1 ‘Iris Murdoch and the Aesthetics of Masochism’ Bran Nicol Journal of Modern Literature, 29:2, 2006. pp.148-65. [author’s copy] In her essay “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ ” Iris Murdoch writes that “[i]t is always a significant question to ask of any philosopher: what is he [sic] afraid of?” (Murdoch 1999a: 359). She is considering the difficulty “in philosophy to tell whether one is saying something reasonably public and objective, or whether one is merely erecting a barrier, special to one’s own temperament, against one’s own personal fears” (Murdoch 1999a: 359). Her question suggests what we might regard as her own fear as a writer—and of fiction, not just philosophy: the sense that she might be fooling herself, presenting a piece of writing as objective or impersonal when it is, in fact, driven by her desire. Her main strategy for alleviating this fear is the theory of literary production she developed throughout her career. What is distinctive about Murdoch’s theory of the novel is that it is also a theory of ethics. Like the good person, she maintained, a novelist should engage in the literary equivalent of ascesis, peeling away the egotistical layers of self which cling to her work to leave the representation of pure “reality”—or as close as one can get to it in art—in all its contingent glory. As she argues elsewhere in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ ” “[t]he chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one” (Murdoch 1999a: 347–8). The writer must resist the