Ontology of the Art Phenomenon 
in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction
Aliona Matiychak, Natalia Nikoriak, Alyona Tychinina
Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, Kotsiubynskiy Street, 2, Chernivtsi, 58012, Ukraine
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8190-0427, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6658-0114, http://orcid.
org/0000-0001-6316-2005
a.matiychak@chnu.edu.ua, n.nikoriak@chnu.edu.ua, a.tychinina@chnu.edu.ua
This article explores the intermedial dialogue of the arts in the oeuvre of British 
writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch. The ontology of the phenomenon of art 
and its functional meaning in Murdoch’s fiction, the specifics of the relationship 
between the arts in her philosophical essays and dialogues are considered from 
the perspective of intermediality. Based on the intermedial study methodology, 
Murdoch’s theoretical and philosophical views on the multifunctional nature of 
art, the interaction of the artist and the artwork are revealed. Key techniques of 
interartistic discourse, including anthroponymic allusions, are considered as 
intermedial markers of Murdoch’s texts, identified and explored at the level of 
imagological transformations. People of art: artists, artistic discourse partakers, 
as well as recipients of art constitute a particular kind of characters in Murdoch’s 
novels. Accordingly, the importance of the recipient, who acts as an essential link 
in the receptive matrix of “author-text-recipient-artwork,” is emphasized in the 
ontology of an artwork. The particular meeting point of Murdoch’s characters is 
the artistic topos: a museum, an exhibition, an art gallery or an artist’s house. In 
addition, the reader of her fiction repeatedly encounters various ekphrastic codes: 
the ekphrases of paintings are not only present in Murdoch’s texts, but function 
as anthropomorphised characters, dramatis personae, have their own space 
(physical and mental places) and play a crucial role in the protagonists’ lives. 
Consequently, we find that the use of intermedial components is one of the markers 
of Iris Murdoch’s idiostyle, which topicalizes important aspects of the philosophy of 
art and brings it into the realm of ontological questions.
Keywords: English literature / Murdoch, Iris / philosophy of art / ontology / 
intermediality / narrative technique / ekphrasis
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Introduction: Art as a syncretic phenomenon
Throughout its development, literature has been characterized by pro-
ductive contacts with other arts. These relationships showed up as 
bilateral or reversible. Not only painters, sculptors, musicians, and, 
ultimately, filmmakers drew plots for their masterpieces from litera-
ture, but literature also created artworks in the process of reception, 
reinterpretation, experience of what was heard (music) or seen (paint-
ing, sculpture, architecture). In particular, the natural attraction to 
visualization brought literature into close contact first with painting 
and music, and furthermore in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries 
with new types of arts: photography, cinema, digital art. In this way, 
literature detached from the original syncretic synthesis of arts gradu-
ally acquires new syncretic parameters within the limits of post-, meta-
modernist aesthetics.
Since ancient times prominent philosophers, artists and sci-
entists tried to reveal the mystery of fine art objects (Pythagoras, 
Plato, Aristotle, John Damascene, Augustine the Blessed, Pico della 
Mirandola, Botticelli, Shakespeare, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux). The 
well-known texts Controversy of the Painter with the Poet, Musician and 
Sculptor by Leonardo da Vinci and The Laocoon by Gotthold Ephraim 
Lessing present the idea of the synthesis of arts, which has become 
productive for modern intermedia studies. Speaking about the rapport 
between literature and painting, in agreement with European think-
ers, Ivan Franko noted the “immovable nature” of painting (Franko 
102). In his fair opinion, the common feature of these arts is their aes-
thetic goal to “reproduce in the soul of the reader or listener” individual 
moments of life in various ways (103). As a poet and a literary theorist, 
Franko emphasized the superiority of poetry in terms of time and space 
(104), and emphasized that “the poet depicts dead nature—enlivening 
it, draws lines with the help of moving images” (109).
