ABSTRACT
In her search to recover the generative power of speech, Iris Murdoch developed a form for the modern novel that allowed her to create her own distinctive and critical approach to liberal discourse. Sartre provided a key counter narrative to this. Her excellent 1953 monograph, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, is the first Anglophone interrogation of his work and evidences his heuristic importance for Murdoch. She admired his plays yet critiqued what she considered to be his formulaic, polemical and ideology-led approach to novels. We can see both approaches in her 1965 novel The Red and the Green: Sartrean polemical discourse and Murdochian liberal, communicative conversations. Sartre unintentionally contributed to Murdoch’s own long-term intellectual development, as is suggested by her continued, albeit reduced, referencing of his work. I chart the way in which, through the post-war decades, Murdoch and Sartre responded differently to various isms, including liberalism, existentialism and structuralism. I also analyse the possibility of using more recent upsurges of populism, with its vacuous and constraining debates about free speech, to contextualise Murdoch’s insistence upon the importance of ‘the speaking person’.
