1 The Driver’s Seat: impersonality or emotion?

1Impersonality, rather than emotion, is a quality habitually associated with the fictions of Muriel Spark. Bradbury2 talks of her ‘hardness’ (251) of ‘the tactics of indifference’ (247) and compares her to ‘the Catholic novelists of detachment, to Joyce’s God-like writer, paring his fingernails’ (248) while Parrinder3 more critically refers to what he terms ‘the anaesthetisation of strongly emotive aspects of reality’ (26) remaining, at the conclusion, ‘troubled at her lack of compassion.’ (31)

2In the novel I would like to look at here, The Driver’s Seat, (1971)4 we are offered, Parrinder tells us, ‘a wholly external and dispassionate account of a woman who (apparently) set out to find someone to rape and murder her...,’ (24) which, the same critic tells us, ‘seems like a slap in the face to feminists and anti-rape campaigners.’ (26) Parrinder overstates his case, to the point of transforming some points of fact, but his critical line is defensible and often applied to Spark’s fiction.

3In the same year as this novel was published, however, Spark was making an oblique appeal, in ‘The Desegregation of Art’ (1970) for greater social commitment.5

... we see and hear everywhere the representation of the victim against the oppressor, we have a literature and an artistic culture, one might almost say a civilization, of depicted suffering, whether in social life or in family life.... For what happens when, for example, the sympathies and the indignation of a modern audience are aroused by a play or a novel of the kind to which I have referred? I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that a great number of the audience or of the readers feel that their moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by the emotions they have been induced to feel.... I would like to see in all forms of art and letters, ranging from the most sophisticated and high achievements to the placards that the students carry about the street, a less impulsive generosity, a less indignant representation of social injustice, and a more deliberate cunning, a more derisive undermining of what is wrong. I would like to see less emotion and more intelligence in these efforts to impress our mind and hearts. (25)

4Now the very patent contradiction between Parrinder’s perspective and Spark’s programme might encourage us to think that one of them has to be wrong. Does The Driver’s Seat exhibit a lack of compassion or is it an effort to impress mind and heart? In the following study I will argue that, despite the apparently detached and indifferent tone of The Driver’s Seat, Spark’s fiction here is one of uncompromising intellectual and emotional commitment.

2 Deliberate ambivalence, or ‘Who do you think you are?’ (96-7)

5For those unfamiliar with the novel, The Driver’s Seat relates the last thirty-six hours or so in the life of a woman in her mid-thirties who flies from an unnamed Northern city for a holiday in an unnamed Southern city. After a series of apparently fortuitous encounters with a series of people, mainly men, the protagonist Lise is eventually raped and murdered by the man she first sat next to on the plane.

6Perhaps the uncertain opinions as to the value of Spark’s work in general and of The Driver’s Seat in particular are to be expected with an author who cultivates ambivalence on several levels, disorienting the reader, destabilising his expectations and forcing him to provide his own meanings.

7To begin with, the behaviour of the protagonist, Lise, anagrammatically ‘lies,’ makes it difficult for any reader identification which we might imagine to be a prerequisite for emotion in fiction. At the airport Lise tells us: ‘I believe in travelling light because I travel a lot....’ (19) Not only is this in contradiction with her unglamourous existence as a clerk in an accountant’s office (9-10) but, four pages later, when a South African woman asks her if she travels much, she replies that she does not. (23) Lise has spoken in English, but a ‘foreignly accented English’ (22) and indeed denies she is English or American when later asked. (48) To the garage-owner, Carlo, however, she says she is ‘only a tourist, a teacher from Iowa, New Jersey . . . a widow . . . and an intellectual.’ (76)

8I could give other instances, but the point is that this representation of Lise’s behaviour appears to be designed to destabilise the reader’s usual expectations of consistency and motivation in fictional characters. By this I mean that we are used to reading about characters who, unlike people in real life, react predictibly, only play one role and whose actions within the fictional framework are causes which trigger off consequences. Lise appears to fit none of these conventional expectations.

