AUTUMN 2007 321337

VOLUME 56

ENGLISH

Parodying Postmodernism: Muriel Spark (The Drivers Seat) and Robbe-Grillet (Jealousy)
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Aidan Day
In 1971 Muriel Spark was interviewed for the Observer by Philip Toynbee. Toynbee asked Spark: What modern novelists do you admire? Her response was unhesitating: Robbe-Grillet certainly (Toynbee 1971: 73). But she also added something: Robbe-Grillet certainly, though I dont in the least accept the theory of the anti-novel (my emphasis; Toynbee 1971: 73). Sparks simultaneous appreciation and, as it were, denial of Robbe-Grillet is my starting point in this essay. The influence of Robbe-Grillets fictional manner upon Sparks own writing was observed by Frank Kermode in a review of The Drivers Seat upon its publication in 1970:
Lise, the heroine of this one, starts out from somewhere in the north for a vacation somewhere in the south . . . As she proceeds on her peculiar pilgrimage we are allowed to observe her closely, but have no other privilege, so that we dont know why she is so upset, whether her hair is tinted, what . . . she thinks shes doing. From the elaborate description of her flat we may infer that she is very isolated, but her snack on the aeroplane is described with equal intimacy, and so are the bellpushes in her 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 and decided that his methods, considered in isolation from the anti-metaphysical propositions he advances to support their general validity, are useful if you want to present obsessed or manic states (Kermode 1970: 425). This rather makes it sound as if Sparks borrowings from Robbe-Grillet are purely formal and are used in a manner quite divorced from their original context. But it can be seen that Spark borrows from Robbe-Grillet exactly in order to comment upon the intellectual propositions which support his fictional methods. Edmund Smyth,
Copyright The English Association 2007

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writing on the nouveau roman in general and on Robbe-Grillet in particular, has observed that It would not be an exaggeration to stress the extent to which the nouveau roman . . . still acts as the essential reference point in any definition of postmodern aesthetics (Smyth 1991: 54). Muriel Sparks appropriation, in The Drivers Seat, of some of Robbe-Grillets fictional devices and her metacommentary on those devices and upon the world-view informing them amounts to a critical engagement with postmodern assumptions and perspectives. Before turning to Sparks work, I want to outline some of the postmodern features of Robbe-Grillets fiction, taking his 1957 novel Jealousy as my example. Jealousy is set on a colonial banana plantation. The narrative discourse, which takes place in an unrelenting present tense, describes objects in the external world together 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 these descriptions. Nor, given the absolute present tense of the narrative, is it possible to identify an omniscient narrator speaking from a command of past and future. There is a blank where the narrator as traditionally understood ought to be. Point of 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, a centipede squashed on a wall of the plantation house to accounts of visits made by A . . . and by Franck to the local town. But it is hard to speak of description in this novel as a faithful mimetic register of a single, objective, coherent reality out there. 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, dull finish, probably not washable. The table is set for three, according to the usual arrangement. (Robbe-Grillet 1987: 46)

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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 and be 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 was perhaps best explained by Robbe-Grillet himself in a 1963 essay entitled Time and Description in Fiction Today. Here, comparing the role played by description in the realist novel of the nineteenth century with the role of description in

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contemporary fiction, he observed that what is new in the new novel is its self-consciousness that description is not an imitative but a constitutive device. Description, he writes, once claimed to reproduce a pre-existing reality; it now asserts its creative function (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 147). According to Robbe-Grillet the point of contradiction in a narrative such as Jealousy is that it draws explicit attention to the constructive or creative rather than merely mimetic role of description. Description, he notes, particularly seems to be inventing its object 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 is doing the inventing? One reading infers that the whole thing is written from the point of view of a husband who is jealously suspicious of his wifes A . . .s relations with Franck. This reading, which attempts to restore a conventional narratorial subjectivity and telos to the story, has to transfer the contradictions in the narrative to the mind of the posited narrator. The inconsistencies are explained away as the symptom of a jealously disturbed imagination. This reading imposes an external subjectivity and what Robbe-Grillet called an external chronology on to the text (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 154). It is a reading which Robbe-Grillet scorned:
it was absurd to suppose that in the novel Jealousy . . . there existed a clear and unambiguous 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 an external chronology would lead, sooner or later, to a series of contradictions, hence to an impasse. (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 154)

