(i) Characteristics of Murdoch's novels
* the emphasis on questions of duty/desire, flesh/spirit, illusion/reality
* a group of characters drawn from the educated middle and upper middle classes, and the various labyrinthine network of relationships within the group, especially their sexual relationships
* a tendency towards elaborate and highly complex plots, frequently involving coincidences, enigmas, puzzles and intrigues, with Murdoch as a kind of games master or master of ceremonies, presiding the actions and circumstances of her characters.
* an emphasis within the narrative on the analysis of characters, their feelings, motives, desires and reasoning, conscious and unconscious.
* The elaborate, but often inconclusive, use of imagery and symbolism, often with the suggestion of wider patters of meaning and significance.
The Bell (1958) is not the first (and certainly not the last) of Murdoch's novels to deal with issues of faith and belief in the modern world, and her treatment of spiritual and moral idealism thwarted by the reality of human desires and failings is a recurrent theme in her novels. What makes The Bell so intriguing is, however, the rich patterning of imagery and symbolism onto such a strong central story-line.
(ii) Murdoch and Characterisation
In her essay 'Against Dryness' (published in Encounter) in the late 1950s, Murdoch argued that, in the days of the Welfare State and the consequent tendency towards social uniformity, it was the duty of the liberal novelist to explore and celebrate individuals and individual characters. In this she was placing alongside earlier liberal novelists such as Woolf, Forster and, in the nineteenth century, most obviously with George Eliot. In The Bell we see how, in the opening chapter, (or in the treatment of a characters like Michael), Murdoch is interested in exploring the depths, conscious and unconscious, that lurk within her characters, seen in their motives, their attempts to justify and rationalise their actions, or to bridge the gulf between aspiration and actuality.
However, it is often noted that Murdoch herself does the very thing which she says novels shouldn't do, that is to sacrifice characters on the 'altar' of elaborate and arcane plots. Murdoch enjoys creating such plots, with labyrinthine twists and turns, and exploring the ways in which characters react and attempt to come to terms with the twists and turns of the impersonal forces of fate, coincidence and necessity. It is fairly easy to see how Murdoch does this in The Bell: how, for example, is Michael to respond when Nick returns, or he feels the attraction for Toby, or discovers that Catherine is actually in love with him? Murdoch does not, I feel, attempt to "square the circle" characters and circumstances but she does, I feel, use this conflict as a means of revealing character and also to make a point about character and individuality.
(iii) Meaning, Imagery and Symbolism
One does not need to go very far into the novel before realising that we are within a veritable forest of symbols. The bell, for example, can mean any number of things - faith, death, change, innocence, candour, love, etc., all of these are, at various points in the novel associated with the bell. The novels themselves exploit and suggest these elaborate patterns of images. Think, for example, of the significance of the following within The Bell - clothes, walls, birds (and planes), the Lake, shoes and sandals.
Within a Murdoch novel we are generally confronted with a "real world" in which there is always the suggestion of deep and meaningful significance, suggestion rather than confirmation. Characters may have moments such as Dora's (in the National Gallery) in which they have the intimation of fundamental truths and depths, but what these might be is never finally confirmed, and they always seem to be provisional and arbitrary. Characters search for the final truth, but usually end up being disappointed when such moments end and they lose sight of that glimpse of meaning and significance in life.
This is, I would argue, fundamental to Murdoch's views on character and the personal apprehension of meaning and significance, and it expressed near the end of the novel when Michael attempts to make sense of all that he has experienced: "The pattern which he had seen in his own life had existed only in his own romantic imagination. At the human level there was no pattern. 'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thought than your thoughts.' And as he felt, bitterly, the grimness of these words, he put it to himself: there is a God, but I do not believe in Him."
Michael here has an inkling of Meaning, of God, of Reason and Purpose, but it is no more than that. It is worth remembering here that Murdoch has written extremely well of the French Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. For Sartre, as for Murdoch, it is part of the human condition that we are continually hankering after a sense of Meaning, Reason, Purpose and Significance, a sense which is continually thwarted, but which we cannot abandon because that would make our lives meaningless, and furthermore because we do keep having occasional glimpses of meaning, but also occasional realisations that these are simply human constructions! In rational terms the quest for meaning is irrational, but Man does not live by Reason alone!
This is all rather abstract, but it is important to try to work with because Murdoch is a philosophical novelist. facing those issues of freedom, choice and necessity which have preoccupied the modern and secular age. Her use of symbolism and meaning within the novel is a powerful dramatisation, within the terms of each novel, of the possibility of meaning and significance, but it remains no more than a possibility - the bell may be a manifestation of divine justice and love in the world, but it can also just be a bell!
Characters within the novel choose to live with, work out, ignore or remain oblivious to these questions, and even with these different strategies they may end up as wise or unwise as they started. Think of Dora, who "learns" and "grows" as a person in the course of this novel, without setting out to learn and grow: she, paradoxically, seems to learn and grow more than James or Paul, which is simply one of the ironies of the novel. Ultimately Murdoch's perspective is ironic and non-judgemental - all experience is valuable, and it may be meaningful, or it may not, but who is to judge? Clearly we have come a very long way from the settled and ordered moral world of Mansfield Park.
(iv) Murdoch and the Novel.
Ultimately I think it is Murdoch's philosophical explorations which 'place' Murdoch in the history of the Novel as a form. From these follow certain narrative implications. Her novels are not, strictly speaking, "realistic", even if they purport to deal with a plausible and credible real world of real people: they retain a certain 'ludic' (or games-playing) quality which makes them seem to be "textual inventions". They do not have the self-conscious or self-referential quality of, say, novels like The French Lieutenant's Woman, but they do have a quality of playfulness as labyrinthine constructions of plot and character. Furthermore, in their use of elusive or half-developed imagery and symbolism, they always suggest the possibility of Meaning, but meaning which is personally experienced, subjective, and which often proves to be provisional and arbitrary. Finally, there is the role of Murdoch as narrator herself, a narrator who, in the words of Stephen in Portrait of the Artist, "like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." There may be a Truth, and there may not be, but who is the novelist to dictate what that truth may or may not be? However, there is no disputing Murdoch's humanist commitment to the principles of honesty and integrity, growth and freedom - this commitment to compassionately humane values remains the hallmark of Murdoch's own liberal values and, furthermore, makes her a worthy successor to the tradition of Eliot and Lawrence.