9As a piece of fiction The Driver’s Seat is generically ambivalent too. To begin with, it relates obviously to the boy-meets-girl holiday romance story. The cover notes of the first paperback edition of the The Driver’s Seat unashamedly exploit this vein: ‘Lise, driven to distraction by an office job, leaves everything and flies south on holiday—in search of what? The passionate adventure, the obsessional experience: Sex?’ The clichés are inside the novel too, as Lise spends her time in the southern city in search of her ‘type of man,’ (68) saying ‘I think he’s around the corner somewhere, now, any time,’ (71) like some eternally hopeful girl looking for her Prince Charming. (70) She is encouraged in her quest by Mrs Fiedke who tells her: ‘I can’t think of anything else but that you and my nephew are meant for each other. As sure as anything, my dear, you are the person for my nephew.’ As critics have pointed out, pared down to its merest essentials the plot becomes ‘girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy.’ (Barreca 227)6

10The novel’s concluding sentence, however, provides us with other indications as to the genre of The Driver’s Seat: ‘He sees already the gleaming buttons of the policemen’s uniforms, hears the cold and the confiding, the hot and the barking voices, sees already the holsters and epaulets and all those trappings devised to protect them from the indecent exposure of fear and pity, pity and fear.’ (107) The chiasmus of the lyrical closure refers us to the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, of course, and we can, if we wish, try and have the novel correspond to the tragic form. The action, after all, takes just a little more than one day, and we can read Lise’s tears at one point in the narrative as a moment of anagnorisis. I’ll be coming back to tragic readings of The Driver’s Seat later on.

11Another fruitful parallel with other fictional genres is provided by the detective story. Most of the elements are present: a cast of suspects, in the form of the male protagonists (Bill, Carlo, Richard and an unnamed aristocrat), a victim, a murder, a series of clues, a trail etc. A detective story would normally begin with a murder, continue with a hunt for the murderer, conducted by a detective thanks to a series of unintentional clues left by the criminal, and eventually conclude with the capture of the villain. Here, however, the story follows the progress of a victim who appears to be looking for, or hunting, someone to kill her. Not only does she do this, but she, the victim, leaves a number of seemingly deliberate clues as she does so: ‘So she lays the trail, presently to be followed by Interpol and elaborated upon with due art by the journalists of Europe for the few days it takes for her identity to be established.’ (51)

12Lise herself refers obliquely to the whodunnit variety of detective story when, in the last chapter, she leaves the paperback novel she had been carrying with the hotel clerk: ‘You can have the book as well; it’s a whydunnit in q-sharp-major and it has a message....’ (101) This ‘message’ is something that has worried critics, as we saw above. In the next section I will be looking at how they have chosen to interpret a text which provides precious few unambiguous signposts for interpretation.

3 The message: ‘it’s a whydunnit in q-sharp-major’ (101)

13In general terms it is the pseudo-tragical reading of The Driver’s Seat which appears to have rallied critical opinion. Let us quote Page, whose chapter on the novel is fairly typical in this respect:

The plot of the novel [The Driver’s Seat] corresponds to the plot of her own life and death that Lise has written: to be in the driver’s seat is to be, whether literally or metaphorically, in charge. But the ending of the novel shows that Lise’s belief in her capacity for self-determination is no more than a delusion: it is after all God, not man or woman, who writes the plots of our lives. When she instructs her murderer to tie her ankles he refuses and ‘plunges into her, with the knife held [sic] high’ [106]. ‘Plunges’, used punningly here, can easily be misread as the act of stabbing her, but actually refers to the sexual act, and it is another two lines before ‘the knife... descends to her throat’ [106]. Ultimately she has been unable, as we all are, to control her own destiny, to write the script of her own life and death.7

14For Page, then, the narrator thwarts Lise’s plot to orchestrate every detail of her own death by having her raped against her wishes as well. Lise is thus a surrogate plotter, punished by the narrator for her hubris in thinking she could control the story: she gets her own way, but not completely. A conceit, whereby the narrator—character relation is used as a metonym for the God—man relation, also allows Page to draw a theological lesson from the novel. Such an interpretative model has its precedents in Spark. Georgina Hogg in The Comforters, Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Patrick Seton in The Bachelors, to name but three, all come to a sticky end after having tried unsuccessfully to manipulate the plot. Before critics reach this reading of The Driver’s Seat, they first have to consider that Lise tries to stage-manage her own demise, that she is indeed out to make a ‘morally, philosophically, and theologically artful use of her own mortality,’ as Bradbury puts it. (253) Let us look at how the novel encourages this.

