When considering book titles great restraint must be used, especially in an era where WikiPedia and google are just a mouse click away. So before we read too many words of it let’s consider the title, Under the Net. You do realize the quality of the clues we are given? It’s a comic novel about work and love, wealth and fame (from the cover), a winner says Kingsley Amis, and the summary on the back probably gives up most of the characters. As clues go these suck.
It is clear that I have no idea yet what Murdoch means by Under the Net. I will claim insufficient information. Most likely she is talking about a cast net and not a trammel (since it is not called through the net) or a seine (since it is not called in the net.) The title is doing its work; I must read to find out if Jake Donaghue, the garrulous artist, escapes or becomes entangled.
I did not know who Raymond Queneau was before reading the dedication and so I have an early gift from this book.
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At first I thought there ought to be fewer verbs in this sentence:
With a book published in the early 1950′s by an author in her fifties, this is an interesting point of view given to a gathering of homosexuals. I would say enlightened but for the negativity in the second sentence. No further opinion is given; the treatment of the passage is subdued (I see it still goes on.) She is speaking in her philosopher’s voice and we will probably get more of that.
I haven’t read any of Murdoch’s philosophical work but I wonder if writing a comic novel is what she does to relax.
I’m not getting this:
Our man Jake is trying not to commit to Lefty. I know Orion the hunter is from Greek mythology and that the gods sent Scorpio to kill him by stinging his foot. The gods were unhappy about Orion’s ego. There was a goddess involved that got him put into the sky. That is the extent of my knowledge of mythology relating to Orion. What is his foot doing in Jake’s eye?
When I first read your deconstructive evaluation of “net” as used in the title, Under the Net, I thought that there were possibilities for something similar with respect to “under.” After all, it has been the opening gambit in a variety of titles: Hesse’s Unterm Rad, Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, Jagger and Richard’s Under My Thumb. Others?
But that might move us away from some of the other more interesting discussion points you have raised. For example, I am curious about your reading of the gathering at Gellman’s home as “a gathering of homosexuals.” I did not read it that way, though that is not to say it could not be read so. I just wonder what textual evidence was behind your reading/response. My reading was that it was just one of the many “regular” but informal gatherings of Gellman’s students of philosophy. Granted they are all male and young and “beardless.” And there is a “homosocial” air that hangs about the British education system. But the same could have been said for the university atmosphere in the US at the same time. Men dominated the student and professor populations, though the attachment of any adjective of the form “homo-whatever” to any of their gatherings, at that time, could well have been “fightin’ words.” Going back over the scene, I still read it merely as (and the word occurred to me during the first read) a “homosocial” gathering of students in much the same extracurricular way we met with friends and professors to discuss “pressing issues.”
I do believe though that you have nailed the crux of that scene. I also stumbled over that sentence [in fact I was going to use it as a “favorite moments” quote but you beat me to it]. At the risk of once again suggesting intent on the part of the author, we have to remember that nothing about stories is random or haphazard. Consider the following:
And it (“it” being “ought” or “oughtn’t”) surfaces again in the conversation with Hugo concerning “talk” (which is really a discussion dancing around the tenets of speech-act theory) recorded on page 60. The philosophical fragment uttered by one of the students, while not specifically a quote of Kant, is part of the ground of Kant’s theory of morality [one of the overt clues to this is Dave’s shouting across the room later in the scene something about “the third Critique,” which was Critique of Judgment, Kant’s digression into aesthetics]. So, as you pointed out, there is a philosophical “voice” running through the story. And it gets stronger the farther into the story we get. Recall that we talked, during the reading of Lolita, of this entity we called the “implied author.” In these philosophical irruptions (as opposed to eruptions) we are seeing the “implied author” which stands between the text and Murdoch. That Murdoch herself was a philosopher is irrelevant. Though, it certainly provided her with the ready knowledge to create the voice controlling the philosophical subtext of the story.