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The contradictory and therefore plural potential narrative lines in Jealousy find their concomitant in the absence of a clearly defined narrator. The presence of such a narrator would cohere the narrative within a single, linear perspective though, as I have just suggested, the contradictions in the story-line would demand that this narrator be inconsistent and disturbed. The importance of the absence of such a narrator is that the absence is designed to allow the involvement of the reader in the text 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 making sense of the narrative and hence to regard the reader as in some degree contributing to the construction of the narrative itself. But in traditional novels the presence of a narrator may at once be seen to deflect attention from the readers creative involvement in the story. In Robbe-Grillets postmodern novel the erasure of the narrator is a means of foregrounding the extent to which the reader is creatively involved in the generation of the narrative. What Robbe-Grillet called the invisible narrator of Jealousy is a combination, as he himself put it, of the writer, and . . . the reader (my emphasis; Robbe-Grillet 1989: 154). Robbe-Grillets emphases on the creative function of description in the novel and on the readers participation in that function are an important aspect of

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his postmodernism. But only an aspect. The essence of his postmodernism resides in his view that the creative or constructive function applies not just to the writers and the readers generation of a literary text but to humanitys relations with the world in general. The idea that human beings are endlessly engaged in inventing the object, to use Robbe-Grillets words, is germane to much postmodern epistemology and ontology and Robbe-Grillet himself spends a fair amount of time attempting to define the idea across the essays which he collected under the title of For a New Novel. In an essay from 1958 he spoke of the utter indifference to humanity of the material world: Man, he said, looks at the world, and the world does not look back at him (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 58). By 1963 and the essay on Time and Description in Fiction Today he was noticing the way in which in the context of an absolute divorce between human interest and the material world humanity imagines the reality of that world into being: It is matter itself, he observed, which is . . . alien to man and constantly being invented in mans mind (RobbeGrillet 1989: 148). This is a characteristic instance of what Hans Bertens has called the postmodern awareness that representations create rather than reflect reality (Bertens 1995: 11). An awareness that human beings never see the material world in an objective, unmediated fashion; that they are caught within and apprehend only human interpretations or constructions of that world. The new art, RobbeGrillet observes, whether it be the novel or film, is not interested in the thing described since, by his view, that cannot be accessed directly anyway but in the description or representation of the thing described and in the structuring and movement of that representation (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 148). He objects to the complaint made by a number of critics about the impossibility of distinguishing . . . what is real from what is mental in his second film LImmortelle. Such a complaint misses the point, he insists, because the film never claimed to be a piece of reality but was developed as a reflection on reality (or on the dearth of reality, as Breton calls it) (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 15051). It was developed as a reflection on a construction which passes as reality but which in itself lacks objective substance. Robbe-Grillet concludes the essay on Time and Description by emphasising that the constitutive rather than imitative principle in a work of art is to be taken as a paradigm of the inventedness of the world and of the self in that world:
the author today proclaims his absolute need of the readers cooperation, an active, conscious, creative assistance. What he asks of him is no longer to receive ready-made a world completed, full, closed upon itself, but on the contrary to participate in a creation, to invent in his turn the work and the world and thus to learn to invent his own life. (second sentence, my emphasis; Robbe-Grillet 1989: 156)

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Robbe-Grillets views on the artifice of the world and of human identity involve at once the idea that time itself, as conventionally understood in the West, is no more than a fabrication. Historical time with its linear plotting of past, present and future, of beginnings, middles and ends is a dimension of a human construction of

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reality. In Time and Description Robbe-Grillet contrasts the model of temporal development which underpins the traditional novel with the destruction of that model in the new novel (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 155, 154):
in the modern narrative, time seems to be cut off from its temporality. It no longer passes. It no longer completes anything . . . Description makes no headway, contradicts itself, turns in circles. Moment denies continuity. (Robbe-Grillet 1989: 155)

Elizabeth Ermarth sees such a subversion of historical time as a principal feature of postmodernisms promise of liberation from oppressive cultural codes. For centuries, she writes,
historical time, with its linked past and future, has made possible the articulation of certain laws of development and has been a cultural absolute from physics to politics to narrative . . . Postmodern novelists begin their primary task of reformulating temporality by showing readers that such an idea of temporality is a convention . . . not a condition of nature . . . In Robbe-Grillets Jealousy . . . the reader is confined to the present tense and thus to a continuous present that constantly erases past and future. No serenely neutral . . . narrator recollects, from an unspecific fictional future, a meaningful history of events . . . Here there is no neutral medium and no common chronological clock in which a plot would be possible . . . Robbe-Grillets 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 in anthematic fashion rather than following any linear track . . . This circling, contradictory 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 attention not to fictions of origins and ends but to the process of consciousness itself as it constructs and deconstructs such fictions. (Ermarth 1992: 16, 30, 54, 724, 86)

