Contemporary English Literature

Tomislav Pavlović

Lecture 4 – In the Footsteps of Bakhtin: David Lodge

David Lodge was born in 1935 at Brockley, London. He studied at University College of
London, obtaining a BA (with honours) in 1955. In 1959 received an MA from UCL. He went on
to obtain a PhD at the University of Birmingham, and taught English there from 1960 until 1987,
being particularly noted for his lectures on Victorian fiction. He retired from his post at
Birmingham in 1987 to become a full-time writer, but he retains the title of Honorary Professor
of Modern English Literature at the University and continues to live in Birmingham.
Lodge’s opus provides a perfect illustration of the situation of the British novel in the
1960’s, which he famously described in 1969 as “standing at the crossroads”: due to the
immense pressure on the aesthetic and epistemological premises of literary realism, many
novelists considered two routes branching off on opposite directions: one led towards
neodocumentary, fiction as history, history as fiction; the other led towards fabulation or
metafiction.1 But despite being drawn to metafiction, Lodge retained a modest faith in realism:
he was not prepared to accept the assumption that history and reality were so appalling and the
human situation so disastrous that realism could no longer be a fitting response to reality.2
Having published two realistic novels in the early 1960’s (The Picturegoers /1960/ was
about young Catholics struggling with the moral problems of their faith, while Ginger You’re
Barmy /1962/ dealt with doing the National Service, a key experience for Lodge’s generation), in
The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), which is about a perfectly realistic subject, young
Catholic parents struggling with the perils of contraception, Lodge started experimenting with
metafiction.
The plot is deceptively simple: it tells the story of a single day in the life of a rather
hapless British postgraduate student named Adam Appleby. Much to his regret, Appleby awakes
every morning with thoughts of all the unpleasant and stressful aspects of his life “crouched like
harpies round his bed”, namely, “that he was 25 years of age, and would soon be 26, that he was
a postgraduate student preparing a thesis which he was unlikely to complete in this the third and
final year of his scholarship, that the latter was hugely overdrawn, that he was married with three
very young children, that one of them had manifested an alarming rash the previous evening, that
his name was ridiculous, that his leg hurt (...) that he had forgotten to reserve any books at the
British Museum for this morning’s reading, that his leg hurt, that his wife’s period was three

