Parodying Postmodernism: MurielSpark (The Driver’s Seat) and
Robbe-Grillet (Jealousy)
Aidan Day
In 1971 Muriel Spark was interviewed for the Observer by Philip Toynbee. Toynbeeasked Spark: ‘What modern novelists do you admire?’ Her response was unhesi-tating: ‘Robbe-Grillet certainly’ (Toynbee 1971: 73). But she also added some-thing: ‘Robbe-Grillet certainly, though I don’t in the least accept the theory of theanti-novel’ (my emphasis; Toynbee 1971: 73). Spark’s simultaneous appreciationand, as it were, denial of Robbe-Grillet is my starting point in this essay.
The influence of Robbe-Grillet’s fictional manner upon Spark’s own writingwas observed by Frank Kermode in a review of The Driver’s Seat upon its publicationin 1970:
Lise, the heroine of this one, starts out from somewhere in the north for a vacationsomewhere in the south . . . As she proceeds on her peculiar pilgrimage we areallowed to observe her closely, but have no other privilege, so that we don’t knowwhy she is so upset, whether her hair is tinted, what . . . she thinks she’s doing. Fromthe elaborate description of her flat we may infer that she is very isolated, but hersnack on the aeroplane is described with equal intimacy, and so are the bellpushes inher bedroom and the contents of her handbag . . .
In short, there is a strong flavour of nouveau roman. (Kermode 1970: 425)
‘Mrs Spark’, Kermode continues, ‘has studied Robbe-Grillet with care anddecided that his methods, considered in isolation from the anti-metaphysicalpropositions he advances to support their general validity, are useful if you want topresent obsessed or manic states’ (Kermode 1970: 425). This rather makes itsound as if Spark’s borrowings from Robbe-Grillet are purely formal and areused in a manner quite divorced from their original context. But it can be seenthat Spark borrows from Robbe-Grillet exactly in order to comment upon theintellectual ‘propositions’ which support his fictional methods. Edmund Smyth,
writing on the nouveau roman in general and on Robbe-Grillet in particular, hasobserved that ‘It would not be an exaggeration to stress the extent to which thenouveau roman . . . still acts as the essential reference point in any definitionof postmodern aesthetics’ (Smyth 1991: 54). Muriel Spark’s appropriation, inThe Driver’s Seat, of some of Robbe-Grillet’s fictional devices and her meta-commentary on those devices and upon the world-view informing them amountsto a critical engagement with postmodern assumptions and perspectives.
Before turning to Spark’s work, I want to outline some of the postmodernfeatures of Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, taking his 1957 novel Jealousy as my example.Jealousy is set on a colonial banana plantation. The narrative discourse, which takesplace in an unrelenting present tense, describes objects in the external worldtogether with the actions of two persons, Franck and a woman named, simply, A.. . . But the text offers no first person narrator who might be undertaking thesedescriptions. Nor, given the absolute present tense of the narrative, is it possible toidentify an omniscient narrator speaking from a command of past and future.There is a blank where the narrator as traditionally understood ought to be. Pointof view is in question. So, too, is the nature of the descriptions in the narrative.These are minute and precise. They range from repeated accounts of, say, acentipede squashed on a wall of the plantation house to accounts of visits made byA . . . and by Franck to the local town. But it is hard to speak of description in thisnovel as a faithful mimetic register of a single, objective, coherent reality ‘outthere’. Take, for example, a description of table settings in the plantation house:
The table is set for one person. A . . .’s place will have to be added.
On the bare wall, the traces of the squashed centipede are still perfectly visible.Nothing has been done to clean off the stain, for fear of spoiling the handsome, dullfinish, probably not washable.
The table is set for three, according to the usual arrangement. (Robbe-Grillet 1987:46)
Set for one or set for three? Similarly, to take another of many possible examples,we are told at one point that:
The bedroom windows are closed. At this hour A. . . is not up yet.
She left very early this morning, in order to have enough time to do her shopping andbe able to get back to the plantation the same night. (Robbe-Grillet 1987: 85)
Has she gone to town or is she not yet up? The point of these contradictions wasperhaps best explained by Robbe-Grillet himself in a 1963 essay entitled ‘Time andDescription in Fiction Today’. Here, comparing the role played by descriptionin the realist novel of the nineteenth century with the role of description in
contemporary fiction, he observed that what is new in the new novel is itsself-consciousness that description is not an imitative but a constitutive device.Description, he writes, ‘once claimed to reproduce a pre-existing reality; itnow asserts its creative function’ (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 147). According toRobbe-Grillet the point of contradiction in a narrative such as Jealousy is that itdraws explicit attention to the constructive or creative rather than merely mimeticrole of description. Description, he notes, ‘particularly seems to be inventing itsobject when it suddenly contradicts, repeats, corrects itself, bifurcates, etc’(Robbe-Grillet 1989: 148).
