Srbu Iuliana Mihaela
Litere, anul III
Univ. Hyperion
David John Lodge (born 28
January 1935) is an English
author and literary critic.
Lodge was Professor of English
Literature at the University of
Birmingham until 1987, and he
is best known for his novels
satirising academic life,
particularly the "Campus Trilogy"
Changing Places: A Tale of
Two Campuses (1975), Small
World: An Academic Romance
(1984), and Nice Work (1988).
Small World and Nice Work
were both shortlisted for the
Booker Prize. Another major
theme in his work is Roman
Catholicism, beginning from his
first published novel The
Picturegoers (1960).
Several of Lodge's novels are satirical depictions of the world of academe. The
so-called "Campus Trilogy" (Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work) are
all set at a fictional university in the English Midlands town of "Rummidge",
modeled after Birmingham. The novels share characters; notably, Rummidge's
English literature lecturer, Philip Swallow and his American counterpart,
Professor Morris Zapp, who aspires to be "the highest paid teacher of
Humanities in the world". Swallow and Zapp first cross paths in Changing
Places, where they swap jobs for an exchange scheme (and later, swap wives).
Lodge has said that the plot of the novel "was a narrative transformation of the
thematic material and the socio-cultural similarities and differences I had
perceived between Birmingham and Berkeley" (during his time as visiting
professor at the University of California, Berkeley).
Lodge's work first received recognition in France in the early 1990s, after the
publication by Rivages of two of his novels, Nice Work and Changing Places.
These were followed in 1991 by Small World and The British Museum Is Falling
Down. Since then almost all his works of fiction have been translated and his
new works are translated fairly quickly. His work is now published in France by
Payot et Rivages. The publication of his theoretical works in France began later,
beginning in 2003 with Consciousness and the Novel. The earlier works of this
area remained unpublished in France, except The Art of Fiction. His books are
routinely translated into a number of other languages including German,
Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Polish and Turkish.
David Lodge is often associated with his friend, Malcolm Bradbury, because
the two men started writing about the same time, they have both decided to
combine academic and literary careers, were the colleagues at the
Birmingham university and above all are the founders of an innovative form of
the campus novels.
The campus novel develops in a more or less specialized community and
addresses a more or less specialized public which is able and willing to
appreciate the numerous elements of literary parody. The campus novel is
thus defined as a satirical comedy with strong elements of parody.
The campus novel as a literary genre was introduced into English literature
by David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury. Their novels Changing Places (1975)
and The History Man (1975) are both situated at fictitious universities and they
both caricature common drawbacks of British university education.
David Lodge is one of the most popular contemporary writers of this genre in
Britain. Ian Carter wrote that he is the brightest and the best of British
university novelists still writing (Carter 256). Through his campus fiction he
contributed to the perception of the university education in Great Britain.
Literary Terms gives this definition:
Campus novel is a novel, usually comic or satirical, in which the action is set within enclosed
world of university (or similar set of learning) and highlights the follies of academic life. Many
novels have presented nostalgic evocations of college days, but the campus novel in the usual
modern sense dated from the 1950s: Mary McCarthys The Groves of Academe (1952) and
Kingsley Amiss Lucky Jim (1952) began significant tradition in modern fiction including John
Barths Giles Goat-Boy (1966), David Lodges Changing Places (1975) and Robert Daviss The
Rebel Angels (1982) (Baldick 30).
This definition applies precisely to the works we will deal with. All the
campus novels are funny, they are critical to one aspect of life or other,
they are all set on university ground either Rummidge and Euphoric
University or one of the conferences and they are all concerned with
people from the academic ground.
Parody is a tool David Lodge uses a lot to make his readership laugh
and at the same time to be aware of his critique. He makes fun mostly of
teachers and uses stereotypes to make them look ridiculous. In the last
part of his campus trilogy, he turns his attention also towards institutions;
institution of British university educational system and industry.
David Lodge's trilogy of novels about a fictional English
university are solidly crafted pieces of comedy, the last
oddly prescient about academic life and British society.
The prime reason why Lodges novels are so popular with
the wide reading public is the use of humour and comic
elements in all of them. He uses satire and irony to ridicule
the academic world with all its peculiar habits.
Baldick in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
describes satire as a mode of writing which exposes the
failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule
and scorn.
Another element crucial for the Lodges comic work is
parody.
In Changing Places, written in 1975 but set in the tail end of the
1960s in the years of student protest Rummidge's
comparatively undistinguished Philip Swallow embarks on an
academic exchange with the flamboyant Morris Zapp of Euphoric
State University in the US. After the initial culture shock has abated
the two men find themselves becoming increasingly comfortable in
their new lives, to the point where even their wives become part of
the swap. Changing Places is the most formally experimental of the
three books parts of it are written as play text, one section is
entirely composed of newspaper clippings but all three share a
postmodern playfulness, a generous dusting of literary reference.
