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Under The Net

Under The Net

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the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth. All theorising is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.” Such a process of learning is necessarily a calling-into-question of what is normally meant by ‘identity’. Indeed, she would often speak of herself as having no strong identity. And yet the capacity so to forget herself depended equally on an unusually strong sense of who she was. In the bar of a train in 1981, an enthusiastic lady greeted Iris Murdoch as Margaret Drabble. ‘How can you tell,’ Iris quizzically and patiently enquired ‘that I’m not Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, or Muriel Spark?’ ‘I’d know you anywhere Margaret,’ cried the enthusiast. Under the Net tells the humorous adventures of Jake Donoghue, a picaresque hero, who was - significantly like the author - of Irish descent. Perhaps it is the mixture of the philosophical and the picaresque, which have made it one of Iris Murdoch’s most enduringly popular novels. In 1998, the editors of the American publishers “Modern Library”, named the work as one of the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century. In 2005 Under the Net was chosen by the American magazine, “Time”, as one of the hundred best 20th century English-language novels from 1923 onwards. Ironically enough, Iris Murdoch herself was refused a visa to visit the United States, despite the fact that she had earned a scholarship from Vassar College in New York, because earlier, she had been a member of the Communist Party. Under the Net, published in 1954 in London, was Iris Murdoch's first published novel. It relates the humorous adventures of Jake Donahue, a male protagonist who many critics believe is closely based on the author herself. Jake is described by Cheryl K. Bove in Understanding Iris Murdoch as a "failed artist and picaresque hero," a sentiment that Murdoch attributed to herself at the time she wrote this book. Although Murdoch was later embarrassed by Under the Net because she felt the writing was immature, other critics have hailed it as one of her best works. It is rated ninety-fifth on Random House's top 100 novels of the twentieth century, and it marked the beginning of a long and distinguished career for Murdoch, who went on to write twenty-five additional works of fiction, as well as several books on moral philosophy, one of her favorite topics. Under the Net can be read simply as a fascinating story of a crazy artist who loves serendipity or on a deeper level as an existential, absurd reflection on life.

Miss Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net, reveals a brilliant talent. (...) Set against this dazzling array of virtues, the weaknesses of Under the Net pale into their proper significance. They are faults of construction and design." - Times Literary Supplement Toda teorizaci��n es una huida. Debe dirigirnos la situación en sí, y eso es inexpresablemente concreto. Desde luego, es algo a lo que nunca podemos acercarnos lo bastante, por mucho que intentemos, por así decirlo, meternos bajo la red".La más humorística de las obras que hasta ahora he leído de la autora, alguien a quien admiro profundamente y a la que saboreo me hable de lo que me hable. Y aquí, en su primera novela, me ha hablado de algunas de las cosas que le importan y de las que ya me ha hablado en sus obras posteriores.

Time.com

Il protagonista è un traduttore che vorrebbe essere scrittore, picaro e bohémien, eccentrico e stravagante: poco impiego, molto ozio, niente negozio. È indolente, pigro, sempre pronto ad abbandonarsi alle avventure, che siano amorose o della conoscenza. The next day, Sadie agrees to let Jake watch her flat. She is especially concerned about the unwanted attentions of Hugo Belfounder, Jake’s former roommate. As roommates, the two had had many philosophical discussions, one of which Jake turned into a not-very-successful novel, The Silencer. In the novel, Jake had attempted to replicate one particular conversation with Hugo that dealt with language as the falsifier of experience. Jake feared his novel had betrayed Hugo’s ideas, so he ended their friendship by not meeting him one night as planned. Jake is a failed writer who earns money translating the works of a French writer. He is in love with Anna Quentin, a singer, and enormously influenced by Hugo Belfounder, a successful entrepreneur whom he meets at a clinic. There, they have serious dialogues about art and truth. When Jake is banished from his rooms, he tries to get in touch with Anna again. Through intricate and sometimes hilarious plot twists, he finds that Anna is in love with Hugo, and that Anna’s actress sister, Sadie, is in love with Jake. To complicate the plot further, Hugo is in love with Sadie. John Wilson is a lifelong enthusiast for London the city and for London in literature, art and film. He came to London to study Physics at Imperial College and has lived in various parts of the city ever since. One of these early works featured a “bogus scholar” and may have been instigated by Iris Murdoch’s own doubts about her intellectual stature. In 1947, when she took up the offer of a postgraduate scholarship to study Philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, she told Raymond Queneau that she had “started writing the novel about the Bogus scholar and the Archaic Goddess which has been in my head so long”. However, she later abandoned the novel, and confided to him her suspicion that what she had produced was “worthless”.