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Fun as it may be, there are, of course, a number of people and the argument in this essay is that Muriel Spark is, up to a point, one of these who have registered a disturbing solipsism about postmodern notions of the inventedness of reality. Terry Eagleton, for example, discussed the matter in his 1996 book The Illusions of Postmodernism:
on this theory it is impossible to say what kind of world our discourse or beliefs are about, any more than those who regard the Grand Canyon or the human body as wholly constructed are able to say what it is that is being constructed . . . Since facts are themselves products of discourse, it would be circular to seek to check our discourse off against them. The world makes no input into our conversation, even if it is what we are conversing about . . . It is really a regressive return to the Wittgenstein 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: 3738)

Eagleton is bothered by what he takes to be the postmodern denial of the idea that it is possible to access things which lie outwith culture and representation. The denial that there are natural, objectively accessible things:

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The natural, on this view of it, is just a mystifying word for those questionable cultural practices we have come to take for granted. It is easy to see how this applies to the view that human civilisation would collapse without the St Patricks day parade, 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 of breathing and by a bleeding to death that Muriel Spark, back in 1970, examined the premises of postmodernism in The Drivers Seat. The echoes in The Drivers Seat of Robbe-Grillets fictional manner are obvious enough. They are apparent not only in the tonally flat description the equal intimacy of descriptions of Lises face and descriptions of the bellpushes in her hotel bedroom but also in the insistent repetitions of particular descriptive details. Such as the one about Lises lips: Her lips are slightly parted (Spark 1974: 9) is an observation which keeps reappearing throughout the story of Lises journey. Then, perhaps most strikingly, there is the dominant present tense of the narration. But these stylistic effects are conceived only in partial complicity with Robbe-Grillet. Because Lise is portrayed as suffering a type of despair in a world suffering from a dearth of reality. The point is partly established in the very first scene of the book which opens, in media res, with Lise hysterically tearing off a dress she has been trying on in a shop because she has just been told by the salesgirl that it will not stain. It is a synthetic fabric which will not bear the imprint of a material reality such as a drop of coffee (Spark 1974: 7). Comparably, the unnatural order of the accountants office where Lise has worked for sixteen years is captured in a numerical symmetry that contains the asymmetrical gender distribution of the office hierarchy: she has five girls under her and two men. Over her are two women and five men (Spark 1974: 9). In this office Lises lips are symptomatically pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet (Spark 1974: 9). Lises apartment, too, is inhumanly functional:
the furniture is all fixed, adaptable to various uses, and stackable. Stacked into a panel are six folding chairs, should the tenant decide to entertain six for dinner. The writing desk extends to a dining table, and when the desk is not in use it, too, disappears into the 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)

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This is not, in fact, disinterested, neutral description. The dispassionate tone is expressly designed to identify a lack of heart in the flat. In a talk delivered in the same year as the publication of The Drivers Seat, The Desegregation of Art, Muriel Spark declared: I advocate the arts of satire and ridicule (Spark 1992: 35). Sparks invocation in The Drivers Seat of Robbe-Grillets descriptive exactitude is a kind of satiric parody. Robbe-Grillets manner is, to a degree, being used against itself. The satiric point is that authentic, organic human presence is absent in a space that signifies only the repression of natural energy:

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Lise keeps her flat as clean-lined and clear to return to after her work as if it were uninhabited. The swaying tall pines among the litter of cones on the forest floor have been subdued into silence and into obedient bulks. (Spark 1974: 15)

The image of a dearth of nature, a dearth of life, in Lises flat expands in The Drivers Seat into a picture of an entire Western world that has committed itself to an effacement of living reality, to a preoccupation with exteriors rather than interiors, surfaces rather than depths. Peter Kemp has noted that Clothes, food, implements, documents: continually, almost obsessively, attention is drawn to the way 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 in the 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 that The Drivers Seat is utterly packed, from its opening drama of the unnatural, synthetic fabric, with references to the way in which the civilisation operates within an order of artifice and representation. In a department store in the southern city Lise is mesmerised by a nylon dog which, at the flick of a switch attached to its lead, barks, trots, wags its tail and sits (Spark 1974: 60). In the same department store, television screens assimilate, elide and nullify the brute natural and the real political in an ecstasy of communication. In this network of information, this smooth surface of representation, ends are not real ends, just simulated ends:
Two television screens, one vast and one small, display the same programme, a wild-life documentary film which is now coming to an end; a charging herd of buffalo, large on one screen and small on the other, cross the two patches of vision while music of an unmistakeably finale nature sends them on their way with equal volume from both machines . . . A well-groomed female announcer comes on both televisions, small and large, to give out the early evening headlines, first stating that the time is 1700 hours, then that a military coup has newly taken place in a middle-eastern country. (Spark 1974: 6364)