Studying the canvases of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian or Caravaggio, 
researchers always at least briefly mention the literary basis of the plot 
in their works, while comparing one or another of their artistic images 
with its prototype. In addition to ancient plots, paintings could also be 
based on contemporary dramatic stories: Hogarth’s canvas “A Scene 
from Shakespeare’s The Tempest” or the “scene” based on the plot of 
John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Consequently, Kira Shakhova empha-
sizes the importance of the narrative moment, which is not typical for 
painting: “[T]he content of the scene can be read by the movements 
of the figures, the expression of the faces.” (Shakhova 99) In this case, 
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the artist Hogarth acts as a storyteller, a genre painter who not only 
mastered the brush brilliantly and masterfully, creating composition-
ally and colorfully wonderful paintings, but also wanted the viewer to 
read each of them like an exciting book. He invented “large-scale visual 
plots,” which gave rise to a series of paintings, the so-called pictorial 
“novels” (100). Actually, the tradition of graphic images with short 
explanatory texts, peculiar to so called comics of the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries, quite popular in England, originates from him 
(101). In this case, in terms of its narrative essence, the pictorial was 
almost adequate to the verbal. The picture-illustration became a visual 
representation of the plot, encouraged the viewer’s imagination, turn-
ing him into the reader.
Since then, researchers have repeatedly emphasized the relation-
ship between the word and fine arts, performing arts, photography 
and cinema. It is especially interesting to trace such interaction on the 
example of multi-artists’ oeuvres, those who equally worked in their 
time or are nowadays working in the plane of several arts (Leonardo da 
Vinci, Taras Shevchenko, Bruno Schultz, Mykhailo Zhuk, Sviatoslav 
Gordynsky, Marcel Duchamp, Emma Andijewska).
The conversion of arts in the aspect of intermediality
In the literary discourse the issue of interaction between literature and 
arts has occupied one of the key niches. Thus, the formalists, whose 
works became a thorough basis for such methodological studies as in-
tertextuality and intermediality, recorded a fruitful inter-art dialogue, 
which was expressed in the interpenetration of various imagological 
narratives. In particular, Eikhenbaum noted that “the evolution of art, 
taken as a single thing, is expressed in constant fluctuations between 
personification (differentiation) and fusion” (Eikhenbaum 16). The in-
dicated phenomenon is primarily explained by the syncretic genetic 
instruction of the arts in general: “In different epochs, this or that art 
seeks to become mass and is inspired by the pathos of syncretism, try-
ing to absorb elements of other arts.” (16) Today, this is an axiomatic 
position in the theory, arising from the basic nature of arts.
Such a tendency towards multimedia conversion of arts is explained 
by the fact that “literary formulas of human behavior and passions 
expressed over the ages” (Shakhova 11) constantly aroused the inter-
est of artists in various spheres. The organic nature of this multimedia 
through the prism of symbolism is explained by Lotman: “Verbal arts, 
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poetry, and later artistic prose seek to build a verbal image from the 
material of conventional signs,” at the same time, the opposite process 
occurs: “a picture, which by its symbolic nature is not created in order 
to serve as a means of narration, but a person constantly tries to tell.” 
(Lotman 15)
Regarding the reception of artistic syncretism by modern research-
ers, we should remember the words by Shakhova, who claimed that 
“the unity of the arts was not interrupted, although they separated 
from the syncretism of the consciousness of the cave age, they devel-
oped generic signs, their own specific language” (Shakhova 5). In his 
turn, Nalyvayko assured that literature stands out among all types of 
art precisely because it “combines the entire complex of its functions in 
a potentially complete expression” (Nalyvayko 8).
By analogy with intertextuality, intermedia allusion, ekphrasis, 
hypotyposis and literary phonography are distinguished in the system 
of modern inter-artistic relationships. In this way, the literary original 
source can be reproduced by means of painting with a great degree 
of approximation to the content and details of a verbal work of art 
or, on the contrary, radically reinterpreted. The poetics of ekphrasis 
deserves special mention as “any reproduction of one art by means of 
another” (Geller 8), which, according to Freidenberg, was “reproduc-
tion of a reproduction,” namely, “imaging of an image” (Freidenberg 
320). Calling ekphrastic inclusions as the so-called “phantoms of the 
text,” Chervinska speaks of specific “codes of meaning and their sys-
tematic receptive recoding in the system of the whole” (Chervinska 
149), which appears to be a rather productive cognitive and receptive 
phenomenon, since finding of an “ekphrastic key” appears as an origi-
nal “way to visualize events at the expense of other specifics of the nar-
rative” (161).
Accordingly, modern literary theory actively appeals to the practice 
of text research in the aspect of intermedia studies. As Clüver states: 
“Once ‘medium’ instead of ‘art’ has become accepted as the basic cat-
egory for the interdisciplinary discourse, the interrelationship of the 
various media is conceived of as ‘intermediality’.” (Clüver 30) In this 
aspect, from the point of receptive poetics, a number of interesting 
connotations arise related to the specificity of decoding intermedia 
inclusions and the dependence of this process on reading competence. 
