Salutary Scars: The “Disorienting” Fictions of Muriel Spark

fatimah azzahra;

This essay explores the relationship between the fiction of Muriel Spark and various modes of experimental writing, including metalepsis and the nouveau roman. Focusing upon texts published between the early 1960s and the early 1970s, I read examples of Spark’s formative engagement with forms of literary innovation alongside the author’s
longstanding preoccupation with the tensions that exist between private selves and public performances. Focusing specifically on Spark’s little-known 1962 play, Doctors of Philosophy, and her experimental “anti-novels” The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Not
to Disturb (1971), I trace the plight of female subjects judged to be deviant by resisting inscription within oppressive cultural narratives. Drawing upon the author’s problematic critical reception, I argue that Spark has long been overlooked, not only as a writer of complex, experimental fiction, but as a woman writer whose literary innovations have energized the explorations of female agency that figure so prominently within her work.