364
PARTISAN REVIEW
survived the causes that brought them into existence, bearing the names
of heroes in whom they no longer believe. The most charming and
harried woman in the book, for instance, is called after Rosa Lux–
embourg.
Miss Murdoch's world is, like the world of the other three novels
I have discussed, a post-political one; but only she is prepared to admit
this disconcerting truth. Her novel does not either pretend like
The
Long View
that politics are inconsequential nor perpetrate like Hersey
and Algren the pious fraud that the liberalism of the '30s is still viable
and sufficient. No, it accepts the defining fact of our age that for any–
one but the self-hypnotized bureaucrat our community is only haunted
by politics, gibbered at by the ghosts of political sloganeers who urge
on us attitudes and stances appropriate to a society which is dead. For
Miss Murdoch (in her book at least; her personal politics are irrelevant
here ) the competing parties are programless, they merely happen to be
in or out. There is one character in her novel who (offstage) becomes
a Communist, but quite as one picks up the chicken pox or some irrele–
vant vice. Yet her recognition of our post-political status gives her book
not less but more relevance to the contemporary scene.
In
one small
section, for instance, she continues the kind of imaginative, comic
revelation of British bureaucratic life that has largely lapsed since
Dickens portrayed the Circumlocution Office with its charming motto:
It can't be done.
Her latter-day Circumlocution Office, now become a
set of initials attached to some vague international organization and
supported by American money, contains still the descendants of Dickens'
dawdlers. But as these merely vestigial gentlemen-bureaucrats confer
with each other among the disordered files about the day's crossword
puzzles, their secretaries, shellacked and permanent-waved young ladies
on the make-begin to take over behind the scenes. Surely, there is no
more savage and satisfactory portrait of the coming rulers of the Offices
that will rule the world than Miss Murdoch's Agnes Casement.
For the rest,
The Flight from the Enchanter
not only manages to
combine a high sense of the comic with shrewd observation of social
types, but adds to both a quite mad willingness to disregard the demands
of sentiment, sensibility and realism alike, and to project characters and
actions justified only by fantasy. Miss Murdoch's book is dedicated to
Elias Canetti, whose love for the improbable and the insane and whose
quasi-surrealist example, serve her as charms to deliver her from English
urbanity and polish and good sense. The influence of recent psychologies
are everywhere in her novel, as in all the others I have been writing
about; but she alone has grasped the fact that we have come to the
