Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction.(Book Review)

Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction. Ed. By MARTIN MCQUILLAN. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. xi+245 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-333-79414-1.

As Martin McQuillan suggests, a theoretical approach to Muriel Spark's work is 'long overdue' (p. 7). Spark criticism is painfully thin for such an important figure (arguably the first British postmodern writer) and, although she can claim Malcolm Bradbury, Helene Cixous, Frank Kermode, David Lodge, Patrick Parrinder, and Patricia Waugh among her fans, none has written a book on her. Of the books that have appeared, the best are uninformed by the influential theories of gender, race, and deconstruction. McQuillan seeks to rectify this with essays on each area, by his long introduction and his own piece on the relationship between autobiography and fiction, by reprinting two Cixous reviews, and finally by his interview with Spark. It is an admirable project and a labour of love. The difficulty is the frequent mismatch between what Spark herself says and the enthusiastic attempts to nail Derrida, Bataille, and the others onto her literary practice.

The book's impatience with the old guard is attractive. Its point of departure is the tendency of earlier critics to label Spark a 'Catholic writer' and to deal with the fiction only in terms of theology. 'Spark', he insists, 'writes fictions (for God's sake) not theological pamphlets' (p. 4), and the stress throughout is on the deconstructive nature of her work: 'Her novels are a conductor for all the signs and meanings in circulation in the contemporary scene' (p. 5). Fair enough. Graham Greene's caveat (never alluded to) that he was not a Catholic writer but a writer who happened to be a Catholic applies equally to Spark. Nevertheless (as Spark would say), the faith remains, difficult as it is to maintain amid humanist, anthropomorphic notions of a benevolent God, and theology has been seen to occupy for these writers the space most of the contributors here would wish to assign to literary and cultural theory. Some others, notably Bryan Cheyette, Alan Freeman, and Cixous, take more seriously Spark's belief in an absent, ineffable, and immanent presence and deal with this as the point of departure generating the endless anteriority and doubleness of human discourse.

On the one hand, then, we have essays (by McQuillan, Jeremy Idle, Willy Maly, and Nicholas Royle) which assault the 'dated' (p. 7) criticism of Bradbury, Lodge, Parrinder, and Patricia Waugh. On the other, there are those (by Susan Sellers, Judith Roof, Eleonor Byrne, Alan Freeman, Patricia Duncker, and Julian Wolfreys) which take Spark texts and analyse them in terms of psychoanalytical, queer, postcolonial, genre, and deconstructive theory. In between stand Cheyette and (oddly) Cixous--but even Freeman assumes that 'Spark's characters seek to write their lives, all the while enacting a life sentence of a higher author's devising' (p. 138).

Along the way there are interesting observations: by Sellers on narcissism; by Roof on fetishism; by Duncker on the status of Lucy Snowe and Sandy Stranger as secretive outsiders, the 'calculating observer' (p. 75) in implicitly transgressive and lesbian texts; by Cheyette on conversion as subversion, Byrne on the 'sexually predatory environment' (p. 120) of the African ...