Ethics and Aesthetics in Muriel Spark’s Authorial Strategies

Abstract

This dissertation tries to find a satisfactory answer to a problem that Scottish writer Muriel Spark (1918-2006) poses in her autobiography Curriculum Vitae (1992). There is a paradox in Spark’s way of narrating her autobiography since she offers us a crystalline and detailed depiction of her younger self up until the publication of her first novel, which contrasts with Muriel Spark's highly metafictional novelistic production, with an almost obsessive tendency to explore and expose the very nature of fiction and the complex relationship between life and art. Therefore, her autobiography ends with the idea of being “completed” or “continued” by her readers in her successive novels as the writer herself suggested in some interviews and essays. In order to depict the basic lines that construct her fictional world, we divide her novelistic production into three periods which not only encompass her career, but also evince the evolution of both the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of her fiction. Each period will be studied through a profound analysis of a representative novel: The Comforters (1957), her first novel, The Driver’s Seat (1970), the author’s favourite, and The Finishing School (2004), the last novel she published. In each novel Spark constructs her fiction-writing self through a set of two main characters whose opposing characteristics paradoxically work as a unifying force. This study analyses the Double Motif in Spark's fiction and its development throughout her work. We will aim to prove that Muriel Spark, as a metafictional writer, experiments with fictional doubles to recreate an aesthetic version of reality and, consequently, of herself. Through the authorial strategy of self-effacement in her novels, Spark may offer her readers a truer version of her fiction-writing self.