The Bell

by Iris Murdoch

touches of the fey.

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.”

She argued that the success of Liberalism, the arrival of the Welfare State, had removed certain political incentives to thinking about human beings as “real various individuals struggling in society”. For the nineteenth-century novelist, she said, quoting Marx, it was possible to see characters as both types and individuals merged. People in that world were only partly free agents—they interacted with a complicated moral world from which they had much to learn.

You cannot, of course, have a hard idea of truth if you have insufficient faith in the human capacity to apprehend or describe the world.

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.”

One of Murdoch’s abiding lessons was the difficulty and necessity of imagining other people, with centres of consciousness as real as our own, and different. This lesson is dramatised differently through the eyes of a first-person narrator failing to learn it, from when it is seen through a spread-out cast of human imaginations.

There are things novels cannot contain, but can point to. In that sense this elegant novel is essentially incomplete, as its author understood.

That was marriage, thought Dora; to be enclosed in the aims of another.

She had retained her prejudices when she lost her religion.

‘Well sought, dear James and Toby,’ said Father Bob Joyce. ‘There is more rejoicing over what is lost and found than over what has never gone astray.’

‘The great thing about a dog’, said Nick, ‘is that it can be trained to love you.’

As Dora looked round the room it occurred to her how nice it was to live once more in a confined space which one was free to organize, with small resources, as one pleased.

She’d see the place in hell before she’d let a nun meddle with her mind and heart.

Dora’s capacity to forget and to live in the moment, while it more frequently landed her in grave trouble, made her also responsive without calculation to the returning glow of kindness. That she had no memory made her generous. She was unrevengeful and did not brood; and in the instant as she crossed the room it was as if there had never been any trouble between them.

Mockery did not come easily to Dora, and had to be thought out beforehand.

His encounter with the Abbess changed his life and his plans completely. With an ease which at first surprised him and which later seemed part of an inevitable pattern, the Abbess imparted to Michael the idea of making the Court the home of a permanent lay community attached to the Abbey, a ‘buffer state’, as she put it, between the Abbey and the world, a reflection, a benevolent and useful parasite, an intermediary form of life. There were many people, she said, and Michael was but too ready to credit her since he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

Michael had always held the view that the good man is without power.

It scarcely occurred to him that his religion could establish any quarrel with his sexual habits. Indeed, in some curious way the emotion which fed both arose deeply from the same source, and some vague awareness of this kept him from a more minute reflection.

By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle.

He had been guilty of that worst of offences, corrupting the young: an offence so grievous that Christ Himself had said that it were better for a man to have a millstone hanged about his neck and be drowned in the depth of the sea.

It was indeed strange that God could have made two creatures so patently from the same substance and yet in making them so alike made them so different.

Spiritual power was indeed like electricity in that it was thoroughly dangerous. It could perform miracles of good: it could also bring about destruction.

Nick had been brought back to him, surely by no accident. He did not dare to imagine that he was himself to be the instrument of the boy’s salvation; but he thought it possible that he might be destined, in some humble way, to stand by, as one who has a small part in some great ceremony, while this was indeed achieved. He was after all, where Nick was concerned, to have a second chance. He could not be meant to reject it. The thing chimed in so exactly with Catherine’s departure from the world. A being of such purity, as he now in exalted mood saw her, might indeed effect the salvation of her brother, and in some way his own as well, and miraculously the redemption of the past.

She had been much upset that morning, on the little walk with Paul, to see a magpie flying off from the lake with a frog in its beak. ‘Do you think the frog knew what was happening? Do you think animals suffer as we do?’ ‘Who can say?’ said Peter. ‘But for myself I believe with Shakespeare that “the poor beetle that we tread upon in corporal sufferance feels a pang as great as when a giant dies”.’ ‘Why can’t the animals all be good to each other and live at peace?’ said Dora, twirling the parasol. ‘Why can’t human beings?’ said Michael to Toby, who was walking beside him.

It had to be admitted that James had been right; the present organization at Imber simply had no place for a sick man such as Nick. It was no one’s business to look after him.

Michael could not now see Nick, as James so dramatically saw him, as a destructive force.

Peter came back and motioned his companions forward. ‘Come and look,’ he said, ‘only don’t come too near. There’s one splendid catch. The little goldcrest in that cage. See him, the little fellow with the red and yellow streak on his head. The rest are sparrows and tits, I’m afraid. And one nuthatch in the far one.’ The birds were inspected while Peter photographed the goldcrest through the netting. ‘Why ever do they go in?’ Dora wondered. ‘For food,’ said Peter. ‘I lay down a little bread and nuts as bait. Then they try to get out by flying what seems the easier way into the second compartment, and then its still harder for them to escape. Some birds will even enter an unbaited trap out of sheer curiosity.’ ‘Again, like human beings,’ said Michael.

Michael observing her thought she epitomized everything he didn’t care for about women; but he thought this with detachment, liking her all the same, and feeling too good-tempered at present to feel distaste for anyone.

‘It’s as good as the real thing!’ cried Dora. ‘Nothing’s as good as the real thing,’ said Peter. ‘It’s odd that even a perfect imitation, as soon as you know it’s an imitation, gives much less pleasure.