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If a host of details reinforce a point about the displacement of the real in modern Western culture, then there is also, of course, the central motif of the novel. The car. Or, rather, the car and the question of who is in the drivers seat. The world that Lise moves in, and which is the cause of her despair, ironically prefigures the observations made by Jean Baudrillard in 1983 when he spoke of the way in which self-determining, autonomous human subjectivity has been eclipsed in the postmodern condition of the modern world:
With the television image the television being the ultimate and perfect object for this new era our own body and the whole surrounding universe became a control screen.

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If one thinks about it, people no longer project themselves into their objects, with their affects . . . their fantasies of possession, loss, mourning, jealousy: the psychological dimension has in a sense vanished . . . Roland Barthes already indicated this some time ago in regard to the automobile: little by little a logic of driving has replaced a very subjective logic of possession and projection. No more fantasies of power, speed and appropriation linked to the object itself, but instead a tactic of potentialities linked to usage . . . an optimalisation of the play of possibilities offered by 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 a drunken demiurge of power. The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen (instead of a live-in projectile as it was before). (Baudrillard 1985: 127)

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Classical distinctions between subject and object collapse in a world where the real has become a matter of the simulated. The subject, transformed, is no longer an agency but an effect. The drivers seat is no longer an object to be inhabited by a subject, the car is no longer a live-in projectile. Both the car and its drivers seat are as humanly empty, as uninhabited, as Lises flat. In an invented world, a world of the unreal or the hyperreal, there is no authentic self which can ever be in the position of seeking something as an object of psychological sanctuary. Oppositions like private and public, inside and outside, depth and surface have no meaning in a postmodern condition of simulation. But a part of Spark clearly desires that the word simulation should retain its meaning of deception, of falsehood. A part of her wants to believe in classical distinctions between a real which may be distinguished ontologically from representations of the real and which can be accessed by an individual human agent. The elision of surface and depth is something she mocks in minor and major ways in The Drivers Seat. As, for example, in a minor way, when Lise, in the airport about to depart for the south, meets a South African woman who is looking amongst the bookstalls for books, not according to their content, but according to whether their covers will match the colour schemes of her bedrooms: In all our places we have spare bedrooms, that makes two green, two pink, three beige, and Im trying to pick up books to match (Spark 1974: 22). At one level this is the harmless comedy of a person with nothing in their head. At another level she is a human equivalent of the stain resisting synthetic fabric that Lise 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 infects the 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 a day, 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 quite unbalanced eyes, those eyes far too wide open to signify anything but some sort of mental distance from reality (Spark 1974: 35). Lises journey, from dehumanized routine in a northern city that is identified indirectly as Copenhagen, to an unspecified southern city, is entirely an attempt to break out of her felt sense of distance from reality. It is an attempt to occupy as

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an autonomous, willing agent the drivers seat of her own life. Everything she does, however daft it may at times seem, resolves into this desperate attempt to resist determination, to gain self-possession and with that self-possession to be able to act on her environment rather than being acted on. Frantically tearing off the dress at the opening of the book is not, for Lise, a symptom of hysteria but an expression of her own agency: two other salesgirls and two other customers gasp and gape. At the door she turns to look back . . . with a look of satisfaction at her own dominance over the situation (Spark 1974: 9). The clothes that Lise finally buys to travel in are lurid in the extreme and are consistently being remarked upon by people she passes. This, too, is part of her attempt to establish her individuality in 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 voice causing the clerk whom she addresses, another clerk who sits working an adding machine, and several other people . . . to take notice of her. The women stare at her clothes. (Spark 1974: 50)

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Lise, we learn, is travelling south with the fixed notion that she is going to meet someone, a partner, a friend, a man. Yet she doesnt know who this friend or partner will be, which leads to mildly absurd exchanges when she is talking with Mrs Fiedke, an old lady she has met in the southern city:
The torment of it, Lise says, Not knowing exactly where and when hes going to turn up . . . they . . . have walked round the block looking so earnestly for Lises friend that Mrs Fiedke has at some point lost the signs of her initial bewilderment when this friend has been mentioned, and now shows only the traces of enthusiastic cooperation in the search . . . Would that be him, do you think? He looks very gaily dressed like yourself. No, thats not him. Its 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: 5758)

