Textual Practice

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Muriel Spark, existentialism and the art of death

by Cairns Craig, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 224 pp., £75.00
(hardback), ISBN: 978-1474447201

Beatriz Lopez

To cite this article: Beatriz Lopez (2019): Muriel Spark, existentialism and the art of death, Textual
Practice, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2019.1670940

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2019.1670940

Published online: 27 Sep 2019.

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TEXTUAL PRACTICE

BOOK REVIEW

Muriel Spark, existentialism and the art of death, by Cairns Craig,

Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 224 pp., £75.00 (hardback),
ISBN: 978-1474447201

Muriel Spark is a slippery writer who resists clear-cut categorisations. Early criti-
cism described her fiction as Catholic satire, but more recent studies have opened
up Jewish, Scottish, postmodern and WWII intelligence approaches to her work.
Despite being one of the most original post-war British novelists, Spark is often
considered a light-hearted writer. Critics have noted that her Catholicism and
noveau roman experimentalism add weight to her writing, yet marginal attention
has been paid to how these aspects inform Spark’s metaphysics. Cairns Craig’s
new book fills this gap, persuasively arguing that her embrace of Christian exis-
tentialism – in particular the work of Søren Kierkegaard – and her rejection of
atheistic existentialism significantly shaped Spark’s religious commitments and
artistic innovations. Building on his thoughtful analysis of Spark’s writing in
The Modern Scottish Novel (1999), Craig also establishes helpful connections
between Spark and fellow Scottish writers James Hogg and J.M. Barrie, which
contextualise her existential concerns within the Scottish literary tradition.
Craig’s introduction provides a useful outline of the key debates around Chris-
tian and atheistic existentialism during the mid-century, tracing their develop-
ment from the philosophy of Kierkegaard. Christian existentialists adopted
Kierkegaard’s concept of faith as choice because it cannot be demonstrated by
reason and has to be enacted in everyday life; therefore, faith can never be
settled and must be continuously tested through our actions. In contrast, atheistic
existentialism retained Kierkegaard’s emphasis on choice but replaced faith with
human freedom, resulting in the negation of a supra-human God. Craig argues
that Spark is ‘a convert to an existential Christianity’ (p. 11) because she
adopts Kierkegaard’s ‘paradox of faith’ – the postulation of faith as a bridge
between time and the eternal which challenges reason. Yet he also shows that
Spark, like Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was also deeply
influenced by atheistic existentialism insofar as it provided her with ‘something
to react against’.1
According to Craig, living next door to death is a crucial theme in Spark’s
fiction, as characters attempt to ‘shape life to their own advantage when death
comes knocking at the door’ (p. 19), often questioning the ontological boundary
between author and character, as well as between the natural and the superna-
tural. Craig cogently argues that Spark’s introduction of the otherworldly into
ordinary life defies Sartre’s atheistic existentialism, which regards the superna-
tural as either a fiction or madness. He also establishes compelling thematic par-
allelisms between Kierkegaard’s life and work and Spark’s fiction – for example,
the ‘continual consciousness of death’ in Memento Mori. Kierkegaard’s three
stages of human experience – the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious – are
2 BOOK REVIEW

also usefully introduced here, and are shown to significantly shape Spark’s exis-
tential approach to fiction in the following chapters.
Chapter two argues that Spark reacts against Sartre’s view of the committed
novel as proof of human freedom by showing choice to be incompatible with a
medium in which characters are always controlled by an author (see, for
example, Caroline Rose in The Comforters). Craig argues that, by parodying
the artificiality of novelistic techniques and the inability of the author to faithfully
represent the world, Spark lays bare the conventions of Ian Watt’s ‘formal
realism’ – characterised by its reliance on causality for narrative development –
and adopts instead a phenomenological interest in the instability of perception
and the disruption of ontological levels which mirrors that of Kierkegaard’s pseu-
donymous works. This is perhaps the weakest chapter, as Craig’s engagement
with existentialism is not consistently sustained, and at times too much emphasis
is placed on Spark’s negation of realism. While she certainly defies formal realism,
Spark is still committed to a historical realism which offers ‘representations that
are plausible by virtue of their rootedness in social reality’2; therefore, some dis-
cussion of how Spark’s historical realism may be reconciled with her experiment-
alism (or signposting to chapter six, where the subject is implicitly broached)
would have been welcome.
Craig traces Kierkegaard’s influence on Spark’s rejection of the aesthetic – our
sensual experience of the world – as the only basis of existence in her depiction of
characters who attempt to transform reality into the aesthetic pseudo-eternity of
the imagination. In this realm, aesthetic possibilities endlessly replace each other,
resulting in the displacement of the ethical and the revelation of the complicity of
the aesthetic with evil (see, for example, Patrick Seton in The Bachelors). Spark is
aware that the novel is incapable of transcending the aesthetic, but Craig expertly
shows how she uses the medium to denounce the dangers of aesthetics when
unrestrained by ethical or religious norms (e.g. Miss Brodie’s neglect of morality).
She also shows how Kierkegaard’s description of Christianity as characterised by
the intervention of eternity in time can be corrupted by an aesthetic perception of
eternity, as well as the importance of martyrdom in The Girls of Slender Means
and The Public Image. These three novels, Craig argues, constitute ‘an exploration
of the ways in which their characters are trapped in the aesthetic’ (p. 100).
Taking Sartre’s concept of ‘nothingness’ – the quality of being which allows
individuals to disengage themselves from their pasts in order to enact their
future life projects – as a starting point, Craig argues that Spark satirises
Sartre’s transference of the capacity to make something out of nothing from
God to man. In The Hothouse by the East River, for example, Paul and Elsa’s
son Pierre – a reworking of Sartre’s friend Pierre – becomes the embodiment
of Sartre’s ‘nothingness’ because his parents are dead and he could not have
been born. He also shows how Spark demonstrates the illusory nature of the
freedom proposed by atheistic existentialism by producing ‘fictions which are
often haunted by the absence rather than the presence of God’ (p. 109), such
as The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Craig also contends that in rejecting Sartre’s ‘noth-
ingness’, Spark embraces the causality of human action, showing Lise in The
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 3