The concept of intermediality, accompanied by the hybridization of 
media, gives rise to new specific forms in all arts.
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The intermedia dialogue of arts in Iris Murdoch’s fiction
The subject of arts has always appealed to the British moral philosopher 
and distinguished novelist, renowned author of essays, reviews and pa-
pers in ethics, aesthetics and history of thought Iris Murdoch (1919–
1999); it appears throughout her oeuvre. Each of the arts, and litera-
ture in particular, she considered as a “moral medium”: “The highest 
pleasures of literature, and one might say, of art generally, are in this 
sense moral pleasures.” (Murdoch, Existentialists 257) Her theory that 
art and morals are connected with sense and form she applied to “all 
the arts not just the literary arts.” (218) She tried to find answers to the 
questions of the relationship and interaction of various art forms, re-
flecting on them in her essays: “Conceptions of Unity. Art,” “Literature 
and Philosophy,” “The Sublime and the Good,” “Art is the Imitation of 
Nature” (Murdoch, Existentialists); and in her philosophical dialogues: 
“The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,” “Art and Eros: 
A Dialogue about Art” (Murdoch, Metaphysics). In addition, she ac-
tively raised the issue of the artist and art in her novels. The writer 
proves that a work of art opens a space for reflection, it also allows 
viewers to be artists thanks to their reception as a form of “experienced 
mental synthesis” (Murdoch, Metaphysics 3).
Hence, the aim of the study is to analyze the works by Iris Murdoch 
in terms of intermediality and art reception. Respectively, not only the 
artistic reception of fine arts in the writer’s novels is taken into consid-
eration, but also the author’s theoretical and philosophical views on the 
problem of true art are surveyed.
Murdoch’s reflections on arts are indicative from the standpoint of 
receptive aesthetics and her philosophical approach to the problem is 
also clearly uttered:
A work of art is of course not a material object, though some works of art are 
bodied forth by material objects. In the case of a statue the relation between 
the material object and the art object seems close, in the case of a picture less 
so. Poems and symphonies are clearly not material objects […]. All art objects 
are ‘performed’ or imagined first by the artist and then by his clients, and 
these imaginative and intellectual activities or experiences may be said to be the 
point or essence of art […]. Art, however, essentially (traditionally) involves the 
idea of a sustained experienced mental synthesis. (Murdoch, Metaphysics 2–3)
The writer carries on the idea of the communicative function of art: 
“Art makes places and opens spaces for reflection, it is a defense against 
materialism and against pseudo-scientific attitudes to life. It calms and 
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invigorates, it gives us energy by unifying, possibly by purifying, our 
feelings.” (8) Emphasizing the multi-functionality of art, the author 
focuses on the importance of catharsis, thanks to which art succeeds in 
realizing its key goal, emotional impact on the recipient.
The increased interest in the interaction of arts is due primarily to 
the wide manifestation of intermedia markers at the level of imago-
logical transformations. Murdoch often expresses the reception of the 
work of outstanding artists with the “voices” of her characters. Many 
of Murdoch’s protagonists belong to or are competent in the field of 
art—they are actually artists, also those who study art, or simply are 
adept admirers of it. In particular, in her final novel Jackson’s Dilemma 
(1995), the attention of readers is drawn to an eccentric character—the 
painter Owen Silbery. The image of the artist is described in detail in 
the text:
Owen was a painter, in fact a distinguished and well-known painter. He 
announced himself sometimes as ‘in the style of Goya’, and moreover, it was 
said, painted horrific pornographic pictures which he sold secretly. He was in 
fact well known as a portrait painter, and one who could satisfy his clients. 
(18)
In this way, the writer tries to intrigue her reader, while at the same 
time shaping the horizons of his expectations. After all, later the recipi-
ent really learns that in these rumors, although they are far from the 
true things, there is a grain of the truth.
In this Murdoch’s novel, the reader’s consciousness repeatedly 
encounters various ekphrastic codes. Thus, Owen classifies his canvases 
into three groups: “ordinary” paintings, paintings of “Frightfulnessism” 
and so-called “special” paintings. Each group of paintings is anthropo-
morphized—“lives its own life” in a separate room and even on another 
floor of the eccentric Owen’s house-studio. In the former bedroom 
on the third floor, “showing only their colourless sides, were other 
innumerable undisposed of ordinary pictures” (Murdoch, Jackson’s 
Dilemma 50). On the fourth floor was Owen’s favorite “dark room,” 
or “chamber of horrors,” as Mildred called it. In addition to paint-
ings, on the walls of this room there were “mild” scary photographs. 
