Coming of age as a Catholic in the early fifties in London was not much different from growing up on New York’s Staten Island ten years or so later—growing up a Catholic, that is. The same sort of Irish Jansenist spirituality and morality seem to have circulated in the boroughs of both metropolises. The church universal has an unmistakable parochial aspect in David Lodge’s early novels; they put in holy card context fasts before Communion, the Hungarian revolution, and the letter to the pope given to the children at Fatima. Some writers make the exotic familiar, some estrange the everyday; others, like Lodge, make the familiar familiar. That is not to say he has nothing new to offer; anyone who lived through those years cannot resist the accuracy and the humor of the recently reissued Souls and Bodies (1980, 1989) which traces the movement of the church militant from its pre-Vatican II Latin assurances to the disappearance of Hell and beyond.
Lodge, born in 1935 and now an honorary professor of English literature at Birmingham University, has had an impressive academic career: works on Greene and Waugh, critical theory, narrative forms—and seven novels. One, Small World (1984), has recently been adapted for television in Britain. As a critic and reviewer in print and on the small screen, as an editor and essayist, he has proven himself a versatile man of letters. His impact and popularity, however, rest on his gifts as a comic writer.
In the introduction to the 1980 Penguin reissue of the 1965 novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down, he describes the sources of his comic impulse:
I had lighted upon a subject of considerable topical interest and concern...one which had not been treated substantively by any other novelist...that was the effect of the Catholic church’s teaching about birth control on the lives of married Catholics and the questioning of that teaching.
The British Museum Is Falling Down is the first of the comic novels, and the tension between sexual impulse and prohibitive restraint has been Lodge’s subject since then. The source of the humor had particular historical circumstances—postwar society on the edge of permissiveness, Vatican II and aggiornamento, and the introduction of the pill—but Lodge taps knowingly a universal theme, the grotesqueries to which sex drives us all. In The British Museum they are unfailingly comic, but as later narrators will tell us some indeed are tragic.
What the church provides by way of tension in Lodge’s two overtly Catholic novels, literary pattern and mythic form bring to the “academic” ones. Lodge’s professional work in literary theory and success in academic life vie with and then surpass the impact of faith, at least in so far as it supplies the energy for his comic impulse. God, quite simply, does not come into Changing Places (1975), Small Worm (1984), and Nice Work (1989), the comedies that span almost two decades and the fortunes, tenured and otherwise, of Professors Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp. Lodge exploited ecclesiastical tensions in The British Museum, changed his focus to that of academic life in Changing Places, but returned to the church, if only to lay ghosts, in Souls and Bodies (1980). Sex, needless to say, remains a con- stant.
Lodge’s first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), one which he describes as a work of”scrupulous realism,” offers in germ much of what is to follow: religious turmoil, relevant literary speculation—on Christopher Marlowe and the Immaculate Conception—the handling of a large number of characters through one structuring device—the movie house—and the coming of age of the male protagonist. There is, however, little of the comic in the treatment of Mark Underwood and his suspiciously self-indulgent return to Catholicism. Mark is one of many chief characters whom Lxxige invites us to dislike.
The confessional mode of Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962, 1982) looks back at the experiences of a young Londoner drafted into the army upon completion of his undergraduate degree in English. Conscription for Jonathan Browne forces him, as it did his creator, to postpone a research degree in English literature. The novel is a reminiscence and is prefaced with these words:
[my] whole story reeks of a curiously inverted, inviolable conceit...I became a voyeur of my own experience.
Even now, it seems, I am not immune from the insinuations of Form. It occurs to me that these notes, which I am jotting down on this momentous morning, might usefully form a prologue and epilogue to the main story.
Self-deprecating tone, attention called to the use of autobiographical material by the fictional narrator (which is also autobiographical material for the author), self-conscious reference to the demands of fiction—Form requires design, artfulness: all these bear the marks of a writer who might succumb to the burden of his own critical self-consciousness. Yet, Lodge does not; rather he leaves us signposts, invitations to gauge his particular narrative stance against those of his predecessors. The British Museum has embedded into it ten passages of pastiche and a structure completed by a sustained parody of Molly Bloom’s monologue. The inability of his initial reviewers to detect the clues to allusiveness prompted Lodge in the new introduction to name the writers pastiched and challenge the reader to detect them.
