In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Muriel Spark's Camp Metafiction
  • Len Gutkin (bio)

"Calculated Irrelevance": Spark's Unserious Tone

One of the oddest moments in Muriel Spark's surpassingly odd oeuvre occurs toward the end of her 1971 novel Not to Disturb:

Meanwhile the lightning, which strikes the clump of elms so that the two friends huddled there are killed instantly without pain, zig-zags across the lawns, illuminating the lily-pond and the sunken rose garden like a self-stricken flash-photographer, and like a zip-fastener ripped from its garment by a sexual maniac, it is flung slapdash across Lake Leman and back to skim the rooftops of the house, leaving intact, however, the well-insulated telephone wires which Lister, on the telephone to Geneva, has rather feared might break down.

(109)

Spark's baroquely metaphorized deus ex machina lightning strike might remind some readers of the death of the Marquis de Sade's Justine. Closer to hand, attentive readers will recognize in the apparently arbitrary similes—the pond lit up "like a self-stricken flash-photographer," the lightning jagging "like a zip-fastener ripped from its garment by a sexual maniac"—elements lifted from Not to Disturb's plot. In this novel, a group of servants led by Lister, the butler, murder their wealthy employers and scheme their way into inheriting fortune and property, all the while tape-recording [End Page 53] and photographing their activities, which include a hastily arranged marriage between a maid and a straitjacketed aristocratic madman in the attic—the "sexual maniac" in question.

This striking passage has not gone unremarked in discussions of metafiction. For Patricia Waugh, for instance, its contamination of metaphorical levels by narrative ones alerts readers to the fact "that pure contingency in novels is always an illusion" (18). As Brian McHale observes of figurative language in the postmodern novel more generally, "[p]ostmodernist writing seeks to foreground the ontological duality of metaphor, its participation in two frames of reference with different ontological statuses" (134). The hilarious, unhinged transgression of ontological levels effected by the "lightning" simile interrupts the highly mannered, apparently restrained atmosphere that is Not to Disturb's default. It is as if the author is saying, "Look at me! I control the metaphors!" Along with The Driver's Seat, The Abbess of Crewe, and The Public Image, Not to Disturb belongs to the phase of Spark's work most strongly identified with the influence of the French new novel, and especially of Alain Robbe-Grillet.1 But Spark's whimsicality would be hard to find in the nouveau roman; as a sensibility, it has more in common with American metafiction.

Though her novels are almost always whimsical, such overt self-reflexivity at the level of poetics as this passage demonstrates is not typical of Spark, whose metafictional muse is normally more understated. The other exception is her debut novel, The Comforters (1957), which presents, as McHale has it, "[t]he classic example" (122) of the kind of literary self-consciousness that would a little later on come to be identified with Robert Coover, Gilbert Sorrentino, and, most famously, John Barth. The Comforters's protagonist, Caroline—a critic working on a study of Form in the Modern Novel (57)—hallucinates a typewriter tapping out the very novel she is in. Although Spark's subsequent novels would never return to this level of explicit metafictionality, they would remain singularly preoccupied [End Page 54] with those problems of literary ontology critics have long associated with the postmodern novel at its most formally experimental.2

While Not to Disturb's "lightning" simile marks a formal limit in Spark's writing, a parodic destabilization of the relationships among tenor, vehicle, and fictional world she was not to repeat, its arch absurdity is profoundly, symptomatically "Sparkian."3 Critics and literary journalists have responded to this quality in various ways. In a recent reconsideration of Spark's career, Parul Sehgal identifies "Spark's particular genius" as "cruelty mixed with camp, the lightness of touch, the flick of the wrist that lands the lash" (Sehgal). Malcolm Bradbury observes her penchant for "camp or high-style figures, productive of comedy" (188). Frequently accompanying identifications of Spark's humor is the...

pdf