Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction by Martin McQuillan (review)

Abstract

762 Reviews when Woolf firstmentioned a potential meeting with Mansfield, she imagined meet? ing her in Cornwall. For Jensen, the setting is a crucial component in this 'fantasy meeting', but the prosaic fact is that Mansfield and Murry were staying in Cornwall that particular summer. This detail does not matter in itself,but it is used to support a reading of Betty Flanders, sitting on the beach in Cornwall at the opening ofJacob's Room, as a representation of Katherine Mansfield, her tears reflecting Mansfield's 'cheap sentimentality' (a judgement of Woolf s which is accepted at face value). This seems a bizarre link to make, the result of wilful as opposed to creative misreading. It is unfortunate because it distracts attention from Jensen's exploration of more con? vincing connections between these two writers. For example, she rightlystresses the importance forWoolf of Mansfield's adverse review of Night and Day (a review which 'haunted' Mansfield as well), and helpfully traces intertextual links between Prelude and Jacob's Room. Her consideration of the relationship between Mrs Dalloway and The Mayor of Casterbridge, by contrast, rests on very tenuous connections and, per? haps as a result, sheds little light on either text. Overall, then, this is an uneven study. It is refreshing in its willingness to confront critical and theoretical orthodoxies, but frustrating in its lack of attention to detail, which in turn compromises its textual readings. Perhaps it is best read as an account of creative rivalries and ambitions, on which it certainly sheds new light. LOUGHBOROUGHUNIVERSITY CLARE HANSON TheorizingMuriel Spark: Gender,Race, Deconstruction. Ed. by Martin McQuillan. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. xi + 245 pp. ?45- ISBN 0-33379414 -1. As Martin McQuillan suggests, a theoretical approach to Muriel Spark's work is 'long overdue' (p. 7). Spark criticism is painfullythin forsuch an important figure(arguably the firstBritish postmodern writer) and, although she can claim Malcolm Bradbury, Helene Cixous, Frank Kermode, David Lodge, Patrick Parrinder, and Patricia Waugh among her fans, none has written a book on her. Ofthe books that have appeared, the best are uninformed by the influential theories of gender, race, and deconstruction. McQuillan seeks to rectifythis with essays on each area, by his long introduction and his own piece on the relationship between autobiography and fiction, by reprinting two Cixous reviews, and finally by his interview with Spark. It is an admirable pro? ject and a labour of love. The difnculty is the frequent mismatch between what Spark herself says and the enthusiastic attempts to nail Derrida, Bataille, and the others onto her literary practice. The book's impatience with the old guard is attractive. Its point of departure is the tendency of earlier critics to label Spark a 'Catholic writer' and to deal with the fictiononly in terms oftheology.' Spark', he insists, 'writes fictions(for God's sake) not theological pamphlets' (p. 4), and the stress throughout is on the deconstructive nature ofher work: 'Her novels are a conductor forall the signs and meanings in circulation in the contemporary scene' (p. 5). Fair enough. Graham Greene's caveat (never alluded to) that he was not a Catholic writer but a writer who happened to be a Catholic applies equally to Spark. Nevertheless (as Spark would say), the faith remains, dif? ficult as it is to maintain amid humanist, anthropomorphic notions of a benevolent God, and theology has been seen to occupy for these writers the space most of the contributors here would wish to assign to literary and cultural theory. Some others, notably Bryan Cheyette, Alan Freeman, and Cixous, take more seriously Spark's belief in an absent, ineffable, and immanent presence and deal with this as the point of departure generating the endless anteriority and doubleness of human discourse. MLR, 99.3, 2004 763 On the one hand, then, we have essays (by McQuillan, Jeremy Idle, Willy Maly, and Nicholas Royle) which assault the 'dated' (p. 7) criticism of Bradbury, Lodge, Parrinder, and Patricia Waugh. On the other, there are those (by Susan Sellers, Judith Roof, Eleonor Byrne, Alan Freeman, Patricia Duncker, and Julian Wolfreys) which take Spark texts and analyse them in terms of psychoanalytical, queer, postcolonial, genre, and deconstructive theory...