‘I think the moral is don’t be found out. Don’t you agree, Toby?’ said Peter, laughing.

Michael felt suddenly very happy. He felt as if he had gathered all these people benignly about him and as if he were in some way responsible for the beautiful evening, for the gaiety and innocence of it all. He found the word ‘innocence’ coming naturally to his mind, and did not pause to ponder over it. How rarely now he had this sense of being, in the company of other people, at leisure and at ease.

We were told at school, at least I was told at school, to have ideals. This, it seems to me, is rot. Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality - when what we need most is just precisely to see reality.

The good man lives by faith. Galatians three eleven. I think we are meant to take this remark quite literally. The good man does what seems right, what the rule enjoins, without considering the consequences, without calculation or prevarication, knowing that God will make all for the best. He does not amend the rules by the standards of this world. Even if he cannot see how things will work out, he acts, trusting in God. He does the best thing, breaking through the complexities of situations, and knows that God will make that best thing fruitful. But the man without faith calculates. He finds the world too complicated for the best thing, and he does the second best thing, thinking that this in time will bring forth the best. Ah, how few of us have the faith spoken of by Saint Paul!’

Innocence in ourselves and others is to be prized, and woe to him who destroys it, as our Lord Himself has said. Matthew eighteen six.

At such times as this one may well feel that the purposes of God are visible in this world. One may even feel that the age of miracles is not over.

That laugh moved Toby strangely. Of course there was no reason why nuns shouldn’t laugh, though he never normally imagined them laughing. But such a laugh, he thought, must be a very very good thing: one of the best things in the world. To be good and gay was surely the highest of human destinies.

Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people’s imperfection.

And as Michael contemplated that tiny distance between the thought and the act it was like a most narrow crack which even as he watched it was opening into an abyss.

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

Memories of the previous evening returned to him vividly, and he had a curious sense of being unfaithful, followed by a feeling of the utter messiness of everything. Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself. Toby looked up at the wall.

‘Was it hell?’ ‘It’s not too bad actually,’ said Dora. ‘I’m only up here for the day, you know. I felt I needed a change. All the people are nice. I haven’t seen any nuns yet, except one that lives outside. But there’s a horrible feeling of being watched and organized.’

Here too, she felt, she was being organized. The sense of unreality returned; after all, there were no meetings and no actions. She stood for a while miserable and irresolute. She no longer wanted to stay and have lunch with Noel. She wanted to get away from the telephone. She picked up her coat and her bag, scribbled a note to Noel, and began to trail down the stairs. She knew Noel wouldn’t mind. That was a wonderful thing about Noel, and made him so unlike Paul; he never bothered about little things such as one’s coming to lunch with him and then suddenly deciding to go away.

‘I can’t fight,’ said Dora. ‘I never could tell the difference between right and wrong anyway. But it doesn’t matter.

She marvelled, with a kind of gratitude, that they were all still here, and her heart was filled with love for the pictures, their authority, their marvellous generosity, their splendour. It occurred to her that here at last was something real and something perfect. Who had said that, about perfection and reality being in the same place? Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it part of her fantasy make it worthless. Even Paul, she thought, only existed now as someone she dreamt about; or else as a vague external menace never really encountered and understood. But the pictures were something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed to be subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something else in it after all.

Her real life, her real problems, were at Imber; and since, somewhere, something good existed, it might be that her problems would be solved after all. There was a connexion; obscurely she felt, without yet understanding it, she must hang onto that idea: there was a connexion.

‘Nothing is too difficult,’ said Dora. ‘I feel this was meant for us. I should like to shake everybody up a bit. They’d get a colossal surprise - and then they’d be so pleased at having the bell, it would be like an unexpected present. Don’t you think?’ ‘Wouldn’t it be - somehow in bad taste?’ said Toby. ‘When something’s fantastic enough and marvellous enough it can’t be in bad taste,’ said Dora. ‘In the end, it would give everyone a lift. It would certainly give me a lift! Are you game?’ Toby began to laugh. He said, ‘It’s a most extraordinary idea. But I’m sure we couldn’t manage it.’ ‘With an engineer to help me,’ said Dora, ‘I can do anything.’ And indeed as she stood there in the moonlight, looking at the quiet water, she felt as if by the sheer force of her will she could make the great bell rise. After all, and after her own fashion, she would fight. In this holy community she would play the witch.

It was true that a person of great faith could with impunity have acted boldly: it was only that Michael was not that person. What he had failed to do was accurately to estimate his own resources, his own spiritual level: and it was indeed from his later reflections on this matter that he had, with a certain bitterness, drawn the text for his sermon. One must perform the lower act which one can manage and sustain: not the higher act which one bungles.

Each one of us apprehends a certain kind and degree of reality and from this springs our power to live as spiritual beings: and by using and enjoying what we already know we can hope to know more.

This is the struggle, pleasing surely in the sight of God, to become more fully and deeply the person that we are; and by exploring and hallowing every corner of our being, to bring into existence that one and perfect individual which God in creating us entrusted to our care.’