Magellan's Log: Iris Murdoch: Gesamtkunstwerke 2

She’s writing what look like more or less standard 20^th century mainstream novels (as Shakespeare wrote what looked like more or less standard 16^th century blood dramas). Conditioned, we enter them on page one expecting certain conventions of narrative, rhetoric, pacing. But she’s working in a much, much larger framework, playing off all those conventions and others as well (of theater, of opera, of art). As Caravaggio required a new way of seeing, Murdoch requires a new way of reading.