This vagueness results in the ostensibly religious (or, one could say, religious-adjacent) ‘buffer zone’ of Imber Court where, as aspiring postulant Catherine Fawley notes, they have to invent everything as they go along ( Corina Stan, “A Sociality of Distances: Roland Barthes and Iris Murdoch on How to Live with Others”, Modern Language Notes 129, no.

Nonetheless, I will suggest that the way music is framed in The Bell can be integrated into the sorts of analyses of this work proposed by scholars who have sought to connect it to Murdoch’s developing and associated philosophical ideas about love and sociability.Ĭorina Stan, for example, whose 2014 article lines The Bell up against some later Barthes, proposes that its set-up and characters show post-war discontent with the alienating features of modern ethical life in the context of a post-religious vagueness about what might ameliorate this. And, while I did read a small amount of secondary literature out of general interest, I was not doing research per se.

As this is a blogpost and not an academic article, you’ll forgive me for presenting this as fairly random thoughts. Some comments in the available secondary literature, however, claim music was pervasive, and while I still don’t think that music is completely central, its presence is worth some comment. In September my bookclub read Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, a novel that I had read twice before and didn’t remember having a lot of music in it. All page references to The Bell are from my Vintage paperback 2004. I ramble extensively about Murdoch, music, and medievalism.

The bell iris murdoch analysis