years older than I am, and when I first met her she did a singing act with her sister Sadie. Anna provided the voice and Sadie provided the flash. Anna has a contralto voice that would break your heart even over the radio; and she makes little gestures while she sings which make her quite irresistible face to face. She seems to throw the song into your heart, at least this was what she did to me the first time I heard her, and I never got over it.

Anna is about as like her sister as a sweet blackbird is like some sort of rather dangerous tropical fish, and later on the act broke up.

Later on Murdoch offers an assessment of Anna that the late John Bayley, her husband, refers to in his memoir of her, Elegy For Iris:

Anna is one of those women who cannot bear to reject any offer of love. It is not exactly that it flatters her. She has a talent for relations, and she yearns for love as a poet yearns for an audience. To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. This is no doubt why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others. Or sometimes she would try another technique, that of deadening, by small and steady shocks, the sharpness of jealousy, until in the end the victim became resigned to the liberal scope of her affections, while remaining just as much her slave as ever. I don’t care for this; and I saw through Anna very rapidly. Yet my interpretation of her never robbed her of her mystery, nor did her emotional promiscuity ever turn me against her. Perhaps this was because I so constantly felt, like the warm breeze that blows from a longed-for island bringing to the seafarer the scent of flowers and fruit, the strength and reality of her tenderness for me. I knew that it was very possible that it was with exactly this charm that she held all her admirers. But it made no difference.

Anyway, that was the scale of the enchantment and ambition that Katherine and I were under, approximately, as that term began a year ago.

I am rereading the novel again partly for fun, partly to learn more about the way it is constructed. I meant in part to say so many other things but I will just get to that later. Though, as my old essay about Murdoch from 2015 suggests, I often feel that way.

*

Here is something meanwhile that I’ve been meaning to get out to you: A list of comic and satirical novels generated back at the beginning of August, when I began a thread here on the Substack App and over on Facebook as well. Asterisks indicate a novel was mentioned repeatedly.

It is quite the list. I am a poor assistant to myself in these matters so this list compilation (brief typo just now as complication?) has taken me many hours. Items may be missing. Feel free to add in the comments, and thank you for helping with this list. I hope you enjoy it.

A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Patricia Wants to Cuddle, by Samantha Allen

The Last Will And Testament Of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida

Lucky Jim and The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

Money and The Information by Martin Amis

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah

Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander

Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin

The Idiot and Either/Or by Elif Batuman

White Boy Shuffle, The Sellout, by Paul Beatty*

Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm

Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans

Revolution of Little Girls by Blanche McCrary Boyd

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Dear Popsy by Eric Bishop-Potter

Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood

My Friends by Emmanuel Bove

The Road To Wellville by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Victim by Andrew Boryga

The Master and Margherita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Nonprofit by Matt Burriesci

Sarahland by Sam Cohen

Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns

Happy All The Time by Laurie Colwin

The Wonder Boys and Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

English, August, by Upamanyu Chatterjee

The Country Life by Rachel Cusk

A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis

The Last Samurai and The English Understand Wool by Helen deWitt

French Exit and The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens*

The Fine Art of Fucking Up by Cate Dicharry

Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn

The End of Vandalism and The Black Book by Tom Drury

Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy*

The Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin

Platitudes by Trey Ellis

Darryl by Jackie Ess

I Am Not Sidney Poitier and Erasure by Percival Everett

Travel In The Mouth of the Wolf by Paul Fattarusso

Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

Where Angels Fear To Tread and A Room With A View by E. M. Forster

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

Everyone Knows Your Mother’s A Witch by Rivka Galchen

A Fairly Good Time by Mavis Gallant

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons*

Let’s Not Do That Again by Grant Ginder

Why I Decide to Kill Myself And Other Jokes by Douglas Glover

Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party and Travels With my Aunt by Graham Greene

Less and Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer*

Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez

Cooking With Fernet-Branca by James Hamilton-Patterson

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

After Many A Summer Dies The Swan by Aldous Huxley

The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving

Negrophobia: An Urban Parable by Darius James

Pictures From An Institution by Randall Jarrell*

Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome*

The Laughter by Sonora Jha

Becoming Nigerian: A Guide by Elnathan John

Invisible Things, Loving Day by Mat Johnson

Ride A Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy

Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe

How To Make Love To A Negro Without Getting Tired, by Dany Laferrière

The Radiance Of The King by Camara Laye

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine*

Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner

Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

The British Museum is Falling Down and Trading Places. Small World, Nice Work (a trilogy here) by David Lodge

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos*

The Ask and Homeland by Sam Lipsyte*

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie

The Portable Veblen and The Dog of the North by Elizabeth Mackenzie*

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death Of An American Writer by Jeffrey Cartwright 1943-1954, by Steven Millhauser

The Pursuit of Love and Love In A Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

Lamb by Christopher Moore

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

The Bee Sting and Skippy Dies by Paul Murray*

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabakov

Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

The Bachelor of Arts by RK Narayan

Jameela Green Ruins Everything by Zarqa Nawaz

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman

How To Leave The House by Nathan Newman

I Do Not Come To You By Chance by Tricia Nwaubani

After Claude by Iris Owens

The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park

Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Viktor Pelevin

Masters of Atlantis, Norwood by Charles Portis*

My Search For Warren Harding and Love Junkie by Robert Plunkett

Out With The Stars, Malcolm, Cabot Wright Begins, by James Purdy

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Portnoy’s Complaint and Operation Shylock by Phillip Roth

Dear Committee Members, The Shakespeare Requirement and The English Experience, also known now as The Dear Committee Trilogy, by Julie Schumacher*

Lucinella and Her First American by Lore Segal

Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Office Politics by Wilfred Sheed

Moo by Jayne Smiley*

Remembrance Of Things I Forgot by Bob Smith

I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith

The Interpreters by Woyle Soyinka

The Takeover and Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark

The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Reboot by Justin Taylor

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

The Old Boys and Miss Gomez And The Brethren by William Trevor

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Rejection and Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte

The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić

I’ll Sell You A Dog by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

What Remains of Elsie Jane by Chelsie Wakelyn

The Loved One, Scoop, Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh*

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

Modern Baptists by James Wilcox

Oval by Elvia Wilk

Now Is Not The Time To Panic and The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse

Nothing To Get Excited About by Charles Wright

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Until next time,

Alexander Chee