Disembodied Voices and Desegregated Art in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means
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This paper examines Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1963) with a focus on the novel’s profusion of disembodied voices. While voices in Spark’s fiction were long considered ambient sound and subsidiary to plot, this paper traces how voices are integral to the ways the novel theorizes the problem of perspective. The novel’s emphasis on diversifying perspectives, thematized by its treatment of disembodied voices, resonates with Spark’s call for desegregated art which fosters sustaining a critical distance from the object. As an art of satire, The Girls of Slender Means studiously maintains a mocking distance from what it sets out to represent, a narrative process which unfolds side by side with the thematization of Nicholas Farringdon’s erroneous reading which results from his penchant for attaching preconceived notions to object. Putting the novel in dialogue with coeval works of Pierre Schaeffer and Roland Barthes which address the phenomenon of disembodied voices, this paper unravels how the novel brings to light plurality of perception as a way to work around the self-absorbed point of view that Nicholas emblematizes. Unfettered by homogenizing ways of seeing, the novel redeems the nuances of lived existence in the postwar setting, offsetting the totalizing perspective that marks Britain’s dominant narrative about the Second World War.
Abstract
This paper examines Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1963) with a focus on the novel’s profusion of disembodied voices. While voices in Spark’s fiction were long considered ambient sound and subsidiary to plot, this paper traces how voices are integral to the ways the novel theorizes the problem of perspective. The novel’s emphasis on diversifying perspectives, thematized by its treatment of disembodied voices, resonates with Spark’s call for desegregated art which fosters sustaining a critical distance from the object. As an art of satire, The Girls of Slender Means studiously maintains a mocking distance from what it sets out to represent, a narrative process which unfolds side by side with the thematization of Nicholas Farringdon’s erroneous reading which results from his penchant for attaching preconceived notions to object. Putting the novel in dialogue with coeval works of Pierre Schaeffer and Roland Barthes which address the phenomenon of disembodied voices, this paper unravels how the novel brings to light plurality of perception as a way to work around the self-absorbed point of view that Nicholas emblematizes. Unfettered by homogenizing ways of seeing, the novel redeems the nuances of lived existence in the postwar setting, offsetting the totalizing perspective that marks Britain’s dominant narrative about the Second World War.
참고문헌 (22)
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