Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Embodied Mind and Vegetal Agency: The Good Apprentice
Iris Murdoch’s Wild Imagination January 1, 2025 Lucy Oulton
Iris Murdoch's novel *The Good Apprentice* depicts human characters interacting with landscapes in ways that suggest a collision of agential forces between people and an animistic natural world. Murdoch's early philosophical interest in Merleau-Ponty's ontology of 'wild being' and the role of the body and sensory awareness as precursors to thought informs these portrayals. The interactions evoke affective experiences of the body in landscape that contemporary affect theorists recognize as significant. Drawing on material ecocriticism and the concept of vegetal agency, the chapter argues that Murdoch often pictures neglected or abandoned spaces that take on an overwhelming sense of rewilding, constituting an agentive force of vegetation on the creep.