Introduction

Muriel Spark has regularly been described as a Catholic novelist, given that her conversion to Catholicism was followed closely by the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, about the struggles of a Catholic convert. However, the intellectual context in which she came to maturity in the years after the Second World War was pervaded by the issues raised by existentialism, issues which surface directly in her novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Existentialism is now associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an atheistic philosophy, but it began as a Christian philosophy inspired by nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which shaped Spark’s own ‘leap to faith’ and his ironic style which shaped her own approach to the novel form.

The Art of Death

Death in a novel has no finality: go back to the beginning and all the characters are still there, replaying the same life. For Kierkegaard, this was also the implication of Hegel’s philosophy: individual deaths were of no significance because they were subsumed into the narrative of history. Kierkegaard rebelled against such an aestheticisation of death: a role in history is no compensation for the personal finality of death. For Spark, art cannot represent death because it cannot encompass that finality (an irony played out at the conclusion of The Driver’s Seat). Art is a pseudo-eternity which negates death by its power of repetition but also thereby fails to offer the salvation that Kierkegaard sought in religion. Many Spark novels self-reflexively explore this tension, most potently Not To Disturb, in which the reality of death is continually postponed by its transformation into the apparently timeless repeatability of a wide variety of artforms. Death is defeated by art but only at the cost of invoking what Hegel had prophesied and Arthur Danto identifies as ‘the death of art’, which comes about when art ceases to be the expression of a shared religious belief.

The Geopolitics of the Personal

Christian existentialist philosophers, such as Gabriel Marcel, argued for a conception of the human individual not as an isolated subjectivity, as in Descartes’ cogito, but as born into and shaped by its relationships with others. ‘Being’ is necessarily ‘being with’. Spark’s plots dramatise, in characters such as Jean Brodie, the dangers of an isolating subjectivity that seeks to make the world conform to its own wishes in order to deny the fact they have been ‘thrown’ into a world they did not choose. In defiance of Sartre’s emphasis on the ability of human beings to choose their own future, Spark’s novels emphasise the historical and geographic ‘thrownness’ of her characters, their accidental arrival in situations they did not choose. These may be the geographical flashpoints of modern history, such as the Palestine of The Mandelbaum Gate, or the temporal eruption of the past into the present, as in Territorial Rights. It is this fundamental lack of control that leads Spark to insist that ridicule must be central to contemporary art, since ridicule not only challenges religious, political and ideological efforts to control events but challenges the presumptions of art itself when it seeks to shape the world.

Kierkegaard: The Limits of the Aesthetic

The ‘aesthetic’ is, for Kierkegaard, the condition in which most people live, a condition he explores through his ‘pseudonymous’ writings, in which his text is supposedly the product of an author other than himself. By such indirection, Kierkegaard is able both to work within the ‘aesthetic’ in his creation of a work of fiction and, at same time, to critique it. It was a technique first developed in ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ section of Either/Or, whose plot is recapitulated in Spark’s The Bachelors. Kierkegaard’s fear of the power of the aesthetic is repeated in Spark’s novels, in which characters like Patrick Seton in The Bachelors or Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie try to aestheticise the world in which they live in order to gain control over it. The aesthetic offers them a false sense of having escaped from time into eternity, an escape that their author resists even when she herself cannot escape the aesthetic medium of her art.

Living Next Door to Death

Spark’s characters live out their lives ‘next door to death’, in plots which often turn on those characters’ efforts to control the future beyond their own death by means of wills and legacies. For Sartrean existentialism, human beings live in a world without God, making themselves by their own individual choices. Spark resists this secular framework by building her plots around apparently supernatural events, such as the ‘typing ghost’ who predicts the future in The Comforters and the phone calls in Memento Mori which remind characters they must die. The introduction of the supernatural reveals a world which cannot be comprehended by the kinds of realism to which Sartre’s secular philosophy was committed.

Repetition

Spark’s The Only Problem recapitulates the sub-plot of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, in which a young man withdraws from society to study the Book of Job. Spark’s central character, Harvey Gotham, is writing a book about Job but finds that his life repeats aspects of Job’s when his wife is accused of being part of a terrorist organisation that police believe Harvey to be funding. Police interrogation becomes equivalent to Job’s confrontation with his ‘comforters’. Harvey, however, has discovered the image of his wife in a painting of Job’s wife completed hundreds of years previously, making repetition central to the structure of the novel. Spark regularly turns repetition into a formal principle that undermines temporal sequence by relating the same event or repeating the same words on a variety of occasions in her stories and novels. Thus her Symposium, with its discussion of the nature of modern love, recalls Plato’s Symposium, but is also a repetition of Kierkegaard’s restaging of Plato in his Stages on Life’s Way. It is a theme taken up in The Takeover, a novel which dramatizes the fact that it has become impossible to distinguish between the real and its many artful repetitions.

Negating Sartre

Sartre’s existential philosophy of freedom was founded on the ‘nothingness’ of consciousness. In several of her novels, Spark adopts ideas from Sartre’s philosophy in order to reveal their contradictory and inhuman consequences. Thus in The Hothouse by the East River Spark poses an ontological paradox: Paul and Elsa died in England in the Second World War, in spite of which they live on as all-too-material ghosts in post-war New York and have conceived children who grow up as wealthy New Yorkers. Spark gives their son the name Pierre, which is the name of a friend regularly invoked by Sartre in illustrating aspects of his philosophy in Being and Nothingness. Spark’s Pierre, both a being and a nothingness, is the producer of a new version of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, in which Barrie’s vision of an eternal childhood is performed by aged actors. The ‘Neverland’ of Barrie’s play thus becomes a mockery of a world that has lost its belief in eternity and has made art a compensation for that loss, a theme also played out in Lise’s efforts to become the producer of the drama of her own death in The Driver’s Seat.

Resisting Realism

For Sartre writing has to be guided by an ethics of freedom. Characters in novels, however, may be representations of free human beings but they cannot themselves be free, since they are governed by the choices of their author and the nature of their medium. The world represented in novels is thus the opposite of a world of Sartrean freedom: it is a pre-determined world. It is a paradox that Spark employs to allow her characters to reveal their own status as the products of fiction and thus challenge the apparently mimetic medium in which they exist. All of her early novels – particularly Robinson and The Ballad of Peckham Rye – present her characters as explorers of the limitations of the mimetic tradition which was taken, in studies such as Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, to be fundamental to the genre of the novel.