15The Driver’s Seat is a text often quoted in manuals on literature for the use it makes of prolepsis. In the course of the novel, which is written in the present tense, we are given a number of remarkable flashesforward. The first of these comes only a dozen or so pages into the book: ‘Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness contructed partly by the method of identikit, partly by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.’ (18) We are soon given the reason for this media interest: ‘She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.’ (25)

16Now once the reader knows how Lise will end up, then the apparently contingent events which make up the bulk of the narrative may be interpreted and given significance in the light of the ending. As Waugh puts it: ‘Reading such a novel for the first time, with its exaggerated sense of an ending and technique of advanced significance, is like the second reading of a conventional novel.’8 Let me take one or two examples to show what is meant.

17Before leaving, Lise brouses in the giftshop at the airport. ‘She looks at the dolls in folk-costume and at the corkscrews. Then she lifts up a paper-knife shaped like a scimitar.’ (24) Later on, in a department store, Mrs Fiedke buys a paper-knife ‘curved like a scimitar’ (67) for her nephew, the eventual murderer, which Lise takes into her ‘zipper-bag.’ (68) In the same store Lise has already bought a silk scarf (60) and a pair of black ties. (66) Once we know how the novel will end, we could see Lise’s purchases in a different light. Instead of the presents she claims them to be, they might instead be stage props, necessary accesories for the final murder. She had already shown a certain interest in sharp objects when inspecting the cutlery on the plane: ‘She feels the blade of the knife. She presses two of her fingers against the prongs of her fork. “Not very sharp,” she says.’ (32)

18Similarly, in her hotel bedroom Lise apparently anticipates where the crime will take place: ‘Lise... pores over her map... takes a ball-point pen from her bag and marks a spot in a large patch of green, the main parkland of the city. She puts a little cross beside one of the small pictures which is described on the map as “The Pavilion”.’ (49)

19Even the curious opening pages, when Lise is hunting for ‘the necessary dress’ (9) can be reread as retrospectively significant:

‘And the material doesn’t stain,’ the salesgirl says.
‘Doesn’t stain?’
‘It’s the new fabric,’ the salesgirl says. ‘Specially treated. Won’t mark. If you spill like a bit of ice-cream or a drop of coffee, like, down the front of this dress it won’t hold the stain.’
The customer, a young woman, is suddenly tearing at the fastener at the neck, pulling at the zip of the dress. She is saying, ‘Get this thing off me. Off me, at once.’ (7)

20The idea of a stain-resisting dress, critics have suggested, evidently does not correspond to the idea Lise has of her own preprogrammed death by stabbing: ‘Lise claims to be insulted by the implication that she is a messy eater; but the reader realises at the end that the real reason for her behaviour is that she is selecting props which will make her death, and the events leading up to it, vividly memorable.’ (Carruthers 521)9

21For at least one critic, the protagonist’s loud and uncontrolled behaviour is interpreted as evidence of incipient mental derangement and of her desire to be noticed:

Throughout the novel she complains, quarrels, speaks more loudly than is normal, laughs hysterically, bursts into tears, stares at strangers; and this behaviour is both evidence of her serious mental instability (there is a hint that she had a breakdown five years earlier) and part of the elaborate trail she is laying.... Lise is the spinner of her own plot, a very active and purposeful victim hunting a passive and reluctant murderer. (Page 72)

22The concluding chapter, when Lise sits in ‘the driver’s seat’ (102) of the car and escorts the murderer to the scene of the crime, apparently instructing him what to do, seems to confirm readings according to which Lise is made into a surrogate plotter, whose schemes rival those of the narrator.10 Are such readings the only way of interpreting the novel?

