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“In came the self-evident and luminous little mess”: Ethical Life Writing in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intenti
Starting from a brief examination of Muriel Spark’s position as a Scottish novelist within the framework of her anti-essentialist, anti-authoritative aesthetics, my essay will take a seemingly abrupt, but in fact consequential turn to investigate the complex antinomies involved in her fictional representation of the lives of others. Although at home and abroad she is hailed as Scotland’s most celebrated author of the twentieth century, Spark’s writerly practice consists of regularly dismantling grand narratives or fixed, stable identities, often clashing with more localized or prescriptive views on the social and national functions of narrative. My argument, however, is that it is the very unease of her “Scottishness” that acts as one of the foundations of her literary ethics, embodied in her acute awareness of the antinomies involved in textualizing the lives of others. Spark’s shrewdly metafictional
(1981) openly thematizes both the obligation, and the risks of telling one’s own and other people’s stories, performing a radical ethics of narrative alterity through its staging of the enmeshments of writing, (auto)biography and experience.
Journal Article
Exploring the Role of Food in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
First published in 1961, Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of the most well-known works of 20th-century British literature, and the book’s portrayal of the eponymous Edinburgh schoolmistress and her select clique of pupils during the turbulent 1930s now forms part of contemporary popular culture. After presenting a quick panorama of the author and the work, this article adopts a bipartite approach to describe the role of food at different junctures in the narrative. Initially, it focuses on the types of foods presented and the occasions where they are served (for example, as high teas), thereby seeking to outline whether any wider literary symbolism can be detected. Subsequently, the article examines the unusual role of food and foodstuffs in Miss Brodie’s romantic relationship with Mr Lowther, the school’s music teacher, a liaison which is ostensibly centred around her focus on him consuming large quantities of food in order to gain weight. These two sets of food-related observations are then interpreted, analysed, and summarised before further suggestions for additional research on the topic are outlined.
Journal Article
Hidden possibilities : essays in honor of Muriel Spark
\"Described by David Lodge as \"the most gifted and innovative writer of her generation,\" Muriel Spark had a literary career that spanned from the late 1940s until her death in 2006, and included poems, stories, plays, essays, and, most notably, novels. The extensive bibliography of her works included in this collection reveals the astonishing output of a powerful and sustained creative spirit. Hidden Possibilities gathers a distinguished group of writers from both sides of the Atlantic to offer an informed overview of Muriel Spark's life and work. Critics have often read Spark in a somewhat narrow context-as a Catholic, a woman, or a Scottish writer. The essays in this volume, while making connections between these contexts, cumulatively situate her in a broader European tradition. The volume includes interviews with Spark that cast light both on the course of her professional life and on her notably distinctive personality. \"Hidden Possibilities combines solid scholarship with engaging personal tributes that, collectively, offer an unabashed celebration of Muriel Spark and her work. The essays are a significant addition to full-length studies of Spark while remaining accessible to Spark's fans and readers.\" -Margaret E. Mitchell, University of West Georgia\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Transfigurations of the Commonplace: Hirst’s Tumbler, Joyce’s Tap
One reason why the concept of the quotidian has proved elusive to critics of literature and the visual arts is that the commonplace in art and literature so often refuses to remain untransfigured, not least because of its power to confront us with the material detritus with which we surround ourselves and which we will eventually join. It is not surprising, then, that contemporary artists share a preoccupation with finding both mortality and transcendence in what John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester called “the lumber of the world.” In this paper, I shall consider how an early Damien Hirst mini-installation, consisting of a glass tumbler of water and a ping-pong ball, takes its only partly mocking place in a still life tradition going back to Roman xenia and seventeenth-century vanitas paintings, and to a related literary tradition typified by Thomas Hardy’s Under the Waterfall and James Joyce’s great prose aria to water all its forms in the Ithaca section of Ulysses.
Journal Article
Metafictional Predestination in Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat
Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat is a radical metafictional experiment, suggesting the inexorable connections between contingency and a predetermined plot which are so common to many Sparkian novels. Following Marina MacKay’s perception that Spark’s experimental narrative operates “in the conceptual space where the more abstract preoccupations of Roman Catholic theology overlap with the metafictional and fabulist concerns of postmodernism” (2008: 506), this essay will discuss how the notion of predestination reverberates in The Driver’s Seat, not only as a remnant of Spark’s Presbyterian education but also as a postmodern re-visitation of classical tragedy in a metafictional key. Spark’s preference for predetermined plots may echo a long philosophical and theological discussion spanning many centuries about free will and predestination, particularly intense in the times of the Protestant Reformation, but it also reflects the sense of predestination as a necessary ingredient of classical tragedy. In The Driver’s Seat Spark deliberately brought to the fore some conventions of Aristotelian tragedy, although she approached them through an experimental subversion ultimately resorting to comedy and ridicule, on Spark’s own admission her weapons for the only possible art form. Our contention is that the metafictional implications of The Driver’s Seat’s prolepses undermine a Calvinist-like certainty concerning predestined salvation or damnation. By using a partial narrator only capable of producing limited accounts, Spark may be playing with an experimental and essentially postmodern interpretive openness which is in tune with the ultimate uncertainty about each individual’s eternal salvation that is commonly accepted in Catholic thought.
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