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Ethics and Aesthetics in Muriel Spark's Authorial Strategies

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Ethics and Aesthetics in Muriel Spark's Authorial Strategies TESIS DOCTORAL Título Ethics and Aesthetics in Muriel Spark’s Authorial Strategies Autor/es Ana Isabel Altemir Giral Director/es Carlos Villar Flor Facultad Facultad de Letras y de la Educación Titulación Departamento Filologías Modernas Curso Académico Ethics and Aesthetics in Muriel Spark’s Authorial Strategies, tesis doctoral de Ana Isabel Altemir Giral, dirigida por Carlos Villar Flor (publicada por la Universidad de La Rioja), se difunde bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial- SinObraDerivada 3.0 Unported. Permisos que vayan más allá de lo cubierto por esta licencia pueden solicitarse a los titulares del copyright. © El autor © Universidad de La Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2020 publicaciones.unirioja.es E-mail: [email protected] >>>>>><<<<<< Ethics and Aesthetics in Muriel Spark’s Authorial Strategies Ana Isabel Altemir Giral Altemir-Giral - 1 Altemir-Giral Ethics and Aesthetics in Muriel Spark’s Authorial Strategies Ana Isabel Altemir Giral Supervised by Carlos Villar Flor, PhD. A Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at University of La Rioja, Spain 2020 2 Altemir-Giral To my father 3 Altemir-Giral ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank my supervisor, Carlos Villar Flor, for his continual support, enthusiasm, and encouragement prior to and during the composition of this thesis. His advice, perceptions, and insights have undoubtedly made this a better study, and I am truly grateful to him for the time he has spent challenging my thinking, guiding my arguments, and supervising me. My partner Isma. He has endlessly encouraged, advised, and looked after me while I have written this dissertation. He has made me laugh, comforted me when things have not gone to plan, and bolstered my confidence when it was low. My daughter Lola, my niece Anais and my nephew Mario who have come to light up my darkest moments. My mum Marisa, my dad Luis, and my brother José Luis have all helped me through this process, especially my dad, who would have loved to see my thesis finished. He will always be an inspiration, and it is to him that I dedicate this piece of work. 4 Altemir-Giral 5 Altemir-Giral CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 8 1.1 A SPARK OF INTEREST ........................................................................... 9 1.2 STATE OF THE ART ................................................................................ 11 1.3 METHODOLOGY ..................................................................................... 21 2. AUTHORIAL STRATEGIES ....................................................................... 41 2.1 CONTEXTUALIZING SPARK ................................................................ 42 2.2 AUTHORIAL EXILE ................................................................................ 54 2.3 MASCULINE INFLUENCE ..................................................................... 56 2.4 RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND .................................................................. 59 2.5 METAFICTION ......................................................................................... 63 2.6 GOTHIC POSTMODERNISM .................................................................. 68 2.7 THE DOUBLE MOTIF ............................................................................. 73 2.8 THE AUTHOR’S FICTIONAL DOUBLE AND THE AUTHOR’S HYBRID CHARACTER ................................................................................................................ 79 3. BETWEEN SELF-AFFIRMATION AND SELF-EFFACEMENT .......... 82 3.1 THE COMFORTERS (1957) ...................................................................... 83 3.1.1 The Author’s Fictional Double: Caroline Rose ............................... 89 6 Altemir-Giral 3.1.2 The author’s Hybrid Character: Georgina Hogg ........................... 118 3.1.3 The author’s first Spark ................................................................. 129 3.2 THE DRIVER’S SEAT (1970) .................................................................. 144 3.2.1 The author’s Fictional Double: Lise ............................................... 155 3.2.2 The author’s Hybrid Character: Mrs Fiedke ................................. 179 3.2.3 The author’s second Spark ............................................................. 191 3.3 THE FINISHING SCHOOL (2004) .......................................................... 214 3.3.1 The author’s Fictional Double: Rowland Mahler ......................... 237 3.3.2 The author’s hybrid character: Chris Wiley .................................. 247 3.3.3 The author’s third Spark ................................................................ 257 4. CONCLUSIONS........................................................................................... 270 5. WORKS CITED ........................................................................................... 289 5.1 Primary Sources ....................................................................................... 290 5.2 Secondary Sources ................................................................................... 292 7 Altemir-Giral 1. INTRODUCTION 8 Altemir-Giral 1.1 A SPARK OF INTEREST I must confess that the reason why I started to write a dissertation on Muriel Spark was a matter of chance. In fact, it was Spark herself who came to me, so to speak: as I was studying the first phase of my Ph.D. courses, I came across some of her novels and so discovered a fascinating author whose work opened a wide range of possibilities within the literary field I was interested in. Muriel Spark rushed into the British literary scenario of the 1950s with a fresh style that challenged the traditional tendencies of fiction by questioning the basic conventions of narrative. Therefore, her work might be considered as a radical change in form representing a middle step between Modernism and the subsequent Postmodernist debate in British fiction. There are numerous reasons which led me to choose this author. Firstly, her original prose, devoid of redundant elements, makes her novels dynamic and enjoyable to read. Secondly, the economy displayed in that sort of novellas endows her work with vivid intensity that provokes the reader into a second reading through self-reflexive techniques spread all over the texts. She often reveals or insinuates the endings in the early part of her novels, focusing the readers’ attention more on the form than on the content. By using an almost irritating omniscience, Spark creates the illusion of a second reading even if one is really reading her novel for the first time. The way Spark writes confronts the problems posed by the constraints of selfhood and authorial presence in her narrative. Her main characters display the 9 Altemir-Giral different types of creative experience, exposing a certain anxiety to reflect the authorial presence through the aesthetics of the text. This dissertation will be focused on Spark’s authorial self-awareness with regard to stylistic foregrounding and the problematic of authorial selfhood and, hence, identity. It will develop an in-depth analysis of the writer’s authorial strategies which alternate between postures of self-affirmation and self-effacement. On the one hand, her experimental narrative technique breaks the narrative levels by introducing a cast of characters who struggle between freedom and restriction. On the other, Spark forces readers to consider and react to the ethics of her fiction and the different ethical responses that her stories bring about in the form of moral choices and the collision between good and evil. In this sense, this dissertation aims to show how the aesthetics of Spark’s narrative engages readers on a more personal level urging them to reflect on ethical dilemmas. In order to depict the basic lines that construct her fictional world, we will divide her novelistic production into three periods which not only encompass her career, but also evince the evolution of both the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of her fiction. Each period will be studied through a profound analysis of a representative novel: The Comforters (1957), her first novel, The Driver’s Seat (1970), the author’s favourite, and The Finishing School (2004), the last novel she published. 10 Altemir-Giral 1.2 STATE OF THE ART Curiously enough, there is a relatively small number of works which exclusively analyzes Muriel Spark’s fiction. This fact is more surprising if one takes into account that some of the most brilliant British writers of her time praised her novels from the very beginning of her career. This is the case of Graham Greene, or Evelyn Waugh who, reviewing Voices at Play in the Spectator (7 July, 1961), declared himself “proud to have been one of the first of her fellow-writers to spot her”. Among the most important monographs on Spark is worth citing Ruth Whittaker’s The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark (1982), in which the author offers a complete study of some of Spark’s most publicly acclaimed novels through an analogy between her narrative and her religious belief. This book concludes with the thesis that Spark’s work progressively becomes more secular to focus on international socio-political themes, but without leaving her Catholic point of view as a valid sub-plot for all her novels. Another insightful study on Muriel Spark’s fiction, of a high interest in the development of this dissertation, is The Art of the Real: Muriel
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