Knowledge Bank

The focus of my thesis is the British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and her sixteenth novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. The principle ideals permeating her work, in both negative and positive ways, are found in texts by Plato, Freud, Sartre, Wittgenstein and Kafka. While she disagrees with the philosophies of all of these individuals on some levels, their philosophical theories are often addressed in both her philosophy and her fiction. A principle structure in all of her novels is the finessing of reality with elements of fantasy; often those fantastic elements are contrived from satiric portraits of philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas resulting from the theories of these men. Ultimately, the story of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine involves a moral dilemma created by one of Murdoch’s typical middle class intellectual male characters, in this novel it is Blaise Gavendar, who imposes his will and desires on other characters. The result is a melodrama that borders on social satire as the characters use ploys developed by earlier writers, for example Dostoevsky, Austen and Dickens, to escape their predicaments. However, the climaxes and dénouement that shape the novel are not the resolutions her readers may hope for, instead her philosophical ideals about human nature shape the novels’ conclusions. Murdoch believed human beings struggled with their existence in order to know the ultimate Good, but in the novel the characters do not come to any definitive conclusions about the Real or the Good and, instead, choose to live in the realm of imitation and desire.
My thesis focuses on the force that drives the characters to commit particular actions and become the individuals that make the decisions that create the plot of the novel, that is a machine of fantasy. It is my belief that the characters allow their desires, and by desires I mean intense wishes, to rule their lives to the extent that they believe their desires must be fulfilled to attain happiness. These desires lead to fantasies about how the characters can achieve happiness and satisfaction; however, fantasies develop from concepts and ideas found in everyday life, such as literature, art, psychoanalysis, philosophy, religion and friends and family, which means there will always be another desire replacing the one before it and the characters will never achieve true happiness or fulfillment. This desiring process results in a machine that feeds from itself, that is if one desire is achieved another one must take its place otherwise the fantasy would not be able to sustain itself. The characters allow desires to rule over their life until ultimately reality is eclipsed by fantasy.
I have traced the development of desire as the principle element of creation in the lives of Murdoch’s characters with the philosophers Hegel, Lacan and Žižek. Ultimately, I have concluded that reality is not a uniform concept in the novel, instead each character creates their own reality from their own fantasies as they pursue the ultimate concept of happiness—love. In trying to achieve an absolute or pure form of love one creates a machine of fantasy that firmly establishes one’s reality in the material world, or that of fantasy, and as such an absolute happiness cannot be obtained because the characters cannot look at the world, reflect upon events or obtain self-knowledge without first encountering the veil of fantasy they have created that covers reality.