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Under the Net
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Under the Net
Under the Net is a 1954 novel by Iris Murdoch. It was Murdoch's first published novel. Set in London, it is the story of a struggling young writer, Jake Donaghue. Its mixture of the philosophical and the picaresque has made it one of Murdoch's most popular novels.
It is dedicated to Raymond Queneau. When Jake leaves Madge's flat in Chapter 1, two of the books he mentions taking are Murphy by Samuel Beckett, and Pierrot mon ami by Queneau, both of which are echoed in this story. The epigraph, from John Dryden's Secular Masque, refers to the way in which the main character is driven from place to place by his misunderstandings.
In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923. The editors of Modern Library named the work as one of the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century.
The "net" in question is the net of abstraction, generalization, and theory. In Chapter 6, a quotation from Jake's book The Silencer includes the passage: "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular here. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net."
Michael Wood, writing in the London Review of Books, notes that "the work’s title,... borrows and interrogates an image [of Newtonian mechanics] from Wittgenstein's Tractatus." Peter J. Conradi, in his 2001 biography of Iris Murdoch, specifies that "the title alludes to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 6, 341, the net of discourse behind which the world's particulars hide, which can separate us from our world, yet simultaneously connect us." According to Conradi, Hugo Belfounder is "a portrait of Wittgenstein's star pupil from 1937, Yorick Smythies."
In this lightly comic novel about work, love, wealth and fame the main character is Jake Donaghue, a struggling writer and translator. He seeks to improve his circumstances and make up for past mistakes by reconnecting with his old acquaintance Hugo Belfounder, a mild mannered and soft-spoken philosopher.
Jake, a shameless mooch and hack-writer—now homeless and out of other solid options—tracks down his ex-girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her elegant sister, an actress named Sadie. He also reacquaints himself with Hugo, whose philosophy Jake had long ago presumptuously tried to decipher and interpret to his own liking. The plot develops through a series of adventures involving Jake and his offbeat minion, Finn. From the kidnapping of a movie-star canine to the staging of a political riot on a film set, Jake attempts to discover and incorporate Hugo's abstruse philosophies in real life situations. Berated yet enlightened, Jake's aspirations to become a true writer/philosopher may at last be at hand.
Jake Donaghue has just arrived back in London from a trip to France. Finn, a distant relative who is so obliging that he is sometimes mistaken for a servant, tells Jake that they are being thrown out of Madge's house, where they have been living rent-free for eighteen months. A conversation with Madge reveals that they are being moved to make way for her new lover, the rich bookmaker Sammy Starfield.
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Under the Net
Under the Net is a 1954 novel by Iris Murdoch. It was Murdoch's first published novel. Set in London, it is the story of a struggling young writer, Jake Donaghue. Its mixture of the philosophical and the picaresque has made it one of Murdoch's most popular novels.
It is dedicated to Raymond Queneau. When Jake leaves Madge's flat in Chapter 1, two of the books he mentions taking are Murphy by Samuel Beckett, and Pierrot mon ami by Queneau, both of which are echoed in this story. The epigraph, from John Dryden's Secular Masque, refers to the way in which the main character is driven from place to place by his misunderstandings.
In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923. The editors of Modern Library named the work as one of the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century.
The "net" in question is the net of abstraction, generalization, and theory. In Chapter 6, a quotation from Jake's book The Silencer includes the passage: "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular here. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net."
Michael Wood, writing in the London Review of Books, notes that "the work’s title,... borrows and interrogates an image [of Newtonian mechanics] from Wittgenstein's Tractatus." Peter J. Conradi, in his 2001 biography of Iris Murdoch, specifies that "the title alludes to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 6, 341, the net of discourse behind which the world's particulars hide, which can separate us from our world, yet simultaneously connect us." According to Conradi, Hugo Belfounder is "a portrait of Wittgenstein's star pupil from 1937, Yorick Smythies."
In this lightly comic novel about work, love, wealth and fame the main character is Jake Donaghue, a struggling writer and translator. He seeks to improve his circumstances and make up for past mistakes by reconnecting with his old acquaintance Hugo Belfounder, a mild mannered and soft-spoken philosopher.
Jake, a shameless mooch and hack-writer—now homeless and out of other solid options—tracks down his ex-girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her elegant sister, an actress named Sadie. He also reacquaints himself with Hugo, whose philosophy Jake had long ago presumptuously tried to decipher and interpret to his own liking. The plot develops through a series of adventures involving Jake and his offbeat minion, Finn. From the kidnapping of a movie-star canine to the staging of a political riot on a film set, Jake attempts to discover and incorporate Hugo's abstruse philosophies in real life situations. Berated yet enlightened, Jake's aspirations to become a true writer/philosopher may at last be at hand.
Jake Donaghue has just arrived back in London from a trip to France. Finn, a distant relative who is so obliging that he is sometimes mistaken for a servant, tells Jake that they are being thrown out of Madge's house, where they have been living rent-free for eighteen months. A conversation with Madge reveals that they are being moved to make way for her new lover, the rich bookmaker Sammy Starfield.