Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form by James Bailey Marilyn Reizbaum BAILEY, JAMES. Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2021. 211 pp. $88.30 hardcover. I have been an avid reader of James Bailey's scholarly work on Muriel Spark and was very happy to see that work collected and expanded in this new book—Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form. I particularly appreciate Bailey's attention to Spark's formal interests, which are characterized by multifariousness—a mélange of genres, and stylistic innovations. And yet, as I have argued, and Bailey does here, Spark has a distinctive style, something readers and critics of Spark struggle to articulate. Bailey's overview of Spark criticism in the introduction does a good job of locating and illustrating the challenge. And the book does a good job of meeting it. As Bailey explains, "Muriel Spark's Early Fiction has been written in the conviction that the form and function of Spark's 'abiding doubleness' remain inadequately explored." He glosses this characterization (coined by Bryan Cheyette) at length, summing it up as "the author's development of a mode of fiction that unites a degree of postmodern narrative 'play' with a realist approach to character construction and a serious moralpolitical vision" (5). Bailey seeks to divest readers of the prevailing view that Spark's style is best understood through her Catholicism, contending that her "developments in style…are restlessly concerned instead with exploring the possibilities of literary form to produce an agile kind of social critique" (6). Beyond the critical overview, the introduction is further dedicated to tracing the refinement of Spark's authorial intent, by examining her first, prize-winning short story, "The Seraph and the Zambesi," and by explaining how his study will bring into play Spark's extensive archive, with which Bailey spent much profitable time. He also sets up what will be one of his greatest contributions to the field of Spark criticism—a substantive discussion of the influence of the nouveau roman on Spark's thinking and writing, particularly as it pertains to the abiding question of narrative authority in Spark's fiction. Chapter Three is where this discussion happens, using The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Mandelbaum Gate, and The Driver's Seat "as valuable snapshots of Spark's evolving engagement with the forms, theories and functions of the nouveau roman's particular 'drama of exact observation'" (108). The book is organized thematically. Chapter One considers the idea of "textual haunting" in Spark's first novel, The Comforters (1957), and the 1961 short story, "Bang, Bang You're Dead," with its flashbacks to what is still very much a colonial South Africa. Bailey draws on Gérard Genette's theory of metalepsis to make a case for [End Page 306] ontological and formal border crossings. Chapter Two admirably pushes back against the commonplace notion of Spark's "authorial cruelty"—"especially evident in her (mis)treatment of female characters"—in a rather idiosyncratic way (66). Through the lens of performativity, Bailey notably analyzes Doctors of Philosophy, The Public Image, Do Not Disturb, and "A Dangerous Situation on the Stairs," a short story Bailey discovered in the author's archive at the McFarlin Library in Tulsa, "to enable a valuable reconsideration of Spark's experimental fiction and its inventive approach to matters of gender, identity and free will" (67). My personal favorite is Chapter Four, which provides a trenchant reading of The Driver's Seat, "shift[ing] focus away from what is told to the manner of its telling. That is, it examines the destabilizing effects of Lise's action upon the narrative itself" (142). Readers must struggle with the main character Lise, with her seeming eccentricity, her death wish, and the rape scene before her murder. Turning in the most focused way to the issue of omniscience, Bailey makes a case for Lise's inscrutability as "effecting a crisis in storytelling," and this returns us strategically to many of the recurring questions regarding Spark's work that Bailey has examined. When, for example, Thomas Mallon, in...