“I found that the novel enabled me to express the comic side of my mind and at the same time work out some serious theme.” –Muriel Spark, “How I Became a Novelist,” in The Informed Air: Essays.
This observation captures what it is I admire in the writing of Muriel Spark: the mixture of comedy and, if not tragedy, at least some serious theme. I am reminded of what Socrates argues at the end of Plato’s Symposium, that the best writer is able to write both tragedy and comedy. Is it possible to do both at the same time?
I am reminded also of what Walker Percy says in one of his essays. He is talking about the predicament of the contemporary Catholic novelist in the American South, but what he says here I believe is applicable more broadly:
“So what should he [the novelist] do? His natural mission in this place and in these times is, if not search and destroy, then probe and challenge. His greatest service is to attack, that is to say, satirize. Don’t forget that satire is not primarily destructive. It attacks one thing in order to affirm another. It assaults the fake and and the phony in the name of truth. It ridicules the inhuman in order to affirm the human. Satire is always launched in the mode of hope” (“How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic” in Signposts in a Strange Land).
Such hope and affirmation are fruits of the comic mind: the mind that knows that, despite all the fakery and phoniness and destructive inhumaneness, there is an unexpected and loving resolution at the end of all things.
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