Owen, who sometimes thought about suicide, was attracted by these 
“distorted creatures,” according to his words, he “lived by their dark 
passions” (176). As for the special paintings, they were located on the 
basement floor of the house, which “now contained correctly slotted 
special pictures” (50). Most of them were portraits of old friends. The 
artist considered them to be “real.”
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The clear demarcation between the artist’s works is, at first glance, 
quite transparent to the recipient. At the same time, the reader observes 
that the boundary between these artistic fictional worlds is often blurred 
and obscure. Especially when Owen reflects on art:
Owen himself had often contemplated suicide and possessed the requirements 
thereof. And did he not, he reflected, as a painter, imagine, create, and gaze 
upon what was degraded and vile? Of course, such things too became his 
art and thereby transformed, ha ha! He must remember to drink a toast to 
Otto Dix. He was real. Owen was sitting in his quiet studio looking at a half-
painted abstract. He hated the picture. (Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma 49–50)
The internal monologue of the character, his “stream of consciousness,” 
testifies to the blurring of the line between reality and the world of art 
in the narrative. The novel Jackson’s Dilemma is full of anthroponymic 
intermedia allusions. In particular, the mention of Otto Dix, a German 
painter, graphic artist and the author of paintings on military themes, 
even more blurs the line between the frightening and the real, the real 
and the ordinary.
The contradictory nature of the painter’s understanding of art in the 
novel is indicated by certain oneiric moments emphasized by Owen’s 
phantasmagoric dreams. Thus, before going to sleep Owen reflects on 
his craft admitting that he must invent, create, “must try to be worthy 
of being a painter”:
He dreamt that he was a slug crawling slowly along the ground, and Piero and 
Titian and Velazquez and Carpaccio and Turner were standing round him and 
looking down at him with faintly puzzled frowns, and he was shouting up 
at them, but his voice was so miserably tiny, he was sure they could not hear 
him, and when he tried to wave his horns at them, he suddenly realized that 
slugs do not have horns. Not even that, he thought in his dream. (Murdoch, 
Jackson’s Dilemma 241)
Consciously and subconsciously comparing his paintings with the 
works of outstanding artists Owen thereby admits that his paintings 
are still far from great art whatever he calls them. At the same time, he 
appears to be a good portraitist, understands art well, but how a picture 
becomes great art remains a mystery to him.
Owen tries to find the answer to this difficult dilemma in the plots 
of his dreams. So, for instance, he dreams that he is sitting at a table 
in a room lit by candles. Opposite him is Caravaggio. There are only 
two of them. It is not by chance that Murdoch introduces the character 
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of such famous artists as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–
1610) into his dreams. This choice of the author allows perceptive read-
ers to understand the image of her character much better. Let’s recall 
that Caravaggio’s painting style consisted in creating emotional ten-
sion, acute affectation of feelings. The best works of the Italian painter 
are based on contrasts: realistic details are combined with the theatrical 
pose; homoerotic image is combined with an intimate and psychologi-
cal improvisation of a mythological theme as in his picture “Bacchus” 
(Cumming 38–39). These details, as well as Caravaggio’s character 
traits (impulsive, unbalanced), make it possible to draw a parallel with 
the painter Owen Silbery, whose homosexuality and drunkenness only 
increase the outrageousness of the image created by Murdoch.
Owen, as a creative person, believes that artists are characterized 
by similar feelings: pain, dissatisfaction, remorse: “How Titian must 
have felt it, when he was very old, ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’—the pain, 
the pain, the old man must have felt it deeply at the end” (Murdoch, 
Jackson’s Dilemma 64). It should be noted that “Apollo and Marsyas” is 
a fairly popular leitmotif in European art. The initial stage of the strug-
gle between the antagonistic deities Apollo and Dionysus was marked 
in the myth of the contest between Apollo and Marsyas. According to 
the myth, the Phrygian satyr Marsyas picked up the flute (aulos) left by 
Athena. In playing the flute he acquired extraordinary skill and, proud 
of himself, challenged Apollo on the terms that the winner could treat 
the defeated party any way he wanted. The audacity of the satyr led to 
the effect that Apollo playing the lyre not only defeated Marsyas but 
also flayed him (Kun 29–31).