But if there is no single external reality being imitated in Jealousy, who is it –given that Robbe-Grillet has not given us any kind of traditional narrator – that isdoing the inventing? One reading infers that the whole thing is written from thepoint of view of a husband who is jealously suspicious of his wife’s – A . . .’s –relations with Franck. This reading, which attempts to restore a conventionalnarratorial subjectivity and telos to the story, has to transfer the contradictions inthe narrative to the mind of the posited narrator. The inconsistencies are explainedaway as the symptom of a jealously disturbed imagination. This reading imposesan external subjectivity and what Robbe-Grillet called an ‘external chronology’on to the text (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 154). It is a reading which Robbe-Grilletscorned:
it was absurd to suppose that in the novel Jealousy . . . there existed a clear andunambiguous order of events, one which was not that of the sentences of the book. . . The narrative was . . . made in such a way that any attempt to reconstruct anexternal chronology would lead, sooner or later, to a series of contradictions, henceto an impasse. (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 154)
The contradictory and therefore plural potential narrative lines in Jealousy find theirconcomitant in the absence of a clearly defined narrator. The presence of such anarrator would cohere the narrative within a single, linear perspective – though, asI have just suggested, the contradictions in the story-line would demand that thisnarrator be inconsistent and disturbed. The importance of the absence of such anarrator is that the absence is designed to allow the involvement of the reader in thetext in a way that is different from the traditional novel. With the traditional novel,it is certainly possible to regard the reader as contributing creatively to makingsense of the narrative and hence to regard the reader as in some degree contribut-ing to the construction of the narrative itself. But in traditional novels the presenceof a narrator may at once be seen to deflect attention from the reader’s creativeinvolvement in the story. In Robbe-Grillet’s postmodern novel the erasure of thenarrator is a means of foregrounding the extent to which the reader is creativelyinvolved in the generation of the narrative. What Robbe-Grillet called the ‘invisiblenarrator’ of Jealousy is a combination, as he himself put it, of ‘the writer, and . . .the reader’ (my emphasis; Robbe-Grillet 1989: 154).
Robbe-Grillet’s emphases on the ‘creative function’ of description in thenovel and on the reader’s participation in that function are an important aspect of
his postmodernism. But only an aspect. The essence of his postmodernism residesin his view that the creative or constructive function applies not just to the writer’sand the reader’s generation of a literary text but to humanity’s relations with theworld in general. The idea that human beings are endlessly engaged in ‘inventing’the ‘object’, to use Robbe-Grillet’s words, is germane to much postmodernepistemology and ontology and Robbe-Grillet himself spends a fair amount of timeattempting to define the idea across the essays which he collected under the title ofFor a New Novel.
In an essay from 1958 he spoke of the utter indifference to humanity of thematerial world: ‘Man’, he said, ‘looks at the world, and the world does not lookback at him’ (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 58). By 1963 and the essay on ‘Time andDescription in Fiction Today’ he was noticing the way in which – in the context ofan absolute divorce between human interest and the material world – humanityimagines the reality of that world into being: ‘It is matter itself’, he observed,‘which is . . . alien to man and constantly being invented in man’s mind’ (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 148). This is a characteristic instance of what Hans Bertens has calledthe postmodern ‘awareness that representations create rather than reflect reality’(Bertens 1995: 11). An awareness that human beings never see the material worldin an objective, unmediated fashion; that they are caught within and apprehendonly human interpretations or constructions of that world. The new art, Robbe-Grillet observes, whether it be the novel or film, is not interested in the ‘thingdescribed’ – since, by his view, that cannot be accessed directly anyway – but in thedescription or representation of the thing described and in the structuring andmovement of that representation (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 148). He objects to thecomplaint made by a number of critics about ‘the impossibility of distinguishing. . . what is ‘‘real’’ from what is mental’ in his second film L’Immortelle. Such acomplaint misses the point, he insists, because the film never claimed to be ‘a pieceof reality’ but was ‘developed as a reflection on reality (or on the dearth of reality, asBreton calls it)’ (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 150–51). It was developed as a reflection ona construction which passes as ‘reality’ but which in itself lacks objective substance.Robbe-Grillet concludes the essay on ‘Time and Description’ by emphasising thatthe constitutive rather than imitative principle in a work of art is to be taken as aparadigm of the inventedness of the world and of the self in that world:
the author today proclaims his absolute need of the reader’s cooperation, an active,conscious, creative assistance. What he asks of him is no longer to receive ready-madea world completed, full, closed upon itself, but on the contrary to participate in acreation, to invent in his turn the work – and the world – and thus to learn to invent hisown life. (second sentence, my emphasis; Robbe-Grillet 1989: 156)
Robbe-Grillet’s views on the artifice of the world and of human identity involve atonce the idea that time itself, as conventionally understood in the West, is no morethan a fabrication. Historical time – with its linear plotting of past, present andfuture, of beginnings, middles and ends – is a dimension of a human construction of
reality. In ‘Time and Description’ Robbe-Grillet contrasts the model of ‘temporaldevelopment’ which underpins the ‘traditional novel’ with the destruction of thatmodel in the new novel (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 155, 154):
in the modern narrative, time seems to be cut off from its temporality. It no longerpasses. It no longer completes anything . . . Description makes no headway, contra-dicts itself, turns in circles. Moment denies continuity. (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 155)
Elizabeth Ermarth sees such a subversion of historical time as a principal featureof postmodernism’s promise of liberation from oppressive cultural codes. For‘centuries’, she writes,
historical time, with its linked past and future, has made possible the articulation ofcertain ‘laws’ of development and has been a cultural absolute from physics topolitics to narrative . . . Postmodern novelists begin their primary task of reformu-lating temporality by showing readers that such an idea of temporality is a convention. . . not a condition of nature . . . In Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy . . . the reader isconfined to the present tense and thus to a continuous present that constantly erasespast and future. No serenely neutral . . . narrator recollects, from an unspecificfictional future, a meaningful history of events . . . Here there is no neutral mediumand no common chronological clock in which ‘a’ plot would be possible . . .Robbe-Grillet’s readers learn what it feels like to inhabit a language (hence a‘reality’) where time is a function of position . . . Attention loops out and returns inanthematic fashion rather than following any linear track . . . This circling, contra-dictory sequence forces readers into new acts of attention by foreclosing on old ones.The process can even be fun . . . Postmodern narrative, in short, calls our attentionnot to fictions of origins and ends but to the process of consciousness itself as itconstructs and deconstructs such fictions. (Ermarth 1992: 16, 30, 54, 72–4, 86)
Fun as it may be, there are, of course, a number of people – and the argument inthis essay is that Muriel Spark is, up to a point, one of these – who have registereda disturbing solipsism about postmodern notions of the inventedness of reality.Terry Eagleton, for example, discussed the matter in his 1996 book The Illusions ofPostmodernism:
on this theory it is impossible to say what kind of world our discourse or beliefs areabout, any more than those who regard the Grand Canyon or the human body aswholly ‘constructed’ are able to say what it is that is being constructed . . . Since factsare themselves products of discourse, it would be circular to seek to check ourdiscourse off against them. The world makes no input into our conversation, even ifit is what we are conversing about . . . It is really a regressive return to theWittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, who held that , since our language‘gives’ us the world it cannot simultaneously pass comment on its relation to it.(Eagleton 1996: 37–38)
Eagleton is bothered by what he takes to be the postmodern denial of the idea thatit is possible to access things which lie outwith culture and representation. Thedenial that there are natural, objectively accessible things:
The natural, on this view of it, is just a mystifying word for those questionablecultural practices we have come to take for granted. It is easy to see how this appliesto the view that human civilisation would collapse without the St Patrick’s dayparade, but harder to see how it applies to events like breathing and bleeding.(Eagleton 1996:58)
Breathing and bleeding. It is in relation to the end that is marked by a stopping ofbreathing and by a bleeding to death that Muriel Spark, back in 1970, examined thepremises of postmodernism in The Driver’s Seat.
