“What a fuss about probably nothing”: Iris Murdoch’s Ordinary Queerness

Abstract

In his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner defines the word queer in terms of its opposition to the ordinary. Queer, he writes, “rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (xxvi). This formulation, while essential in its challenge to bourgeois heteronormativity, positions Queer Studies in an adversarial relationship to the everyday. By virtue of its critical distance from the normal, Warner’s sense of queer calls a host of traditional concepts—such as the individual, love, and goodness—into question. In this context, it is not surprising that Iris Murdoch’s impact on Queer Studies has been, to date, negligible. Her moral philosophy and realist fiction appear reactionary in this suspicious light. In particular, her association with a sexless Platonism and censure of poststructuralism has distanced her work from both feminism and Queer Studies. I want to challenge this distance: on the one hand, many critics have misread Murdoch’s Platonism, which rests on a robust and far-fromdisembodied account of Eros; on the other hand, literary scholars increasingly echo Murdoch’s concerns regarding critical theory, especially as they pertain to critique’s dominance. With these two shifts in perspective, Murdoch’s particular inflection of queerness comes into view. In what follows, I make the case for Murdoch’s relevance to Queer Studies through an analysis of her thirteenth novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat.1 I argue that the text’s representation of queer desire challenges regimes of the normal, in Warner’s sense, but does so without endorsing or inducing critical detachment. On the contrary, A Fairly Honourable Defeat illustrates the nearness of the queer and decries theorists’ intellectualized flight from life’s muddle. Through its attentive witness to human frailty, the novel reminds readers of what they already know—but have theorized away—regarding the incoherence of desire, the messiness of attachment, and the centrality of love. To this end, I sketch recent debates in literary studies that have queried critique’s cynical sensibility. With these limitations in mood and mode in mind, I will show how Murdoch’s novel accounts for the dangers of suspicious reading, especially when skepti-