Here are some reasons for disliking the novels of Muriel Spark. First, that she is, as the mother of a friend of mine put it, a girl of slender means. Her books are too spun-out. They seem all surface, and a rather dry, sparsely furnished, though elegant and mannered surface at that. The one exception is The Mandelbaum Gate, which offers us, as the blurb-writers say, a vivid panorama of contemporary Israel. But there, if you like, is a book which lacks moral profundity. A serious young man once told me that he could find nothing but distaste for a writer who, confronted by the Arab-Israeli conflict with all its tragic moral and political dilemmas, chose to treat it all, as he put it, merely as the background for a trivial love story.

'Trivial.' The word is out. Yet Muriel Spark's novels seem, while one is reading them, to be profoundly, if obscurely, preoccupied with morality, not to say moral theology. Indeed they seem to be about nothing else. But there is no denying the obscurity. (p. 225)

Partly the air of inconsequentiality stems from Miss Spark's authorial tone of voice, which is characteristically cool, level and uninvolved, and occasionally enigmatically flippant. (p. 226)

In Muriel Spark paradox is not a means of leading us to an emphatic rediscovery of 'orthodoxy' or of the world as it 'really' and 'objectively' is. It seems rather to be sought for its own sake. But that raises the question of whether what underlies it is not the bottomless relativism Chesterton feared. Seen in this light the 'lightness of touch' for which Miss Spark has been praised may seem all too explicable: mere intellectual shiftiness; a paper screen concealing an abyss.

Once raised, the charge of shiftiness can be extended all too easily to plot and characters. Nothing is ever fully explained or given depth. (p. 227)

If we are to see where, and why, Muriel Spark's fiction departs from the canons of the traditional novel we need a concrete example of a 'traditional' technique of fiction, and some reasonably clear idea of what such a technique achieves, and how.

For this role I shall select Jane Austen. Her major novels are everything that Muriel Spark's seem not to be: both morally and psychologically they are impressively achieved and coherent structures into which a vast amount of concrete detail is incorporated without arbitrariness or loose ends.

At the same time there are parallels. Like Jane Austen, Muriel Spark is a moral satirist. Like her she paints with fine strokes upon a small canvas, and yet achieves at her best a power and universality which transcend the littleness and provinciality of her characters and their world. Both are, in some sense which is at least partly the same sense, anti-Romantic writers. Both nourish a preference for the concrete over the general, for what is actually, materially given over idealising fancy…. Neither has much time for sentimental moralising; that is, for moralising which is not under the control of a moral intelligence which is exact and discriminating precisely because it is exercised about some concrete and intimately known set of circumstances. (pp. 228-29)

Because fiction and reality are held together in a Jane Austen novel by the tensions and constraints of simultaneously maintaining the plausibility of a complex fiction and the coherence of an organising moral viewpoint, readers feel that they 'know where they are' with Jane Austen, whereas with Muriel Spark they don't. (p. 234)

[The classical technique of novel-writing] will not allow you to show the reader the gulf between a set of values taken together with the detail of the life, the modus vivendi, which they organise, and what gives life and content to all such partly conventional structures: the formless magma of human potentiality. But this, it seems to me, is Muriel Spark's peculiar subject-matter. (p. 236)

Her books are exercises for the reader in continuous redefinition…. It is a curious feature of [The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie], which it shares with The Girls of Slender Means, that although it concerns a crisis in the beliefs and personality of one character, Sandy Stranger, as she emerges from childhood, the character in question is treated merely as one more character, and often a rather peripheral character, in the novel. We are not treated to a ringside view of Sandy's inner life, as we are [in Jane Austen] to Emma's. At the same time we know in a rather external way all sorts of curious extrinsic facts about her…. Why does she become a nun in an enclosed order? What about her strange book of psychology, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace ('on the nature of moral perception')? Why put any of this in at all?

There are two answers, which are at first sight contradictory. The first is that the enigmatic and incomplete fragments of information which the novel drops casually concerning Sandy are meant to puzzle and irritate; to create in the reader a spirit of nervous dissatisfaction, of not knowing quite where he is going or what he is supposed to see when he gets there, which will make him work towards a reconstruction of Sandy's mind from the bits and pieces of information which the novel offers him.

