An elderly woman picks up a telephone and a strange voice says, Remember you must die.
“Who is that speaking, who is it?” the elderly Dame Lettie demands, but the caller, “as on eight previous occasions,” has already hung up.
So who is it that is calling and saying these foreboding words to the cast of geriatrics in Muriel Spark’s blackly comic 1959 novel, Memento Mori?
In one sense, the novel doesn’t tell us. The story ends with the culprit’s identity unrevealed. Mortimer, the retired police inspector who some suspect to be himself the culprit, confides to his wife: “in my opinion the offender is Death himself.” And this, David Lodge comments, “though literally absurd, is metaphorically as near as we get to a solution to the mystery.”
At first I was dissatisfied with Spark’s ambiguous ending to her novel, but Lodge’s comment inspired me to think Memento Mori anew. Lodge describes the book as having many of the conventions of a 19th-century potboiler mixed with “an element of the uncanny.” True enough. Though the elderly folk receiving the phone calls all have their suspicions about the identity of the caller, the caller strangely, as Lodge notes, “speaks in different voices and accents to different people and has an unaccountable knowledge of their movements.”
In his recent provocative piece in the New York Times, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?”, Paul Elie expresses a hope that, at least in regard to Christian belief, writers will return to the task of dramatizing belief “the way it feels in your experience, at once a fact on the ground and a sponsor of the uncanny, an account of our predicament that still and all has the old power to persuade.”
Spark has an affinity for events and characters that are sponsors of the uncanny. Recall, for example, the first-person narrator in her masterful short story, “The Portobello Road,” who we discover several pages in is narrating events from beyond the grave. The point of Spark’s use of the mysterious caller in Memento Mori, Lodge remarks, is that through the caller “the existence of a transcendent, eternal and immaterial reality impinges on the lives of [Spark’s] aging characters.”
There are characters in Memento Mori with impressive belief, such as Jean Taylor, who endures the indignities of her nursing home by turning them into an offering:
After the first year she resolved to make her suffering a voluntary affair. If this is God’s will then it is mine. She gained from this state of mind a decided and visible dignity, at the same time as she lost her stoical resistance to pain. She complained more, called often for the bed pan, and did not hesitate, on one occasion when the nurse was dilatory, to wet the bed a the other grannies did so frequently.
About the telephone calls Jean says to her friend, Dame Lettie: “It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.”
But most of the characters in Memento Mori have not formed the habit while young, and–phone calls or no phone calls–they do not show much inclination to develop the habit while old. In this way Memento Mori works as a novel about belief by way of negation. For much of the novel’s comedy is generated by the trivial or malicious ways in which the characters drive out the thought of Death, “the first of the Four Last Things to be ever remembered.”
Photo of telephone by Iván Melenchón Serrano from morguefile.com
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