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A review by cais
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch
4.0
4.5 stars
“Extreme continuing unhappiness often consoles itself with images of death which may in a sense be idle, but which can play a vital part in consolation and also in the continuance of illusion. If that happens, I am dead, consoles, and also dulls the edge of speculation and even of conscience. It is another way of saying, to me that cannot happen.”
My initial thought when finishing this was it is the bleakest & most cynical of all the Murdoch books I’ve read so far. Or, to put it another way, it’s an accurate portrayal of human behavior. Murdoch’s humor is not lost here, but it certainly does not drive this story. This is a brilliant book, intelligent & entertaining. There are glorious descriptions of settings, of nature (including a motley pack of dogs) which delighted me. But this book is also distressing. I was nearly done with it but put off reading the last 20 pages until the following day because I needed a moment to accept what had just happened in the story.
Marriages & love affairs & domesticity, as per usual with Iris, are the vehicles through which this story is told & through which morality is examined. Relationships are turned upside down, concessions are made, concessions are retracted, people get what they want, but then miss what they had & scheme destructively (both intentionally & not). I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are winners & losers and who is which is perhaps not as obvious as it first seems. Which love is the sacred & which is the profane?
Most of the loves portrayed here are distorted by egoism & fantasy. Some of the characters encompass Murdoch’s concept of the void (inspired by Simone Weil), one of her ethical modes of being, which is despair or affliction in opposition to transcendence, which is necessary for goodness (morality). Some people try to fill the void with lies & fantasy rather than experiencing the reality of pain. Fantasizing makes the world & other people more & more abstract, meaning we can’t really see them. If we can’t really see them, we can’t treat them with moral consideration & they become a means to an end, the end being the fulfilling of fantasy, the maintaining of lies. It’s all wrong, but people live entire lives this way. Entire relationships (like ones in this book), some lasting years & years, are lived this way. As Iris noted in one of her philosophy books, “being in love, the insanity of it.”
“It might be perfectly true that there was no deep sense in things, that nothing and no one had real dignity and real deserving, that ‘the world’ was just a jumble and a rubble and a dream, but was it not supreme cheating to make this senselessness seem to be the very essence of one’s being? He might be a very shoddy artist, but he had the artist’s capacity to cheat. Better surely to live as ordinary clever people live, by wit and pain and sex, finding these at last in the pinnacle of one’s spirit. Better to resort to the holiness of suffering and to consent to give some name (‘love’ for instance) to the ground of one’s being, rather than to attempt this radical undoing of natural essence.”
“Extreme continuing unhappiness often consoles itself with images of death which may in a sense be idle, but which can play a vital part in consolation and also in the continuance of illusion. If that happens, I am dead, consoles, and also dulls the edge of speculation and even of conscience. It is another way of saying, to me that cannot happen.”
My initial thought when finishing this was it is the bleakest & most cynical of all the Murdoch books I’ve read so far. Or, to put it another way, it’s an accurate portrayal of human behavior. Murdoch’s humor is not lost here, but it certainly does not drive this story. This is a brilliant book, intelligent & entertaining. There are glorious descriptions of settings, of nature (including a motley pack of dogs) which delighted me. But this book is also distressing. I was nearly done with it but put off reading the last 20 pages until the following day because I needed a moment to accept what had just happened in the story.
Marriages & love affairs & domesticity, as per usual with Iris, are the vehicles through which this story is told & through which morality is examined. Relationships are turned upside down, concessions are made, concessions are retracted, people get what they want, but then miss what they had & scheme destructively (both intentionally & not). I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are winners & losers and who is which is perhaps not as obvious as it first seems. Which love is the sacred & which is the profane?
Most of the loves portrayed here are distorted by egoism & fantasy. Some of the characters encompass Murdoch’s concept of the void (inspired by Simone Weil), one of her ethical modes of being, which is despair or affliction in opposition to transcendence, which is necessary for goodness (morality). Some people try to fill the void with lies & fantasy rather than experiencing the reality of pain. Fantasizing makes the world & other people more & more abstract, meaning we can’t really see them. If we can’t really see them, we can’t treat them with moral consideration & they become a means to an end, the end being the fulfilling of fantasy, the maintaining of lies. It’s all wrong, but people live entire lives this way. Entire relationships (like ones in this book), some lasting years & years, are lived this way. As Iris noted in one of her philosophy books, “being in love, the insanity of it.”
“It might be perfectly true that there was no deep sense in things, that nothing and no one had real dignity and real deserving, that ‘the world’ was just a jumble and a rubble and a dream, but was it not supreme cheating to make this senselessness seem to be the very essence of one’s being? He might be a very shoddy artist, but he had the artist’s capacity to cheat. Better surely to live as ordinary clever people live, by wit and pain and sex, finding these at last in the pinnacle of one’s spirit. Better to resort to the holiness of suffering and to consent to give some name (‘love’ for instance) to the ground of one’s being, rather than to attempt this radical undoing of natural essence.”