Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• GUTKIN, LEN

Titel

Muriel Spark's Camp Metafiction

Ist Teil von

• Contemporary literature, 2017-04, Vol.58 (1), p.53-81

Ort / Verlag

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Novelist Muriel Spark's baroquely metaphorized deus ex machina lightning strike might remind some readers of the death of the Marquis de Sade's Justine. Closer to hand, attentive readers will recognize in the apparently arbitrary similes--the pond lit up like a self-stricken flash-photographer, the lightning jagging like a zip-fastener ripped from its garment by a sexual maniac--elements lifted from Not to Disturb's plot. In this novel, a group of servants led by Lister, the butler, murder their wealthy employers and scheme their way into inheriting fortune and property, all the while tape-recording and photographing their activities, which include a hastily arranged marriage between a maid and a straitjacketed aristocratic madman in the attic--the sexual maniac in question. Though her novels are almost always whimsical, such overt self-reflexivity at the level of poetics as this passage demonstrates is not typical of Spark, whose metafictional muse is normally more understated.