The "net" in question is the net of abstraction, generalization, and theory. [4] In Chapter 6, a quotation from Jake's book The Silencer includes the passage: "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular here. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net." [5] :91 He realises that it is Bastille Day, and he wanders the city for hours in a daze. In the evening, he is watching fireworks when he sees Anna. He tries to follow her, but the crowd impedes him. He nearly catches up with her in a park, after she leaves her shoes to walk barefoot on the grass. But he briefly loses sight of her, and the woman he accosts is not her. Kellman, Steven, “Shakespearean Plot in the Novels of Iris Murdoch,” in Iris Murdoch, edited by Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views series, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, p. 89. Under the Net is an extraordinary novel which can be read on so many levels. The setting switches between London and Paris on a whim. Most of the characters seem to play at life: to dabble in one thing or another. Time and again we see facades and illusions, such a movie theatre set of an impressive Roman temple, which is shown to be a paper and plaster sham, crumpling to nothing. A simple reflection in a lake dissolves in an instant when it is disturbed. The truth is not how it appears.

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Still it's a good story and I enjoyed the humor in the writing. So why rate it a ‘3’? It turns out, and I did not know this while I was reading the book, that this was the first novel that Murdoch published, 1954. Obviously her skills improved over time. Indeed she kept a debate about human difference alive, through the bad years when the fools of both extreme right and left had sheepishly pretended that it did not matter, or even did not exist anyway. Human difference also meant moral difference. How is it that some human beings are morally better than others? What is it that might make a man good, even in a concentration camp? Consider Korczak, who gave his life in Treblinka, or Kolbe in Auschwitz, or, indeed, Frank Thompson. How did it come about that in the epoch of greatest political evil, the century of Stalin and Hitler, moral terms had simultaneously been evacuated of any absolute significance by philosophers? Dennis Wrong (2005) The Persistence of the Particular, chapter 1: The irreducible particularities of human experience, Transaction Publishers ISBN 0-7658-0272-4 Chekhov's Gun: Explosives sold by Hugo Belfounder. They serve for practical ends twice: first to himself then to the protagonist.

In a way, the relationship between Jake and Hugo is one of artist versus saint. The role of the artist can be seen as to express and communicate ideas, putting them into some kind of form. The saint’s function, however, is contemplative: to be a medium through which ideas are born. Jake and Hugo are closest while they are part of a medical experiment. During this time they are able to spend their time discussing theories and philosophising. Hugo is seen to be the contemplative one, whose concepts are stronger than Jake’s. Hugo even states that some of the thoughts expressed in the book were a bit too deep for him. Today: Elizabeth II continues as queen of England. Her reign has outlasted ten prime ministers, with Tony Blair serving in the post in the early twenty-first century.

