| Iris Murdoch was an important figure in the 20th century English literature. She dedicated all her life to writing for forty years on end, and reaped bump harvest including twenty four novels, four philosophical works, and a number of plays and poems, as well as articles, and each book was produced at the speed of eighteen months, which fully displayed her excellent artistic creativity and aesthetic inventiveness. She has won acclaim from the readers and critics both at home and abroad. Indeed her productivity alone could have inspired awe and respect among her readers while her role as a moral philosopher and novelist made her appear rather unique. As her novels provide the readers with sensational stories that are the blending of comic, serious, intriguing, sanguine, bizarre or lyric elements, and her philosophical pronouncements on good, evil and love that she has tried to infuse into these works make them penetrate the complicated modern life.Her dual roles as a novelist and philosopher were quickly recognized by critics. In his A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel, Frederick R. Karl esteemed Murdoch highly for her verbal skill, incisive conception of some characters, ability to convey humor and sadness, awareness of the larger world, a philosophical point of view-all these admirable qualities gave her a cut above her contemporary peers. As a novelist, Murdoch inherited a great deal from her predecessors for the formulation of a style of her own. She borrowed great deal from the nineteenth century realist for its tolerance of and patience with the characters no matter what classes they belong. As she points out that a novel must be a house fit for free characters to live in, she notes that novels in that period show a respect for reality and for people who may have conflicting ideas of life and however, are allowed to exist side by side in harmony. In contrast, the modern fiction is journalistic, lacking a scene where people are merged with the background of society, and individual who can rely on the social value or the transcendental reality. Besides, she learned from the modern and postmodern novelists the arrangement of plots in terms of time and space, the point of view, and the use of images and symbols.As a philosopher, she assimilated part and parcel of the previous philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Hume and Burke while rejecting what she thought inappropriate. Contingency, uniqueness of man, framework and fallen man are four basic elements that constitute her moral philosophical"non-systematic, non-totalizing"framework, that is, within a new conception of metaphysical unity in which she tries to save individual man from any monist picturing. Man, as a moral agent, is determined by the antecedent social framework and his history that is the origin and shaping force of his ego while the social framework is made up of contingent rubbles, accidents, and unsystematic details that may defy our effort to unify. Man is situated between life of contingency that may transcend him and the ego that may absorb him in his own fantasies or myth, thus failing to see reality and value of his relationship with other moral agents. In this sense, man is stuck in the tension of the unpredictable contingency of real social life and the power of his and fantasy-ridden and solipsistic ego, and therefore the only way for him to become morally good lies in the degrees he can see reality.Murdoch associates"the good"with self-understanding. She thinks that we human have a natural inclination towards the good, and this inclination arises from our love and pursuit of the real or truth. The good is then tantamount to love; in other words, the good exists in love. But love does not lie on the verge of the behaviorist world and it is not anything existing for its own. Meanwhile, Murdoch elevates good to the level of God by regarding God as the incarnate of the good, which is of great importance in a post-religious age.The good is in fact a fable. This kind of interpretation is somewhat archetypal. In an age when God ceases to be valid, to rely on the good of human being to guide people's mind and behavior is no better than a myth. Therefore, the good can mystify the everyday life and can make people extract the spiritual meaning from imagination and exciting dramatic life, and combine story with the play of mind. To read her stories as a fable is quite apt because it is the extension and not deviation of realism.It is apparent that there are two Platonic axioms embedded in Murdoch's philosophy, and when taken together, they make clear the genuine radicalism of her project. The first is the human desire cannot help being drawn towards the good, a transcendental and non-physical truth, validated by our attempt to see the unself. The second is that the mind is a relentless ego which habitually mistakes the false images of the good for good itself, so that even the most spiritually advanced human beings cannot escape from nets of illusion created by the desire. In this light, when the good presents itself in various inauthentic modes, the love for the good will be displayed likewise in inauthentic ways.Murdoch provided framework of reference for her critics, and in a way, she is the best interpreter of her novels. Peter J. Conradi, Maria Antonaccio, Suguna Ramanathan, David J. Gordon and Hilda D. Spear have contributed lengthen works to the criticism of her works by adopting her theoretic framework. They conclude that Murdoch reflected her ideas in her works by making the characters the speakers of her ideas. However, these characters lack the sense of a"common historical world,"a sign of their difficulty in looking back and their existence in myths. Therefore, when God dies, the human psychological strength depletes, and they become as if the demons and geniuses. To explain this, she resorts to Plato's cave to show fuzziness of morality and the un-bridged gap between"the good"and reality. In order to know their moral deficiency and approach the moral standard as near as possible, her characters have to undergo moral pilgrimage including tribulations, pains or even death, and this is the imperfect form of art she craved.At the same time, Critics in China also adopt her philosophy as the perspective to read her stories. Hou Weirui, He Weiwen, Yin Tiechao, Fan Lingmei, Yin Qiping and Yue Guofa have contributed original articles on the theme of her novels. They have found the paradox of the pursuit of the absolute concepts of love and good in a relative and contingent world, and the temptation of power play in language as well as the thoughts on contradiction between the existing self and reality.However, it should be noted that critics both at home and abroad resort to her philosophical ideas for the explanation of her novels, which in great measure is due to the profundity of her thought that was built on the basis of the various schools of philosophy in the twentieth century, and that her works have touched the human life and gone deep into the consciousness. It is, nonetheless, a pity that, if the comments are made only on the basis of the author's own framework of theory, he is sure to be deep in the prefigured frame without possibility of offering anything new, and this is why the author of this dissertation decides to turn