Perhaps the writer was struck so much not by the mythologem 
which terrifies with its cruelty, but by the spiritual meaning put into his 
canvas by the painter of the late Italian Renaissance Titian Vecellio da 
Cadore (1489–1576). Titian depicted Marsyas hanging upside down 
from a tree as Apollo cuts the skin on his chest. Marsyas is barely alive 
from pain, but his blissful smile indicates that he sacrificed his life for 
the sake of art.
Furthermore, this painting by Titian is mentioned by Murdoch in 
her other novels as well. However, the writer deliberately avoids its 
unambiguous interpretation, as if inviting the reader to join the discus-
sion, as a kind of artistic game. Thus, in the novel A Fairly Honorable 
Defeat (1970), the theme of this painting discussed by a homosexual 
couple is interpreted from a different perspective. Axel and Simon are 
people of different backgrounds: in terms of age, character, habits and 
type of activity. However, there is something that unites them; love, so 
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ruthless and incomprehensible to people around them, and so vulner-
able at the same time:
“You’re Apollo and I’m Marsyas. You’ll end by flaying me.” “That’s an image 
of love, actually, Apollo and Marsyas.” “How do you mean?” “The agony of 
Marsyas is the inevitable agony of human soul in its desire to achieve God.” 
“The things you know.” “The things you failed to learn at the Courtauld.” “I 
don’t believe it though. Someone is flayed really.” (Murdoch, Fairly Honorable 
Defeat 33)
Although Simon had read history of art at the Courtauld Institute 
of Art (London’s Courtauld Gallery is famous for works by French 
Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, as well as having a school of 
painting at the Gallery), when it came to art, Axel, who had stud-
ied philosophy at Oxford, often aptly contradicted Simon and was 
often right (27). Like the time when in the Accademia he let Simon 
hold forth for some time about Titian’s “Pietà” (Mary Magdalene’s 
Lamentation on Christ) and then “pointed out that it had been fin-
ished by Palma Giovane, a fact which Simon ought to have known” 
(68). Thus, Murdoch seems to declare that it is not necessary to be a 
professional art critic in order to know and feel real art, to be able to 
read and perceive it. As she writes in her philosophical essay:
In enjoying great art, we experience a clarification and concentration and per-
fection of our own consciousness. Emotion and intellect are unified into a 
limited whole. In this sense art also creates its client; it inspires intuition of 
ideal formal and symbolic unity which enable us to co-operate with the artist 
and to be, as we enjoy the work, artists ourselves. (Murdoch, Metaphysics 8)
The writer’s emphasis on the importance of the client’s figure as the “con-
sumer of art” in the essence of an artwork looks extremely symptomatic. 
Paradoxically, art was not only a topic that caused disputes between Axel 
and Simon, it really became a connecting link for them in the form of 
Greek kouros. It is about the statue of Apollo of the fifth century B.C. 
from the National Museum in Athens, “the tutelary deity of their love” 
(Murdoch, Fairly Honorable Defeat 78). They had known each other for a 
long time, but only there, in Greece, next to a “sacred kouros,” they sud-
denly realized that they were destined to be together. Their love passed 
some ordeals and, despite the intrigues of Julius King (the personification 
of evil in its sophisticated form), it turned out to be much more reliable 
than the marital relationship of Hilda and Rupert, the scrappy love of 
Morgan to Julius, the innocent love of Morgan and Peter.
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However, Axel and Simon are not the only art connoisseurs in the 
novel. Murdoch’s characters usually choose an artistic topos for their 
rendezvous, appointing them to museums, exhibitions, art and sculp-
ture galleries. In particular, Julius and Morgan meet in the Tate Gallery 
at an exhibition of modern sculpture, but the crowd of visitors inter-
feres with the conversation and they move to the next hall with great 
art, which, surprisingly, is almost completely unpeopled.
In an exchange of impressions about Turner’s canvases, the writer 
juxtaposes the classical understanding of the paintings of this master of 
marines and landscapes bold in their color effects (Morgan’s percep-
tion) with deliberately provocative, daring statements (Julius):
“How calm great pictures make one feel”, said Morgan. “I love these late Turn-
ers. Passionate turmoil held in perfect immobility. Elemental energy mysteri-
ously constructed into space and light … Um.” “Don’t you care for Turner?” 
“Not much. A hopelessly derivative painter. Always copycatting somebody: 
Poussin, Rembrandt, Claude. Never finished a picture without ruining it. And 
he had far too high opinion of himself. He should have remained a minor 
genre painter, that’s about his level. I’m afraid his painting resembles his 
poetry” (Murdoch, Fairly Honorable Defeat 220).
Such a critical opinion by Julius certainly cannot go unnoticed, it can 
even cause the indignation of “knowledgeable readers.” Especially it 
concerns Julius King’s criticism about Turner’s “derivativeness” that 
is very subjective and unfair. Having passed the school of French and 
Dutch masters, in his mature years Turner acquires his own, uniquely 
original wet-on-wet Turnerian technique. It is well-known that such 
French artists as Claude Monet and Henri Matisse in their youth stud-
ied Turner’s unusual technique of light and colors (Cumming 66). We 
are once again convinced that in relation to individual painters the 
words of Julius King (who, with an ingenuity worthy of Machiavelli, 
mercilessly experiments on his friends, playing with their destinies) 
help to reveal his own human nature.
Moreover, in her fiction Murdoch quite often reproduces the effect 
of suggestion on the consciousness of her characters at the moment of 
the reception act. Thus, the theater playwright and director Charles 
Arrowby from the novelThe Sea, the Sea (1978) in his conversation with 
a hypothetical reader admits that he is “not very much knowledgeable 
about pictures,” but they give him a certain “calm pleasure,” he likes 
the atmosphere of galleries; Arrowby even confesses that he derives “a 
lot of sheer erotic satisfaction from pictures of women” (Murdoch, Sea 
169).
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Looking at the pictures in the Wallace Collection, Arrowby associ-
ates the women depicted there with the women having left a trace in 
his life:
Then it began to seem that so many of my women were there; only not Hart-
ley … Lizzie by Terborch, Jeanne by Nicolaes Maes, Rita by Domenichino, 
Rosina by Rubens, a perfectly delightful study by Greuze of Clement as she 
was when I first met her … There was even a picture of my mother by Reyn-
olds, a bit flattering but a likeness. Yes, I looked for Hartley. Some could have 
rendered her, Campin perhaps, Memling or Van Eyck. But she was not there. 
(Murdoch, Sea 170).
Only knowing the artistic manner of these painters, the reader can 
imagine what each of the women was like according to the author’s 
idea. However, the protagonist does not find exactly the one who 
captured his thoughts, his first love, the beloved of his adolescence, 
Hartley.
The desire to get his love back turns into an obsessive idea. Many 
years have passed and now Hartley is an elderly married woman, Mary 
Hartley Fitch. Nevertheless, Charles Arrowby wants to turn back 
his lost love; he does not realize that he loves only a fictional image 
inspired by the pictures and his reminiscence of events forty years 
ago. To enhance the created effect, the writer brings her protagonist 
to the gallery, where his father had taken him once as a boy. Arrowby 
finds himself facing Titian’s picture “Perseus and Andromeda” and, 
“admiring the graceful naked figure of the girl,” suddenly, although he 
has seen this picture many times, he notices “the terrible fanged open 
mouth of the sea dragon” (Murdoch, Sea 171). Charles is terrified; he 
realizes the similarity of the see dragon seen in the picture with the 
see monster from his hallucination. Just as in the Titian’s picture sen-
sual passion acquires an almost pantheistic character, merging with the 
elemental forces of nature, so the element of Charles’s passion evokes 
“terrible demons” capable of destroying reality and inspiring love for 
his adolescence. Only the loss of the dearest people (the tragic deaths 
of cousin James and young Titus) and related events will help Charles 
Arrowby look at his life differently and finally understand that his love 
for Hartley was not a part of the real life, it belongs to the world of 
artistic reflection.
It is obvious that according to the author’s idea, works of art play 
a decisive role in the life of her characters. Mainly they are the paint-
ings by well-known Italian artists, like the picture by Titian’s appren-
tice Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto, 1518–1594) in the novel 
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An Unofficial Rose (1962). For Hugh Peronette, as the owner of the 
picture, it was just a “golden dream” of different life, but for his son 
Randle, it became a means to get his dream come true.
Most of all the Tintoretto glowed upon her with a jeweled beneficence. It 
lighted the room now, like a small sun. It was not a very large picture: it repre-
sented a naked woman and was almost certainly an earlier version of the figure 
of Susannah in the great Susannah Bathing in Vienna. Only it was no sketch, 
but a great picture in its own right and justly of some fame: a notable segment 
in the vast seemingly endless honeycomb of the master’s genius. (82)
Hugh Peronette, who never dared to break up his marriage and join his 
life with the woman of his dreams, Emma Sands, only after the death of 
his wife Fanny, decides to sell his most valuable thing, his treasure and 
consolation, a “priceless picture” to help his son start a new life. Hugh 
does not want a repetition of his own life and love story. Randle and 
his wife Ann are unhappy in marriage, and as the father he couldn’t but 
support his son’s love for the woman Randle loved with all his heart. 
He realized that “Randall’s thing is very serious. He’s really in love, the 
way it only happens once or twice in a lifetime. And with someone like 
him the mature love is the one to trust” (157). Hugh auctioned his 
favorite picture. It was sent promptly to Sotheby’s, and was purchased 
by the National Gallery. When Randle received a check from his father 
for a hefty sum, he was filled with confused feelings, among which the 
feeling of liberation prevailed.
In the novel An Unofficial Rose, the writer embodied the theory of 
two forms of beauty: physical and spiritual, which are usually mani-
fested through the double essence of love (Platonic eros). According 
to Murdoch, love in its physical manifestation testifies to the lack of 
freedom associated with the destructive feature of human personality. 
And, on the contrary, the higher power of love is capable of awakening 
the best feelings in people, revealing high moral traits and qualities. 
Consequently, love is both physical and spiritual mystery that cannot 
be separated, so Murdoch sympathizes and understands the attempts of 
her characters to find out what ordinary love and sacred love mean not 
only in An Unofficial Rose, but in her other novels (Under the Net, The 
Sea, the Sea, The Black Prince, etc.). Moreover, in the novel The Sacred 
and Profane Love Machine (1974) this theme appears in the title, which 
echoes the title of Titian’s painting “The Sacred and Profane Love” 
(1514). Regarding the plot of this picture, as well as Murdoch’s novels, 
some attempts were made to interpret it in terms of the Plato’s idea of 
love (Byatt; Conradi; Dipple; Islamova; Mizinina; Tracy), but, without 
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153
a doubt, both the novel and the picture are imbued with hedonism, the 
authoritative assertion of beauty and harmony in search of the truth.
According to Murdoch, the human soul seeks to know the truth, 
but only love and art can help in it. The writer deploys this thesis in her 
novel The Black Prince (1973): “Art tells the only truth that ultimately 
matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And 
after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.” (416) Reflecting on 
the outlined issue, in the best traditions of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, 
Murdoch even dramatizes the idea in her own dialogue about art, in 
which Socrates, Plato and his disciples act as protagonists. By the mouth 
of Socrates, she assures that “good art tells us more truth about our 
lives and our world than any other kind of thinking or speculation—it 
certainly speaks to more people. And perhaps the language of art is 
the most universal and enduring kind of human thought” (Murdoch, 
Existentialists 493). Art, according to Murdoch, brings the recipients 
closer to knowing the truth. The Good appears as the highest meaning 
of art for her, because art is a powerful influence on a person, which 
helps to discover the true human nature. In this way, Iris Murdoch 
actualizes important aspects of the philosophy of art and brings them 
into the realm of ontology.
Conclusion
The issue of intermedia dialogue of arts, actualized by modern literary 
studies, was one of the key problems in Iris Murdoch’s oeuvre. The 
British writer tried to find out the ontology of the art phenomenon, 
its multifunctional sense in the life of a person alongside with the spe-
cifics of the relationships between arts. Reflecting on art in her own 
philosophical essays and dialogues (“Conceptions of Unity. Art”; “Art 
and Eros: A Dialogue about Art”), Murdoch argued that a work of 
art opens up a space for reflection, it enables the recipients to be co-
creators while experiencing art in its cognitive and aesthetic aspects.
The theoretical and philosophical views of the author on the prob-
lem of polyfunctionality of art, its communicative role, the problem of 
the artist and his work of art are also actively articulated by Murdoch in 
her novels. In the texts of her fiction, the writer accumulates the experi-
ence of various arts, which she implements through a number of liter-
ary techniques. In particular, in Jackson’s Dilemma, The Black Prince, 
The Sea, the Sea and some others we identified and explored the inter-
media markers at the level of imagological transformations (by means 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2023
154
of anthroponymic and anthropomorphic allusions). The protagonists 
of her novels are painters, novelists, theater directors, art connoisseurs 
or in vast majority people somehow related to arts. Thus, the author 
emphasizes that it is not necessary to be a professional artist or an art 
critic in order to read and experience “true art.”