The second novel, Small World, is set against
the backdrop of the international academic
conference circuit, and is full of echoes of
medieval literature; young Irishman Persse
McGarrigle travels the world in search of the
love of his life while a large cast of
international academics, including Swallow
and Zapp, joust for a near-mythical
professorship.
Small World makes constant reference to Arthurian legend, in the plot,
character names and in allusions made by the characters (all
academics). Lodge says of the novel's genesis, "It gradually grew on me
that there was an analogy between my story and the Arthurian story,
particularly the Grail quest in which a group of knights wander around
the world, having adventures, pursuing ladies, love, and glory, jousting
with each other, meeting rather coincidentally or unexpectedly, facing
constant challenges and crises, and so on [...] This all corresponded to
the modern world with its Round Table of professors: the elite group who
get invited to conferences, who go around the world in pursuit of glory.
Sometimes they take the opportunity to indulge in amorous intrigue, or
to joust with each other in debate, pursuing glory in the sense of wanting
to be at the top of their profession."
Although Small World, David Lodges seventh novel, is ostensibly an
academic comedy of manners, Lodge compounds, or comically
complicates, his story and its realistic surface by joining to it an underlying
plot borrowed from romance literature, the mythic quest.
The book begins in April 1979 at a small academic conference at the
University of Rummidge. It is the first conference that Persse McGarrigle,
(a reference to Percival the grail knight), an innocent young Irishman who
recently completed his master's thesis on T. S. Eliot, has attended. He
teaches at the fictional University College, Limerick, after having been
mistakenly interviewed because the administration sent the interview
invitation to him instead of someone else with the same last name.
Several important characters are introduced: Rummidge professor Philip
Swallow, American professor Morris Zapp, retired Cambridge professor
Sybil Maiden, and the beautiful Angelica Pabst, with whom McGarrigle
falls immediately in love. Much of the rest of the book is his quest to find
and win her.
Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow, who are seeing each other for
the first time in ten years after the events of Changing Places,
have a long evening talk. Since the previous novel, Swallow has
become a professor and head of the English Department. Zapp
has discovered deconstructionism and reinvented himself
academically. Swallow tells Zapp about an incident a few years
before, when after almost dying in a plane crash he spent the
night at a British Council official's home and slept with the
official's wife, Joy. Soon after, Swallow read in the newspaper
that Joy, the official, and their son had died in a plane crash.
The second part of the book begins by going around the world,
time zone to time zone, showing what different characters are
doing all at the same time: Morris Zapp travelling; Australian
Rodney Wainright trying to write a conference paper.
Cheryl Summerbee is also introduced. She is a check-in clerk for
British Airways at Heathrow and plays a small but very important
role in helping, or hindering, other characters as they travel
around the world. She loves reading romance novels, especially
the kind published by "Bills and Moon".
People continue to move around from conference to conference around the
world in Part III. Persse continues to pursue Angelica. At a meeting in
Amsterdam, Persse hears the German literary scholar Siegfried von Turpitz
speaking about ideas that he submitted in an unpublished book, and all but
accuses von Turpitz of plagiarism. Zapp rises to defend Persse from von
Turpitz. Later, Persse sees someone who looks like Angelica, and thinks
she has appeared in pornographic movies and worked as a stripper. In
Turkey, Phillip Swallow meets Joy, the woman he thought was dead. She
explains that only her husband had been on the plane that crashed. They
begin an affair, and Swallow plans to leave his wife.
Events and characters move along in Part IV, often with direct reference to
the genre of romance, such as Sybil Maiden (who at one point acts as a
sibyl) saying that grail knights "were such boobies... All they had to do was
ask a question at the right moment, and they generally muffed it." Zapp is
kidnapped by an underground left-wing movement, but is later released
after pressure from Morgana. Persse, who has won an award and got a
credit card, has enough money to continue to chase Angelica but never
manages to catch up with her. She does leave him a clue referencing The
Faerie Queene and he discovers that she has an identical twin, and it is the
twin, Lily, who made the pornographic movies.
When Persse meets Cheryl Summerbee again, she is now reading not
romance novels but romances such as Orlando Furioso and critics such
as Northrop Frye after Angelica has passed through her line. Persse is
happy to learn this, but Cheryl is shaken to see that Persse is infatuated
with Angelica, because she loves him herself. Persse continues to chase
Angelica around the world, to conferences in Hawaii, Tokyo, and Hong
Kong, and Jerusalem, but he never catches up with her. At that
Jerusalem conference, Philip Swallow is with Joy, but after he sees his
son there he becomes psychosomatically ill, which people think might be
Legionnaires' Disease in a moment of panic. This stops the conference,
and leads to the end of Philip and Joy's affair.
Part V takes place at the Modern Language Association conference in
New York at the end of 1979. All of the characters in the book are there.