Finding this man is the key element in Lises attempt to achieve self-possession and by that self-possession to escape a felt sense of nothingness:
Will you feel a presence? Is that how youll 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 that has been absent in the artifice of her life. She is described, as she searches, in terms

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of that natural reality which had been repressed in her apartment in the city of the north: Her lips are slightly parted and her nostrils and eyes, too, are a fragment more open than usual; she is a stag scenting the breeze (Spark 1974: 7273). But this image of the stag, the trophy of the hunter, defines the very peculiar nature of her pilgrimage. Because what she is doing, trying to track this man down, is hunting for someone who will turn her into the hunted object. She is looking, with animal sensitivity, for the type of a man who will kill her. And she eventually finds him, in the form of Mrs Fiedkes nephew, who, Mrs Fiedke confides, has been unwell, we had to send him to a clinic (Spark 1974: 65). Later, we discover that he had, in fact, stabbed a woman. When Lise at last meets him, Richard, she immediately intuits the type and she leads him off to a place where despite his vain 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 and bind her ankles. No, he says, kneeling over her, not your ankles. I dont want any sex, she shouts. You can have it afterwards. Tie my feet and kill, thats 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 is finality. She screams and then her throat gurgles while he stabs . . . He runs to the car . . . He sees already the gleaming buttons of the policemens uniforms . . . sees already the holsters and epaulets and all those trappings devised to protect them from the indecent exposure of fear and pity, pity and fear. (Spark 1974: 106107)

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Perceiving how final is finality. This is not a presentation of the simulation of an end, like the finale music which seamlessly and painlessly dismisses the pictures of a buffalo charge on the television screen. This is not conceived as the constructed end of a constructed thing, the living body. This is the real, material end of the natural bodys life. It is designed as a reflection on something which lies outwith representation. Lise can be seen as being presented at this point as escaping artifice and representation and as connecting with the real. Becoming a hunted object means just that. She has engaged with an objective world. The profound irony in Sparks fiction is that it is only by Lises stopping breathing and by her bleeding to death that her life can gain content and depth, that it can be realised as something other than artifice and representation. What energises Sparks parody of postmodern perspectives is that Lise has connected with reality using the procedures of

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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 her body may contradict any idea that life is only a matter of invention. In this fiction the only way the heroine or, in a sense, the anti-heroine can prove the content of her life is by the ending of it. The implication is that her desperate death-wish is the disease of a postmodern civilisation suffering under the delusion that it is possible to evacuate reality, depth and content. Perceiving how final is finality. An end presumes a beginning. And a beginning and an end involve, however briefly, a middle. Sparks point in The Drivers Seat would be that the natural body is subject, outside representation, to these limits, which are the co-ordinates of what is still the dominant contemporary Western conception of time and history. Judged by the natural bodys movement from birth to death, from beginning to ending, there is this much linearity in nature and it is that observed, materially founded linearity which informs Western conceptions of time. That the life of the individual natural organism operates within parameters that can legitimately be called beginnings and endings, origins and conclusions, that the body breathes and stops breathing, is the minimal objective reality that can be presupposed in Sparks vision in The Drivers Seat. And it controls her conception of plot. In Robbe-Grillet there is, as Elizabeth Ermarth says, no common chronological clock in which a plot would be possible (Ermarth 1992: 72). The refusal of plot in Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau romanciers is something attacked by Spark through a character in her 1965 novel The Mandelbaum Gate, set in Israel in the early 1960s at the time of the Eichmann trial. Barbara Vaughan, the principal character of the novel, attends a part of the trial, listening not to the impassioned evidence from survivors of the death-camps (Spark 1967: 177) but to what was generally agreed to be a boring phase in the trial: that is, Eichmann speaking in his own defence (Spark 1967: 177). His actual discourse, we are told, was a dead mechanical tick, while its subject, the massacre, was living (Spark 1967: 177). But Barbara finds that this dull phase was in reality the desperate heart of the trial (Spark 1967: 177). And this because Eichmanns discourse reminds her of the procedures of the nouveau roman in its studied denial of plot, its evasion of finality. The manner of Eichmanns discourse, like that of the new or anti-novelists, betrays, for Barbara, a refusal to engage with unrepresented reality, a refusal to engage with human mortality itself:
She thought, it all feels like a familiar dream, and presently located the sensation as one that the anti-novelists induce . . . At school she usually took the novels and plays of 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 clients attention to specific 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

