Iris Murdoch's Paradoxical Novels: Thirty Years of Critical Reception by Barbara Stevens Heusel (Studies in English and American Literature, Linguistics, and Culture: Camden House) the critical reception of Murdoch shows her major critics' conflicting arguments, analyzed their disagreements, and presented their various conclusions. Except when particular occasions necessitated comment, the study attempted to stay out of the fray. Revealing many perspectives and raising many questions gives readers the opportunity to listen to dialogues among critics and to reach informed conclusions about Murdoch's direction in ‑ and her influence on ‑ the development of the contemporary novel.

Furthermore, this examination organized chronologically the three phases through which book‑length Murdoch studies have explored and evaluated her novels: 1965 to 1976, 1977 to 1986, and 1987 to the present. The critics' analyses represent the stages of their understanding, which have relied to some extent on Murdoch's progress in visualizing and determining her own direction. Whatever the arguments and conclusions of these critics may be, each of them struggles with three major questions about Murdoch as a creator of fiction. These questions ‑ To what extent is Murdoch a philosophical novelist? Is she a realistic novelist? Is she a postmodern novelist? ‑ form the three sections of this study. While decrying the act of categorization, as did Murdoch, the study admits that categorization remains an activity, albeit a dangerous one, which is common to all human beings.

Disagreements over answers to these questions separate the critics. From the first newspaper reviews in 1954 to 1976, the early critics, who were exploring the texts of an unknown novelist and needed assurance from Murdoch that their interpretations were plausible, tended to apply her critical statements about literature ‑ and even her philosophical statements ‑ directly to her novels. With a few variations, they generally saw her novels as extensions of her professional life as a philosopher. Even though the major critics were sympathetic to her insistence that she was not a philosophical novelist, they also, after defining the term philosophical novelist to suit their purposes, found it necessary to refer her readers to philosophical texts that might aid in comprehending the novels. Most of these critics, nevertheless, revealed an uneasiness about their own necessary oversimplification of her goals. Arguing that she was a traditional realist, they applied adjectives such as "outrageous, quirky, fantastic" to her texts.

Writing between 1977 and 1986, the second, less orthodox group began to celebrate Murdoch's uniqueness. As a whole, they were more willing to challenge her statements in interviews and to compare her narrative techniques to those of earlier literary masters. Since Murdoch had become a well‑known novelist by this time, the critics focused on contextualizing her work to demonstrate the direction and significance of her contributions to the novel. An influential transitional critic, Lorna Sage, signaled a major change in Murdoch studies in 1977 when she published an essay that convinced many critics that Murdoch not only had no desire to console the reader but that she created intentionally unfinished, imperfect texts to disturb the reader's complacency. Richard Todd and Peter Conradi gave Sage credit for these seminal ideas. The criticism of Todd and Elizabeth Dipple made clear Murdoch's revitalization of Shakespearean themes. Conradi's focus on her spirituality and his study of Dostoevsky as an influence demonstrated that Murdoch's paradoxical position was less puzzling in light of Dostoevsky's description of his own realism: "What the majority call fantastic and exceptional".

Critics writing after 1986 applied much broader lenses to view Murdoch's novels historically in relationship to the Western tradition of the novel and in relationship to theoretical issues. Dipple and Barbara Stevens Heusel demonstrated her carnivalesque leanings. Deborah Johnson, who is among the first feminist critics to have addressed Mttrdoch's oeuvre, laid the groundwork for new studies on gender and sexuality. These critics explore the postmodernist characteristics of the novels. It seems certain that discussion of her writing will remain an active part of contemporary literary discourse and will continue to be an important source of information about the development of the novel, the strategies that become literary history.

The body of criticism has arrived at and recorded some major conclusions about Murdoch's stated goals and her descriptions of her own thinking processes. The consensus is that she was an unorthodox quester after the truth, a novelist who devoted her life to recording a broad picture of the human condition. Concluding that the twentieth century had been a period of narcissism, Murdoch dramatized in her fiction, individual human idiosyncrasies against an age‑old background of Western cultural history. Few novelists have been able to draw on such a thorough education in the academy and in life.

Because she was a professional philosopher, many early critics and at least one later one assumed that demonstrating another philosopher's influence on Murdoch's thinking proved that she was a philosophical novelist. Later critics do not accept such a foregone conclusion. Her wide experiences in the world of philosophy created an eclectic thinker, whose views many more‑conservative philosophers have considered unorthodox. She was obviously moved by the work of great philosophers, as she was by artistic geniuses, but she managed to separate her two professions and to use her knowledge of each to complement and enhance the other. Living in two worlds, she could never totally rid her mind of what she knew about the peripheries of her other fife ‑ but she could and did control her goals. As a result of her rich life, her oeuvre reveals an extraordinarily enlightened view of reality. Readers must weigh for themselves what percentage of professional philosophical discourse if any ‑ they find in each novel and then decide whether what they discover interferes with the story. Furthermore, her biographical experiences no doubt affected the scope of her interests and helped determine the choice of subject matter for her novels, although she wrote adamantly that she did not base incidents or characters in novels on real events and people. The critic's categorization of novels into styles was of no interest to her. She wanted the freedom to create her own unique style in each novel. Other than arguing against the solipsism of the modernist stance and for eighteenth‑century and particularly nineteenthcentury realism, she preferred to ignore such classification.

What is crucial for literary critics is that Murdoch, a natural and consummate storyteller, never gave up on the novel during the 1950s and 1960s, when certain critics were declaring it dead. Her oeuvre continually revitalized the novel form by incorporating traditional genres and techniques; such mixing allowed her, through stylizing and parodying spatial and temporal features, to make old forms convey new concepts. She chose a realistic canvas and a popular genre for her first novel, and in the remaining twenty‑five she wove her own unorthodox patterns, mixing comedy of manners and parable, picaresque and gothic, detective story and fantasy, epistolary novel and magic realism.

At the beginning of this study I promised to grant Murdoch's critics the same kind of freedom she no doubt wanted: the freedom to argue about the stages and value of her novelistic output and the effectiveness of her narrative process in fashioning the material world without attempting perfection. Demonstrating the journey these critics made from 1954 to 1995 reveals the complexity of Murdoch's project and the danger of categorizing her as a philosophical novelist, a realist, a postmodernist, or some combination thereof. Her most devoted critics seem to agree that Iris Murdoch embodies the qualities of the good artist.

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