Whose Life Is It Anyway?

I was reading, desultorily, the stories of Muriel Spark during a hard season. It was in New Mexico in October. The sky was suspended between the otherworldly cottonwoods and an equally implausible blue. I read one story a night to fill the interval before the space heater made the room warm enough for sleeping. For some reason I can't remember, I decided to read backwards through the book, an E.P. Dutton hardcover with a brick-red cover and Spark's name in faded yellow. Ali Smith had suggested, over the course of some correspondence from the previous year, that I read the story called "The House of the Famous Poet." I did. Then I was hooked. From one story to the next, what struck me, possibly because I had been feeling something like this myself, was the sense that the characters kept finding themselves, often comically or grotesquely, in other people's stories. Someone who was convinced she was in control over the narrative of her life would realize with a shock that her life was part of a tale told by others. 

"A Member of the Family," to take one example, begins with Richard asking Trudy to come meet his mother. The story then backtracks to the first meeting of the couple — in Bleilach, "one of the cheaper lake towns" in Southern Austria — and comes to a climax when Trudy dines with Richard's mother, along with some other "old friends" of Richard's who have, as the final line of the story goes, "become members of the family."1 Richard is not there, however, because he's a pick-up artist and a cad whose method of discarding previous girlfriends is to introduce them to his mother. The title isn't so much a title as a punchline. The bottom of the story drops out under Trudy and she finds herself one among many characters who suffered through the same plot. Other stories — "The Twins," "Bang-Bang You're Dead," "The Executor," "Another Pair of Hands"—play different riffs on the idea that you, as the putative main character, recognize the story, are part of it, are telling it, or can understand it. 

In a piece to commemorate Spark's 100^th birthday, Smith draws out the contemporary political relevance of Spark's work. She writes that Spark "hands us the key to the demystification the age needs in, say, an age of Trump, an age in which living means having powerful fictions nationally, internationally and politically foisted on us. Her fiction lets us understand the workings of such fictions."2 What are the stories we tell ourselves, what are the stories we're told about ourselves — and where do these stories overlap, if anywhere? While there might not be overt political content in most of Spark's short stories, the complexity of their narrative perspectives invites a reading that questions our conscription within and submission to dominant fictions. At the end of Spark's "The Twins," the protagonist realizes that her hosts Jennie and Simon, old friends who have been accusing their baffled guest of various minor insults, are following the direction of their children. Fed up and bewildered, the narrator finally decides to leave. As she leaves, she looks back at the twins, who are looking in turn at their own parents: "There was an expression on [the children's] faces which I have only seen once before. That was at the Royal Academy, when I saw a famous portrait-painter standing bemused, giving a remarkable long look at the work of his own hands. So, with wonder, pride, and bewilderment, did the twins gaze upon Jennie and Simon."3 The line between art and life is thin stretched thin here. Art is equivalent to the creation and control of others, at least in the hands of the twins. But with the word "bewilderment," Spark suggests that art also is not entirely in their hands.       

Smith's novels often raise such questions directly and respond to the entrapments of political fictions in their own way. Smith's commonplace book, The Book Lover (2006), opens with a single sentence from Austen's "Northanger Abbey": "No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine."4 That's echoed in the first thing that Sacha's mother says in Summer (2020): "Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life, Sacha's mother says. Then she says, Sacha, what is that? Where's it from?"5 The answer is David Copperfield; Dickens, almost as much as Shakespeare, influences the Seasonal Quartet — quite literally flows into it, because these books are not exactly revisions, or rewritings, or anything that, to me, has an obvious name. The Dickens quotation here springs quite naturally from the life of Sacha's mother, from the textures and experiences of her ordinary, daily experience. 

All the way back to Like (1997), Hotel World (2001), and The Accidental (2005), the protagonists of Smith's novels are women for whom the narrative conditions are unpropitious — because they are too young, sometimes, or have died tragically, or locate their desire in places the world finds impossible to sanction. They are Catherine Morlands and David Copperfields and Trudys; they are orphans, drifters, refugees, ghosts, and teenagers. They crawl into ditches or dumbwaiters for love and believe in a future that shuts down on them without any warning, over and over. These are the characters with which, as Stephanie DeGooyer suggests in her piece, Smith confronts the novel's longstanding problem of making the individual life "stand in for" a larger social world. Maybe they don't look the right part or, like Aisling from Like, come from a place people don't come from in books, or maybe something else prevents them, a country that says only certain kinds of people belong. Their stories are taken out of their hands, whether by accident or by institutional design — by, say, the protean, ubiquitous security agency SA4A that is a recurrent antagonist in the Seasonal Quartet.

