An Evening with Iris Murdoch

ence Steen. Professor Davies began by quoting from something Miss Murdoch had written years ago linking the novelists function with therapy. While perhaps art might at times have a therapeutic effect, she did not think that should be the aim of the artist. Art should seek something fundamental whatever the artist chooses. Here your correspondent feels that his notes and his memory are not adequate to recall or do justice to the discussion. In fact he can do no better than record in random fashion, a few of the thoughts and ideas which the questions evoked and which he managed to capture, eg. 'We live in a post-Freud and post-Marx era since when attitudes have changed fundamentally ...the hours and hours of talking to a psychoanalyst might be just as therapeutic if they had been spent with a friend... Freud got his idea of the subconscious from Plato... Pornography is the end-point of the degradation of art... art which is the opium of the people is bad art, made in totalitarian states to serve the ends of the state... where the good citizen is shown as noble and successful'. Mr Crossley asked Miss Murdoch which novelists of the past 50 years she thought had been most significant. Miss Murdoch began by saying that she was not a reader of the contemporary novel and could not speak about recent work'... 'Joyce disturbed the world of the novel with Ulysses, but he was not a good model, rather a dead-end, he changed the use of language, he was cold, sending out rays of power... Kafka metaphysical and deep, hard to imitate... Virginia Woolf changed the tone of the novel after her things became impossible which before had been accepted, e.g. the narrative style of Dickens or Thackeray, she admired her but did not like her... D. H. Lawrence was a great writer, but not as great