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lines which were punctuated only by the refrain, Bureau IV-B-4. Barbara felt she was caught 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 administered to the man, was also part of the information received by you from the General Government? The Witness having sprung to attention, gave formal ear to this speech from an alien cult concerning a man being dead. (Spark 1967:177, 179)

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If the Nazi mind in The Mandelbaum Gate fails to engage with death, if it fails to comprehend the reality and gravity of death (an alien cult concerning a man being dead), if it is locked out of reality, and if Spark draws a parallel between that mind-set and the postmodern perspectives of the nouveau roman, then in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961, she had made a comparable point when she drew a parallel between fascism and the schoolteacher Jean Brodie, a woman committed to inventing her life and the world around her. Cairns Craig has noted that:
Miss Brodies fascism . . . is founded in an imperious imagination which not only wishes to be the unacknowledged legislator of her world, but must impose itself forcefully 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 to act out as though they had no freedom of will . . . no reality outside of the constructions of her imagination. They form part of a story which is a function of her belief 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 the 1930s, Sandy Stranger, the most percipient of the schoolgirls, remarks that the Brodie set was Miss Brodies fascisti . . . all knit together for her need (Spark 1985: 31). Sandy becomes fascinated by Miss Brodies way of fabricating her life, her way of reinventing her past, for example, so that the attributes of a past lover come 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 divided between her admiration for the technique and the pressing need to prove Miss Brodie guilty of misconduct. (Spark 1985: 72)

Brodies misconduct turns critically in the novel on the fact that her imagining of the world into being causes her to become the indirect cause of one of her schoolgirls deaths. In 1937 she persuaded Joyce Emily Hammond, who had been anti-Franco in her sympathies, to go to Spain to support Franco and the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Joyce Emily died when the train she was travelling in had

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been attacked (Spark 1985: 118). Just as Eichmann cannot recognise the concern of the presiding judge about a man being dead, so Brodies constitutive imagination cannot connect with the potential consequences, in the actual historical world, of her fantasies. Spark drew a telling correlation in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie between totalitarian impulse and the idea of the construction of the self, the fabrication of history, the inventedness of reality. The death of Joyce Emily as she tried to fulfil a part of Jean Brodies construction of the world is the thing that finally prompts Sandy Stranger to break with that construction and to engineer Brodies dismissal from the school staff on political grounds. But if Jean Brodie cannot ultimately contain Sandy Stranger, if she cannot manage completely to control the plots she weaves, then neither does Lise entirely control the plot of the life she invents in The Drivers Seat. Lise had not thought to be raped before she dies. Just as the inventedness of her life is an attempt to reach a death that is not invented, so the invented nature of her life does not prescribe everything that happens to her while she is still alive. The rape had not formed part of her plan. In being the author of her own life Lise is, of course, a model of the author of the novel. The novel is metafictional in this sense. And if Lise cannot get everything right, neither can the author. In Robbe-Grillets Jealousy the narrator is deprived of omniscience by, as I have said, the unrelieved present tense of the narrative and also by many, many details which further establish the limitations of his or her point of view. We are told at one point, for instance, of A . . ., that Her mouth is not quite closed, and may be quivering imperceptibly (my emphasis; Robbe-Grillet 1987: 33). And so on. Now The Drivers Seat has a future interposed at a number of points in its predominant present tense. Early in the story the non-first person narrator tells us that Lise is going to be found dead. Even so, there are peculiar limitations set on the apparently omniscient narrator of the novel. We hear repeatedly in the midst of narrative descriptions of persons, locations and events expressions like probably, presumably, seems, perhaps, it depends. In one scene, as Lise is leaving her hotel room, the narrator says Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell? (Spark 1974: 50). What is the point of these qualifications on omniscience? They echo Robbe-Grillet. But, again, in a manner that can be seen as parodic. One way of reading the difference from Robbe-Grillet concerns Sparks Roman Catholicism. Catholicism is not an obvious dimension of The Drivers Seat. In his review, Frank Kermode observed that with The Drivers Seat [s]omething . . . has . . . dropped outof Sparks fictional mode: the visibility of a transcendental plot into which the plot of the novel somehow fits (Kermode 1970: 425). We could say, however, that while there may be no overt religious frame of reference in the novel, nevertheless the deficiencies in the narrators knowledge might be seen to carry the implication that just as behind Lise stands the author so behind the human author stands the great author of all. The critique of the omniscient author would come, in this case, not from a secular, postmodern but from a religious perspective. Behind Lises plot stands the authors and the authors perspective is subsumed by Gods. Neither Lise nor the author can claim absolute foreknowledge. Spark would be building in an implicit awareness that

