Jack London, meet Iris Murdoch

I'm currently working through an omnibus of Jack London short stories, and I came across the following gem in one of his stories about Hawaii, "The House of Pride." The main character is a self-absorbed, self-righteous, self-assured land baron who has just learned that the free-spirited, ukulele-playing, village playboy is his half-brother. When the image he has constructed of his father crumbles, his own self-image is threatened. London captures the moment of weakness.

"And in that moment, flashing and fleeting, it was given him to see his brother tower above him like a mountain, and to feel himself dwindle and dwarf to microscopic insignificance. But it is not well for one to see himself truly, nor can one so see himself for long and live; and only for that flashing moment did Percival Ford see himself and his brother in true perspective. The next moment he was mastered by his meagre and insatiable ego."[1]

For a brief moment, the light of truth peeked through a crack the fantasy he had constructed about himself and his family, but the power of self-deception is not easily overcome. He quickly spackles the crack and stabilizes his delusion.

The passage from Jack London immediately called to mind another writer who explored the power of the "fat relentless ego."[2] Iris Murdoch was a novelist and philosopher who spent a career writing about the human propensity for self-delusion. Her novels regularly feature protagonists who live contentedly in consoling fantasies. The challenging of these fantasies is the main conflict of the novels, and the shattering of them the climax. For one of the best examples, see her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea, the Sea.

What her novels show, her philosophical essays explain. "The chief enemy of excellence in morality," she writes, "is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one."[3] Self-knowledge isn't necessarily the answer to the problem, as we might think. "Self-knowledge" is itself usually a delusion, and so what one needs is to truly see what there is outside oneself.

For Murdoch, seeing properly is essential to moral action (while fantasy, on the other hand, clouds vision and leads potentially to immoral action). "True vision occasions right conduct," she asserts. And elsewhere: "Freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action."[4] When one sees others as they really are, she is free from the shackles of fantasy and thereby free to act rightly.

London and Murdoch agree on the importance of true sight as a ground for right action. And they also agree that such vision is nearly impossible for humans to sustain. I'm not sure about London's religious leanings, but I know that Murdoch remained a (very Platonic) atheist her whole life. They both see clearly the human condition, however, whether they're grappling with the "meagre and insatiable" or "fat relentless" ego.

I might give it a different name--the old self, the flesh, or Adam--but I would affirm the clarity of their vision. And I appreciate their powerful, insightful, and beautiful expressions of that vision.

May we be people who keep our eyes fixed on Jesus (Heb 12:2) and attend to the true and noble things (Phil 4:8) in order to clarify our vision.

[1] Jack London, "House of Pride" in Short Stories of Jack London (eds. Labor, Leitz and Shepherd; New York: Macmillan, 1991), 307.

[2] Iris Murdoch, "On 'God' and 'Good'" in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (ed. Conradi; New York: Penguin, 1997), 342.

[3] "On 'God' and 'Good,'" 347-8.

[4] "On 'God' and 'Good,'" 353 and 354.