Under the Net Gets Under the Skin

(Just a reminder, all my posts contain spoilers to some extent or another.)

There seems to me to be two basic courses that a novelist can follow when employing a first person narrator.  In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s nameless narrator is a charismatic character who takes us on his personal journey and allows us to experience his fears and outrages first hand along with him.  His ravings in the opening section grab us by the throat and let us know who will be our guide.  This use of first person is the use of character, voice, and perspective to control how we understand the world we travel in within the cover of that book.  Holden Caulfield is another captivating character, but unlike Ellison’s narrator, Caulfield doesn’t simply guide us.  We follow him, but we also think beyond his translation of his experiences.  Caulfield does his best to be fair and to rein in his attacks, but he has the perspective of a 15-year-old boy, and we can both revel in it and see beyond it.  In this respect, we have our second use of a first person narrative: the narrator as an unreliable teller.  In Under the Net, Iris Murdoch takes the unreliability of the first person narrator and makes it central to the theme of her novel, and she does so in a truly interesting and original way.  It’s not that we have to decipher Jake Donaghue’s lies that he tells to convince us of some untruth, but that the very adventure we are reading is the result of Jake’s continuing inability to know the truth.

In addition to being a very fun story about a struggling writer’s misadventures in London, Under the Net is a philosophical book.  Jake is writer who is an intellectual and something of a professional bum.  In order to make ends meet, he mainly translates the works of a French writer, who while skilled in the construction of plot, is no more than a hack in Jake’s eyes.  Most of Jake’s attempts at serious writing are left unfinished and abandoned. The one work that has been published met a lukewarm reception at best.  This failed book takes the form of a dialogue between two characters who are discussing the extent to which the truth can be told and communicated, and in some ways, that concern is Jake’s central concern throughout Murdoch’s novel too.  But the deliciousness of Murdoch’s story comes in the fact that Jake, while being honest with those of us reading the novel, is horrible at understanding those around him.

All the actions of the novel stem in some way from Jake’s misapprehension of the situations he finds himself in.  He fails to understand that Hugo (the man whose conversations with Jake provided the raw material for Jake’s published novel) does not hate the novel or Jake for publishing it.  He fails to understand that Hugo can love Sadie over Anna.  He fails even to understand that Hugo would go West instead of East when stepping out to a pub!  He thinks Anna is mimicking Hugo’s sentiments when she founds the mime theater, when in fact Hugo is following Anna’s lead.  He fails to understand that it is Anna chasing Hugo and not the other way around.  Every action that Jake takes that compels the novel forward is based on a misperception of the motives and desires of those who surround him.  And yet, even if we suspect that Jake is jumping to hasty conclusions, we are not allowed to be outside his thoughts.  He speaks to us the truth as he knows it, even though he doesn’t know it, and he couldn’t be more certain that he is right.  It is a brilliant approach to the first person narrative, and even if I loved nothing else about the book, I would love that.

But of course there is so much more to love.  I am a greedy reader, and I want my philosophical ideas and my gripping plot at the same time, and Murdoch is a storyteller after my own heart.  This novel sometimes feels like a French philosophical work: 

When does one ever know a human being?  Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

But instead of creating a philosophical tract, Murdoch presents this exploration of what we know about our fellow human beings as a comedic tale full of rich characters and compelling scenes.  The result is an entertaining read that satisfies both halves of the brain.

There is, I believe, a whole paper to be written on the forms of dialogues in this novel, but I’m not the guy to write it.  Between Hugo and Jake’s philosophical exchange, Lefty’s Socratic method, and Dave’s unyielding positions, there is something that Murdoch is saying about the way we interact with each other in our efforts to find (or force upon others) the capital-T Truth.  If you read the book and write that paper, please send me a copy because I’d love to read it!