Spark’s Quantum Novel: Uncertainty, Observation, and Agency in <i>The Comforters</i>

Despite Muriel Spark's professed interest in science, few critics have considered the impact of scientific ideas on her work. Drawing on archival sources, this essay examines the central role of quantum physics in Spark's first novel, The Comforters. Spark's working notebooks for the novel reveal that she understood its metafictional conceit in terms of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as a dramatic example of the observer affecting the observed. As a result, by attending to the contemporary sources from which Spark drew her knowledge of quantum physics, I demonstrate that the novel's paradoxes of observation are significantly inspired by quantum mechanics. In The Comforters, as in quantum physics, an indeterminate reality is given shape by the mutual interaction of observer and observed. Because of this, all knowledge in the novel – including that retailed by the narrator – is perspectival and potentially fallible; and this, in turn, should cause us to reconsider the universally-assumed characterization of Mrs Hogg as the novel's villain.