Arthur Kingfisher oversees a panel discussion about criticism where
Swallow, Zapp, Morgana, and others present their opinions on what
literary criticism is. Zapp's kidnapping experience has cured him of his
interest in deconstructionism. Persse (contrary to what Sybil Maiden had
said about knights not asking the right question at the right time) asks,
"What follows if everyone agrees with you?" Kingfisher is inspired by this
question, and recovers from his mental and physical impotence.
Persse finally finds Angelica and hears her read a paper about romances that
directly reflects the structure of Small World itself: "No sooner is one crisis in
the fortunes of the hero averted than a new one presents itself; no sooner has
one mystery been solved than another is raised; no sooner has one adventure
been concluded than another begins... The greatest and most characteristic
romances are often unfinished they end only with the author's exhaustion, as
a woman's capacity for orgasm is limited only by her physical stamina.
Romance is a multiple orgasm." After this talk, Persse runs through the hotel
and sees a woman he takes to be Angelica, kisses her and declares that he
loves her. She takes him up to her hotel room where they make love, in
Persse's first sexual experience. However, after this encounter, she reveals that
she is not Angelica, but the twin sister, Lily. Persse feels ashamed, but Lily
convinces him that he was "in love with a dream".
Later in the evening, Arthur Kingfisher announces that he will offer himself as a
candidate for the UNESCO chair. Right afterwards, Sybil Maiden steps forward
and announces that she is Angelica and Lily's mother and Kingfisher is their
father, which throws the entire meeting into a joyous uproar. Angelica
introduces Persse to her fianc, Peter McGarrigle, the person whose job
Persse was interviewed for back in Ireland. However, Peter is not angry,
because as a result, he went to America and there met Angelica. Swallow has
returned to his wife, saying "Basically I failed in the role of a romantic hero."
All of the narrative threads of the novel wrap up but for one:
Persse realizes that Cheryl Summerbee, not Angelica, is the
woman for him, and he flies to Heathrow to see her. He arrives at
the airport on New Year's Eve, but learns that Cheryl no longer
works there, having been fired the day before Persse arrives.
The new attendant tells Persse that Cheryl wanted to travel
anyway at some point, and took this as her chance. No one
knows where she has gone. The novel ends with Persse
wondering "where in the small, narrow world he should begin to
look for her.
David Lodge has stated that the character of Morris Zapp was
inspired by the literary critic Stanley Fish.
He also stated that: The reason why I thought of using the Grail
legend in Small World is a very simple one. When I started
thinking about the novel, I wanted to deal with the phenomenon of
global academic travel. The idea came to me at a James Joyce
conference in Zurich, which in fact is one of the settings for the
novel. I was getting into that international conference-going circuit
myself for the first time. Indeed I went straight from Zurich to
another conference in Israel. I was intrigued by the conjunction of
high-level academic discussion with a certain amount of partying
and tourism; by the mixture of cultures; and by the idea of people,
all of whom know each other, converging from all over the world
on various exotic places to talk about fairly esoteric subjects, and
then flying off, only to meet each other again in another exotic
venue. This is where I started: a kind of academic comedy of
manners, with a global dimension. The characters would travel
widely, having adventures as they went.
The trilogy concludes with Nice Work, a reworking of the Victorian
industrial novel, written in the mid 1980s but set in 1979. Feminist
academic Robyn Penrose is reluctantly put forward for a
"shadowing" scheme in which she is obliged to follow factory boss
Victor Wilcox about his day-to-day business, in an attempt to open
up a dialogue between Rummidge and its industrial surroundings.
As in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, initial animosity
between the two gives way to grudging respect before spilling over
into something more. Nice Work is also, despite the specificity of its
setting, the most resonant and in some ways prescient of three
books in the way it depicts shifts in the academic environment and
in British society as a whole.
David Lodge surely contributed to the recognition of British universities in the society.
Not only English society, though; as the novels have been translated into many
languages they affected and amused people from many countries and backgrounds.
He anchored the idea of higher education in the minds of ordinary people. The two
worlds, however, did not become one, but David Lodge tried to bring them as close as
possible. On one hand, he tries to communicate something about universities to the
reader who is inexperienced where the universities are concerned. He wants all his
readers to laugh and for this reason he employs various comic devices and elements in
his writing. On the other hand he also tries to make people who are familiar with
universities become conscious of its problems and he does so also by using the same
means.
His main device is criticizing by using humorous techniques, such as parody, irony and
satire. He makes fun of whatever he thinks needs to be pointed at and atoned. In his
campus novels, he compares the British and American way of doing things. He pokes
fun at both, but as he spends more time in the British environment, he also spends more
time criticizing British life-style, the educational system, its traditional views and also the
government.
On the whole, David Lodge is not the brightest and the best of British university
novelists still writing (Carter 256) for no reason. He is such a fantastic writer that his
novels can be read over and over again with the same pleasure, enjoyment and
laughter as if read for the first time.