I guess you could find a way to write through that problem by making much out of the individual, the heroic bit of human grit in the wheels, the haecceity that can't be reduced to automaton status. Smith doesn't give up on people who find themselves in other people's stories. It's from that starting position, in fact, that she begins, as her proper names suggest: "Art" and "Lux" in Winter, for example, are examples of what Matthew Hart calls "allegory-by-naming." Her characters may not be named Error or Chastity, but they learn to read their lives as carrying a double meaning. The task of becoming the hero of your story takes the form, in Smith's novels, of first recognizing that you're already part of another story you didn't write. That story ties you to a larger role, albeit one that requires self-scrutiny and interpretation. 

Autumn (2016) tells the story of a long-lasting friendship between 101-year-old Daniel Gluck, a songwriter, and Elisabeth Demand, a "no-fixed-hours casual contract junior lecturer."6 We learn Daniel's backstory much later in Summer, sections of which take place in a British internment camp on the Isle of Man. From the beginning of the novel, Elisabeth finds herself brushing against systems, processes, and procedures that threaten to entrap her. In an early scene, Elisabeth goes to the post office to get a new passport, but is rebuffed, the first time, for having the wrong size face. Elisabeth traces out the fictional consequences of the post office agent's verdict: 

The agent replies: "This isn't fiction . . . This is the Post Office." The bad faith of such institutions is not only the chosen inanity of bureaucracy. It is the pretense that the process isn't itself a fiction "foisted upon us," but rather a stone-cold inevitability, something that, since it's always existed, cannot be retold in any other way.

But the retelling of inherited fictions is precisely what forms the substance of the friendship between Daniel and Elisabeth when they're younger. Daniel comes up with a game and a name for it: the Bagatelle. A bagatelle is a trifle, a minor piece of music; it's also, in an entirely different genre, a close relative of billiards. "The whole point of Bagatelle is that you trifle with the stories people think are set in stone," Daniel says.8 While political fictions entrap and constrain, trifling with them offers a kind of freedom, or perhaps "amends," to echo Pamela Thurschwell. Where thirteen-year-old Elisabeth sees an inevitable outcome to a conflict between a man dressed as a tree and a man with a gun, Daniel encourages a value of hospitality that lies outside of narrative or historical predictability: "And always give them a choice—even those characters like a person with nothing but a tree costume between him or her and a man with a gun. By which I mean characters who seem to have no choice at all. Always give them a home."9 Even their own names participate in a Bagatelle, as Daniel explains earlier in the narrative. This play with names is part of what Charlotte Terrell calls "faith in the transformative work of words" in the Seasonal Quartet. His surname means "luck," from the German, while the given name Daniel makes him an interpreter of dreams. Hers, Elisabeth, means that "one day she'll probably, quite unexpectedly against the odds, find herself being made queen."10 They have in common "the capacity to become someone else," if they so choose.11

What are the uses of such allegory in contemporary fiction? Allegory in Spenser or Bunyan can remind us of a spiritual order that undergirds our world of contingency and that provides a framework for evaluating human action. What about allegory in a world that wants for such anchors and assurances, one such as our own? "Against the odds," Elisabeth will be the heroine of the story; Daniel spends large portions of the novel interpreting his dreams. In Autumn, allegory functions not as a reminder of sempiternal values, but rather as an enactment of the human capacity to become someone else at will. 

Allegory can expose processes and procedures that have taken on a fictional life and plot of their own (the security agency "SA4A," or "safer," as Elisabeth reads it, wryly): this is the "demystification" that Smith identifies in Spark's work. In a slightly different way, to be a Daniel or an Elisabeth is also to recognize yourself as playing a role in a story not of your own making. Yet from these names issue fictions that trifle with the ones foisted upon us. To live a double life, in the allegorical sense, is to meet the fiction-making of politics on its own ground. Reading Spark, Smith writes that "books make futures—even their own futures—negotiable." I like the word she lands on here. If stories are foisted on us, why not trifle with them? After all, this is fiction, not the post office. But even in the post office, in Autumn, since the library has closed, everyone is reading. 

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Walt Hunter is Associate Professor of World Literature at Clemson University. He is the author of Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham University Press, 2019) and a collection of poetry, Some Flowers (Madhat Press, 2022). 

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