“Ought brings you back to is in the end.” In the story, this remark occurs temporally after the discussions with Hugo; yet, it sets up the presence of “ought/oughtn’t” in the reporting of those discussions, dealing with both aesthetics and with speech-acts—both important thematic elements in the story being developed by the implied author, not by Jake; Jake is just “telling” the story. “Ought” denotes obligation. “Is” denotes presence, being. What can we do with the connotations of those denotations, acting in the relation established in the utterance “Ought brings you back to is in the end,” that will answer the question, “Yes, but what sort of is?”?
Too philosophically speculative for me at this hour . . . But, I believe that that apparently chance utterance at a gathering of students of philosophy was no accident. I believe the statement is crucial to tying the text together. We’ll see . . .
More to follow as I catch up . . . Jake and Hugo just spoke on the phone. I want to consider the metanarrative aspects of the text at some point.
We have seeded a discussion off-line and hopefully this comment can bring us back to order. Wittgenstein believed that language only allows us to express the concrete and is meaningless for discussions of abstractions like metaphysics. This constraint is the net that language throws over truth.
An example of this is Hugo’s discussion with Jake that hints of this limitation of language:
Murdoch has contrived a wonderful discussion between the two characters. Jake, garrulous artist (;-), perhaps distracted from his own art by translating popular writing, is having the process of writing words about feelings questioned by Hugo the idealist. It is worth re-reading this passage because it closes so well. Hugo convinces Jake of this language failure so much that Jake claims that “… almost anything one says, except things like ‘Pass the Marmalade’ or ‘There’s a cat on the roof’, turns out to be a sort of lie.”
Just a quick note, for now: another coincidence, perhaps. If you still have your copy of the Tractatus lying about, you might find that one of the translators of the work is none other than David F. Pears.
The net is taking on the characteristics of a web.
You might recall the book section I sent you when we were reading Lolita. It came from Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, by Lisa Zunshine. Zunshine’s primary premise is that recent theoretical work in cognitive science—particularly in the realm of interpersonal relations—can “furnish us with a series of surprising insights into our interaction with literary texts” (4). She goes on to suggest that “fiction engages , teases, and pushes to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity” (4). The “mind-reading” she is talking about here is not telepathy; rather, “it is a term used by cognitive psychologists, interchangeably with ‘Theory of Mind,’ [JRF note: I will abbreviate later as ToM] to describe our ability to explain other people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires” (6). You may recall there has been a lot of discussion recently (NPR is where I first heard it, while driving home from Philadelphia this last summer) concerning “mirror neurons.” This notion of ToM is related to, but not identical with, mirror neurons. There is a lot more that goes on in our heads trying to “read” the “thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires” of others [another aside: none of this is as new as some would like to think; R.D. Laing was talking about this very thing when looking into interpersonal dynamics in the 60s]. And—I’ll bet you are wondering where I am going with this—we have in Under the Net a wonderful example of just this sort of behavior in the person(a) of Jake.
I believe it was Aristotle, but I cannot find where, who says that we run through/create narratives (in a proleptic way, I suppose) to pre-play scenarios we anticipate encountering, in a process, I suppose, of preparing ourselves for a variety of possible outcomes and branchings. I know I do it. And, throughout the text of Under the Net, we “see” Jake doing it. But not only are we reading about Jake in his efforts, say, to determine how to react to Sacred Sammy when he finally does encounter him in Madge’s flat or intuit what Mister Mars is “thinking,” but we are, ourselves, trying—based on clues and cues in the text—to figure out what Jake is thinking, despite the fact that he is continually telling us. Or, is he?