Souls and Bodies’ narrator identifies himself as the author of The British Museum and quotes a hilarious letter of praise from an appreciative Czech. He also tells the reader he has described the dress of his principals, ten undergraduates, in such a way as to reveal their character traits and muses, citing the dictum of a recent French critic, on how to describe married love. Lodge not only makes the familiar familiar, his narrators employ an ironic familiarity, and invite a sort of conspiracy in which they will share the jokes framed for the unwitting mortals the writer has created. And what sort of jokes? Largely those deriving from the sheltered childhoods bestowed upon them by their Catholic families, their naïveté about sex, their slipping commitment to a traditional world view, and their frustrating attempts to keep the faith, renew the church, and live in the late twentieth century. The tone of the books makes a reader think that Lodge has invited them to be his dinner guests; and the host is expansive, witty, and titillatingly explicit about sex.
Souls and Bodies was issued first in England as How Far Can You Go? and as this title implies, it is a book about license. When the vertical axis of faith sticks believers with absolute truths to the horizontal of the real world, the compass they have is no wider than dogma and no more free than the constraints which link the human will to the divine—per Jesum Christum et Matrem Ecclesiam. Lodge has his couples face the passing of the “Snakes and Ladders” game plan of faith and confront the problematic freedom that comes when God’s hand no longer guides them through the univocal teaching of the church. Rabelais’s motto, “Do as you will!” hangs over the swinging sixties. And in that tension between extra ecclesiam nulla salus and “Do as you will!” the comic energy of this serious funny novel leaves us with the answer: wait and see. The topicality of the book, its concern with the church’s ban on contraception, can, mutatis mutandis, be brought ahead ten years and be applied to the abortion debate. “How far can you go?” is for most of the faithful today a vital question.
Here is Lodge describing the mental equipment of his late adolescent Catholics:
Up there was Heaven; down there was Hell. The name of the game was Salvation, the object to get to Heaven and avoid Hell. It was like Snakes and Ladders/Chutes and Ladders/; sin sent you plummeting down towards the Pit; the sacraments, good deeds, acts of mortification, enabled you to climb back towards the light. Everything that you did was subject to spiritual accounting.
The spiritual accounting was keenest, of course, in the merits and demerits associated with sex. “Our courtship,” declares Dennis, a student we have followed to middle age, “must have been one of the longest drawn-out foreplay sessions in the histor of sexuality.” We see inexpert gropings, tortured attempts not to go too far, and watch wedding night encounters with their inevitable disappointments. The “How Far Can You Go?” game of course extends beyond courtship and into marriage:
But just when they began to get the hang of sex—to learn the arts of foreplay, to lose their inhibitions about nakedness, to match each other’s orgasmic rhythms—pregnancy or fear of pregnancy intervened, and their spontaneity was destroyed by the tedious regime of calendar and temperature chart.
Under the pressure of the permissive society and with the safety of the pill, the married Catholic couples abandoned the “safe method” and did go to contraception. In one of a series of “straight” authorial discourses to the reader, we hear this: In one of a serie of “straight” authorial discourses to the reader, we hear this:
So they stood upon the shore of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a situation both agreeably stimulating and slightly unnerving. For we all like to believe, do we not, if only in stories? People who find religious belief absurd are often upset if a novelist breaks the illusion of reality he has created. Our friends had started life with too many beliefs—the penalty of a Catholic upbringing .... they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief (as of literary convention) it is a nice question how far you can go in this without throwing away something vital.
The last sentence is as good a way as any to describe the tone of this novel: an ironic proposal that something vital has gone. The only character whose life gives us religious assurance is the nun Ruth who, in a quixotic trip to the States to discover what the reform of convents here might teach her order in England, finds in Disneyland a dark night of the soul. Later in an emotional prayer group meeting she experiences an illumination which sustains her to the novel’s close. That Lodge should make Ruth at first so skeptical of prayer groups and then have her find in them so profound an experience which he parodies even as he has it enrich is yet another of his teasing novelistic ways of having it all.
In the profession of faith that is the writing of novels, the author is both god and believer, and in being both can happily, ironically (as in the last quotation), raise doubts about the possibility of his own existence. In miming the divine immanence and creative role he calls attention to the demise of the Absolute. The bleak cosmic frame of the story, introduced benignly enough in an exchange between a priest about to give up his vocation and an adolescent looking through a telescope at the infinite universe, tells us that we are until death and little more—“the only immortality...was that of being stored in a kind of cosmic memory bank.” Not that God is a joke; the plot unties enough loose strands at the close to allow us to believe that faith is an option. No, we are told, consider this: if God is a joke, then so is the novelist. How can he preserve the absolutism, the unironic refusal to intrude, if the supreme fiction of creation is really a put-on?
Souls and Bodies ends with another fiction, a transcript of a television documentary (the year is 1975) of an Easter Liturgy of the Catholics for An Open Church. The speaker of the last voice-over is coyly unidentified; he says among other things that assessment of Christian belief is like reading or writing a novel:
... we maintain a double consciousness of the characters as both, as it were, real and fictitious, free and determined, and know that however absorbing and convincing we may find it, it is not the only story we shall want to read (or, as the case may be, write) but part of an endless sequence of stories by which man has sought and will always seek to make sense of life. And death.
