{"title":"对穆丽尔·斯帕克不敬的一瞥","authors":"E. Ridge","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2129588","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"James Bailey’s new book offers a bracingly fresh perspective on Muriel Spark’s early writing. It takes as its starting point a portrait of Spark, painted by Sandy Moffat for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 1984. Spark was far from enamoured by this portrait; as Bailey notes, she would observe, in a later essay, that its artist had been ‘less interested in capturing her in his painting than the brightly coloured scarf that she happened to be wearing... ’ (1). Being unfamiliar with this portrait, I took the trouble of googling it. Spark was right to be disgruntled; the resemblance is closer to Margaret Thatcher, a discomfiting visual reference point in a mid1980s context. Yet this resemblance, whether accidental or implied, is also telling. Not unlike the Iron Lady, Spark has also been mythologized as both sharp and uncompromising in her authorial vision, even if the material of metaphorical choice might be ‘crystalline’ (18) rather than iron in her own case. Bailey sets out to expose and to explode some of the reductive critical templates that have been established, through and alongside this process of mythologization, for interpreting Spark’s work. In particular, he takes issue with the tendency to read the typical Spark narrator in terms of a ‘relatively uncomplicated analogy’ with an ‘omnipotent and often callous God’ (14). Given Spark’s widely discussed turn to Catholicism, theological understandings of her work are not unjustified in and of themselves. Yet, as Bailey persuasively argues, such approaches have come to unjustifiably dominate Spark criticism, thus muting other potential implications and often very subversive forms of socio-political critique that might otherwise be discerned throughout her wide-ranging oeuvre. Bailey, instead, strategically mutes the theological in his analysis of Spark’s early writings and the results are compelling. It leads to an attentiveness to alternative narrative modes and stances – ‘the ghostly (or perhaps haunted narrator); the detached observer; the frustrated voyeur; the postmodernist attention to James Bailey, Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, £75 hardback, 9781474475969.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"91 1","pages":"348 - 351"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"An Ungodly Look at Muriel Spark\",\"authors\":\"E. Ridge\",\"doi\":\"10.1080/09574042.2022.2129588\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"James Bailey’s new book offers a bracingly fresh perspective on Muriel Spark’s early writing. It takes as its starting point a portrait of Spark, painted by Sandy Moffat for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 1984. Spark was far from enamoured by this portrait; as Bailey notes, she would observe, in a later essay, that its artist had been ‘less interested in capturing her in his painting than the brightly coloured scarf that she happened to be wearing... ’ (1). Being unfamiliar with this portrait, I took the trouble of googling it. Spark was right to be disgruntled; the resemblance is closer to Margaret Thatcher, a discomfiting visual reference point in a mid1980s context. Yet this resemblance, whether accidental or implied, is also telling. Not unlike the Iron Lady, Spark has also been mythologized as both sharp and uncompromising in her authorial vision, even if the material of metaphorical choice might be ‘crystalline’ (18) rather than iron in her own case. Bailey sets out to expose and to explode some of the reductive critical templates that have been established, through and alongside this process of mythologization, for interpreting Spark’s work. In particular, he takes issue with the tendency to read the typical Spark narrator in terms of a ‘relatively uncomplicated analogy’ with an ‘omnipotent and often callous God’ (14). Given Spark’s widely discussed turn to Catholicism, theological understandings of her work are not unjustified in and of themselves. Yet, as Bailey persuasively argues, such approaches have come to unjustifiably dominate Spark criticism, thus muting other potential implications and often very subversive forms of socio-political critique that might otherwise be discerned throughout her wide-ranging oeuvre. Bailey, instead, strategically mutes the theological in his analysis of Spark’s early writings and the results are compelling. It leads to an attentiveness to alternative narrative modes and stances – ‘the ghostly (or perhaps haunted narrator); the detached observer; the frustrated voyeur; the postmodernist attention to James Bailey, Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, £75 hardback, 9781474475969.