4 Investing contingency with design: ‘Elaborated upon with due art’ (51)

23The readings of The Driver’s Seat discussed above are convincing. They cannot be excluded and yet, they leave me somewhat uneasy. We are led to think that, once we have realised that Lise is a hysteric who is punished for presuming to engineer her own murder, we have understood everything. When I reread Page’s comments above, however, I am struck by his glibness of tone. I am left with the impression that, if Lise ‘complains, quarrels, speaks more loudly than is normal, laughs hysterically, bursts into tears, stares at strangers,’ then she is, for many critics, practically begging to be murdered by the ‘passive and reluctant murderer.’ Now such a blatantly sexist interpretation has already been anticipated by the text when, in the closing pages, we read the following exchange:

‘A lot of women get killed in the park,’ he says, leaning back; he is calmer now.
‘Yes, of course. It’s because they want to be.’ She is searching in her bag.
‘Don’t go too far,’ he says quietly.
‘I’ll leave that to you,’ she says... (104)11

24While Spark is admittedly not an outspoken feminist, I find it hard to imagine that she subscribes to Lise’s confident explanation as to why women get killed in the park. This first degree reading, however, displays the same sort of reasoning which underscores much criticism of the novel. Rankin takes things one step further:

Only at the very end does Lise see ‘how final is finality.’ She is, in the end, not to be pitied too much, for her plan has worked. Her victim [sic] is more in need of sympathy. He, a rehabilitated sex-offender, goes to prison. This is a macabre form of suicide, and one which hides its planner’s intent.... Lise has decided to commit suicide, yet cannot bring herself to do it.... she is committing suicide because she has been a lonely anonymous woman, and both the modus operandi of her suicide and her actions during the hours preceding it, will ensure her at least posthumous recognition in the world.12

25Rankin slips, in this passage, from a ‘form of suicide’ to ‘decided to commit suicide’ to ‘is committing suicide.’ Now surely, whatever one’s opinion of Lise, she definitely does not commit suicide. To claim she does is to side, as Rankin seems to, with the killer, and it is in this respect that The Driver’s Seat is, I feel, as much about ‘the reporting of women’s experience by men’.13 as anything else.

26The above readings of The Driver’s Seat all involve attributing a purpose to the protagonist. This is, as we have seen, a natural consequence of the prolepses. The flashes forward after Lise’s death provide us with the end of a causal chain and encourage us to read, or to reread, apparently contingent events as motivated. This change of perspective is all the more remarkable as the text is written in the narrative present. In a past tense narrative like Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, both the main narrative and the prolepses are in the preterite. It is in the nature of the preterite to imply a certain determinism. The present tense, on the other hand, is the narrative tense of contingency, of unconnectedness. The events narrated appear contemporaneous with the act of narration, giving the impression that anything could happen, that things have not been predetermined.14 The intrusion of will prolepses in a present tense narrative thus implies a greater change of perspective than past tense prolepses in a past tense narrative. Roof neatly says that ‘Leaping into the future gives the present a design.’15 The problem, in The Driver’s Seat, is finding whose design. Critics appear to have no difficulty identifying the ‘real reason[s] for [Lise’s] behaviour.’ (Carruthers 521) Let us look more closely at two of the passages which allow us to anticipate her purpose.

