Adria Bernardi: Spandrels, Spark, and a Leap Over the Tombstone: A Discussion of (Swift) Connections and (Unexpected) Associations Made Outside Chronological Sequence (January 2005)

How can fiction writers, as Muriel Spark put it, give “disjointed happenings a shape”? Adria Bernardi considers the ways that narrative can be driven by association, often of the resonant, seemingly small image, as well as craft strategies of voice and tonality, and precision of image and language. Drawing on non-fiction about writing by Robert Boswell and Italo Calvino, Bernardi looks, for examples in fiction, at Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means.