The Scrivening

An alternative title for this journal was “The Scrivener”—after Bartleby, the scrivener, Herman Melville’s literary Rorschach test, a man who prefers not to. A scrivener is paid to write, but for now, at least, Under the Net is free to read.

Its actual title is stolen from a 1954 novel by Iris Murdoch—her first—about an idling writer, Jake, and his philosophical friends. The novel features fireworks, the abduction of a showbiz dog, and a philosophical dialogue, The Silencer, from which its title, in turn, is stolen. “[The] movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards truth,” a character in The Silencer declaims:

All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

The image is stolen, a third time over, from a passage of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on scientific theories as nets wh…