Spark versus Homo economicus

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay looks at how Spark’s fiction from around the turn of the 1960s (Robinson, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, short stories) deals with the imperative of production in the post-war consensus. It is easy to see in this a parody of the practices of 1950s Time and Motion, but these themes also return us to the Scottish Enlightenment and the eighteenth century negotiation with a consolidating British settlement. For one thing, in this negotiation the rationalisation of production became equated with the progressive as such, something drawn on by post-war mass psychology and teased out in the stories. For another, ‘general education’ appears here as an important possible counterweight to the alienation of specialised work. This is also a question of subjectivity, since in this definition of the progressive the social self is ultimately financial, viewing embodied experience, irrational entanglements, and even death, as problematic interruptions. Late ‘50s Spark stories play on this, and frequently provoke such interruptions of the labour theory of value, lightly but pointedly, often with rich historical connotations. These provocations are rare within post-war consensus, and speak to the ‘totalised’ financial individualism that would follow.