13 Ways of Reading Jackson's Dilemma: Enigmatic Hope Beyond the Human

The novel Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) was the last book published by novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919-1999). It is a problematic work in many ways, and it has been assumed by many critics that its apparently disjointed and artless nature arises from the deterioration of Murdoch’s health owing to Alzheimer’s Disease. In this paper I aim to find other ways to view this novel.
My initial impetus was to try out thirteen different approaches, echoing Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird’. However, while retaining this title and some of these ideas, I decided to compare the novel with two other books which, while nominally novels, defy expectations of the genre: V.S. Naipaul’s 1987 The Enigma of Arrival and Christos Tsiolkas’s 7 ½, published in 2021. These two novels deliberately challenge the fictional form, using a first-person narrative style which appears closer to autobiography, and containing little in the way of plot or character development. I speculate that Murdoch might also have been deliberately stretching the bounds of the novel form in this final, enigmatic work which ends, as do the other two novels, on an ambiguously hopeful note.