Lise grabs the papers and moves away as if thinking only of the next formality of travel. She puts her ticket in her bag, takes out her passport, slips the boarding card inside it, and makes straight towards the passport boxes. And it is almost as if, satisfied that she has successfully registered the fact of her presence at the airport among the July thousands there, she has fulfilled a small item of a greater purpose. (20)
Lise stands for a moment in the aisle, raising the arm on which the hand-bag is slung from the wrist, so that the paperback, now held between finger and thumb, is visible. She seems to display it deliberately, as if she is one of those spies one reads about who effect recognition by pre-arranged signals and who verify their contact with another agent by holding a certain paper in a certain way. (39)

27Both these passages might allow us to think that Lise has a plan, and yet, on closer reading, the expression of purpose is couched in hypotheticals: as if, almost as if, seems. I could cite other examples, but the point is that Lise’s intentions are only ever presented to us as hypotheses one could reach based on surface appearances.16 The narrative even reminds us, on two occasions, with a question addressed directly to the reader, that we cannot know what Lise is thinking: ‘She puts the bunch of keys in her hand-bag, picks up her paperback book and goes out, locking the door behind her. Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?’ (50)

28When Carlo the garage-owner describes to Lise an overheard telephone conversation which makes him think his wife is unfaithful, Lise sagely counsels him: ‘“You must understand,” Lise says, “that anything at all that is overheard when the speaker doesn’t know you’re listening takes on a serious note. It always sounds far worse than their actual intentions are.”’ (80)

29The advice could almost be addressed to the reader who, with the hindsight provided by the prolepses, is sensitive, and possibly over-sensitive, to anything that might be taken as incriminating evidence. Before the final chiasmus mentioned above, the novel’s last paragraph mixes narrative and prolepsis, taking us with the killer into the police station:

He runs to the car, taking his chance and knowing that he will at last be taken, and seeing already as he drives away from the Pavilion and away, the sad little office where the police clank in and out and the type-writer ticks out his unnerving statement: ‘She told me to kill her and I killed her. ...’ (107)17

30We might, as McQuillan has suggested, pick up on the clue of the apparently unmanned type-writer automatically producing a statement to consider The Driver’s Seat as an example of the self-begetting novel, a variety of metafictional conceit which Spark had already experimented with in The Comforters for example. This line of inquiry is particularly interesting since Lise has spent a good part of the novel looking for her ‘type.’ The word is not so common a synonym for man in English, and its repetition makes it a leitmotiv of the novel. Lise is of course killed by her type, the man she had sat next to in the plane, but she is also killed by the written type, the words on the page. The link between the two might remind us of the etymology of type, from the Greek typtein, to strike.

31We could also interpret the type-writer as the writer of types, i.e. something or someone that presents us with stereotypical situations or individuals. I have tried to suggest that it is largely in this way that The Driver’s Seat functions. The apparent contingency provided by the present-tense narrative and the absence of consistency or motivation are brutally forced into pattern by the proleptic revelation of Lise’s murder. Once the reader begins reinterpreting accident for design, however, he is very easily encouraged to slip into stereotyped interpretations where Lise, a woman, is punished for trying to assume control over the essentially male narrative. The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is turned on the reader, whose patriarchal expectations, as we have seen from our study of the criticism, often appear to exonerate the killer. Like the journalists of Europe, the reader, well used to the murder story, is left to ‘elaborate... with due art’ (51) upon the dispassionate account he is provided with. If Lise appears to display her detective novel deliberately, (39, 54) it is perhaps just to help the reader recognise the type of story he is required to interpret.

5 A more deliberate cunning: emotion from impersonality

32The impersonality of The Driver’s Seat is that of the police report or the forensic photograph. Its use of the present and its refusal to engage with the psychology of its characters (if that were not an oxymoron) is part of a deliberate strategy. As Kermode writes:

There is certainly a remoteness, a lack of ordinary compassion, in her dealings with characters, but this is part of the premise of her fiction; if we feel sorry in the wrong way, it’s because our emotions are as messy and imprecise as life, part of the muddle she is sorting out.18

33Onto this dispassionate surface the reader is tempted and encouraged to supply pattern. What these patterns may reveal about our own expectations is, however, often rather unnerving. It is in this respect that The Driver’s Seat does not eschew emotion per se, but displaces the nexus of emotion. Instead of emotion being generated, and purged, through pathos and identification, it is aroused by the enforced confrontation between the reader and his often disturbing expectations about what, to use the idiom, makes a good read.