"Listening to the Silence": Sound and Religious Belief in Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington

"MY EARS HAVE A GOOD MEMORY," says Muriel Spark's novelist narrator Fleur Talbot in Loitering with Intent. ¹ "If I recall certain encounters of the past at all, or am reminded perhaps by old letters that they happened, back come flooding the aural images first and the visual second" (14).

Fleur and Mrs. Spark are habitual eavesdroppers: they loiter with intent and are "always on the listen-in" for those unexpected gifts of artistic apprehension which (says Fleur) may come the author's way "in the normal course of the day" (13). Of those gifts speech, and the associated creative ventriloquism, are particularly cherished, and Fleur notes with considerable pleasure that she sees "no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work. I am sparing no relevant facts" (59).

The alertness then of Muriel Spark's ear (as her readers have well appreciated) informs the very texture of her narratives. She not only hears her characters but also, it seems, she hears her narrators. "With a novel," she says, "you know the dialogue. It belongs to each character. But the narrative part--first or third person--belongs to a character as well. I have to decide what the author of the narrative is like . . . every theme demands a very different sort of commentator, a different attitude." ² In this way the term she uses for her collection of stories and radio-plays, "ear-pieces," might well be extended to her work as a whole: the plays, she says, are meant for the "outer ear," the fiction for the inner. Hence Mrs. Spark's habit of turning her mind "into a wireless set" and letting the characters "play on [her] ear," and her related preference for shorter narratives where tone may be more easily sustained. ³

At the same time Mrs. Spark's highly aural imagination is always made to serve her religious purposes. One consequence of this is the degree to which she resorts to a traditional aural metaphysic. So often in her work the mimic's relish of her own inventions fuses with the religious fabulist's appropriation of Judeo-Christian precedent, with habits of belief and creative functioning in which voice (for example) is a metonymy of spirit, and sounds such as the Pentecostal wind are manifestations of divine intention. Throughout her career Muriel Spark has worked closely and easily with this aspect of her inheritance, and as she does so sensibility is transformed into technique and a quirk of character becomes a tool of religious analysis. ⁴

Gifted therefore with her remarkable ear and a religious faith which both provoked and "explained" her, ⁵ Muriel Spark has sought repeatedly to provide her readers with "something to react against," proposing (with Nicholas Farringdon) that "a vision of evil" may be just as instructive as "a vision of good." ⁶ Within that process aural materials are of fundamental importance. Amid many possible examples we might recall the demonic séance in The Bachelors ("It was nearly all noise," says one character, "absolute hell," 44); the deeply flawed aural liturgy devised by Mrs. Spark's fellow-eavesdropper (and undoubted alter ego) the Abbess of Crewe; the fractured neologisms of the mutinous servants in Not to Disturb ("Lister never disparates, he symmetrizes," 58); or the disintegrating spiritual acoustic of The Driver's Seat. In that last novel policemen "bark" (107), laughter is "noise" (17), Lise plots her own death "in four languages" (97), and a macrobiotic crackpot assumes the words of the gospel, "He who hath ears let him hear" (33). "Strange voices" says the uncomprehending Jehovah's Witness Mrs. Fiedke, "look at the noise" (56).

Mrs. Fiedke's remark, of course, is extraordinarily apt. For in...