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she, as author, can only write a fiction of the real. This is not a fiction which speaks of the absolute contingency of the real but it remains a fiction, nevertheless. The implication would be that ultimate, unconditioned reality is to be associated with God, who subsumes all, author as well as text. But the novel may also be read in a more secular way that still involves a questioning of the postmodernism of a Robbe-Grillet. The very last words of The Drivers Seat concern the trappings devised to protect the policemen from the indecent exposure of fear and pity, pity and fear (Spark 1974: 107). In his Poetic Aristotle said that the purpose of tragedy was to arouse pity or fear (Buckley 1850: 417). He also said that plot is the soul of tragedy, that plot is an imitation of action, that tragedy is the imitation of a whole action, and that a whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end (Buckley 1850: 419, 418, 420). Tragedy, in this sense at least, is not possible in Robbe-Grillets fiction where there is no single, whole action. Indeed in his 1958 essay, Nature, Humanism, Tragedy, Robbe-Grillet had attacked the tragic vision as something which paradoxically humanises and hence recuperates the alien universe. Partly by the way that it confirms plot and endorses the reality of an end, The Drivers Seat can be seen to reinstate tragedy as one of the possible outcomes of human life. The tragedy of Lise would be that of a person driven to negate herself by a culture which deprived her of a sense of autonomy and agency. However, whether read as invoking either a religious or a humanist frame of reference, The Drivers Seat, with the grotesque perversion of its story and its allusions to the nouveau roman, emerges as a text committed not so much to satirising as to parodying Robbe-Grillet and postmodernism. I use parody because the term denotes a special relationship with the thing that is being parodied. As I noted at the outset, Muriel Spark once recorded her own respect for Robbe-Grillet as a novelist. It is a respect which she has reiterated throughout her career. In an interview with Martin McQuillan, conducted for inclusion in his 2002 collection of esssays, Theorizing Muriel Spark, Muriel Spark not only said that she considered The Drivers 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 naturally would have a bent towards the nouveau roman but in fact I was very influenced by Robbe-Grillet. (McQuillan 2002: 216)

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The term parody allows for such respect, even for a fascination with the achievement that is being called in question. In 1933, for example, Gilbert Murray noted that Aristophanes certainly was fascinated by the poetry of Euripides even as he parodied it with a charm and skill which prove his . . . understanding (Murray 1933: 107). Muriel Spark is likewise fascinated by the phenomenon of what is termed 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,

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then four years earlier, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she had signalled the fascination, the profound attraction that postmodern outlooks held for her. It is well known that in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Sandy Stranger is the student who is closest 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 and mythologising her own past, Sandy is the one who is shown further rewriting that story in a schoolgirl tale about Miss Brodie. It is Sandy who is shown as being so saturated in fiction and in fiction-making that she has conversations with Alan Breck, the hero of Robert Louis Stevensons Kidnapped. Sandy shares intimately in Brodies cast of mind. She is figuratively kidnapped by Brodie. And she exemplifies not just Brodies cast of mind but that of Spark the novelist, the creator both of herself and of Brodie. In his 2000 study of Spark, Bryan Cheyette observes that Sandy half-English, like Spark, a stranger to Edinburgh, and so on is close to being an authorial mouthpiece (Cheyette 2000: 58). As such, Sandy dramatises a fundamental dichotomy in Sparks own mind. At the end of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Sandy, having turned in Brodie on political grounds, becomes a Roman Catholic, immersed, under the appelation Sister Helena, in a nunnery. She is famous 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 of her strange book of psychology, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which had brought so many visitors that Sandy clutched the bars of her grille more desperately than ever. What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena? Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism? Sandy said: There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime. (Spark 1985: 1278)

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Whilst it was a voluntary conversion to Catholicism, Sandy remains desperately riven. Riven between her willed submission to religion, on the one hand, and the force of the principle represented by Jean Brodie on the other. She is torn between a containment of the generative, constitutive capacity of the mind the capacity for transfiguring the commonplace and a letting loose of that capacity. Sandy has submitted herself to a disciplining of her minds powers, submitted herself to a norm. Just as Spark once spoke of her own conversion to Catholicism as a submission less to an active belief in some transcendental spiritual power than to an institutional norm which she saw as the prime repository of Western moral and humane values: Thats what my conversion meant to me, she said in 1987:
Thats settled, thats where I depart from, thats the north, the norm, and I can go around from that point . . . Its very important to me to have a point of departure, because in the modern world nobody has any . . . fixed idea of anything, and in a world 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

