‘A study, in a way, of self-destruction’: The Driver’s Seat and the Impotent Gaze

Abstract

This chapter extends the preceding chapter’s discussion of The Driver’s Seat to offer a thorough reassessment of its largely one-sided critical reception, as well as its nuanced approach to the inextricable relationship between gender, narrative perspective and epistemological power. It argues that the novel – which has been read predominantly as Spark’s most starkly drawn parable of human fallibility versus divine omniscience – is concerned instead with that which escapes and thus destabilises the exacting, investigative and emphatically male gaze of its narrator. Through a critical framework which combines critical commentary on the nouveau roman, previously unexamined archival material, studies of metaphysical detective fiction, and theory related to narrative point of view, the chapter shifts focus from existing readings of the protagonist, Lise, as the hopeless object of a godlike narrative viewpoint, and considers her instead as a captivating figure who, even after death, confronts and commands the epistemologically limited perspective of her hopelessly fascinated narrator-voyeur. Spark’s description of The Driver’s Seat as ‘a study, in a way, of self-destruction’ can thus be seen to relate not only to Lise’s determined drive to death, but to the subversive unravelling of the narrating ‘self,’ tormented and undone by the novel’s perennially unknowable subject.