Études Britanniques Contemporaines (Dec 2020)
Post-Existentialist Moments: Murdoch and Highsmith
Abstract
‘Roquentin is a Platonist by nature’, says Iris Murdoch of the hero of Sartre’s Nausea, commenting on his distaste for the gross contingency of existing things. This pathological condition of detachment may respond to a change of attitude on our part; it may also admit of transformation into detachment as an ethical ideal on the lines of Weilian ‘decreation’. However, alongside this ‘cool Platonist’ attitude, a different ‘angry’ Platonism is possible. Murdoch’s contemporary Patricia Highsmith, herself powerfully influenced by existentialist writings, provides a fictional meditation on this theme in Strangers on a Train, where the principles of order and permanence collide with the psychopathic singularity of a man convinced that it is better to commit murder than to ‘die like sheep’. Murdoch, though, has no time for the idea of the transcendent acte gratuit. Her positive resistance to this idea goes on to shape her mature philosophy.
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