Muriel Spark, Existentialism and The Art of Death

Muriel Spark, Existentialism and the Art of Death traces Muriel Spark’s indebtedness to the tradition of Christian existentialism that derives from nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Christian existentialism was well-established before Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir developed its influential atheistic version in the 1940s, and the book explores the ways in which Spark, in her novels and short stories, develops Kierkegaardian themes and techniques in celebration of the ‘leap to faith’. It also shows how Spark builds on Kierkegaard’s conception of the ‘aesthetic’ as the condition of secular, sensual existence, and the paradoxical condition of art, which cannot, in itself, escape the aesthetic but must point to its own entrapment within values that its author rejects. Kierkegaard’s ironic adoption of pseudonymous surrogate authors for many of his books is similar to the ways in which Spark endows her central characters with powers normally reserved to the author/narrator of a story. The book provides detailed analysis of these issues in many of Spark’s major novels in order to show her engagement with, and her rejection of, atheistic existentialism, and her insistence that art can only provide the consolation of a pseudo-eternity which distracts from the recognition of Christianity’s true eternity. In this sense, hers is an art of death – of her characters’ efforts to control death, and of the novel’s formal evasion of it.