A Clockwork Iris
Murdoch’s notable 1961 essay ‘Against Dryness’ introduces the idea of the ‘written’ novel – a line of argument that is an instance of the ‘confident, ambitious breadth of reference’ Peter J. Conradi mentions in his preface to Existentialists and Mystics:
Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right.
