Who’s afraid of realism?: ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark

Close Readings

James Wood explores Muriel Spark's 1961 novella, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, examining its unique blend of realist grammar and postmodernist

Key takeaways

• The novel uses free indirect style to adopt the perspective of a 12-year-old schoolgirl.
• Wood compares Spark's technique to Nabokov's Pnin, noting how both works reflect on the act of narrating a life.

Main topics

• Muriel Spark's literary style
• Realism vs. Postmodernism in literature

Notable quotes

most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted

Conclusion

The episode provides a deep, personal appreciation for Spark's ability

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close reading series from the London Review of Books. I'm James Wood, and this month we're discussing Muriel Spark's brilliant, beautiful, compact novella, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961. Speaker 2 (0:21) In all sorts of ways, it's a perfect book for our series. It's also very personal. It's a very personal book for me and one I deeply love. It may be the one I most love on our list of books going back to Madame Bovary. It's perfect, I think, because it drags with it many of the elements, the grammar of realism that we've been discussing from the beginning of series, but adds, as one might expect from an adventurous and innovative writer writing in the 1960s, what we might call a sort of postmodern element or twist to that realist grammar. The realist grammar is pretty obvious. There's a wonderfully vivid brilliance that Spark shows in what we were calling flat characterization. That would be a sort of Dickensian caricature. We were discussing it in relation to some of the minor characters in Mrs. Dalloway, for instance. Brilliant, vivid, almost caricatural characterization. Fabulous use of our old friend free and direct style, close third person. We're going to discuss that. But quite a lot of the novel is essentially narrated in third person, but from the implied perspective of a 12-year-old schoolgirl. Fabulous. details which we're going to get into in a minute. And in the most basic sense, in the most basic realist sense, it offers a recognisable and veridical account of the world. This is, as everyone acknowledges, Muriel Sparks' autobiographical novel about her own schooling in 1930s Edinburgh and about a teacher who was very important to her and her friends. But It's weirdly close to the novel that I was just discussing a month ago with Patricia Lockwood, Nabokov's Panin, and not just because the whole of The Prime and Mischief Brody was published in The New Yorker, as were several chapters of Panin. It has a very interesting interrupted form. It sort of moves chronologically, but there are amazing sort of flash-forwards and interruptions. We'll come to that in a minute. And it has very interesting self-reflexive elements. Both Pinin and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie are not just books that narrate a life, Professor Pinin, Miss Brodie, but they're books that reflect on the narrating of a life. They're books that make you think about how one goes about telling the story of a life. And both of them ask an important question, which is, what do we know of people? In so far as these books ask the question, what can we know of people? They also, of course, ask the question, what can we know of fictional characters? We often assume in a kind of caricatured realist way, the mirror going down the middle of the road, the window pane, that reading a fictional character is a window into reading a human being, that there's a proximity there between the fictive character and the human being. And that's why people talk about characters growing and changing and so-and-so is just like me. Both Pinin and the Prime Minister, Jean Brody, put a kind of obstacle in the way of what we can really know about these characters. And insofar as they do that, they not only make us think about how difficult it is in ordinary life to know people, but they also cause us to reflect on those assumptions and premises that we often bring to realist texts. Why should we assume that a character made up of words on a page has a direct connection to a human being. Why should we think that we should know what a character is in a novel just because we're told a lot of things about her? The French nouveau romancier, that's to say French postmodern avant-garde writers like Nathalie Sarraute, were quite interested in Muriel Spark, as it turns out, in the 1960s because they detected I think, amidst a kind of solid British post-war realism, think, say, Kingsley Amis, they detected in Spark someone who was more interesting and radical and self-reflective about the processes of writing than her peers. Indeed, she famously wrote a... frankly postmodern and self-reflective novel called The Driver's Seat in 1970, which as the title might give away, it meditates quite deeply on questions of sort of authorial omniscience and control and so on. Anyway, this is all quite boring. And the one thing I don't want to be is boring about this absolutely brilliant, funny novel that means so much to me. So let's get to the basics. As those