‘Repetition, boredom, despair’: Muriel Spark and the Eichmann Trial

Abstract

The aims of this essay are twofold. The first section focuses on the experience of Muriel Spark at the trial of the Holocaust administrator, Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, and on the author’s translation of this event into a fictional encounter in her novel, The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). The second section considers Spark’s use of the techniques of the French nouveau roman as a means of depicting Eichmann’s blind faith in a system representing extreme and uncompromising order. Spark’s exposure to Eichmann, I argue, had a profound and largely unacknowledged effect on the fiction she went on to write. By drawing upon the techniques of the nouveau roman in later novels such as The Driver’s Seat (1970), the author articulated anxieties unique to the post-war world.