For the narrator and novelist David Lodge, the tensions that faith brings to living the just life and facing the arrival of death seem to lapse with this statement. In the equation he makes above between the divine creative activity and that of the novelist, he introduces a new set of tensions. Three years before this, Lodge had asserted in his theoretical work, The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), “all critical questions about novels must be ultimately reducible to questions about language” and not, as he went on to say, questions about content. The three “academic novels” indicate that the critical theories Lodge pursued at this time gave stimulus to his craft with a new sort of dualism: that between language and reality.
The novels warn us unequivocally about the problems of mixing life and literature: “Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children. Life is the other way around”—so Adam Appleby of The British Museum. Yet we might risk indulgence in the fallacy which takes fiction as autobiography to note that the sex in Souls and Bodies has undergone a form of exorcism. Changing Places, written five years earlier, offered alter-ego Philip Swallow a second sexual awakening without any Catholic traumas. Having opened up such a possibility, it is as if Lodge could not go on as a novelist until he had in Souls and Bodies evoked the Demon Sex, named Him with explicit anatomical detail, and summoned Him jocularly enough for us to smile at the nakedness of the grotesques. God and Hell disappear and the pill comes. The new dogmas have names such as “structuralism” and “semiotics.” With these models of the way the Word works, Lodge pursues the old demon in new guises.
Changing Places is a very funny novel, one of perfectly bal- anced plots and self-advertised changes of narrative form. We have a key provided: many references to a manual called Let’s Write a Novel whose words of advice Changing Places cheerfully subverts even as it cites them. The book begins the sequence with Philip Swallow leaving the university at Rummidge (the fictional equivalent of Birmingham) and spending a fateful six months in the year 1969 at Euphoria State University on the West Coast of the United States. His opposite number, Morris Zapp, occupies Philip’s position through the same but considerably less turbulent period on the English campus.
The two men change even the most intimate of places, their respective wives’ beds and in the grand finale sort themselves out in something like marital reconciliation. The permissiveness of Flower Child California and the vitality of the State of Euphoria occasion a second coming of age for Philip, whose English reserve disappears as he joins the “Dionysian hordes.” Morris has, by contrast, British reserve to contend with and fittingly he seduces both Hilary Swallow and the Rummidge English faculty by catching the “creeping English disease of niceness.”
The fun of Changing Places lies in the zany plot, Morris’s dead pan, and Philip’s inept exploration of women’s liberation, sit-ins, happenings, and Desiree Zapp. The novel also offers us a pastiche of narrative styles: epistolary form, newspaper clippings, advertisements, double flashbacks, and the “climactic” reconciliation as movie script. How will the two women and two men pair off? Almost by way of a “cocked snook” the novel equivocates about how art might bring real life situations to some sort of closure. Philip gets to conclude the novel by commenting on the indeterminacy of movie endings which unlike those of novels do not announce their arrival by the diminishing number of pages left to read. If the pill can turn life into “having sex and not having children,” which was, as Lodge’s Adam Appleby had once quipped, the chief characteristic of literature, then what can literature now do with sex? Equate it with pleasures of the text, not as pornographic stimulation, but as untrammeled play: language’s stripteasing revelations (to paraphrase what Morris Zapp will say) of the ways in which literature and life are not the same. To start, literature can mythologize sex.
Small World, which appeared in 1984, nine years after Changing Places, is built on the archetype of Romance. It comes complete with a Miss Maidan, a retired university teacher and once a student of Jessie Weston, an enactment in Lausanne of the text of “The Wasteland,” and the erratic romantic questing of the hero, young Persse McGarrigle (read Percival) who pursues the illusive and literally duplicit Angelica Pabst. We are left in no doubt, sex is part of the natural cycle and cycle it is: those at the beginning are in the heats and sweats of love and are apt to go to any lengths—in this case any professional literary conference—to fulfill their desires.
The man at the turn of the cycle, Philip Swallow, as he puts it in a telling phrase, is “fucking my way out of the grave” in defiance of death following a near fatal plane crash. Arthur Kingfisher, the doyen of literary critics, is the aged Fisher King and is impotent even in the hands of his manipulating amanuensis, but stiffens suddenly in a spring-like December wind to an old man’s virility and, of course, reestablishes control of the realm of literary criticism. Persse asks the questions demanded of every Grail Knight and is granted possession of the woman he desires only to find that he desires another woman.
