The self-begetting novel is a major sub-genre of this century. Its paradigm is Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, at the same time an account of its own birth and of the rebirth of its principal protagonist as novelist…. Notable examples of self-begetting novels since Proust's have been Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausée, Michel Butor's La Modification, and Claude Mauriac's La Marquise sortit à cinq heures. Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954) is a remarkable instance of this French tradition transposed to British soil. (p. 43)

On the very first page of Murdoch's very first novel [Under the Net], published soon after her study of Sartre [Sartre: Romantic Rationalist], the narrator [Jake Donaghue] presents himself as, perhaps like his creator, arriving in England 'with the smell of France still fresh in my nostrils'…. His suitcases are heavy with French books.

Jake Donaghue never relinquishes the center of attention in this narrative, which is consistently related to us from his first-person perspective. Although he admits 'I can't bear being alone for long' … and 'I hate solitude' …, Jake is in effect 'a connoisseur of solitude'…. Jake declares: 'The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction'…. However, his introspective narrative will prove to be self-creative precisely through its recognition of the dense contingency of the external world. (p. 45)

Jake delights in 'the sort of dreamy unlucrative reflection which is what I enjoy more than anything in the world'…. His tendency to examine the self, the world, fiction, and the relationships among the three is one of the marks of the self-begetting novel….

Like any sovereign self-begetting novel, Under the Net has its own cast of artist figures…. But the most important artist within this work of art is, of course, Jake Donaghue, who conceives of himself as sovereign of his narrative realm. At least in the beginning of the novel, everyone, especially Jake's submissive foil Finn, exists as an extension of his creative self….

Like Marcel [protagonist/narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu] or Roquentin [of La Nausée] Jake is a writer. He has composed an epic poem entitled 'And Mr. Oppenheim Shall Inherit the Earth', but he is able to earn money by translating best-selling but mediocre contemporary novels by [the fictitious] Jean Pierre Breteuil. One of them, Le Rossignol de bois (in the Donaghue translation, The Wooden Nightingale) is itself about the relationship between reflection and creation. (p. 46)

Jake's development as a novelist is inseparable from his growth as an individual. Both produce Under the Net. With his literary hack work as mere translator of second-rate fiction, Jake consciously restricts his originality. But his friendship with Hugo, who seves as a kind of Quietist prophet for him, makes him aware that: 'The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods'…. All literature, even his more serious efforts in The Silencer, thereby becomes fraud, if indeed 'it is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine'…. (pp. 46-7)

One of the major factors in shaping Jake's new identity as novelist is the transformation of Jean Pierre Breteuil, the French author. With the publication of Nous les vainqueurs, Breteuil himself undergoes a reincarnation from mercenary to genuine artist….

Breteuil's artistic birth forces Jake to question his own neatly formulated conceptions of reality. In the process, it inspires him to attempt to rival the Frenchman by producing his own novel. (p. 47)

[With] his novel awaiting birth, he is now a new man.

It was the first day of the world. I was full of that strength which is better than happiness, better than the weak wish for happiness which women can awaken in a man to rot his fibres. It was the morning of the first day….

A self has been begotten by the narrator in imagery which consciously evokes the Creation. Jake is to be both father and artificer…. (pp. 47-8)

At the end of Under the Net, Jake returns to Mrs. Tinckham's cat-congested newspaper shop, which he has visited in Chapter One. Now, in a scene remarkably parallel to the one in which Roquentin listens to a recording of the English song 'Some of These Days' in the Rendez-Vous des Cheminots café (and which itself owes much to use of the Vinteuil sonata in A la recherche), he hears Anna Quentin singing on the radio.

Like a sea wave curling over me came Anna's voice. She was singing an old French love song. The words came slowly, gilded by her utterance. They turned over in the air slowly and then fell; and the splendour of the husky gold filled the shop, transforming the cats into leopards and Mrs. Tinckham into an aged Circe….

It is a stunning illustration of the potential power of art. (p. 48)

The sense of rebirth, rededication, and liberation at the conclusion of Undo the Net derives from the promise of a work which will succeed in understanding the contingent world and thereby uttering what is 'unutterably particular'.

Early in the novel, the as yet unredeemed Jake declares: 'I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason'…. Iris Murdoch the critic indicts Jean-Paul Sartre for possessing what she considers the same heretical beliefs…. Murdoch's reading of Sartre suggests a view of French fiction as aseptic. She regards it as her British, and human, duty to introduce micro-organisms, 'the stuff of human life' into the Petri dish furnished by her teachers on the Continent.

Because of what she sees as this distaste for the contigent, individuated world, despite graphic images of the viscosity of existence, Murdoch considers Roquentin's a 'rather dubious salvation'. Her own Jake Donaghue, on the other hand, is portrayed as overcoming that orientation 'which is fatal to a novelist proper'. His career in Under the Net is framed by his visits to Mrs. Tinckham's, appropriately 'a dusty, dirty, nasty-looking corner shop'…. And, having developed an understanding of and fondness for this reality, Jake is presumably about to become 'a novelist proper', if not a proper novelist, at the conclusion of Under the Net. (pp. 48-9)

[Murdoch's] narrator commits himself to accepting life within the British Isles. Artistic rebirth paradoxically becomes a process of entering rather than departing, immersing yourself in the hair of the dog that bit you. Theorizing is the enemy, and 'All theorizing is flight'. (p. 49)

Begetting itself and a new self for Jake, Under the Net avoids flight. It returns for a candid assessment of itself and the world in which it is enmeshed. (p. 50)