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Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark's Fiction

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Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark's Fiction Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark’s Fiction Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark’s Fiction Fotini E. Apostolou Contributions to the Study of World Literature, Number 107 GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Apostolou, Photeine. Seduction and death in Muriel Spark’s fiction / by Fotini E. Apostolou p. cm.(Contributions to the study of world literature. ISSN 0783-9345 ; no. 107) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-313-31651-1 (alk. paper) 1. Spark, MurielCriticism and interpretation. 2. Seduction in literature. 3. Death in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR6037.P29Z55 2001 823΄.914dc21 00-069147 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 2001 by Fotini E. Apostolou All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-069147 ISBN: 0-313-31651-1 ISSN: 0738-9345 First published in 2001 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright Acknowledgments The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Excerpts from the following works by Muriel Spark: The Ballad of Peckham Rye (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984); “Bang-bang You’re Dead” from Bang-bang You’re Dead and Other Stories (Lon- don: Granada, 1982); The Comforters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963); The Driver’s Seat (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1988); Loitering with Intent (London: Bodley Head, 1981); Not to Disturb (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974); “The Portobello Road” from The Go-Away Bird and Other Sto- ries (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); The Public Image (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990); The Takeover (Harmondsworth: Pen- guin, 1978). Used by permission. Excerpts reprinted from The Space of Literature by Maurice Blanchot, translated with an introduc- tion by Ann Smock, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. 1982 by the University of Nebraska Press Editions Gallimard, 1955. Excerpts from The Transparency of Evil by Jean Baudrillard (London: Verso, 1993). Used by per- mission. Excerpts from Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” in Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber Ltd.). Also in Ariel, Copyright 1963 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Pub- lications, Inc. To Kostas Everything is seduction and nothing but seduction. Jean Baudrillard Seduction If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to the 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 Contents Acknowledgments xi Prologue xiii 1 Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark’s Poetics 1 2 Textasy: Writing and Being WrittenOr, Seducing and Being Seduced 17 3 Deadly Desires: The Inscription of the Body as Initiation into Narrative 33 4 Seduction of the Gaze: Spectacles and Images in The Public Image 55 5 Gold RushOr, All that Glitters Is Gold in The Takeover 73 Epilogue: Memento Mori? 93 Bibliography 101 Index 123 Acknowledgments My particular thanks are due to all the people who, through their enthusiasm and support, helped me to complete this work. Words can’t describe Jina Politi, without whose ideas my argument would have been completely different; an inexhaustible source of inspiration, Jina opened new horizons before me. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas 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. 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, ready to listen to my problems and offer her invaluable advice and experience. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, who never stopped believing in me, was a very supportive presence all these years. I am particularly grateful to Mr Anargyros Heliotis, as he was the first person to introduce me to 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 supportive. Finally, our librarian, Fotini Stavrou, was immensely helpful. Prologue [S]eduction 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 “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. 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 seduced me into writing about it. 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 delicate detachment 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. 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 xiv Prologue 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. 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. What is of particular importance to these critics is Spark’s preoccupation with metafictionality and plotting, 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 had written 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 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. Spark had a starkly complex religious and cultural background. The child of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, she grew up in Scotland. 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 Prologue xv she managed to find only after her conversion at the age of 36. In the forty years following that event, she wrote twenty-one novels, many poems, plays, children’s books, and short stories.
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