On Muriel Spark's POV
Anachronism, Prolepsis and Omniscience
When I asked Muriel Spark how she wrote, she said, ‘I think of the book first, and then I strike.
Her answers were usually short.
This one, I think, explained why her novels are so clear, so easy to read and so mysterious — and therefore so rereadable.
She began with poetry, and brought a poet’s sense of certainty into her prose.
There has been academic writing on Spark’s use of something like a third-person omniscient POV of the sort I was describing yesterday. That is, a godlike narrator who is not only able to jog alongside their characters, but to inform us — the reader — of their ultimate fate. I’d like to explore this a little more informally, and a lot more theologically.
Perhaps her most famous paragraph of third-person omniscient time-jumping comes in her best-known and best-loved novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (New Yorker, 1961).
Mary Macgregor, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year, never quite realised that Jean Brodie’s confidences were not shared with the rest of the staff and that her love-story was given out only to her pupils. She had not thought much about Jean Brodie, certainly never disliked her, when, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the Wrens, and was clumsy and incompetent, and was much blamed. On one occasion of real misery — when her first and last boy friend, a corporal whom she had known for two weeks, deserted her by failing to turn up at an appointed place and failing to come near her again — she thought back to see if she had ever really been happy in her life; it occurred to her then that the first years with Miss Brodie, sitting listening to all those stories and opinions which had nothing to do with the ordinary world, had been the happiest time of her life. She thought this briefly, and never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie’s pupils. ‘Who has spilled ink on the floor — was it you, Mary?’
This is sometimes described as prolepsis — the rhetorical reference to a future event as if it has already happened.
I think that’s wrong.
I don’t think prolepsis fits because from her assumed POV the event, like all of human temporarily, has already happened.
It’s not really the future, it’s not a jump ahead. It’s just what the people involved haven’t consciously experienced in their current state of being. There’s no pro- (before) it can grasp forward from.
Spark’s form of omniscience is divine, very much as in Isaac Watts’ hymn ‘Our God, Our Help in Ages Past’ —
A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.
Or T.S.Eliot’s future-seers, J. Alfred Prufrock —
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…
And Tireseas —
And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed
What, to us, seems the present moment is, to this POV, not just the past but an element of a continuum seen totally, and all at once.
In this, I think Muriel Spark’s is the closest any writer has come to a genuine third-person omniscient POV — a God’s eye view — because she is prepared to suggest that her characters are living deterministically. They may possibly have something like free will, but exactly how they exercise that free will has already been decided.
Spark used a very similar omniscient, everything done and dusted POV in her next novel, The Girls of Slender Means (Saturday Evening Post, 1963). Here, it seems slightly more malicious than in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but deliciously so.
In slightly later novels, Spark began to play around with her main idea — which you might summarize in the words of the KLF —
and everything you learn
Will point to the fact that time is eternal
In The Driver’s Seat, 1970, a woman who feels her fate is inevitable still makes great efforts to force herself towards it. For the word fate, you could use doom. There’s a hovering sense that everything we read about her is a slightly stale re-enactment.
But aren’t all characters in all novels like that, really? When we re-read Emma, Emma’s going to make the same misjudgements. Emma is always doomed to be Emma, down to the last comma.
Spark’s characters are always doomed. (Again, not foredoomed, because what is going to happen to them has already happened — in the most important sense, for the most important being — they have just not yet consciously experienced it.) The only ‘time’ they were not doomed was before they were created.
In one of my favourite of Spark’s books, the very short Not to Disturb, 1971, a group of below-stairs characters in a ‘big house near Geneva’ await a murder that they know, with absolute certainty, is about to take place amongst their rich and aristocratic masters.
The servants are like angels or devils who have already been tipped off as to what precise actions this or that human will take. They seem to sit in an ante room to history. But their own actions, too, must be inevitable. Yet their casualness seems to defy this.
Defiance or acceptance is all that’s left to Spark’s characters, once they become aware of their temporal situation.
Some, reading this, might say, Well, what’s the point? If you’re not going to give a person a fair shot at changing their fate, why should we care about them?
Spark isn’t afraid of her characters seeming like marionettes. I think she quite enjoys the puppetry aspect of her POV. She was explicit in not giving a fig about them being sympathetic.
There is, of course, a link between this POV and Spark’s conversion to Catholicism. Although she didn’t like to speak much of this, and certainly not to explain it, I believe that she was convinced by an unflinching idea of what true divine omniscience must mean.
If God is omniscient, and exercises that omniscience, then any human agency is illusory. A god-granted illusion, but still an illusion.
This, I think, is why although Spark was of the faith, she did not take Holy Communion or even attend Mass.
With the God she believed in, what was the point? He had already decided her fate, and there was nothing she could do about it.
In this, Spark was perhaps closer to a Protestant view of predestination. (Like the Calvinists and the Anabaptists. Jehovah’s Witnesses have a version of this, but still stridently work towards salvation.)
Many Catholics would believe that the POV of these novels of Spark’s was heretical.
She wouldn’t have cared.
They were just doing what they were doing.
Interesting that this discussion of omniscient POV has veered once again towards religion and god. Can we have complete omniscience without god? I like the idea of a type of omniscience that runs along the lines of Einsteins theory of general relativity, so that, theoretically the past present and future could all be running at the same time. After all Einstein was a determinist and I wonder if these theoretical concepts could stand in for omniscience instead of god?
I’m reminded of the grammatical pleasure Tony Nuttall took in teaching the application of Calvinism to 17th century poets (specifically, in this case, Herbert): ‘they were acting well in order to have been saved.’