![]() ![]() ![]() You can’t settle, as the last place you want to find the strange (but where the strange very much is you’re simply immune to it) is in that front room, that pub, that office: all those places you feel you have some kind of absolute impression of, which is, in any case, mere sanity-augmenting shorthand. In altering the means of communicating the well-known slightly, it becomes alien whilst retaining its essence. ![]() But there’s something terribly wrong, and the heightened pitch turns well-worn recognition into something bizarre, queasy, and difficult to adjust to. You recognize it you can hear every note. Muriel Spark’s fiction, particularly if you haven’t read any for a while, feels like putting a very familiar old vinyl LP on at 45rpm. If you read The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), you understand, as has been emphasized by Muriel Spark many times, that “unnatural” is another term for “dangerously non-conformist.” The danger is a threat to all, propagator not excluded, but you know without a doubt which, of the two, you are encouraged to prefer. The artifice of the constructed persona: a favorite of this author. “If you try to be too natural, see where it gets you.” “All human beings who breathe are a bit unnatural,” Dougal said. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |