On Dogs and Good: Iris Murdoch’s Animal Imagination

Abstract

Dogs being exemplary in terms of empathic and selfless capabilities, it is no wonder Murdoch chose this species, in her novel-writing, as her totem ethical animal, as the counter-example to the ‘fat, relentless [human] ego’ (The Sovereignty of Good 52) exposed in her philosophy: ‘dogs are often figures of virtue’, she once confirmed in an interview (Dooley 155). But dogs’ foreignness to human language poses a crucial aesthetic problem: how can this unspeakable alterity be written? In analyses of key-passages of some major novels, this paper proposes a zoopoetic approach to the ways in which the text works at inscribing this animal otherness. In 1998, Derrida theorised about ‘the point of view of the absolute other’ (The Animal that therefore I Am) expressed by the gaze of the animal—a point of view which Murdoch had set to words much earlier through borderline narrative experiments where focalization shifts from human to animal, in pages where the novelist’s imagination ventures into what could be termed ‘zoofocalisation’, when everything passes through the animal’s perceptions as though the dog’s alterity were appropriating the narrative voice.

Keywords

• ego
• alterity
• ethics
• cynomorph
• gaze
• ‘animot’