‘Now the Illumination’: Iris Murdoch as Zen Philosopher-Poet

Abstract

Hullah—himself a poet—was, with Yozo Muroya, instrumental in persuading Murdoch to allow some of her poetry to be collected in the 1997 Poems, for which he wrote a fine Critical Introduction. In this chapter Hullah takes his study of Murdoch’s poetry, which he believes is currently undervalued, to a yet more detailed level. Giving an informative introduction for Western readers to Zen and haiku—both of which Murdoch studied and revered—he contends that this ‘is a place where a proper appreciation of her poetic output can begin’ (68). He sets out the evident appeal of Zen Buddhism for Murdoch with ‘its focused championing of the […] insight and enlightenment that will be arrived at through sustained attentive meditation’ (69) in parallel with her ‘own notoriously godless notion of good’ (83) and, in as much as ‘the focus of the Zen meditative act can be the actual, the ordinariness and contingency, the nuts and bolts of the natural object-world outside us’ (69), it shares a very Murdochian perspective. As also does the fact that ‘Zen is a realistic faith, infused by a Taoist elevation of actual human experience, conveyed in anecdote and attention to what Murdoch calls the thinginess of things, meaningfully filtered through the purposeful lens of art’ (69). With this as background to close readings from diverse Japanese and English poets as well as Murdoch, Hullah analyses her poetry from the early—‘I Will Not Wander’, ‘The Message of the Bumble Bee’ and ‘After the 2nd of April’—in which he finds ‘a counterpoint, contrary and violent post-Romantic Modernist challenging of Nature not only red in tooth and claw, but now conveyed in splintered, fragmented imagism’ (76), to the later—‘The Brown Horse’, ‘Poem and Egg’ and ‘No Smell’—in which he perceives ‘the dialogue between Romantic and Zen-haiku strategies that co-exist in her poems of the later 1970s and 1980s’ (80). The culmination of this essay is ‘John Sees a Stork at Zamora’, ‘one of her best poems’ (85) written in 1975 which, Hullah contends, ‘is a Zen koan-like portrayal of the act of unselfing’ (86) and he concludes that ‘the technically impressive and knowingly intertextual, eclectic poetry produced by Murdoch is good poetry as well as meaningful philosophy’ (82). The jury may still be out, but in Paul Hullah, Murdoch has an expert champion of her poetry. In the next few years we anticipate that an edited selection of Murdoch’s poetry will be published showcasing the best of her work in this little-known area of her writing. The Murdoch collections in Kingston University archives stretches to thirteen substantial notebooks and consideration of these in relation to her other work will form a new dialogue in the years to come.