6

Murdoch, Derrida and

The Black Prince
Paul S. Fiddes

Why Murdoch and Derrida?

In this essay I intend to place a chapter of Iris Murdoch’s philosophical

writing alongside one of her novels, juxtaposing her piece on ‘Derrida
and Structuralism’ from her book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, with
her novel The Black Prince, published in 1973. Though Metaphysics as a
Guide to Morals was published in 1992, some 19 years after her novel,
Murdoch tells us that she read Derrida’s early book Writing and Difference
when it was published in 1967, and was ‘impressed and disturbed by
it’ (MGM, p. 291). As will become clear, since that time she continually
reflected on his works, which she calls ‘brilliant’ and ‘difficult’ (MGM,
p. 291), and so it is not an anachronism to suggest that there is some
echo of Derrida’s thought in her 1973 novel.
Let me make clear right at the beginning, however, that I have not
proposed this exercise because I think that the protagonist of The Black
Prince is a Derridean figure in any exact way. I do not suggest for one
moment that Murdoch has portrayed the central character Bradley
Pearson simply as a Derrida in disguise. Rather, my point is this: the
‘Derrida’ of her philosophical chapter is a kind of composite figure or
a cipher. For those who know the work of Derrida he hardly seems like
Derrida at all; in fact, he has become the target for all that she dislikes
about recent philosophy. Similarly, Bradley Pearson, the narrator of
The Black Prince, is a composite figure, incorporating several of the
philosophical opponents that Murdoch later identifies in her book
on metaphysics, including touches of the kind of thought that she is
later explicitly to identify as ‘Derridean’. It is not impossible that she
actually has Derrida in mind for aspects of Bradley’s personality at the
time of writing the novel,1 but this is not essential for my argument.

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A. Rowe et al. (eds.), Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts

© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2012
92 Murdoch, Derrida and The Black Prince

My proposal is that Bradley exhibits traits of thought that worry her and
which she later extensively attributes – not altogether accurately – to
Derrida himself.
Like many of her characters, both the ‘Derrida’ of the chapter and
the ‘Bradley’ of the novel disregard the truth that comes from engaging
with a reality that lies beyond us, and this means failing both to struggle
with the contingencies of everyday life and to serve the Good. Murdoch
thus satirizes Bradley in the same way as she later attacks Derrida. As
is well known, Murdoch had an ambiguous relationship with mid- and
late twentieth-century French philosophy, beginning with her early
work on Sartre in 1953. She is fascinated by the moves to give atten-
tion to ‘ordinary life’ in the phenomenological tradition and to make
it the stuff of philosophy, but she finds a lack of moral seriousness in
Sartre’s particular emphasis on a mere act of the human will.2 Derrida
represents for her a climax in the loss of the moral self, and so her criti-
cal account of Derrida is central to her vision of the world, not merely
passing comment. By 1992 he appears as a major opponent, making
an appearance in nearly every chapter of her book, but especially in
‘Derrida and Structuralism’. Exploring her account of Derrida makes
clear the kind of philosophical thinking she is rejecting, though we
shall see that her earlier novel not only exemplifies the nature of her
opposition, but ironically tends to undermine one aspect of it.

A curious account of Derrida

Let us start with the chapter of philosophy. The first surprise for those
who know Derrida at all well is the very title, ‘Derrida and Structuralism’.
Murdoch classifies Derrida as a structuralist; indeed she regards him
as its leading advocate. Further, it transpires that she regards post-
structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism (even at times
modernism) as all varieties of structuralism. There is a grain of truth
in this, since they all do rely on the view of Ferdinand de Saussure
that the ‘individual is submerged in language, rather than [being] an
autonomous user of language’ (MGM, p. 185).3 Put another way, the
common element is the belief that language constructs the world. After
that, however, there are profound differences between these intellectual
movements and structuralism.
To take a key instance, Murdoch regards Derridean ‘deconstruction’ as
a kind of intensification of structuralism. Those like Derrida who seek to
‘deconstruct’ a text do so, she maintains, in order to seek ‘the hidden-
deep [...] meaning of the text’ (MGM, p. 189). They are searching for the