The echoes in The Driver’s Seat of Robbe-Grillet’s fictional manner areobvious enough. They are apparent not only in the tonally flat description – theequal intimacy of descriptions of Lise’s face and descriptions of the bellpushes inher hotel bedroom – but also in the insistent repetitions of particular descriptivedetails. Such as the one about Lise’s lips: ‘Her lips are slightly parted’ (Spark 1974:9) is an observation which keeps reappearing throughout the story of Lise’sjourney. Then, perhaps most strikingly, there is the dominant present tense of thenarration. But these stylistic effects are conceived only in partial complicity withRobbe-Grillet. Because Lise is portrayed as suffering a type of despair in a worldsuffering from a dearth of reality. The point is partly established in the very firstscene of the book which opens, in media res, with Lise hysterically tearing off a dressshe has been trying on in a shop because she has just been told by the salesgirl thatit will not stain. It is a synthetic fabric which will not bear the imprint of a materialreality such as a ‘drop of coffee’ (Spark 1974: 7). Comparably, the unnatural orderof the accountant’s office where Lise has worked for sixteen years is captured in anumerical symmetry that contains the asymmetrical gender distribution of theoffice hierarchy: ‘she has five girls under her and two men. Over her are twowomen and five men’ (Spark 1974: 9). In this office Lise’s lips are symptomatically‘pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet’ (Spark 1974: 9). Lise’sapartment, too, is inhumanly functional:
the furniture is all fixed, adaptable to various uses, and stackable. Stacked into a panelare six folding chairs, should the tenant decide to entertain six for dinner. The writingdesk extends to a dining table, and when the desk is not in use it, too, disappears intothe pinewood wall . . . The bed is by day a narrow seat with overhanging bookcases;by night it swivels out to accommodate the sleeper . . . in the bathroom as well,nothing need be seen, nothing need be left lying about. (Spark 1974: 14)
This is not, in fact, disinterested, neutral description. The dispassionate tone isexpressly designed to identify a lack of heart in the flat. In a talk delivered in thesame year as the publication of The Driver’s Seat, ‘The Desegregation of Art’,Muriel Spark declared: ‘I advocate the arts of satire and ridicule’ (Spark 1992: 35).Spark’s invocation in The Driver’s Seat of Robbe-Grillet’s descriptive exactitude is akind of satiric parody. Robbe-Grillet’s manner is, to a degree, being used againstitself. The satiric point is that authentic, organic human presence is absent in aspace that signifies only the repression of natural energy:
Lise keeps her flat as clean-lined and clear to return to after her work as if it wereuninhabited. The swaying tall pines among the litter of cones on the forest floor havebeen subdued into silence and into obedient bulks. (Spark 1974: 15)
The image of a dearth of nature, a dearth of life, in Lise’s flat expands in The Driver’sSeat into a picture of an entire Western world that has committed itself toan effacement of living reality, to a preoccupation with exteriors rather thaninteriors, surfaces rather than depths. Peter Kemp has noted that ‘Clothes, food,implements, documents: continually, almost obsessively, attention is drawn to theway that these are covered up by plastic or by paper’ (Kemp 1974: 123). This‘recurrent motif of covering’, he writes, the ‘constant stress upon externals’, the‘artificial sameness’ that characterises the shops in the city of the north and those inthe city of the south, suggests a civilisation devoted to denying the energy of the‘real thing’, to erasing the ‘vitality of difference’ (Kemp 1974: 123, 125). So thatThe Driver’s Seat is utterly packed, from its opening drama of the unnatural,synthetic fabric, with references to the way in which the civilisation operateswithin an order of artifice and representation. In a department store in thesouthern city Lise is mesmerised by ‘a nylon dog which, at the flick of a switchattached to its lead, barks, trots, wags its tail and sits’ (Spark 1974: 60). In thesame department store, television screens assimilate, elide and nullify the brutenatural and the real political in an ecstasy of communication. In this network ofinformation, this smooth surface of representation, ends are not real ends, justsimulated ends:
Two television screens, one vast and one small, display the same programme, awild-life documentary film which is now coming to an end; a charging herd ofbuffalo, large on one screen and small on the other, cross the two patches of visionwhile music of an unmistakeably finale nature sends them on their way with equalvolume from both machines . . .
A well-groomed female announcer comes on both televisions, small and large, togive out the early evening headlines, first stating that the time is 17·00 hours, thenthat a military coup has newly taken place in a middle-eastern country. (Spark 1974:63–64)
If a host of details reinforce a point about the displacement of the real inmodern Western culture, then there is also, of course, the central motif of thenovel. The car. Or, rather, the car and the question of who is in the driver’s seat.The world that Lise moves in, and which is the cause of her despair, ironicallyprefigures the observations made by Jean Baudrillard in 1983 when he spoke of theway in which self-determining, autonomous human subjectivity has been eclipsedin the postmodern condition of the modern world:
With the television image – the television being the ultimate and perfect object forthis new era – our own body and the whole surrounding universe became a controlscreen.
If one thinks about it, people no longer project themselves into their objects, withtheir affects . . . their fantasies of possession, loss, mourning, jealousy: the psycho-logical dimension has in a sense vanished . . . Roland Barthes already indicated thissome time ago in regard to the automobile: little by little a logic of ‘driving’ hasreplaced a very subjective logic of possession and projection. No more fantasies ofpower, speed and appropriation linked to the object itself, but instead a tactic ofpotentialities linked to usage . . . an optimalisation of the play of possibilities offeredby the car as vector and vehicle, and no longer as object of psychological sanctuary.The subject himself, suddenly transformed, becomes a computer at the wheel, not adrunken demiurge of power. The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, itsdashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen(instead of a live-in projectile as it was before). (Baudrillard 1985: 127)
Classical distinctions between subject and object collapse in a world where the realhas become a matter of the simulated. The subject, transformed, is no longer anagency but an effect. The driver’s seat is no longer an object to be inhabited by asubject, the car is no longer a ‘live-in projectile’. Both the car and its driver’s seatare as humanly empty, as uninhabited, as Lise’s flat. In an invented world, a worldof the unreal or the hyperreal, there is no authentic self which can ever be in theposition of seeking something as an object of psychological sanctuary. Oppositionslike private and public, inside and outside, depth and surface have no meaning in apostmodern condition of simulation. But a part of Spark clearly desires that theword simulation should retain its meaning of deception, of falsehood. A part of herwants to believe in classical distinctions between a real which may be distinguishedontologically from representations of the real and which can be accessed by anindividual human agent. The elision of surface and depth is something she mocks inminor and major ways in The Driver’s Seat. As, for example, in a minor way, whenLise, in the airport about to depart for the south, meets a South African womanwho is looking amongst the bookstalls for books, not according to their content,but according to whether their covers will match the colour schemes of herbedrooms: ‘In all our places we have spare bedrooms, that makes two green, twopink, three beige, and I’m trying to pick up books to match’ (Spark 1974: 22). Atone level this is the harmless comedy of a person with nothing in their head. Atanother level she is a human equivalent of the stain resisting synthetic fabric thatLise casts off at the opening of the book. The displacement of content, of the real,that characterises the world which Lise is represented as moving through infectsthe minds of people in that world in different ways. There is, for example, Bill,whom Lise sits next to on the plane, who is into macrobiotic food and an orgasm aday, who styles himself as some kind of new age guru, an ‘Enlightenment Leader’as it is ironically put (Spark 1974: 33), and who ‘stares ahead with glazed and quiteunbalanced eyes, those eyes far too wide open to signify anything but some sort ofmental distance from reality’ (Spark 1974: 35).
Lise’s journey, from dehumanized routine in a northern city that is identifiedindirectly as Copenhagen, to an unspecified southern city, is entirely an attempt tobreak out of her felt sense of distance from reality. It is an attempt to occupy – as
an autonomous, willing agent – the driver’s seat of her own life. Everything shedoes, however daft it may at times seem, resolves into this desperate attempt toresist determination, to gain self-possession and with that self-possession to be ableto act on her environment rather than being acted on. Frantically tearing off thedress at the opening of the book is not, for Lise, a symptom of hysteria but anexpression of her own agency: ‘two other salesgirls and two other customers gaspand gape. At the door she turns to look back . . . with a look of satisfaction at herown dominance over the situation’ (Spark 1974: 9). The clothes that Lise finallybuys to travel in are lurid in the extreme and are consistently being remarked uponby people she passes. This, too, is part of her attempt to establish her individualityin a social condition where she feels deprived of it. In her hotel in the southern city:
Lise puts her room-key on the counter and asks for her passport in a loud voicecausing the clerk whom she addresses, another clerk who sits working an addingmachine, and several other people . . . to take notice of her.
The women stare at her clothes. (Spark 1974: 50)
Lise, we learn, is travelling south with the fixed notion that she is going to meetsomeone, a partner, a friend, a man. Yet she doesn’t know who this friend orpartner will be, which leads to mildly absurd exchanges when she is talking withMrs Fiedke, an old lady she has met in the southern city:
‘The torment of it’, Lise says, ‘Not knowing exactly where and when he’s going toturn up’ . . . they . . . have walked round the block looking so earnestly for Lise’sfriend that Mrs Fiedke has at some point lost the signs of her initial bewildermentwhen this friend has been mentioned, and now shows only the traces of enthusiasticcooperation in the search . . .
‘Would that be him, do you think? He looks very gaily dressed like yourself’.
‘No, that’s not him’.
‘It’s quite a problem, with all this choice. What about this one? No this one, I mean,crossing in front of that car? Would he be too fat?’ (Spark 1974: 57–58)
Finding this man is the key element in Lise’s attempt to achieve self-possession andby that self-possession to escape a felt sense of nothingness:
‘Will you feel a presence? Is that how you’ll know?’
‘Not really a presence’, Lise says. ‘The lack of an absence’. (Spark 1974: 71)
Spark presents Lise, in her searching, trying to move closer to the reality thathas been absent in the artifice of her life. She is described, as she searches, in terms
of that natural reality which had been repressed in her apartment in the city of thenorth: ‘Her lips are slightly parted and her nostrils and eyes, too, are a fragmentmore open than usual; she is a stag scenting the breeze’ (Spark 1974: 72–73). Butthis image of the stag, the trophy of the hunter, defines the very peculiar nature ofher pilgrimage. Because what she is doing, trying to track this man down, ishunting for someone who will turn her into the hunted object. She is looking, withanimal sensitivity, for the type of a man who will kill her. And she eventually findshim, in the form of Mrs Fiedke’s nephew, who, Mrs Fiedke confides, ‘has beenunwell, we had to send him to a clinic’ (Spark 1974: 65). Later, we discover thathe had, in fact, stabbed a woman. When Lise at last meets him, Richard, sheimmediately intuits the type and she leads him off to a place where – despite hisvain attempts to resist his own proclivities – he can kill her:
He ties her hands, and she tells him in a sharp, quick voice to take off his necktie andbind her ankles.
‘No’, he says, kneeling over her, ‘not your ankles’.
‘I don’t want any sex’, she shouts. ‘You can have it afterwards. Tie my feet and kill,that’s all. They will come and sweep it up in the morning’.
All the same, he plunges into her, with the knife poised high.
‘Kill me’, she says, and repeats it in four languages.
As the knife descends to her throat she screams, evidently perceiving how final isfinality. She screams and then her throat gurgles while he stabs . . .
He runs to the car . . . He sees already the gleaming buttons of the policemen’suniforms . . . sees already the holsters and epaulets and all those trappings devisedto protect them from the indecent exposure of fear and pity, pity and fear. (Spark1974: 106–107)
Perceiving how final is finality. This is not a presentation of the simulation of anend, like the finale music which seamlessly and painlessly dismisses the pictures ofa buffalo charge on the television screen. This is not conceived as the constructedend of a constructed thing, the living body. This is the real, material end of thenatural body’s life. It is designed as a reflection on something which lies outwithrepresentation. Lise can be seen as being presented at this point as escaping artificeand representation and as connecting with the real. Becoming a hunted objectmeans just that. She has engaged with an objective world. The profound irony inSpark’s fiction is that it is only by Lise’s stopping breathing and by her bleeding todeath that her life can gain content and depth, that it can be realised as somethingother than artifice and representation. What energises Spark’s parody of post-modern perspectives is that Lise has connected with reality using the procedures of
postmodernism itself. She has planned, imagined, constructed this denouement,after all. She has invented the course of her life so that the ending of the life in herbody may contradict any idea that life is only a matter of invention. In this fictionthe only way the heroine – or, in a sense, the anti-heroine – can prove the contentof her life is by the ending of it. The implication is that her desperate death-wish isthe disease of a postmodern civilisation suffering under the delusion that it ispossible to evacuate reality, depth and content.
Perceiving how final is finality. An end presumes a beginning. And a begin-ning and an end involve, however briefly, a middle. Spark’s point in The Driver’sSeat would be that the natural body is subject, outside representation, to theselimits, which are the co-ordinates of what is still the dominant contemporaryWestern conception of time and history. Judged by the natural body’s movementfrom birth to death, from beginning to ending, there is this much linearity in natureand it is that observed, materially founded linearity which informs Westernconceptions of time. That the life of the individual natural organism operateswithin parameters that can legitimately be called beginnings and endings, originsand conclusions, that the body breathes and stops breathing, is the minimalobjective reality that can be presupposed in Spark’s vision in The Driver’s Seat. Andit controls her conception of plot.
In Robbe-Grillet there is, as Elizabeth Ermarth says, ‘no common chrono-logical clock in which ‘‘a’’ plot would be possible’ (Ermarth 1992: 72). The refusalof plot in Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau romanciers is something attacked by Sparkthrough a character in her 1965 novel The Mandelbaum Gate, set in Israel in the early1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial. Barbara Vaughan, the principal characterof the novel, attends a part of the trial, listening not to ‘the impassioned evidencefrom survivors of the death-camps’ (Spark 1967: 177) but to what was ‘generallyagreed’ to be a ‘boring phase’ in the trial: that is, Eichmann speaking in his owndefence (Spark 1967: 177). His ‘actual discourse’, we are told, ‘was a deadmechanical tick, while its subject, the massacre, was living’ (Spark 1967: 177). ButBarbara finds that this ‘dull phase was in reality the desperate heart of the trial’(Spark 1967: 177). And this because Eichmann’s discourse reminds her of theprocedures of the nouveau roman in its studied denial of plot, its evasion of finality.The manner of Eichmann’s discourse, like that of the new or anti-novelists,betrays, for Barbara, a refusal to engage with unrepresented reality, a refusal toengage with human mortality itself:
She thought, it all feels like a familiar dream, and presently located the sensation asone that the anti-novelists induce . . . At school she usually took the novels and playsof the new French writers with the sixth form. She thought, repetition, boredom,despair, going nowhere for nothing, all of which conditions are enclosed in a tight,unbreakable statement of the times at hand . . .
The counsel for the defence consulted his document and drew his client’s attention tospecific names, Misters this and that and their sons, locked in reality [my emphasis].And his client, a character from the pages of a long anti-roman, went on repeating his
lines which were punctuated only by the refrain, Bureau IV-B-4. Barbara felt she wascaught in a conspiracy to prevent her brain from functioning . . .
. . . the voice of the presiding judge was uttering a question:
You mean, that the remark that the man is dead, in spite of all the tonics administeredto the man, was also part of the information received by you from the GeneralGovernment?
The Witness having sprung to attention, gave formal ear to this speech from an aliencult concerning a man being dead. (Spark 1967:177, 179)
If the Nazi mind in The Mandelbaum Gate fails to engage with death, if it fails tocomprehend the reality and gravity of death (‘an alien cult concerning a man beingdead’), if it is locked out of reality, and if Spark draws a parallel between thatmind-set and the postmodern perspectives of the nouveau roman, then in The Primeof Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961, she had made a comparable point when shedrew a parallel between fascism and the schoolteacher Jean Brodie, a womancommitted to inventing her life and the world around her. Cairns Craig has notedthat:
Miss Brodie’s fascism . . . is founded in an imperious imagination which not onlywishes to be the unacknowledged legislator of her world, but must impose itselfforcefully on that world and coerce everyone to its dictates. Thus the Brodie girls. . . are each given an identity by their teacher, identities which she expects them toact out as though they had no freedom of will . . . no reality outside of theconstructions of her imagination. They form part of a story which is a function of herbelief that she can will into existence whatever she imagines. (Craig 1993: 66)
One day, after Miss Brodie has been extolling the virtues of the Italian fascists in the1930s, Sandy Stranger, the most percipient of the schoolgirls, remarks that the‘Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fascisti . . . all knit together for her need’ (Spark1985: 31). Sandy becomes fascinated by Miss Brodie’s way of fabricating her life,her way of reinventing her past, for example, so that the attributes of a past lovercome to reflect the attributes of the man she is currently enamoured of:
Sandy was fascinated by this method of making patterns with facts, and was dividedbetween her admiration for the technique and the pressing need to prove Miss Brodieguilty of misconduct. (Spark 1985: 72)
Brodie’s misconduct turns critically in the novel on the fact that her imagining ofthe world into being causes her to become the indirect cause of one of herschoolgirl’s deaths. In 1937 she persuaded Joyce Emily Hammond, who had beenanti-Franco in her sympathies, to go to Spain to support Franco and the Fascists inthe Spanish Civil War. Joyce Emily died ‘when the train she was travelling in had
been attacked’ (Spark 1985: 118). Just as Eichmann cannot recognise the concernof the presiding judge about ‘a man being dead’, so Brodie’s constitutive imagina-tion cannot connect with the potential consequences, in the actual historicalworld, of her fantasies. Spark drew a telling correlation in The Prime of Miss JeanBrodie between totalitarian impulse and the idea of the construction of the self, thefabrication of history, the inventedness of reality. The death of Joyce Emily as shetried to fulfil a part of Jean Brodie’s construction of the world is the thing thatfinally prompts Sandy Stranger to break with that construction and to engineerBrodie’s dismissal from the school staff on political grounds.
But if Jean Brodie cannot ultimately contain Sandy Stranger, if she cannotmanage completely to control the plots she weaves, then neither does Lise entirelycontrol the plot of the life she invents in The Driver’s Seat. Lise had not thought to beraped before she dies. Just as the inventedness of her life is an attempt to reach adeath that is not invented, so the invented nature of her life does not prescribeeverything that happens to her while she is still alive. The rape had not formed partof her plan. In being the author of her own life Lise is, of course, a model of theauthor of the novel. The novel is metafictional in this sense. And if Lise cannot geteverything right, neither can the author. In Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy the ‘narrator’is deprived of omniscience by, as I have said, the unrelieved present tense of thenarrative and also by many, many details which further establish the limitations ofhis or her point of view. We are told at one point, for instance, of A . . ., that ‘Hermouth is not quite closed, and may be quivering imperceptibly’ (my emphasis;Robbe-Grillet 1987: 33). And so on. Now The Driver’s Seat has a future interposedat a number of points in its predominant present tense. Early in the story thenon-first person narrator tells us that Lise is going to be found dead. Even so, thereare peculiar limitations set on the apparently omniscient narrator of the novel. Wehear repeatedly – in the midst of narrative descriptions of persons, locations andevents – expressions like probably, presumably, seems, perhaps, it depends. In onescene, as Lise is leaving her hotel room, the narrator says ‘Who knows herthoughts? Who can tell?’ (Spark 1974: 50). What is the point of these qualificationson omniscience? They echo Robbe-Grillet. But, again, in a manner that can be seenas parodic. One way of reading the difference from Robbe-Grillet concernsSpark’s Roman Catholicism. Catholicism is not an obvious dimension of TheDriver’s Seat. In his review, Frank Kermode observed that with The Driver’s Seat‘[s]omething . . . has . . . dropped out’of Spark’s fictional mode: ‘the visibility ofa transcendental plot’ into which the plot of the novel somehow fits (Kermode1970: 425). We could say, however, that while there may be no overt religiousframe of reference in the novel, nevertheless the deficiencies in the narrator’sknowledge might be seen to carry the implication that – just as behind Lise standsthe author – so behind the human author stands the great author of all. The critiqueof the omniscient author would come, in this case, not from a secular, postmodernbut from a religious perspective. Behind Lise’s plot stands the author’s and theauthor’s perspective is subsumed by God’s. Neither Lise nor the author can claimabsolute foreknowledge. Spark would be building in an implicit awareness that
she, as author, can only write a fiction of the real. This is not a fiction which speaksof the absolute contingency of the real – but it remains a fiction, nevertheless. Theimplication would be that ultimate, unconditioned reality is to be associated withGod, who subsumes all, author as well as text.
But the novel may also be read in a more secular way that still involves aquestioning of the postmodernism of a Robbe-Grillet. The very last words of TheDriver’s Seat concern the ‘trappings devised to protect’ the policemen ‘from theindecent exposure of fear and pity, pity and fear’ (Spark 1974: 107). In his PoeticAristotle said that the purpose of tragedy was to arouse ‘pity or fear’ (Buckley1850: 417). He also said that plot is ‘the soul of tragedy’, that plot is ‘an imitationof action’, that tragedy is the imitation of a ‘whole action’, and that ‘a whole is thatwhich has a beginning, middle and end’ (Buckley 1850: 419, 418, 420). Tragedy,in this sense at least, is not possible in Robbe-Grillet’s fiction where there is nosingle, ‘whole’ action. Indeed in his 1958 essay, ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy’,Robbe-Grillet had attacked the tragic vision as something which paradoxicallyhumanises and hence recuperates the alien universe. Partly by the way that itconfirms plot and endorses the reality of an end, The Driver’s Seat can be seen toreinstate tragedy as one of the possible outcomes of human life. The tragedy of Lisewould be that of a person driven to negate herself by a culture which deprived herof a sense of autonomy and agency.
However, whether read as invoking either a religious or a humanist frame ofreference, The Driver’s Seat, with the grotesque perversion of its story and itsallusions to the nouveau roman, emerges as a text committed not so much tosatirising as to parodying Robbe-Grillet and postmodernism. I use parody becausethe term denotes a special relationship with the thing that is being parodied. As Inoted at the outset, Muriel Spark once recorded her own respect for Robbe-Grilletas a novelist. It is a respect which she has reiterated throughout her career. In aninterview with Martin McQuillan, conducted for inclusion in his 2002 collectionof esssays, Theorizing Muriel Spark, Muriel Spark not only said that she consideredThe Driver’s Seat as her ‘best novel to date . . . the creepiest’ (McQuillan 2002:229), she also observed of French radical intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s:
I was thinking the same thoughts that they were thinking, people like Robbe-Grillet.We were influenced by the same, breathing the same informed air. So, I naturallywould have a bent towards the nouveau roman but in fact I was very influenced byRobbe-Grillet. (McQuillan 2002: 216)
The term parody allows for such respect, even for a fascination with the achieve-ment that is being called in question. In 1933, for example, Gilbert Murray notedthat Aristophanes ‘certainly was fascinated’ by the poetry of Euripides even as ‘heparodied it with a charm and skill which prove his . . . understanding’ (Murray1933: 107). Muriel Spark is likewise fascinated by the phenomenon of what istermed postmodernism.
If, through the voice of Barbara Vaughan in The Mandelbaum Gate of 1965,Spark suggested something of her own school-time reading in the nouveau roman,
then four years earlier, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she had signalled thefascination, the profound attraction that postmodern outlooks held for her. It iswell known that in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Sandy Stranger is the student who isclosest to Jean Brodie herself, as far as the matter of inventing reality is concerned.Shortly after passages in which Jean Brodie is heard rewriting, constructing andmythologising her own past, Sandy is the one who is shown further rewriting thatstory in a schoolgirl tale about Miss Brodie. It is Sandy who is shown as being sosaturated in fiction and in fiction-making that she has conversations with AlanBreck, the hero of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Sandy shares intimately inBrodie’s cast of mind. She is figuratively kidnapped by Brodie. And she exemplifiesnot just Brodie’s cast of mind but that of Spark the novelist, the creator both ofherself and of Brodie. In his 2000 study of Spark, Bryan Cheyette observes thatSandy – ‘half-English, like Spark, a ‘‘stranger’’ to Edinburgh’, and so on – is ‘closeto being an authorial mouthpiece’ (Cheyette 2000: 58). As such, Sandy dramatisesa fundamental dichotomy in Spark’s own mind. At the end of The Prime of Miss JeanBrodie Sandy, having turned in Brodie on political grounds, becomes a RomanCatholic, immersed, under the appelation ‘Sister Helena’, in a nunnery. She isfamous for a book she has published. The closing lines of the novel read:
And there was that day when the inquiring young man came to see Sandy because ofher strange book of psychology, ‘The Transfiguration of the Commonplace’, whichhad brought so many visitors that Sandy clutched the bars of her grille moredesperately than ever.
‘What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena? Were theyliterary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?
