Muriel Spark and fake news

This essay considers Muriel Spark’s experience, staging and critique of ‘fake news’, or the propaganda distortion of information in Information Operations within the society of the spectacle. Spark fictionalises media warfare and disinformation operations she had become familiar with through her work for British intelligence during the Second World War, namely the Political Warfare Executive’s fake radio newscasts to Nazi Germany as conceived and directed by Sefton Delmer. The electronic and informational space of computational data as fake news was heralded by the information-bearing radio waves of wartime secret state black propaganda and psywar operations. This prehistory is reflected upon in the second volume of Delmer’s autobiography, Black Boomerang, and in Spark’s The Hothouse of the East River, where she fictionalises her work at Milton Bryan. This article will concentrate on a close reading of The Only Problem, a novel that stages the construction of fake news stories as militarised-psychographic, post-ethical, erotic manipulation of the public sphere. Effie appears as emergent love object to Harvey, resurrected as media goddess of fake news and psychological warfare, and it is that love that matches the manipulative redefinitions projected on victims by both the terrorist disinformation machine and the media as state apparatus.