To say that The Bell is a novel of ideas is to misdescribe it. One of Murdoch’s abiding preoccupations was with the complicated, not wholly describable “thinginess” of the physical and moral world, which could be represented in art in a more complex way than it could be analysed in discourse. It is better to say that The Bell is a novel about people who have ideas, people who think, people whose thoughts change their lives just as much as their impulses and feelings do.
That, indeed, describes the book that I read, but I fear that in my casual and often amateurish approach to text, to any text, I may not have plumbed the depths of its true complexity.
It is a novel rich in the interior lives of its characters, and therefore the experience of reading it can provide a satisfying escapism. At the same time, however, it doesn’t lend itself easily to quotation. There aren’t short paragraphs or crisp exchanges of dialogue that embody the deeper themes and meanings the author wants to explore. Instead, dark and foreboding shapes of the “not wholly describable thinginess of the physical and moral world” emerge slowly out of the fog of character thought and action.
My first dogear occurs on page 142.
Michael shook his head as if to clear away a slight haze which was buzzing round him. He began to realize that he had a headache. He really must control his imagination. He was surprised that it could play him such a trick. He was blessed, or cursed, with a strong power of visualizing, but the snapshots which it produced were not usually so startling. Michael felt solemn now.
Michael is Michael Meade, a former schoolmaster and now leader of a lay religious community aligned with an order of Anglican nuns. He is a mostly-closeted gay man, and in this scene he is driving back to his community of Imber Court with Toby, a young man about to enter college and spending a summer at Imber, asleep on the seat next to him.
Michael felt solemn now, responsible, still protective and still joyful, with a joy which, since he had taken a more conscious hold of himself, seemed deeper and more pure. He felt within him an infinite power to protect Toby from harm. Quietly he conjured up the vision of Toby the undergraduate, Toby the young man. Somehow, it might be possible to go on knowing him, it might be possible to watch over him and help him. Michael felt a deep need to build, to retain, his friendship with Toby; there was no reason why such a friendship should not be fruitful for both of them; and he felt a serene confidence on his own most scrupulous discretion. So it would be that this moment of joy would not be something strange and isolated, but rather something which pointed forward to a long and profound responsibility, a task. There would be no moment like this again. But something of its sweetness would linger, in a way that Toby would never know, in humble services obscurely performed at future times. He was conscious of such a fund of love and goodwill for the young creature beside him. It could not be that God intended such a spring of love to be quenched utterly. There must, there must be a way in which it could be made a power for good. Michael did not in that instant feel that it would be difficult to make it so.
Michael, of course, is physically attracted to Toby, and in this passage the reader can see the way he has come to grapple with that reality. It is, in its own way, an almost pure religious ideal, the hope, the demand, that everything within him must be there for something good, for some higher purpose.
Moments later, overcome with these thoughts of protection and shepherding, Michael unexpectedly kisses Toby, and immediately regrets and apologizes for it. The experience shatters Toby’s understanding of the world and his place in it, summarized beautifully in the following sentences from Murdoch:
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.
It is a feeling that numerous other characters in Murdoch’s compelling narrative will experience -- the shifting of the ground under their feet, the realization that what they once thought was real is not what actually is, that there exists some other reality, traditionally hidden from all but the most artistic contemplatives.
There are many surrogates for that reality in the novel -- none perhaps more obvious than the bell itself. The bell in question belongs to the order of Anglican nuns and there are, in fact, two of them. One from the twelfth century which, legend has it, flew out of the bell tower and plunged into the lake after a nun broke her vows by receiving a lover in the Abbey. And a second from the modern day which is to be installed in the bell tower with great ceremony as a long overdue replacement.
Swimming in the lake one day, Toby discovers the ancient bell half buried in the bottom mud, and he, with a young woman named Dora Greenfield, conspire to salvage it and secretly substitute it for the new one as some kind of divine miracle. That plan goes awry, but the juxtaposition of the two bells provides a handy symbol for the novel’s key thematic element. Which, after all, is the real bell? The one that has lain buried in its watery grave for centuries, or the one newly minted and received with much expectation and ceremony. And who, in the end, can tell the difference?
As mentioned in the introduction, it is art that can play a key role in helping us decide. Dora Greenfield is, in fact, a former art student, and now the disillusioned wife of one Paul Greenfield, an art historian spending a summer at Imber Court in order to study some of the 14th-century manuscripts belonging to the Abbey. At one point in the narrative, she flees from her husband and from the lay community at Imber and visits the National Gallery in London, a place she had been in “a thousand times,” where “the pictures were almost as familiar to her as her own face.”
Dora was always moved by the pictures. Today she was moved, but in a new way. 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 values. But now there was something else in it after all.
That, in the end, may be the most important aspect of art, be it paintings in the National Gallery, or interior novels by Iris Murdoch. It provides an objective rock in the sea of subjectivity we otherwise find ourselves swimming in.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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