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Christian-Judaic tradition that grew up around the Mediterranean dictates what we think is good or evil . . . The idea of Christ as an example, for instance, was terribly important to the whole development of the West sociologically, morally . . . politically. What would the slave liberation movement have been without it? But if you go over to the Islamic side, for instance, what have they got to teach us about love, about pity, about all the things that we hold precious? Theyve nothing at all. Therefore I hold, perhaps because I talk from within it, to this Judeo-Christian tradition. (Frankel 1987: 445)

This answer itself enacts the division that runs through Sparks works, particularly of 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 this Judeo-Christian tradition. These expressions of the cultural situatedness, and hence the implied idea of the relativity of her norm, allow in by the back door, as it were all the postmodern perspectives Spark is so anxious to contain by her adoption of the norm. Read like this, Sparks statements here form a curious parallel with the image of Sandy desperately clutching the bars of her grille. By this image, Sandy and behind her, Spark herself feel the force of both the will to contain and the drive to beak free of containment and allow the inventive energies of the mind free play. There is the sense, on the one hand, of moral and ultimately political responsibility what we think is good or evil . . . What would the slave liberation movement have been without. . .[the] idea of Christ . . . What has Islam to teach us about pity . . .? This chimes with the moral and political categorization, in The Mandelbaum Gate, of Eichmans discourse as that of the nouveau roman and of postmodern ideas. But against this there are the undermining parentheses concerning situatedness and relativism. And there is the desperation of Sandys act of self-disciplining. The force of Sparks critique of postmodern perspectives in The Drivers Seat may, in fact, be seen to derive not so much from any metaphysical propositions in Sparks Catholicism, nor from the invocation of the western humanist tradition, as from an underlying identification with the dynamic but politically and morally troubling, because relativist, perspectives of the postmodern. In Sparks case, it is something like a matter of irresistible force meets immoveable object. Her dark parable in The Drivers Seat touches a division in her own mind between irreconciliable sympathies. Her conviction of the need for a morally and politically responsible norm cannot be reconciled with an understanding that such a norm has no universal, objective foundation. Muriel Sparks work comprises an exploration of intellectual issues through a medium of imaginative writing; a medium which lives by nuance, irony, tension and the ambiguities of connotative language and equivocal plot. It is one of the privileges of creative writing that it can thrive on and be celebrated for its articulation without necessarily having to move to resolution of contradictory and irreconciliable energies and outlooks. Some recent criticism, noting the way in which divided identity is a prominent preoccupation in Sparks fiction, has sought to import a discourse for talking

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about Spark and her work from what is broadly postcolonial theory. Bryan Cheyette, looking, properly enough, for the roots of Sparks fiction in her life, has written that Sparks hybrid background part English, part Scottish, part Protestant, part Jewish has enabled her to become an essentially diasporic writer with a fluid sense of self (Cheyette 2000: 10). Such a frame for reading Spark is highly suggestive. But we should not forget that in calling her schoolmistress Jean Brodie, Spark had already figured the theme of division in her writings in terms of a classic Scottish paradigm. One does not, in fact, need a range of multiples once one has taken that first step and doubled. For all her mixed provenance, Spark, in exploring in novels such as The Prime of miss Jean Brodie, as well as in The Drivers Seat, her need for a Western norm, on one hand, and her disturbed responsiveness to creative impulse and postmodern implication, on the other, has re-ignited the paradigm set by Edinburghs Deacon Brodie in terms forcefully appropriate to the contemporary world. University of Aarhus, Denmark

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References
Baudrillard, Jean (1985) The Ecstasy of Communication in Hal Foster (ed) Postmodern Culture, pp.12634, first published 1983 as Hal Foster (ed) The Anti-Aesthetic by Bay Press; London, Pluto Press. Bertens, Hans (1995) The Idea of the Postmodern. A History, London and New York, Routledge. Buckley, Theodore (1850) translator, Aristotles 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.6378. 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 and New 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, John Calder. (1989) For a New Novel, first published 1963 by Les Editions de Minuit; translated by Richard Howard, 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, Penguin Books. (1992) The Desegregation of Art in Joseph Hynes (ed) Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, New York, G.H. Hall. (1974) The Drivers Seat, first published 1970 by Macmillan; Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. (1985) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, first published 1961 by Macmillan; Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. Toynbee, Philip (1971) Interview with Muriel Spark, Observer Colour Magazine, 7 November 1971, pp.7374.

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