Another intermedia code of Murdoch’s novels is the perception of 
artworks created by great artists. In her literary texts such receptive 
versions are often uttered by the “voices” of her characters, both pro-
fessionals and amateurs. Hence, the writer’s emphasis on the impor-
tance of the recipient (“client,” “consumer” of the art), who acts as an 
essential link of the receptive matrix “author-text-recipient-artwork.” 
In addition, quite often Murdoch reproduces the effect of suggestion 
on the consciousness of her characters at the moment of the reception 
act (The Sea, the Sea). The internal narratives of her characters, their 
“stream of consciousness,” at the same time testify to the blurring of 
the boundaries between the reality and the world of art.
The usual meeting place of Murdoch’s characters is an artistic topos, 
which appears as another intermedia marker. Museums, theaters, exhi-
bitions, galleries of paintings and sculptures (A Fairly Honorable Defeat) 
appear as such demonstrative topos. Sometimes a function of the artistic 
topos is performed by a painter’s house, certain rooms of which appear 
in the reader’s reception as thematic collections in his private gallery 
(Jackson’s Dilemma).
Consequently, the reader’s consciousness repeatedly encounters 
various ekphrastic codes (the ekphrasis of paintings). In particular, 
the great paintings are not only described and discussed in Murdoch’s 
texts (ekphrastic writing), but function as separate characters—they 
anthropomorphize, “live their own life,” have their own space (Jackson’s 
Dilemma, A Fairly Honorable Defeat). In addition, according to the 
writer’s idea, works of art sometimes play a decisive role in the lives of 
her characters (An Unofficial Rose, Under the Net, The Sea, the Sea, The 
Black Prince). So, we can state that the use of intermedia components is 
one of the markers of Iris Murdoch’s idiostyle, which actualizes impor-
tant aspects of the philosophy of art and brings them into the realm of 
ontological issues.
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155
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Ontologija umetniškega fenomena v delih Iris 
Murdoch
Ključne besede: angleška književnost / Murdoch, Iris / filozofija umetnosti / 
ontologija / intermedialnost / pripovedna tehnika / ekfraza
Članek obravnava intermedialni umetniški dialog v opusu britanske pisate-
ljice in filozofinje Iris Murdoch. Ontologija umetniškega fenomena in njegov 
funkcionalni pomen v avtoričinih proznih besedilih, specifike medumetno-
stnega razmerja v njenih filozofskih esejih in dialogih so obravnavani z vidika 
intermedialnosti. Prispevek na osnovi intermedialne raziskovalne metodolo-
gije razkriva avtoričine teoretske in filozofske poglede na multifunkcionalnost 
umetnosti, interakcijo umetnika in umetniškega dela. Ključne tehnike medu-
metnostnega diskurza, skupaj z antroponimičnimi aluzijami, so obravnavane 
kot intermedialni označevalci besedil, identificirani in raziskani na ravni ima-
goloških transformacij. Ljudje umetnosti: umetniki, udeleženci umetniškega 
diskurza, pa tudi prejemniki umetnosti predstavljajo poseben tip likov v roma-
nih Iris Murdoch. Skladno s tem je v ontologiji umetniškega dela poudarjen 
pomen prejemnika, ki deluje kot bistveni člen receptivne matrice »avtor-bese-
dilo-prejemnik-umetniško delo«. Posebno stičišče likov v avtoričinih delih 
so umetniški toposi: muzej, razstava, umetniška galerija ali umetnikova hiša. 
Poleg tega se bralec ali bralka njene proze vedno znova srečuje z različnimi 
ekfrastičnimi kodi: ekfraze slik niso le prisotne v avtoričinih besedilih, ampak 
delujejo kot atropomorfizirani liki, dramatis personae, imajo svoj prostor 
(fizična in mentalna mesta) in igrajo odločilno vlogo v življenju protagonistov 
in protagonistk. Posledično ugotavljamo, da je uporaba intermedialnih kom-
ponent eden od označevalcev idiostila Iris Murdoch, ki aktualizira pomembne 
vidike filozofije umetnosti in jih postavlja v sfero ontološke problematike.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK  821.11.09Murdoch I. 
111.852
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i3.08