LITMIR.BIZ

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So you would cut all speech, except the very simplest, out of human life altogether. To do this would be to take away our very means of understanding ourselves and making life endurable.

      Annandine: Why should life be made endurable? I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story – but that doesn’t stop all stories from being lies. Only the greatest men can speak and still be truthful. Any artist knows this obscurely; he knows that a theory is death, and that all expression is weighted with theory. Only the strongest can rise against that weight. For most of us…truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. (81)

      All speech lies, and art is only a special form of speech, yet great art alone can tell us essential truths. The same idea occurs in An Accidental Man twenty years later, where the novelist Garth says, ‘you may know a truth but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie’ (107). Under the Net is as full of artists as it is of philosophers – it concerns, in part, the ancient quarrel between the two, between art and truth. Jake is an artist who writes philosophy of a sort, a translator who has written and had torn up an epic poem, and who ends the book ready to write a novel. His friend Dave Gellman is a ‘pure’ linguistic philosopher. Mrs Tinckham, whose shop Jake finds welcoming, reads Amazing Stories and lives in a world ‘where fact and fiction are no longer clearly distinguished’ (18). Anna is a singer who, being in love with Hugo, takes over like Jake what in him is lived out (Hugo is the man trying to get beyond duality) and creates a second-hand vicarious version of it in the mime theatre. She calls singing ‘corrupt’, ‘exploiting one’s charm to seduce people’, compared to the puritan ideal of mime, which is ‘very pure and very simple’.

      The art-form which dominates the story and links most of its picaresque worlds – raffish-bohemian, sporting, and high capitalist – is film. This is the world Madge is suing to enter, over which Sadie reigns as a star, and which rumours tell us Anna may be seduced by, though we last hear of her not in Hollywood but as a singer in Paris. Murdoch wrote of the necessity of thinking of reality as ‘a rich receding background’ (ad). This idea – which is incidentally not the assertion of a simple realist but rather of one who believes that truth lies in a certain kind of directedness – gets into the text in a variety of ways. Just as we meet Hugo for most of the text only through Jake or Anna’s reflections and copies of his world-view, so there is in the worldly realm of film also a recession of power figures. Hugo is involved in film-making too, which gives this recession another kind of piquancy. Jake is outwitted by Sadie and Sammy Starfield over the theft and use of a Breteuil translation he has made. They in their turn are outwitted by Madge and possibly H.K. Pringsheim, who are going to ‘wipe out’ Hugo’s film company. Madge undergoes two changes of style during the book, and there is some ‘final’ paymaster behind Madge’s second metamorphosis into a starlet in the making, but though Jake muses about this person and imagines him in three different guises, his curiosity remains unsatisfied. Just as Hugo is the absent centre of the world of ideas, so there is some final paymaster in the world of power who also makes Jake feel peripheral.

      Murdoch drew attention to F.M. Cornford’s comparison of the cinema with Plato’s Cave, a place of darkness, false glitter, specious Goods, mechanical fantasy. In The Fire and the Sun television figures twice as an image of Platonic eikasia, the lowest realm of illusion. Film’s standards of truthfulness and accuracy are evoked for us in the scene at Hugo’s studio in Chapter 12. Sadie is playing the part of Orestilla in a film about the Catiline conspiracy. Sallust says of Orestilla that no good man praised her save for her beauty, and Cicero professed to believe her to be not only Catiline’s wife but his daughter too. Despite three eminent ancient historians on the film’s payroll the script presents her as ‘a woman with a heart of gold and moderate reformist principles’ (UN 140)!

      Jake rejects the inglorious, tawdry consumerist fantasies of film in Paris where Madge offers him a sinecure position as scriptwriter, a rejection paralleled by his distancing himself from Lefty Todd’s requirements also. Madge asks him to use his art, if only part-time, to prettify capitalism; Lefty wishes him to serve the revolution. Though this is to make the book sound unduly allegorical, the echo is there. Jake is declaring for the independence of art, which best serves society when it serves its own truth, in rejecting both Lefty and Madge.

      

      Under the Net is full of lockings-in and lockings-out, of unlocking and of theft. It is also full of jokes about copying, and Jake occupies a world perplexingly full of copies. Murdoch noted that in writing the novel she was copying Beckett and Queneau as hard as she could, but that it resembles nothing by either of them (Caen, 1978); such an account of the book’s gestation also mirrors its themes.

      The theme of doubling is most apparent in Jake’s feelings about the Quentin sisters who, like Gainsborough’s daughters in the painting that Dora visits in the Tate Gallery in The Bell, are ‘like, yet unlike’. Jake mistakes the sisters and his feelings for them. He thinks the singer Anna ‘deep’ because she handles her own emotional promiscuity with an apparent slippery success, and finds the film star Sadie glossy and dazzling and hard. His quest is dramatised for us in the superb scene in the Tuileries where he pursues a woman he takes for Anna but who merely resembles her, and where the statuesque stone lovers mock and imitate the human ones. Moreover Paris, full on the fourteenth of July, recalls and parodies the City of London, empty at night, and the glassy Seine is explicitly compared with the tidal Thames. Notre Dame is reflected in the tideless Seine ‘like a skull which appears in the glass as a reflection of a head’. There is a catalogue of churches in both London and Paris. We are told that all women copy one another and approximate to a harmonious norm (10). In another episode which has been related to G.E. Moore and David Pears,¹⁰ Dave Gellman is writing an article for Mind on the incongruity of counterparts:

      he wrote sitting in front of a mirror, and alternately staring at his reflection and examining his two hands. He had several times tried to explain to me his solution but I had not yet got as far as grasping the problem. (157)

      Finally, in the last chapter, and before Jake meets Mrs Tinckham and her cat, which has perplexingly but only partly copied itself, producing half Siamese and half tabby kittens, he hears in an upper room someone playing the piano. ‘Someone else picked up the tune and whistled it’ (224).

      Thus is one of the novel’s themes – plagiarism – mockingly elaborated. The sea of small, shy jokes about copying matters because copying is one of the book’s great themes. Jake copies Hugo’s ideas in ‘The Silencer’ just as Anna copies his ideas in the mime theatre. In each case Hugo ironically turns out to be too modest to recognise the reflections. He is, as Jake comes to see, a ‘man without reflections’ (238). He is closest to the truth of all the characters, because he lacks much self-image. He can begin to educate Jake twice – first in showing him what the world looks like to one who lacks preconception, and then at the end by showing him the truth about his relations with the other characters. Hugo’s wisdom represents the direction in which art must be pulled if it is to succeed in making a structure that illuminates what it points to without too greatly obscuring it; in a sense, without lying.

      The point that Jake lies and is an unreliable narrator is made many times. He has a rule of ‘never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion’ (13). He lies to the reader that he pays Madge ‘little rent’, and confesses that he pays none. Soon afterwards with Anna he tells ‘my first lie’ (43), that he has nowhere to sleep that night. He assumes that others are lying back to him, and his habit of untruth has consequences since when Sadie – whom he has decided is a ‘notorious liar’ (68) – tells him plainly that Hugo is in love with her, he permits himself to believe that it is really she who loves Hugo. When questioned by Lefty he notes that under direct questioning he usually lies (96). During his crucial encounter with Hugo in the hospital his asseveration that ‘I felt I had to be desperately truthful’ is followed within five lines by ‘uttering my first lie’ (220).

      Jake’s habit of untruth is explicitly connected with his being an ‘incorrigible artist’ (25). His care for verbal shapeliness and impressiveness is evidenced when, in considering how to tell

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