Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark's Fiction
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
SEDUCTION AND DEATH IN MURIEL SPARK’S FICTION FOTINI APOSTOLOU DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE SCHOOL OF ENGLISH FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONIKI 1997 To Kostas Everything is seduction and nothing but seduction Jean Baudrillard Seduction “If I had my life over again I should form the habbit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. without the ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on white eggs.” Muriel Spark Memento Mori C on t en t s Acknowledgments Introduction Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark’s Poetics 1 Chapter 1 Textasy: Writing and Being Written—Or, Seducing and Being Seduced 39 Chapter 2 Deadly Desires—Or, How Can the Inscription of the Body Initiate Narrative? 76 Chapter 3 Seduction of the Gaze: Spectacles and Images in The Public Image 123 Chapter 4 Gold Rush—Or, All that Glitters Is Gold in The Takeover 160 Epilogue Memento Mori? 196 Bibliography 202 Abbreviations 243 Acknowledgments My particular thanks are due to all three members of my committee for their enthusiasm and support throughout these long five years. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, my supervisor, made things much easier with her detailed and precise comments on my work; our discussions always bore fruit, as she had an amazing ability to urge me forward step by step. Words can’t describe Jina Politi, without whose ideas my thesis would have been completely different; an inexhaustible source of inspiration, Jina really opened up new horizons before me. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, who never stopped believing in me, was a very supportive presence all these years; she always managed to detect some crucial drawbacks, which I was too immersed in my work to notice. I would also like to thank Katy Douka-Kabitoglou not only because her personal library was always available, but also because she stood by me, always ready to listen to my problems and offer her invaluable advice and experience. I am particularly grateful to Mr Anargyros Heliotis as he was the first to introduce me into Spark’s fiction. The friendship of Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou was inestimable both during the first years, when she read my work, and during the last phase, because she was so warm and supportive when I most needed her. I owe my thanks to Effie Botonaki, Irene Hania and Paraskevi Papaleonida, because sharing problems and experiences is always such a relief! Finally, I can’t forget Fotini Stavrou, our Librarian, and her immense help in the library. Introduction Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark’s Poetics … seduction is inevitable. No one living escapes it—not even the dead. For the dead are only dead when there are no longer any echoes from this world to seduce them, and no longer any rites challenging them to exist. Jean Baudrillard Seduction Prologue “Seduction is inevitable” as Jean Baudrillard states in his work Seduction. These three words alone capture, I believe, the essence of my argument, which will be an attempt to discover how seduction works in Muriel Spark’s narratives, how it lures its objects into its domain and bewitches them. seduction and death in muriel spark’s poetics Since the emphasis of this work is to be on seduction, I feel I should begin by clarifying what it was in Muriel Spark’s writing that brought this particular writer to the centre of my attention, that seduced me into writing about her fiction. When referring to Muriel Spark one always starts with her style, the best-known feature of her writing, since she is famous mostly for the extreme lightness of her tone, the delicately detached touch of her pen that creates a chilling distance for the reader of her (mostly very short) fiction. It was this peculiar style of handling the most serious matters with such extreme, deadly serenity that first induced, or should I say seduced, me into writing about her prose. By letting myself free to roam into the secret passages of Spark’s fiction, I tried to further this first seduction, to risk a deeper lure by attempting new readings of her work. At this point it would be appropriate to have a brief look at the wider context in which Spark wrote her work and the various readings that have been attempted by critics until now. In contemporary fiction we witness a move toward a focus on the writing process itself, toward the mechanics of writing; the role of the author, the narrator, the character; the role of language as a structure that conditions and envelops human existence. Authors, suddenly uneasy about their “implied” role in narratives, try to redefine it by standing back and reflecting on their own and all previous texts— written or spoken—that have conditioned their writings. Muriel Spark, working within this self-reflexive context, has offered her own perspective on authors and characters, language and writing, reality and fiction, content and discontent. 2 seduction and death in muriel spark’s poetics Spark’s work has often been studied in the light of metafictionality by modern critics like Patricia Waugh, Ruth Whittaker, Malcolm Bradbury, Gerardine Meaney, and others. Her interest in the fictional process is revealed in her adoption of metafictional methods, whereby she exposes the structures that underlie the process of writing and being written. What is of particular importance to these critics is Muriel Spark’s preoccupation with metafictionality and plottings, which imprison her characters and mark their inability to escape writing. Most of her critics have related Spark’s interest in metafictionality to her religious beliefs, since it was her conversion to Catholicism in 1954 that signaled her entrance into fiction—until then she wrote only poetry and some critical essays—through a process that I will discuss in more detail later. It was, therefore, to be expected that critics would focus their attention on her religion, which appeared to play such an important role in her fiction. As Patricia Waugh states in her influential book Metafiction: “The concern with freedom in both cases [Spark’s and Fowles’s] is . a consequence of the perceived analogy between the plot in fiction and the ‘plot’ of God’s creation, ideology or fate. It is a concern with the idea of being trapped within someone else’s order” (121). Waugh immediately goes on to relate this idea to the postmodern context of the imprisonment of language and signification: “At the furthest fictional extreme, this is to be trapped within language itself, within an arbitrary system of signification which appears to offer no means of escape” (121). Evidently, Spark’s Catholicism acts as a determining principle for critics who feel uncomfortable within a postmodern context. Most 3 seduction and death in muriel spark’s poetics secondary works on Spark’s narratives handle themes such as freedom, autonomy, and omniscience mainly in relation to her religion. David Lodge, for example, who discusses Muriel Spark’s omniscient narrators in his article “The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” again touches on the issue of the relationship between Catholicism and omniscience: “The objections to orthodox Christian belief and to authorial omniscience in fiction are … essentially the same: that both involve a denial of human autonomy, of human freedom” (121). Freedom and autonomy, then, are inextricably bound to the doctrines of Catholicism and to omniscience. The child of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, growing up in Scotland, Spark had a starkly complex religious and cultural background. Her marriage at an early age and her life in Africa, her divorce, and her work for the secret intelligence service of the British Foreign Office during World War II were significant cornerstones in her life. However, it was her conversion to Roman Catholicism that coincided, as I mentioned above, with a turning point in her life, her initiation into fiction and the finding of her voice as a writer. Muriel Spark was intent on the idea of the right voice that would lead her to writing; she sought desperately to find a voice that would be hers, a voice which she managed to find only after her conversion at the age of 36, after which she has written 20 novels and three volumes of short stories, in a period of 40 years. She herself stated in 1961: 4 seduction and death in muriel spark’s poetics Nobody can deny I speak with my own voice as a writer now, whereas before my conversion I couldn’t do it because I was never sure who I was, the ideas teemed, but I could never sort them out. I was talking and writing with other people’s voices all the time. But not any longer. This is the effect of becoming a Christian. (Spark, “My Conversion” 61) Her works, however, have never been a clear proclamation of her faith, thus obstructing any efforts on the part of critics to associate her directly with her religion. Gerardine Meaney, in her recently published work (Un)Like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction (1993)—which focuses on the writings of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Doris Lessing, Julia Kristeva, Muriel Spark and Angela Carter—has been the only one to study Spark’s fiction from a feminist point of view. As she states in her introduction, “Muriel Spark … has never been associated with the feminist movement.