ABSTRACT
Near the beginning of The Driver's Seat Muriel Spark signals that she is going to offer some 'drastic reductions', using the economic metaphor to introduce a decadently consumerist cosmopolitan world. At least some of the problems posed for the reader by this radical laconicism may be usefully thought of in the twinned terms of the author's subtitle: partial disclosures and displaced authorities. The former refers to the way in which we are normally given only part of the picture and compelled to construct the story frequently out of only meagre clues. Interpretation is itself always a more or less drastic reduction of all the possible readings provoked by the blanks in the text. Generic reassignment has, in fact, already established itself as a an aspect of characterization and the reading process. Popular literary kinds, not so culturally privileged as the tragic, are parodically destabilized, since Lise appears to reconstruct her life-narrative through deceptive and contradictory rewritings of her own script.