Tropes:

Anna thus symbolises truth, although she is literally surrounded by fantastic appearances in the theatre. She is also, as truth is, very elusive. Jake is a seeker of truth, but it always frightens him. Although he is always drawn to her, Anna always seems to be slightly out of his reach. Towards the end of the novel, in Paris, he follows her, but is deceived by someone who looks like Anna. Even when he catches her, he is afraid to confront her. In contrast, Anna’s sister Sadie is an actress: flashy and dazzling, but someone who always pretends, and in her personal life is also deceitful. And, as a consequence of this self-scrutiny, Jake develops a little emotional intelligence; not as much as his creator had, but enough to be a decent man.He evolves from scrounging taxi-blagging laziness worthy of Skimpole in Bleak House(‘there’s nothing that irritates me so much as paying rent’) through a bleak, albeit brief, depression reminiscent of Melville’s Bartleby, turning his face to the wall, to, eventually, understanding ‘the possibility of doing better’.By the novel’s end, Jake has resolved to earn money with a sensible job, to find a place to live for him and Mars.He might even begin to write a novel, possibly this novel, because he has started to notice the world around him.

She connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest can be relaxed. We are fortunate to have shared our appalling century with her. I count myself among the many who hope to have been taught by her, and who will miss her terribly. Murdoch's first effort here is a fine example of such blundering on -- but she perhaps remained too wary of trying harder to get close enough to "crawl under the net". Partly because of Jake’s narcissism, partly because of Murdoch’s wit, Under the Netis also exceptionally good on shame, self-consciousness and awkwardness, those intensely human characteristics which so pointlessly occupy much of our lives.Jake is always trying to enter places he shouldn’t be: ‘I am myself a sort of professional Unauthorized Person; I am sure I have been turned out of more places than any other member of the English intelligentsia.’Even Mars the Alsatian is capable of sympathy, embarrassment, conveniently playing dead to make a speedy exit: ‘We [Jake and Mars] turned away, looking casual.’And, in desperate situations, Murdoch’s descriptions of sights and smells and sounds, always so precise, make us indentify with Jake; she is a master of the creative writing rule of Show not Tell.When Jake breaks into the night-time hospital, his fear is real and believable; it is ‘strangely alive,’ its stairs ‘glittering, deserted, immense’ unlike the ‘small sound of [his] footfalls’.‘There was a silence into which it seemed to me that I had just let loose a vast quantity of sound.’Yes, there is also safe-breaking, theft, trespass and a riot, but these dramas happen every day, in real life.They are only melodramas to the dismissive. The novel can be seen as a process of revelation to Jake, that our subjective descriptions are apparent, and unreliable. They conform to our “Net”, and are not the world itself, which may slip away, Under the Net. However, Wittgenstein later referred to this work as meaningless nonsense, and in 1953 he totally rejected the concepts which he had originally published in “Tractatus”.Jake’s friends seem to present a paradox. Wittgenstein stated that language always imposes limitations on thought. This idea is proposed by one of the main characters, Hugo Belfounder. We hear a lot about Hugo Belfounder before he actually appears in the novel. Jake has looked up to Hugo ever since they met, at a medical research hospital, where the two of them had volunteered to be guinea pigs for a new cold remedy. Significantly, their first few days are silent, at Jake’s request, although they are roommates. It is Jake who breaks the silence, and from then on Jake is fascinated by this mild mannered and softly spoken intelligent man. The two have long philosophical discussions, which both enjoy so much that they enlist for a second medical experiment. Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) was a French author and precursor of the literary theory of postmodernism. His works are said to have been a link between the surrealists and the existentialists. He was very interested in language, and some of his novels were written phonetically rather than with proper spelling. Murdoch tried to translate one of his novels into English, but his use of colloquial language presented a challenge that she could not proficiently surmount. Some critics believe that Queneau’s Pierrot Mon Ami (1942) was an inspiration for Murdoch’s Under the Net. It is Queneau’s book that Murdoch’s narrator Jake takes with him when he must vacate his apartment at the opening of Under the Net. Under the Net is also dedicated to Queneau. Then why were you sneering? Don't deny it!" I cut off his objections before he could mouth them. "You were smiling. I saw it." Existentialism, as espoused by Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, is developed in France by Jean-Paul Sartre through his essays and novels.



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