Colors of Consciousness in the Novels of Iris Murdoch

“There’s extraordinary electrical power, joy, variety and difference one can have simply by thinking about colour,” Iris Murdoch said in a 1993 interview for Modern Painters (“Beautiful” 50). Her sustained scrutiny of color was an essential aspect of her complex search for a synesthetic form of communication which could more accurately render consciousness. Murdoch’s highly distinctive color rhetoric emerges from a complex fusion of many influences, including Plato’s description of color in Timaeus and Critias as “a flame which emanates from every sort of body, and has particles corresponding to the sense of sight”;1 Rainer Maria Rilke’s thoughts regarding the colors of Paul Cézanne, which, Rilke claims, have a favorable moral and spiritual effect on the perceiver (see Murdoch, Metaphysics pp. 246–47);2 Murdoch’s intellectual discourse with the color theorist Denis Paul;3 and the vividly colored imagery of her close friend the artist Harry Weinberger, whose bold, sensual, and elemental paintings permeate Murdoch’s novels.4 Color is deployed by Murdoch both realistically and expressionistically to produce a more truthful rendition of the experience of being in love: to convey love’s agony and ecstasy, its delusions and its flashes of clarity. Color also helps Murdoch to portray the vital importance of loving attention to the external world. Although moral progress is shown to be extremely difficult to achieve, Murdoch reveals that contemplation of the colors of external reality and their healing, refining, and stimulating impact on inner consciousness may facilitate a moral step forward. Murdoch’s early explorations of color are most fully realized in The Sandcastle, in which an array of colors is invoked to render the inner psychology of characters. Anne Rowe observes that the first meeting of the schoolmaster Bill Mor and the artist Rain Carter, who are soon to fall in love, is accompanied by “a riotous fusion of colours” which “evokes each character’s primitive sexual attraction for the other, replicates the shock of new emotions, and evokes the dangerous energy being released that will have devastating consequences for Mor, his wife and children, and Rain herself” (Iris 86). Rowe also identifies the “various shades of a lurid green” which appear later in the novel to convey Mor’s “sickening guilt”