He IS telling us, in retrospect, only those aspects of the story—and we don’t even know whether it is a “true” telling of the story or not—that he wants us to hear. Consider his “reported” discussion with Hugo (page 59) which you have already cited: “‘There’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,’ said Hugo. ‘All these descriptions are so dramatic.’” And here is where things are going to get messy. At the level of the text (not the story), the implied author has a reason/intent for putting that discussion in the story. At the story level, Jake has a reason/intent for telling us about it, in those terms. And at the level of both text and story, we the implied reader and the actual reader are trying to intuit the “thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires” of, respectively, the implied author and Jake. Make sense so far? And this is just what Zunshine is trying to get at in her book in terms of the reasons we read fiction. But the levels of “reading” are not so easily demarcated as I suggest here. There is slippage and fuzziness at the frontier: Jake crosses the boundary several times, as when he addresses us, the readers, directly:
And, later on the same page:
There are several things going on here at once. First, we have Jake crossing the text/story boundary and addressing us, the readers, directly involving us in the story and the act of telling it, much the same way Humbert did in Lolita. Second, we have Jake “reading” OUR minds and telling us what he thinks we are thinking. Is he trying to establish sympathy for his self-created character? Third, we have the text referring to itself: “I said just now . . .” And, finally, we have our old friend RELIABILITY making its presence known: Jake not only lies to us, he has the temerity to tell us that he does so. All of these narrative “tricks” are part of what can be called, in terms of the text being self-referential, meta-narrative.
What started me down this path this morning (and it took me where I wanted to go at the end of my first post) was the following:
He’s doing it again. He’s trying to read Anna’s mind. He’s letting us look inside his thought processes, in much the same manner he let us in on and explained his stream of consciousness dozing (pages 167-168). He has shifted to present tense narration. He has reduced Anna to a mere “character.” Does this mean she is his fabrication? Have some of the ways Jake has extricated himself from difficulties seemed a little coincidental? A little deus ex machina? Just what story is Jake telling/writing?
Very heady stuff in your last comment. It is an interesting perspective of the story and one that I am still digesting.
I need to work out unreliable narration with respect to fiction. Here we have a fictional character recounting occurrences from the past — I expect them to be flawed because they are from one point of view and one (fictional) memory. If we are not careful we will call the narration of both Beowulf and John Gardner’s Grendel unreliable. Perhaps they are.
Fortunately I have a Dictionary of Narratology. I will probably finish the book tonight and then reread the 18th chapter; I think it deserves it.
Think of unreliability in narration as incongruity between apparent intent and actual conduct of the narrator/characters. It is not unlike conditions encountered in life.
You are right, though, in saying that we have to be careful in considering it as a critical notion about any work we encounter, else every narration becomes unreliable. There are those who start from the premise that all narration IS just that: unreliable. But there are distinctions of (un)reliability.
The “classic” case of unreliable narration in terms of “intent v. conduct” comes from Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. There we have a narrator who paints himself as extraordinarily knowledgeable about the people of whom he is writing when, in fact, he knows nothing at all about them or what motivates them or their relations among one another. Nor does he care about them to the extent that he claims he does.
The Rashomon effect is another type of (un)reliability from which we all suffer as a consequence of our limited perspectives and the freight we accumulate and carry through life. Hugo, albeit through Jake as narrator (and surreptitious author of events?), says as much in Chapter 18:
This is the ground beneath the notion that all narration is (un)reliable. This is the type of (un)reliability I sensed with the Continental Op and with Scout. Saleem Sinai, Humbert, and now Jake are examples of the former.
Jake, of course, despite having “always travelled light,” cannot let go of his freight. In fact, the story opens with Jake hauling so much freight that (1) some of it is confiscated by Customs and (2) he has to enlist Finn to help transport it and (3) he has to store bits of it with a variety of characters to whom he consigns his burdens.
Ironically, as much as Jake strives to rid himself of his baggage, he only accumulates more, despite the whole Buddha thing he sets up in the cherry tree “grove” in Chapter 17 (pp 206-207). Images of Siddhartha danced through my head.
