Perforated Narrative Space in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means

Abstract

NOTE: Due to a possible editorial conflict of interest author Tijana Parezanović did not participate in the editing/publishing process of this issue of the journal.This article deals with the spatial aspect of texts about World War II and the post-war period, analyzing Muriel Spark’s 1963 novella The Girls of Slender Means as an example. It observes the novella as a realistic work narrated in the fantastic mode, and the analysis is primarily informed by Patricia García’s concepts of the fantastic of space and the fantastic hole. The article argues that the temporal disruption made by World War II is reflected in texts about the war as spatial perforation. As The Girls of Slender Means is carefully structured around the firmly ordered and intact space of the May of Teck Club, the one location that triggers the major event of the novella is a hole in the building’s structure, the heterotopic perforation conceived as fantastic because it is hidden from sight in the otherwise shattered landscape of post-war London. This location is simultaneously a spatial emblem of the cultural and social circumstances of the era since it creates a temporal loop which bring the present, past, and future together into a comprehensible whole, which can be seen in the parallelism of the novella’s two timelines (1945 and 1960s). Additionally, the analysis results in the implications of the given concepts of spatiality to the narrative method, showing that spatial perforations also cause a perforated story and narrative gaps, thus leaving for the reader to infer the meaning of the unnarrated.