Cruel Narrations: an Introduction to Muriel Spark (In-Person)

When Muriel Spark died in 2006, newspapers across the world published obituaries celebrating her dark comedy and unforgettable characters. In her 21 novels and dozens of short stories and essays, Spark approached death differently: not as a reason for either lament or celebration, but rather as a fact of life, suffused with many possible religious meanings and critical for understanding our helplessness in the face of political and personal limitations. Spark’s wry and carefully crafted plots are populated by characters whose vividness is often countered by the narrator’s reminders of their fictionality. Spark’s narrators like to tell the reader about the circumstances of a character’s death while they are still, fictionally, alive, thereby prompting the reader to ask existential questions: What does it mean to live against the backdrop of war, ideological struggle, the beauty of art and nature, and the body’s ceaseless needs and knowledge of its finality?

In this course, we will read three novels written consecutively by Spark—The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)—to think about life and death with Spark as a guide and examine literary style and narration in post-war English prose. How did Spark achieve a comic effect while describing the cruelty of life’s vicissitudes? What makes her novels modern classics, published and republished by multiple presses? How does her work fit into categories such as “women’s prose,” “British spinster fiction,” and “Catholic literature”? And is there a redemptive quality even (or especially) with the darkest of comedies?