What, exactly, is a comic novel? Or, to ask it another way (and maybe get a different answer): what makes a novel “comic”? These questions are of importance because Under the Net is characterized on its cover as “a comic novel about work and love, wealth and fame.” Of course, regardless how obvious it sounds, whatever answers we come up with will hinge on just what we mean by “comic.” For openers, can we say that “comic” is equivalent to “comedic,” and use those terms interchangeably, despite there being subtle shades of difference in their meaning? That is the tack I will take for now. And starting with the OED, we find that both words have their origin in Greek, in terms of characterizing “the revels” (mostly associated with Dionysus) and ridiculous behaviors—that is, behaviors open to ridicule by the more “upright” members of society. The latter makes one think more in terms of Bacchus.
In the Poetics, Aristotle treats us to a detailed discussion of tragedy and occasional remarks about comedy. It is rumored that he did write a second discourse specifically about comedy, but it appears to be among the “lost” Aristotelian texts (recall that his book on comedy was central to Eco’s wonderful story, The Name of the Rose). Aristotle’s approach consists mainly of delineating the differences between tragedy (his main topic) and comedy, for example:
In tragedy, the characters try to rise above adverse circumstances; in comedy their behaviors leave them open to ridicule. It is at the opening of Section 6 that Aristotle leaves the tease for us:
So, unless we can pry the Vatican library open, we will never know what Aristotle really said about comedy and the comic. But there are those who have inferred much from bits of discussion in his other works.
On the other hand, in terms of what we know of the Aristotelian sense of comedy, Jake did place himself in ridiculous situations and we derived great enjoyment from seeing him extricate himself (recall his initial—and only face-to-face—encounter with Sacred Sammy, or his eventual encounter with Hugo in the hospital ward). Aristotle’s word for this is/was catharsis. It works for both Tragedy and Comedy. One calls to mind Norman Cousins who cured himself of a debilitating disease with laughter watching old comedic films.
While taking a class on Shakespeare focused specifically on the texts of the Sonnets and selected Plays, with no side trips into theory land or historical (or other) contexts, it was suggested that comedies start with a happy situation that is then perturbed by some event and the rest of the play consists of the effort to return things to “normal.” And, generally, the comedies end pretty much where they began, albeit with one or two crucial changes, e.g., new knowledge on the part of the characters. Working from this definition of the comedic, Under the Net can be considered “comic.” We start with the perturbation and are led to believe that things were “happy” before Madge decided to get married and toss Jake and Finn into the street. The rest of the novel consists of Jake trying to find a new place to land but also takes in an exploration of his past brought up-to-date through “present” encounters, many of which are “comic” in themselves (e.g., the theft of Mister Mars and the riot on the movie set—both of which were called out in the cover blurb, but also the midnight swim in the Thames and Jake’s continual misreading of others—so much for his Theory of Mind!). And, Jake ends pretty much where he began: a mere 60 pounds in his account, no place to live, no woman in his life—except Mrs. Tinkkham, and Finn has been replaced by Mister Mars. What has changed is Jake, himself—or, so he would like us to believe.
As a final point for tonight I’d like to consider the role of irony in the “comic.” And here I am thinking of “dramatic irony” as evinced in ancient Greek theatre: the audience has knowledge the characters do not. In Tragedy (as in Romeo and Juliet, or Othello) and in Comedy (as in The Comedy of Errors, where two sets of identical twins, master and servant in each set, are continually mistaken for one another, as are the individuals in the pairs among one another—but the audience can tell them apart), this knowledge disparity enhances the cathartic effect, whether manifest as shared anguish or in laughter. Under the Net relies on just this sort of irony, though—I would suggest—the knowledge difference is something we have to tumble to as a consequence of our growing mistrust –albeit in a kindhearted way—of Jake as a reliable narrator. And, in fact, his unreliability—particularly in terms of reading people and situations—is itself comedic, in the context of his narration.
Humbert’s reliability issues were decidedly NOT comedic. But in what way are they different from Jake’s that we can say that?
The question I still want to poke at is the role of philosophy in all of this . . .