A NEW SPIRITUALITY IN IRIS MURDOCH’S NOVELS
A NEW SPIRITUALITY IN IRIS MURDOCH’S NOVELS

Summary/Abstract: The 20th century literature mirrored the social, political and cultural developments of the time, because life had become more diversified and people started to ignore the traditional ways of understanding the world. The diversity and richness of the 20th century life was reflected in the complexity of the 20th century novels that were more realistic than before and tent to acquire modern features. Iris Murdoch was an Irish writer of the 20th century, loved and appreciated in the world, her name being surrounded with an aura of glory. She was considered one of the most important women writers of her age and created twenty-seven novels, three philosophical essays and two philosophical plays for these works being rewarded with The Booker Prize. She had a strong philosophical background starting with Plato, Aristotle, Kant and continuing with Simone Weil and Wittgenstein, but she preferred to say that she created moral psychology. Giving up the rules of the scientific age, Iris Murdoch considers her place in a long line of creators, like Yeats and James Joyce, who refused to limit themselves to the staid realism of the English tradition. In examining Murdoch’s creative magic, I have tried to explain the complexity of this writer’s challenging existentialist fiction. She redefines, in this postmodern era, the limits of the novel of formal realism in order to address ethical issues that are still unresolved in the final decade of the 20th century. Murdoch had the courage of retracing the history of the novel form, bringing back to life techniques now considered out fashioned if not non-novelistic. She refused to console her audience with fulfilled expectations whether modernist or postmodernist ones, because she was able to decree, like a miraculous Demiurge, ineluctable forms, desires, and hopes in characters that often puzzle the readers.

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