\",\"PeriodicalId\":54053,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Women-A Cultural Review\",\"volume\":\"91 1\",\"pages\":\"348 - 351\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":2.0000,\"publicationDate\":\"2022-07-03\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Women-A Cultural Review\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2129588\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"0\",\"JCRName\":\"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Women-A Cultural Review","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2129588","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
摘要
詹姆斯·贝利的新书为穆里尔·斯帕克的早期写作提供了一个令人振奋的新视角。它以桑迪·莫法特(Sandy Moffat) 1984年为苏格兰国家肖像画廊(Scottish National portrait Gallery)所画的一幅《Spark》肖像为起点。斯巴克对这幅画像一点也不感兴趣;正如贝利所指出的,她在后来的一篇文章中观察到,这幅画的艺术家“对在画中捕捉她的兴趣不如她碰巧戴着的鲜艳的围巾……由于不熟悉这幅画像,我不厌其烦地用谷歌搜索了一下。斯帕克的不满是对的;这种相似之处更接近玛格丽特•撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher),在20世纪80年代中期的背景下,她是一个令人不安的视觉参照点。然而,这种相似之处,无论是偶然的还是隐含的,也很能说明问题。与铁娘子没有什么不同,斯帕克在她的写作视野中也被神话化为犀利而不妥协,即使隐喻的材料选择可能是“水晶”(18)而不是她自己的铁。Bailey开始揭露和揭露一些简化的批判性模板,这些模板已经建立起来,通过和伴随着这个神话化的过程,来解释Spark的工作。特别是,他反对将典型的《星火》叙述者解读为“相对简单的类比”,即“全能而冷酷的上帝”(14)。鉴于斯帕克被广泛讨论转向天主教,对她作品的神学理解本身并不是不合理的。然而,正如贝利令人信服地指出的那样,这样的方法已经不合理地主导了火花批评,从而掩盖了其他潜在的含义,往往是非常颠覆性的社会政治批评形式,否则可能会在她广泛的作品中发现。相反,贝利在分析斯帕克的早期作品时,策略性地将神学因素隐去,结果令人信服。这导致了对另类叙事模式和立场的关注——“幽灵般的(或者可能是闹鬼的叙述者);超然的观察者;失意的偷窥者;詹姆斯·贝利:《穆里尔·斯帕克的早期小说:文学颠覆与形式实验》,爱丁堡大学出版社,2021年,75英镑精装本,9781474475969。
James Bailey’s new book offers a bracingly fresh perspective on Muriel Spark’s early writing. It takes as its starting point a portrait of Spark, painted by Sandy Moffat for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 1984. Spark was far from enamoured by this portrait; as Bailey notes, she would observe, in a later essay, that its artist had been ‘less interested in capturing her in his painting than the brightly coloured scarf that she happened to be wearing... ’ (1). Being unfamiliar with this portrait, I took the trouble of googling it. Spark was right to be disgruntled; the resemblance is closer to Margaret Thatcher, a discomfiting visual reference point in a mid1980s context. Yet this resemblance, whether accidental or implied, is also telling. Not unlike the Iron Lady, Spark has also been mythologized as both sharp and uncompromising in her authorial vision, even if the material of metaphorical choice might be ‘crystalline’ (18) rather than iron in her own case. Bailey sets out to expose and to explode some of the reductive critical templates that have been established, through and alongside this process of mythologization, for interpreting Spark’s work. In particular, he takes issue with the tendency to read the typical Spark narrator in terms of a ‘relatively uncomplicated analogy’ with an ‘omnipotent and often callous God’ (14). Given Spark’s widely discussed turn to Catholicism, theological understandings of her work are not unjustified in and of themselves. Yet, as Bailey persuasively argues, such approaches have come to unjustifiably dominate Spark criticism, thus muting other potential implications and often very subversive forms of socio-political critique that might otherwise be discerned throughout her wide-ranging oeuvre. Bailey, instead, strategically mutes the theological in his analysis of Spark’s early writings and the results are compelling. It leads to an attentiveness to alternative narrative modes and stances – ‘the ghostly (or perhaps haunted narrator); the detached observer; the frustrated voyeur; the postmodernist attention to James Bailey, Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, £75 hardback, 9781474475969.