The sex isn’t in the head in this book, it is in the remarkable and remarkably funny design. The tensions are those of inevitability: schadenfreude is the italicized expression Lodge uses more than once to gloss his character’s responses, a malicious chuckle, of joy in another’s defeat, of displacement of the inevitable death that is approaching. Every attempt to “fuck death” and produce a rebirth is sterile, although life is in the trying—which is a consummately pagan and understandable sequel to Souls and Bodies where sex threatened a form of spiritual death.
The commonplace that the university stifles the artist has to be reversed in Lodge’s case: he makes his art out of the university and, never afraid to teach, offers potted courses in the latest forms of critical theory. His command of theory is such that he can make postmodernist theories thematic. The enlivening ingredients are his way with dialogue and, inevitably, sex.
In Lodge’s most recent novel, Nice Work, the exotic becomes familiar (and vice versa) in a deconstruction of a cigarette adver- tisement-significantly the billboard is an icon is a rebus is a representation of the vagina and makes smoking ultimately a surrogate for rape. (Is this book sold in North Carolina?) Our guide through this is Robyn Penrose, a young lecturer in Philip Swallow’s department at Rummidge, who is assigned to “shadow” Vic Wilcox, engineer and managing director of a local foundry. They are participants in a government scheme to bridge the two cultures, to mix the ivory tower with the shop floor. Robyn is postmodern, a feminist, and certainly not at all tense about sex. At an early juncture in the novel, she and her significant other, Charles, are having, as the narrator comments in deadpan, “non-penetrative sex,” not through fear of AIDS but because Robyn refuses to take the pill for health reasons and Charles finds condoms “unaesthetic.” AIDS to heterosexuals, we read “was only a cloud on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand.” The contextual pun on the massage going on apart, there is a sign here which seems deliberately dropped. The hand which presides over this novel is manus hominis and not manus dei. Sex before AIDS is a matter of choice and self-control, an indulgence like a food which must be had in moderation and in health.
The tension that comes of sex in Nice Work is one of interpretation. Robyn, in a moment of champagne abandonment, but still “in control,” takes Vic to bed only to find that he reads the act as commitment, worse, as love. The tension in the scenes which follow is that of intention: what the act means and cannot mean. Vic’s notions of the signified and signifier are for Robyn ungrounded in any reality. Vic reads romantic love and Robyn reads “fuck.” No flesh comes from that word. Typically Robyn deals with her problem as one of interpretation, asserting to a colleague that she is “getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality.” The plot defuses the tensions with Vic’s return to his family life. This is occasioned not by fulfillment through sex (making love) but through metaphor (making meaning)—his family galvanizes around him when he abruptly loses his job. In Robyn’s own parlance (the distinction formulated by Roman Jackobson) we have to differentiate metonymy from metaphor, representation from meaning: sex does not mean love. It is not a metaphor for emotion, rather it is “fuck,” a metonym for a physical act which means rather less than the act might imply among those creatures who are not readers of signs.
“But repetition is death!” Robyn cried. “Difference is life, Difference is the condition of meaning. Language is a system of differences....”
In the end these words might stand as an epigraph for David Lodge’s academic novels; he has one theme, or so it seems, the assertions of sex and the denials of death. He repeats with a difference that theme in each of these comic novels. The delight he takes in the literary theology which sees God as the “ultimate floating signifier” allows him a Wizard-of-Oz-like godhead—only he invites us to come behind the throne and watch the machinery of illusion and effect. Our host for dinner has got to the port stage and is expansive in his insistence on the variety of sameness, of the way in which we deal not with absolutes intersecting time, but only with time which time and time again is betrayed by language.
Nice Work, to be fair, is about a great deal more than sex. Robyn’s assertion about “repetition” refers to the dangers of too uniform a literary curriculum and canon, by extension to the nature of the factory work that she has witnessed, to post-industrial England and the ways of corporations, and to the uniformity of university students. Finally Nice Work is about commitment to teaching and to family: Robyn does not take the plum job offered to her by Morris Zapp at Euphoria; rather, because of an unexpected legacy, she stays on at Rummidge and even provides the venture capital for Vic’s nascent company and renascent family.
Coming into middle age in the English midlands in the early eighties is not unlike coming into middle age some years later in America. Whatever faith the man, David Lodge, now professes (and tell me, gentle Reader, what hermeneutic do we use to interpret the words, “the man”?), we know it is grounded in a Catholic childhood. Reading David Lodge is also like overhearing a confession, an elaborate, improbable, and deliberately shocking confession, meant to redden the ears of reverend father. Lodge’s heels seem to poke from under the curtain and wriggle as he half-remembers and half-invents detail after detail. We can only guess his thoughts as he winks slyly at whatever Presence watches the charade and at the blackness beyond the grille. We also hope that he has no firm purpose of amendment.