The second and more important answer, which seems at first sight to contradict the first, but in fact complements it, is that the enigmas are there to obstruct the establishment of that systematic and unblemished unity of conception which it is of the essence of Jane Austen's genius to create and of her readers' pleasure to explore, and which makes possible the liberating, constantly surprising play of wit and moral perception which informs the interior of the novel precisely by the very rigour with which it restricts the range of what can enter the bounded, though not finite, world which it creates. The technique of a Muriel Spark novel is in fact exactly opposite to Jane Austen's: it works by continual dislocation, by setting up a fabric of faults and cleavages from one side of which the events of the novel can be construed in one way, while from the other they fall irrevocably (although we can recapture our first innocent vision by an effort of imagination) into another pattern. The pleasure of reading her lies in the unexpectedness and yet the justice of these discoveries. It is the pleasure of continually breaking out into a new-found world—a new level of sophistication…. Muriel Spark's technique is inherently inimical to the setting-up of a single 'authorial' or 'ultimate' point of view from which alone everything in the novel can ultimately be seen as cohering with everything else …; although of course one can have a reading of a Muriel Spark novel which is from a technical point of view ultimate and 'complete' in the sense that it catches all the force (although perhaps not all the reverberations) of all the dislocations.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is in this sense organised round Sandy's betrayal. Read straightforwardly from the first page on, the book can for some time be taken as a piece of amusing but rather lightweight social satire about the startling effect of a flamboyant and strong-minded spinster upon the girls of a drably conformist Edinburgh school. Of course even on that level there is an undercurrent of resistance and discomfort stemming from the urbane, deadpan irony of the style…. (pp. 237-39)

However, even discounting style, the social-satire reading of the book runs steadily into choppier and choppier water…. [There] is a constant swell, as of wind and tide in opposite directions, of uncertainty about what we are to think of Miss Brodie. (p. 239)

By the time we arrive at Miss Mackay's study, and Sandy's economical betrayal, we are mostly on Sandy's side, and the novel has turned retrospectively in our hands from a light social satire to a vision of metaphysical evil. Standing—like the half-adult Sandy—partly in and partly out of the Brodie set and its peculiar ambience, we are able to take Sandy's vengeful view of Miss Brodie as a secularised Calvinist…. She has sought to make the world intelligible on her terms by constructing a little world in which she can be, as none of us can in the real world, the source of all enlightenment. (It is no accident that this might also be a description of what a novelist does: on one level you can see Muriel Spark either as writing about her own craft and its predicament, or as using her own craft as a type of the human condition.) In this world love is a sentimental fiction. Jean Brodie's 'renunciation' of Teddy Lloyd is no more a real renunciation than her affair with Gordon Lowther is a real affair. Indeed it is hard to see what reality either man has for her: in the end they are both objects of her fantasies…. She has set herself in the place of God. (pp. 240-41)

The voice which delivers this impassioned judgement on Jean Brodie is Sandy's, charged with all the vengeful fires of adolescence, 'more fuming, now, with Christian morals, than John Knox'…. Thus Sandy herself, answering Jean Brodie's complaints about betrayal, sounds not, indeed, like the God of Calvin but like a cross between St Ignatius Loyola and the Christ of the Apocalypse casting out the lukewarm: 'Sandy replied like an enigmatic Pope: "If you did not betray us it is impossible that you could have been betrayed by us. The word betrayed does not apply …"… (pp. 241-42)

But the real thrust of dislocation comes from Teddy Lloyd, who both loves Miss Brodie and sees through Sandy's newfound fanaticism.

Teddy Lloyd continued reproducing Jean Brodie in his paintings. 'You have instinct,' Sandy told him, 'but no insight, or you would see that the woman isn't to be taken seriously.'

'I know she isn't,' he said. 'You are too analytical and irritable for your age.'

