Abstract
The subject of plot-making fascinates Mrs Spark: both the fictional construction of a novel and the scheming activities of her characters. As a novelist who is also a Catholic, she is aware that her own fiction-making activities take place within what could be called ‘God’s plot’, being a metaphor for the Christian belief in a divinely ordered universe. In her novels the stress is either on the plots laid by her characters, or reflexively on a demonstration of how plot functions in a novel. In each case she elicits our perception of a divine or a moral plot behind the obvious one, and the interest is heightened by the tension between the two, and how it is resolved.
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Notes
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1968) pp. 181–2. (First published 1951.)
Angus Wilson, The Wild Garden, or Speaking of Writing (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963) p. 146.
David Lodge, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) pp. 119–44.
Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Muriel Spark’s Fingernails’, Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel (London: Oxford University Press, 1973) p. 253.
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© 1982 Ruth Whittaker
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Whittaker, R. (1982). Plots and Plotters. In: The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07464-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07464-8_5
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