Science Fiction or the Power of Fiction: Different Readings of Muriel Spark’s “The Playhouse Called Remarkable”

This essay aims to explore one of Muriel Spark’s lesser-known short stories, “The Playhouse Called Remarkable”, a formally and thematically ingenious and ambiguous narrative. The story can be summarized as the journey of six natives from the Moon travelling to Earth to share their knowledge with human beings who are dying of boredom and lacking projects or higher-level pursuits in life. What initially might seem like a science fiction short story about a journey from the Moon to Earth develops into a complex and symbolic portrayal of the Moon and an imaginary visualization of moon people, illustrating the artless state of mankind threatened by extinction. Through the symbolic narrative of Moon Biglow and his companions’ journey to Earth, Muriel Spark, with a surreal and almost playful style, presents, in “The Playhouse Called Remarkable”, a reflection on the transforming and illuminating power of art. By telling the story of the mythical moon people and their coexistence with human beings, she delves into the assumption that mankind cannot subsist without art or literature, focusing on the radical importance and necessity of literature as Tzevan Todorov theorized much later in La Littérature en peril (2007).