'Like a Clarity under a Mist': Iris Murdoch's World of Sounds and Silences

When we think of Iris Murdoch’s relationship with other art forms, the visual arts come most readily to mind. Murdoch’s imagery, when describing an atmosphere or a setting, is also very often richly visual. However, music and other sounds can also be very important.

From the beginning, Murdoch orchestrates her sound-worlds as much with ambient noise, birdsong and human sounds overheard, as with actual music ― and silence is often important, not just as absence of sound but as an almost palpable quality in itself: her silences come in different qualities, moods and textures. The attributes of silence are necessarily perceived, consciously or unconsciously, by a listener or hearer, like the experience of listening to or hearing music and other sounds. In Murdoch’s novels, when sounds or silences are described, it is rarely just a matter of scene-setting ― it almost always provides insight into the state of mind of the character who is experiencing it.

I want here to look at some of the ways Murdoch uses silence both as a phenomenon and an idea in her novels ― in particular, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and Under the Net.