Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Embodied Mind and Vegetal Agency: The Good Apprentice

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.

Study at a glance

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.