to a new way.Therefore, the author of this dissertation thinks that if we distance ourselves a little further to look at her world, we may find the fuzziness and compromise in her philosophy and limitation in her artistic creation. Lacan's desire and Heidegger's care can provide us a new perspective to look at her fiction. We propose that good is the inauthentic mode of care and desire as fundamentally the result of the present dilemma of human existence, which is the motif of her novel. Care is the totality of human existence in which desire functions as the product of language. The human, once thrown into the world, suffers not only the self that seeks to identify the specula image in the mirroring media but also the shaping force of the social and traditional discourse, and therefore, the good relies but in the identification with the bigger other or the Other, the Phallus as a compromise with the condition of his existence. This is not pessimism; on the contrary, the reflection upon these concepts is the pursuit of our own desire, and it is the narrative impulse and narrative structure of human beings.In the dissertation, we will adopt some of Heidegger's concepts, such as care, Dasein, being, thrownness, etc., with emphasis upon Lacan's post-psychoanalysis, such as the specula stage, unconscious, the structure of language, and desire and identification. The use of these terms aims to look at the behavior and mentality of the characters and conduct a phenomenological survey of the evolution of their thought and disclose their spiritual crisis so as to arrive at the conclusion that in the post-religious era when mankind loses his faith and identity, moral degeneration is inevitable. The author also wants to point out that identification with the other is a process of iconoclasm, the reflection and understanding of which structure the human desire.The first chapter of the dissertation is devoted to the review of Murdoch's literary and philosophical achievements, which we think is an indispensable part, for without understanding the genesis of her writings and philosophy, it is impossible to understand her fiction.The second chapter aims at the discussion of Heidegger's Dasein and Lacan's subjectivity of desire. Dasein is an overall concept through Heidegger's Being and Time, and it is conducive to our grasp of care as a whole. Dasein may transmute into various inauthentic modes like gossip, curiosity, ambiguity and falling. Inauthentic as these modes of being are, they are all subject to the totality of care. Since care is the immediate being of Dasein, the cause of care lies then in desire. Desire is not only biological but also free from consciousness. It is the inter-subjective communication that constructs desire, and desire is therefore closely associated with identification with the other or Other.The third chapter will review the main characters Under the Net and A Word Child by using Lacan's Imaginary Order. Jake Donaghue and Hilary Burde are both thirty-odd young intellectual that deeply suffer from the spell of language. Jake is initially a Sartrean believing in the free will of human being; his solipsistic self plunges him into imagination of others and into a game in which he wants to give himself up to the more wise incarnate in Hugo Belfounder. He finally ends up waking to find that Hugo is but an ordinary person, that is, he sees the partial truth exposed to him. Hilary is a polyglot but is frustrated in his inability to communicate with others properly. This is partly due to this precocious learning of the language and partly from the tragedy his inhibited oedipal dynamic caused. When the similar conditions arise, he falls desperately in love with Gunnar's second wife and causes her death.The fourth chapter takes Lacan's Symbolic Order as the perspective to study The Flight from the Enchanter and A Severed Head. Mischa in Flight and Martin in Head are characters involved deeply in language. The former is a power figure whose fame is built partly on his fortune and partly on words about him. Rosa wants to resists his charm for fear losing her independence; she sets up a power hierarch of her own with herself at the top, but finally it dawns on her that she nearly becomes the sex object of the demon-like twins and has to go to Mischa for help to dispel the demons, thus she is drawn back to Mischa again. Many of other characters are all invariably feel the powerful and willful charm of Mischa, but when Mischa is found also a refugee-like figure having lost his country, his charm just vanishes. Similarly, Martin is a forty-some wine merchant with intellectual temperament. He luxuriates in the life having a wife and mistress. When his wife tells him that she loves another, his world begins to collapse. Martin is susceptible to other's words, and he likes to analyze the motives of his and others, and therefore, he seems to be totally subsumed by language. However, he is, in his unconscious, aware of the difference between wife, mistress and a mystery woman. His relationships with them are unconsciously built on the pattern of need, demand and desire, with mistress as his need for sexual satisfaction, wife as his demand for social identity and the mystery woman Kleine as the substitute of desire, truth in this case.The fifth chapter is devoted to the analysis of The Black Prince by the employment of Lacan's Real Order. Bradley Pearson is a fifty-eight-year-old retired taxman who thinks that he has literary talent. He retires early in order that he will leave London for the seaside to finish his opus. However, his relationships with Arnold, a true accomplished writer in a way, his sister, his ex-wife and Francis prevent him from realizing his jouissance in search of his self in literature. His idyllic defilement with Julian, his friend's daughter, saves him from the entanglement with the worldly things. When they succeed in arriving at Patara, a city dedicated to Apollo, he exults in the love with Julian and unconsciously takes Julian as the sacrifice to Apollo so that Apollo could help him to realize his wish in literature. Julian, on the one hand is the object of his love, she is the object in love by which he hopes to satisfy his literary jouissance on the other. Bradley is so much obsessed by imagination that his imagination can never be cashed in the symbolic world, that is, the world we inhabit. He is, therefore, further distanced from truth.The sixth chapter is the summary. In this part, the author of this dissertation hopes to arrive at such a conclusion, that is, although Murdoch wants to save dignity for human beings by avoiding making him reduced to the"discursive effect,"she is portraying characters that are spellbound by language and become its prisoners. For her, thanks to the good and love, human can get out the trap and charm of language. However, in our analyses, we will find that what launches them into the pursuit of the good and love is the desire to avoid falling, and to purse the authentic mode of being symbolized by his wish to live with truth. Murdoch's characters live in a world of her construction, and experience a moral pilgrimage; it is a pilgrimage necessary for all of us, particularly in an age when discourse messages proliferate and moral degenerates.
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