The contrast between insight and instinct is, as we know, Miss Brodie's own. We are in no doubt that Miss Brodie prefers insight to instinct, which is indeed why she chooses Sandy as a natural confidante. (p. 242)

In what way was Jean Brodie innocent? Well, there is a sense in which Jean Brodie is necessarily innocent: she has never done anything, has never acted…. She harms only those who are like her: Joyce Emily Hammond, who shares her political romanticism, and Sandy, who loves daydreams, secret knowledge and the superiority which comes from 'insight'. What distinguishes Sandy from Jean Brodie is fear and desire. (pp. 242-43)

It is because she fears it that Calvinism is not a joke to her, as it is to Miss Brodie, but an alien presence which cannot be assimilated to the commonplace unity of her life but sticks out like a sore thumb. (p. 243)

Desire leads her into the affair with Teddy Lloyd; jealously she wishes to know how he can love Jean Brodie, and she searches his mind to find out. Calvinism and Teddy Lloyd's mind: these two thrusting obstructions tear at the fabric of a life made from a nice Edinburgh suburb and the Brodie set. They let in light, give Sandy new ground to stand on, a vantage-point upon which to erect her critique of Brodieism and from which to act against it.

Sandy's betrayal is thus precisely not innocent; in one sense, obviously, because it destroys Miss Brodie for good … but more profoundly because Sandy knows and wills what she has done. It is the prime act of her liberation; it is the affirmation of her awakening from childhood and sleepwalking…. And therefore Sandy needs—must have—assurance that she is awake, that in her new and pristine state she sees straight, perceives reality at last: the commonplace transfigured. It is scarcely surprising that she should feel the need to write a book on the nature of moral perception; as we have seen, she is, like Jean Brodie, a great one for insight: she likes to feel on top of things as Miss Brodie, once Sandy has finished with her, plainly no longer does.

The loss of any assurance of reality, of the finality of any vision of what is or what has worth, is the underlying theme of all Muriel Spark's fiction. (pp. 243-44)

Teddy Lloyd, like Barbara Vaughan [in The Mandelbaum Gate], understands the possibility of simultaneously accepting and relinquishing a vision of the world…. [Miss Brodie] is for him not something fixed in any single vision of his, but something outside all visions, which can thus serve as a perpetual and inexhaustible source of new creation, and is known through the resistance it offers to imagination in the work of creation…. Sandy's view of her is quite just, but it is not final: it has not the piercing security which 'insight' would have if it were not the epistemological chimera which it is.

Muriel Spark leaves open, I think, the question of whether Sandy cleaves to 'insight' to the bitter end. The fact that she tries to capture the nature of moral experience in a book suggests that she does, as does the final haunting image of her 'clutching the bars of her cell'. For if we cannot know the world from the standpoint of a single vision we cannot know it by detached contemplation at all. We can know it only through the experience of the resistance of the real, and to know that resistance we must commit ourselves, we must act, take chances. We find reality, as Barbara says, by making decisions.

The contrast between detached contemplation of the world, and exposure to the real in decision and action, runs as a connecting thread through all Muriel Spark's fiction. (p. 249)

The purpose of Muriel Spark's technique, I think, is to construct novels that have to be read with the same sense of engagement with a perpetually obstructing reality. Certainly in reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie one passes, as I have tried to show, through a series of dislocations, each of which disturbs one's former conception of the novel and transforms it into something new. In the process the reader finds himself living through the stages of Sandy Stranger's childhood and conversion, and is finally led to see, through the texture of the novel, as it were, something about the nature of our relationship to reality which mutely shows itself in the ambiguities of Sandy's final state and of her relationship to Teddy Lloyd. This is not something the novel could achieve if it possessed the luminous integrity of surface and depths which Jane Austen's novels have. For then it would possess and generate a moral climate, on which the reader could repose his judgement, and the kind of reading which Muriel Spark needs for her purposes would be excluded.

In short whereas Jane Austen's art occupies the interior of a very serious and powerful moral point of view, Muriel Spark's is busy precisely at the still point at which worlds of consciousness, each organised and dominated by such a moral vision, cleave from the still and speechless surface of reality. (p. 250)

Bernard Harrison, "Muriel Spark and Jane Austen," in The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer and the Work, edited by Gabriel Josipovici (copyright © Open Books Publishing Ltd 1976), Open Books, 1976, pp. 225-51.∗