‘If I could have given Willy my full attention this morning’: Ethics as Perceptive Attention in Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good

• Main Author: Jean-Michel Ganteau
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2020-12-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: attention; care; consideration; ethics; ethics of attention; exposition
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/10076

The Nice and the Good is one of Murdoch’s ‘open’ novels (Conradi), which privileges the ways of exposure to the other. This it does by resorting to generic heterogeneity, using the conventions of the thriller and mixing them up with those of romantic comedy (as underlined by many critics), adding to them a measure of romance as the instrument not only of supernatural probing but also as a means of ethical exploration. As often with Murdoch’s fiction, the narrative addresses the conflict between narcissism and love, and this it does through an obviously didactic vein (as evinced in the characters’ discourse) and more especially by staging the relations among the cast of characters gathered in Octavian Gray’s estate. Murdoch’s exploration of this ethical conflict is investigated by staging ‘orectic’ (Nussbaum) characters radically drawn to the other and characterized by interdependence, hence vulnerability to the other, one of the main acceptations of the good relying on the ‘virtue of acknowledged dependence on the other’ (McIntyre). The search for the good life is also predicated on the powers of the imagination, whose lack is deplored and whose improvement is encouraged. Above all, it is through attention to details that the novel’s proposal of a practical ethics is put forward. This is shown negatively, when evil is equated to a lack of care, and positively, through the evocation of the characters’ attention to details of the natural and human worlds. The novel thereby favours a quality of attention to singularities (as opposed to abstractions) that defines our moral experience (Laugier) and that it expresses in terms of exposure to the other (Levinas), consideration of the other (Pelluchon, Massé) and care for the other (Laugier), thereby boosting up the relation and ethical aspects of attention. Ultimately, the novel considers aesthetic and ethical experience as perceptual training to what is less visible and perceptible, and above all, to take up Simone Weil’s definition, as the need to ‘concentrate [...] on the distance between what we are and what we love.’