Driver’s Seat to be ‘in the driving seat of causality’ in her construction of a past-
oriented future.
Lise’s narrative is in fact based on repetition and recollection – two concepts
developed by Kierkegaard in Repetition and adopted by Spark in her fiction, as
Craig effectively shows in chapter five. For Kierkegaard, romantic love is based
on ‘recollection’, which involves looking from the present to the future and
from the future to the past once love has ended. However, he believes that recol-
lection has to be resisted and replaced with ‘repetition’, which ‘anticipates a future
that is like the past but understands that that which is repeated is also, in the
moment of its repetition, made different’ (p. 126), for example, in marriage.
Craig notes that, for Spark, eternity is the place of ‘true repetition’, and the con-
trast between temporality and eternity is enacted in Mary Macgregor’s repeatedly
foretold death in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Margaret’s recurrent proximity
to deadly accidents in Symposium or Hubert’s continuous re-enactment of a reli-
gious fiction in The Takeover.
Like Kierkegaard, Spark is preoccupied with the replacement of socio-histori-
cal circumstances with imaginative activity. Both Kierkegaard and Spark
acknowledge that subjectivism is dangerous because it ‘displaces external reality
at the cost of moral discrimination’ (p. 165). To counter this, existentialism
relies on Heidegger’s notion of the ‘thrownness’ of being-in-the-world, which
constrains our freedom with historical circumstances over which we have no
control. Craig argues that Spark draws on Christian existentialists such as
Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Mounier in her understanding of the self as
characterised by being with others. Her novels ‘are characterised by plots that
dramatise both “being with others” and “being-in-a-situation”’ (p. 170)
through the exploration of group dynamics in specific social and historical
environments (e.g. Joanna’s elocution is interrupted by Churchill’s speech in
The Girls of Slender Means). In addition, Craig draws on The Mandelbaum
Gate to show how Spark renders the aesthetic and the eternal as two sides of
the same coin in their negation of time and history.
The last chapter explores the influence of existential death in Spark’s fiction.
Beginning with Kierkegaard’s conceptualisation of death as an existential
reality which cannot be transformed into a contribution to a higher aesthetic
order, Craig goes on to outline a crucial disagreement in atheistic existentialism
regarding death. While Heidegger describes death as the consummation of a life
which brings our existence to a meaningful closure, Sartre sees death as entirely
accidental and absurd because it disrupts our future-oriented life projects. For
both Heidegger and Sartre, however, death constitutes a conclusion, whereas
Kierkegaard sees death as a new beginning in eternity. Craig provides useful read-
ings of Spark’s engagement with both atheistic existentialist accounts of death in
her fiction. Not to Disturb, for example, explores Lister’s transformation of the
‘the contingency of life […] into the certainty of art’ (p. 212). Craig also shows
that, unlike Sartre, Spark remains sceptical of an aesthetic vision unrestrained
by the ethical and religious commitment we need to guide our lives because it
can easily become complicit with evil.
4 BOOK REVIEW

Muriel Spark, Existentialism and the Art of Death is an engaging and thought-
ful study of the influence of existentialism on Spark’s fiction. While its emphasis
on Kierkegaard provides a useful narrative focus, it occasionally over-relies on his
philosophy at the expense of other Christian existentialist thinkers such as
Jacques Maritain, whose influential book Art and Scholasticism – which contends
that art is not the product of an ‘angelic mind’, but is embedded in historical cir-
cumstances – is an important influence on Spark’s metaphysics.3 Nevertheless,
Craig does make a strong case for an ‘existential Spark’ through his compelling
readings of her novels and short fiction, and as such, this is a valuable contri-
bution to Spark scholarship. In doing so, Craig resolutely shows that despite
her abundant sense of humour, Spark was thoroughly aware of and engaged
with the key philosophical debates of the mid-century, making it more difficult
than ever to disqualify her as a trivial writer.

Notes
1. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2018), p. 32.
2. Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London:
Edward Arnold, 1995), p. 183.
3. Patricia Waugh, ‘Muriel Spark and the Metaphysics of Modernity: Art, Secular-
ization and Psychosis’, in David Herman (ed.), Muriel Spark: Twenty First
Century Perspectives (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 84.

Beatriz Lopez
Department of English Studies, Durham University, Durham, UK
beatriz.lopez-lopez@durham.ac.uk
© 2019 Beatriz Lopez
https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2019.1670940