Sandy said: ‘There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime’. (Spark 1985: 127–8)
Whilst it was a voluntary conversion to Catholicism, Sandy remains desperatelyriven. Riven between her willed submission to religion, on the one hand, and theforce of the principle represented by Jean Brodie on the other. She is torn betweena containment of the generative, constitutive capacity of the mind – the capacityfor transfiguring the commonplace – and a letting loose of that capacity. Sandy hassubmitted herself to a disciplining of her mind’s powers, submitted herself to anorm. Just as Spark once spoke of her own conversion to Catholicism as asubmission less to an active belief in some transcendental spiritual power than to aninstitutional norm which she saw as the prime repository of Western moral andhumane values: ‘That’s what my conversion meant to me’, she said in 1987:
That’s settled, that’s where I depart from, that’s the north, the norm, and I can goaround from that point . . . It’s very important to me to have a point of departure,because in the modern world nobody has any . . . fixed idea of anything, and in aworld like that a fixed point is very important . . . What other norm could there be,for someone brought up in the Western world . . .? Whether we like it or not, the
Christian-Judaic tradition that grew up around the Mediterranean dictates what wethink is good or evil . . . The idea of Christ as an example, for instance, was terriblyimportant to the whole development of the West – sociologically, morally . . .politically. What would the slave liberation movement have been without it? But ifyou go over to the Islamic side, for instance, what have they got to teach us aboutlove, about pity, about all the things that we hold precious? They’ve nothing at all.Therefore I hold, perhaps because I talk from within it, to this Judeo-Christiantradition. (Frankel 1987: 445)
This answer itself enacts the division that runs through Spark’s works, particularlyof the 1960s and 1970s. There are two parentheses which are specially important:‘What other norm could there be, for someone brought up in the Western world’;‘Therefore I hold, perhaps because I talk from within it (my emphases), to thisJudeo-Christian tradition’. These expressions of the cultural situatedness, andhence the implied idea of the relativity of her norm, allow in – by the back door, asit were – all the postmodern perspectives Spark is so anxious to contain by heradoption of the norm. Read like this, Spark’s statements here form a curiousparallel with the image of Sandy desperately clutching the bars of her grille. By thisimage, Sandy – and behind her, Spark herself – feel the force of both the will tocontain and the drive to beak free of containment and allow the inventive energiesof the mind free play. There is the sense, on the one hand, of moral and ultimatelypolitical responsibility – ‘what we think is good or evil ’. . . ‘What would the slaveliberation movement have been without. . .[the] idea of Christ ‘. . . What hasIslam ‘to teach us about pity . . .?’ This chimes with the moral and politicalcategorization, in The Mandelbaum Gate, of Eichman’s discourse as that of thenouveau roman and of postmodern ideas. But against this there are the underminingparentheses concerning situatedness and relativism. And there is the desperation ofSandy’s act of self-disciplining. The force of Spark’s critique of postmodernperspectives in The Driver’s Seat may, in fact, be seen to derive not so much fromany metaphysical propositions in Spark’s Catholicism, nor from the invocation ofthe western humanist tradition, as from an underlying identification with thedynamic but politically and morally troubling, because relativist, perspectives ofthe postmodern. In Spark’s case, it is something like a matter of irresistible forcemeets immoveable object. Her dark parable in The Driver’s Seat touches a division inher own mind between irreconciliable sympathies. Her conviction of the need fora morally and politically responsible norm cannot be reconciled with an under-standing that such a norm has no universal, objective foundation. Muriel Spark’swork comprises an exploration of intellectual issues through a medium of imagi-native writing; a medium which lives by nuance, irony, tension and the ambiguitiesof connotative language and equivocal plot. It is one of the privileges of creativewriting that it can thrive on and be celebrated for its articulation – withoutnecessarily having to move to resolution – of contradictory and irreconciliableenergies and outlooks.
Some recent criticism, noting the way in which divided identity is a promi-nent preoccupation in Spark’s fiction, has sought to import a discourse for talking
about Spark and her work from what is broadly postcolonial theory. BryanCheyette, looking, properly enough, for the roots of Spark’s fiction in her life,has written that ‘Spark’s hybrid background – part English, part Scottish, partProtestant, part Jewish – has enabled her to become an essentially diasporic writerwith a fluid sense of self’ (Cheyette 2000: 10). Such a frame for reading Spark ishighly suggestive. But we should not forget that in calling her schoolmistress JeanBrodie, Spark had already figured the theme of division in her writings in terms ofa classic Scottish paradigm. One does not, in fact, need a range of multiples once onehas taken that first step and doubled. For all her mixed provenance, Spark, inexploring in novels such as The Prime of miss Jean Brodie, as well as in The Driver’s Seat,her need for a Western norm, on one hand, and her disturbed responsiveness tocreative impulse and postmodern implication, on the other, has re-ignited theparadigm set by Edinburgh’s Deacon Brodie in terms forcefully appropriate to thecontemporary world.
University of Aarhus, Denmark
References
Baudrillard, Jean (1985) ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ in Hal Foster (ed) Postmodern Culture,pp.126–34, first published 1983 as Hal Foster (ed) The Anti-Aesthetic by Bay Press; London, PlutoPress.Bertens, Hans (1995) The Idea of the Postmodern. A History, London and New York, Routledge.Buckley, Theodore (1850) translator, Aristotle’s Treatise on Rhetoric and The Poetic of Aristotle, London,Henry G. Bohn.Cheyette, Bryan (2000) Muriel Spark, Writers and their Work Series, Tavistock, Northcote House.Craig, Cairns (1993) ‘Doubtful Imaginings. The Sceptical Art of Muriel Spark’, Etudes Ecossaises,no.2, 1993, pp.63–78.Eagleton, Terry (1996) The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford, Blackwell.Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds (1992) Sequel to History. Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time,Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.Kemp, Peter (1974) Muriel Spark, Novelists and their World Series, London, Paul Elek.Kermode, Frank (1970) ‘Sheerer Spark’, The Listener, 24 September 1970, p.425.McQuillan, Martin (2002) (ed) Theorizing Muriel Spark. Gender, Race, Deconstruction, Houndmills andNew York, Palgrave.Murray, Gilbert (1933) Aristophanes. A Study, Oxford, Clarendon Press.Robbe-Grillet, Alain (1987) Jealousy, first published 1957 by Les Editions de Minuit; London, JohnCalder.(1989) For a New Novel, first published 1963 by Les Editions de Minuit; translated by RichardHoward, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press.Smyth, Edmund (1991) ‘The Nouveau Roman: Modernity and Postmodernity’ in Edmund Smyth(ed) Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction, London, Batford.Spark, Muriel (1967) The Mandelbaum Gate, first published 1965 by Macmillan; London, PenguinBooks.(1992) ‘The Desegregation of Art’ in Joseph Hynes (ed) Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, New York,G.H. Hall.(1974) The Driver’s Seat, first published 1970 by Macmillan; Harmondsworth, Penguin Books.(1985) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, first published 1961 by Macmillan; Harmondsworth, PenguinBooks.Toynbee, Philip (1971) Interview with Muriel Spark, Observer Colour Magazine, 7 November 1971,pp.73–74.
