The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark

Whittaker, Ruth

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-07464-8

Cited by 6 publications

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“…7 However, early critics remained primarily interested in the ontological dimension of Spark's writing, often framed as Catholic satire, to the detriment of attention to its historical and political perspectives. 8 In the 1990s, Ian Rankin argued that Spark's intelligence job 'proved crucial to the writing career that followed' as her novels make use of 'forgeries and fakes' and portray their mythmakers as 'images of the novelist', but little attention was paid to the effects of such elements in her fiction. 9 Most recently, literary scholars such as Marina Mackay, Victoria Stewart and Adam Piette have provided more robust analyses of how Spark's involvement in black propaganda has influenced the representation of themes such as treason, secrecy and misinformation, respectively, in her novels.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Muriel Spark and the Art of Deception: Constructing Plausibility with the Methods of WWII Black Propaganda

Lopez

2020

The Review of English Studies

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From May to October 1944, Muriel Spark was employed by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret service created by Britain during the Second World War with the mission of spreading propaganda to enemy and enemy-occupied countries. This was a formative experience which allowed her to develop an understanding of literal truth as elusive and historically contingent—even a constructed effect—as well as an interest in fictional fabrication and deception. Drawing on an account of the methods of WWII British black propaganda, Spark’s biographical accounts, and heretofore untapped archival documents from the Political Warfare Executive Papers (National Archives), this essay analyses how Spark employs the fictional equivalent of the methods of WWII black propaganda in order to examine the creation of plausibility in her novels. It explores Spark’s deployment of verifiable facts, evidence, precise information, appropriate tone, narrative coherence, targeting, covert motives, chronological disruption and repetition to construct the key elements of fiction in her novels. I argue that such fictional strategies provide a political and moral antidote to totalitarian thinking by presenting reality as necessarily contingent, and therefore open to external contestation and democratic debate. Bringing together history, biography and literary criticism, this is the first systematic and archivally supported examination of how Spark’s work for the PWE opens up a way of rethinking her fascination with the art of deception.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%