Muriel Spark: Some Biographical Sources of Satire

Abstract

It is a truism that serious fiction is not necessarily fantasy, but is often grounded in the reality of the author's life. However, many fictional characters, plots, philosophical themes, and descriptions of places and events have their source in unconscious determinants linked with the author's experience. I include fiction that employs satire, even though satire seems to be directed to certain character types as well as institutions, customs, and beliefs worthy of ridicule. Consequently, personal elements in the writer's background may not be obvious. For this reason I have chosen the novels and short stories of the late Muriel Spark, for several decades one of the most widely read and admired satirists in her native Britain and the United States. Using a broadly defined psychoanalytic framework, including references to Object Relations theory, I have examined the following determinants of Spark's fiction: familial, religious, interpersonal, psychosexual, and psychosis-induced experiences. The emotional sub-stratum of Spark's satire is anger, the apparent analogue of her feelings toward the real people in her life. By generalizing these feelings, often bitter and resentful, Spark has given her readers a view of the human race that is deeply pessimistic, written in a style that is concise and oddly amusing, with occasional overtones of supernatural forces at work.