Writer's Block: A Novelist's Malady

When acclaimed British novelist Iris Murdoch released her 26th novel, Jackson's Dilemma, in 1995, it took a beating in many reviews. Writer A.S. Byatt said the characters "have no selves and therefore there is no story and no novel." It was a surprising turn for the Booker prize-winning author.

Murdoch later revealed in a newspaper interview that she'd uncharacteristically grappled with writer's block while working on Jackson's Dilemma. In 1997, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. She died at 79, two years later.

Murdoch's sudden writer's block was the first sign of Alzheimer's, the debilitating effects of which are clearly seen in her last novel, contends Peter Garrard, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London. With the aid of text-recognition software, Garrard compared two of Murdoch's earlier books -- her first novel, Under the Net, and her Booker Prize winner, The Sea, The Sea -- with her final novel and found that Jackson's Dilemma was significantly less sophisticated.

Ignoring subjective stylistic differences, Garrard compared the frequency with which Murdoch deployed common and uncommon words. As dementia took hold, Murdoch's word choice became more pedestrian and her vocabulary shrank. The study, presented at the New York City meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, also found that new words were introduced in Jackson's Dilemma at a much slower rate than in previous novels.

"She was doing all this writing when no one had the slightest idea that she was having some sort of cognitive deficiency," says Garrard. He notes that in the early stages of Alzheimer's, typically before diagnosis, sufferers often struggle in frustration to express their thoughts, especially when describing abstract concepts.

For Garrard, Iris Murdoch could not have been a more perfect case study. During her entire writing career, she submitted her manuscripts in longhand and allowed only minimal editing.

Passages from Iris Murdoch's first and last novels stand in sharp contrast:

From Under the Net, 1954

"So you may imagine how unhappy it makes me to have to cool my heels at Newhaven, waiting for the trains to run again, and with the smell of France still fresh in my nostrils. On this occasion, too, the bottles of cognac, which I always smuggle, had been taken from me by the Customs, so that when closing time came I was utterly abandoned to the torments of a morbid self-scrutiny."

From Jackson's Dilemma, 1995

"His beautiful mother had died of cancer when he was 10. He had seen her die. When he heard his father's sobs he knew. When he was 18, his younger brother was drowned. He had no other siblings. He loved his mother and his brother passionately. He had not got on with his father. His father, who was rich and played at being an architect, wanted Edward to be an architect too. Edward did not want to be an architect."