Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Embodied Mind and Vegetal Agency: The Good Apprentice
Iris Murdoch’s Wild Imagination January 1, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-87833-6_5 via Springer Nature
Summary
This chapter examines Iris Murdoch's novel The Good Apprentice to explore how human interactions with landscape are depicted as pivotal, agential encounters. It traces Murdoch's philosophical interest in the body and sensory awareness, influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of 'wild being'. The analysis focuses on moments where characters meet an animistic landscape, suggesting a collision of agential forces that resonates with contemporary affect theory. Drawing on material ecocriticism, it discusses vegetal agency—the active force of nature—as seen in Murdoch's portrayal of abandoned spaces undergoing rewilding, where vegetation becomes an agentive presence on the creep.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Murdoch's depictions of human-landscape interactions in The Good Apprentice illustrate a collision of agential forces, where vegetal agency and rewilding spaces act as agentive presences, aligning with affect theory and material ecocriticism. |
Abstract
Iris Murdoch’s Wild Imagination returns to the land to focus more intently on Murdoch’s depictions of key moments of human interaction in landscape. With reference to The Good Apprentice, chapter 5 begins by charting Murdoch’s fascination, as a young philosopher, with the role of the body and sensory awareness as essential precursors to thought. It considers Murdoch’s early interest in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and examines the degree to which his ontology of ‘wild being’ might be applied in any practical or meaningful sense. It assesses interactions between character and animistic landscape in the novel in order to scrutinize the collision of agential forces that seems to occur at these powerful moments. Murdoch’s portrayals of such interactions are suggestive of the affective experience of body in landscape that is recognized as critically significant by today’s affect theorists. An associated theoretical discourse, adopted by practitioners of material ecocriticism, constitutes vegetal agency which asserts the agential force of nature. Such notions of vegetal agency inform discussions of how Murdoch often pictures spaces, neglected or abandoned by their human inhabitants, that take on an overwhelming sense of rewilding, constituting an agentive force: the vegetal on the creep.