1
Cf. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel 1878-2001, Penguin, London, 2001, p. 411. In literary criticism,
the term fabulation was popularized by Robert Scholes, in his work The Fabulators, to describe the large and
growing class of mostly 20th century novels that are in a style similar to magical realism, and do not fit into the
traditional categories of realism or (novelistic) romance. They violate, in a variety of ways, standard novelistic
expectations by drastic – and sometimes highly successful – experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal
sequence, and fusions of the everyday, fantastic, mythical, and nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional
distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic. Metafiction is a type of fiction
that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. It is a literary term describing fictional writing that self-
consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship
between fiction and reality, usually through irony and self-reflection.
2
Bradbury, op. cit., p. 376.
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days overdue, and that his leg hurt”.3 The overall picture is almost complete, but for one essential
detail: Adam Appleby, impoverished and stressed to his limits, is a Catholic in the early 1960’s.
While he has hopes that the Church might change its teaching on artificial contraception, it
certainly never occurs to either him or his wife Barbara to do anything but live within its
constraints, the results of which are scattered about his tiny apartment: Adam and Barbara have
three children – Clare, Dominic, and Edward. (Their friends occasionally ask them if their
intention is to work through the entire alphabet.) Adam expands this vision into an entry from an
imaginary Martian encyclopaedia on “Roman Catholicism”, compiled after life on Earth has
been extinguished by a nuclear war:
“Roman Catholicism was, according to archaeological evidence, distributed fairly widely
over the planet Earth in the twentieth century. As far as the Western hemisphere is concerned, it
appears to have been characterized by a complex system of sexual taboos and rituals. Intercourse
between married partners was restricted to certain limited periods determined by the calendar
and the body temperature of the female. Martian archaeologists have learned to identify the
domiciles of Roman Catholics by the presence of large numbers of complicated graphs,
calendars, small booklets full of figures, and quantities of broken thermometers, evidence of the
great importance attached to this code. Some scholars have argued that it was merely a method
of limiting the number of offspring, but as it has been conclusively proved that the Roman
Catholics produced more children on average than any other section of the community, this
seems untenable.”4
The above is the first of the many examples of Lodge’s extensive use of pastiche (a
literary or other artistic genre that is a “hodge-podge” – a work cobbled together in imitation of
several original works).5 This novel, incorporating passages where both the motifs and the styles
of writing from various sources, in this case an entry from an encyclopaedia, are imitated,
develops through a series of delightfully witty parodies of the literary styles of Virginia Woolf,
Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene (a fellow Catholic author), among others. As
Lodge points out in his afterword to the 1981 edition of the novel, when it was first published
very few reviewers recognised the full extent of the parodies, while a surprising number of them
never even mentioned them, some even complaining that it was somewhat derivative. It was only
after the blurb of a later American edition drew attention to the parodies that they were duly
noticed and generally approved.6 But even if the reader remains blissfully unaware of the actual
sources of some, or even all, of the parodic passages in the novel, it need not diminish his/her
enjoyment of it.
And so we follow Adam Appleby through his day as he vainly attempts to work on his
thesis (entitled “The Structure of Long Sentences in Three Modern English Novels”) within the
labyrinthine bowels of the British Museum. However, rather than work on his thesis, Adam is,
time and again, distracted from his work and gets into all kinds of trouble instead. He disputes
matters academic, personal and theological with his colleagues; uncovers a lost and potentially
scandalous manuscript by one Egbert Merrymarsh, a minor Chesterton-like apologist (when he
eventually has a look at it, he feels uncomfortable realising that the man’s writings are worthless
drivel); contemplates adultery for the sake of his career (at the house in Bayswater where he is
supposed to get the unpublished manuscripts, Adam has to cope with an assortment of weird
3
David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down, Penguin Books, London, 1983, pp. 7-8.
4
Idem, p. 12.
5
Etymologically, pastiche is the French version of the Greco-Roman dish pastitsio or pasticcio, a kind of pie made
of many different ingredients.
6
Lodge, op. cit., p. 171.
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characters ranging from butchers to a young virgin intent on seducing him); comes to his senses;
and throughout, makes frequent anxious telephone calls home monitoring his wife’s condition,
all the while wearing his wife’s underwear on account of lacking a clean pair of underpants of
his own to put on, having scorched a recently washed one on the grill-pan.
In the course of researching his PhD thesis, Adam comes to realise that “Literature is
mostly about sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.” 7 At the end
of the day, Adam’s main dilemma is resolved satisfactorily: his wife is not pregnant, after all. In
fact, the end of the novel belongs to his wife, in a parody of Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy
ending James Joyce’s Ulysses. But instead of Molly’s orgasmic and life-affirming “yes”,
Barbara’s monologue ends with an ironic – and postmodern – “perhaps”.8
In his later works, Lodge moves freely between the two modes, most notably so in his
“campus novels” trilogy (Changing Places /1975/, Small World /1984/, Nice Work /1988/).
Changing Places, inspired by Lodge’s experience of teaching in California, centres on two
academics: Englishman Phillip Swallow from the University of Rummidge in the West Midlands
(rather obviously modelled on Birmingham), and Morris Zapp, an American from the State
University of Euphoria (California), and their participation in an exchange programme that sees
them swap politics, lifestyles and wives. The English participant, Philip Swallow, is a very
conventional and conformist British academic, and somewhat in awe of the American way of
life. By contrast the American, Morris Zapp, is a top-ranking American professor who only
agrees to go to Rummidge because his wife agrees to postpone long-threatened divorce
proceedings on condition that he move out of the marital home for six months. Zapp is at first
both contemptuous of, and amused by, what he perceives as the amateurism of British academia.
As the exchange progresses, however, both Swallow and Zapp find that they begin to fit in
surprisingly well to their new environments. In the course of the story, both men have affairs
with the other’s wife. (Before that, Swallow even sleeps with Zapp’s daughter Melanie, without
realizing who she is.) Swallow and Zapp even consider remaining permanently. The book ends
with the two couples convened in a hotel room to decide their fates, without reaching a clear-cut
decision.
As we find out from the sequel, Small World, Swallow and Zapp returned to their
respective countries and domestic situations. Nice Work (1988) completes the trilogy with the
story of industrialist Vic Wilcox and his unlikely relationship with Marxist, feminist and post-
structuralist academic Dr Robyn Penrose.
Lodge pursued his metafictional concerns in his fictional as well as critical/theoretical
works. In the context of the latter, of particular importance is Lodge’s discovery of the work of
the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and his notion of “dialogue”, which he sees as
being central to the novel, as opposed to the monologism of older literary modes as epic or lyric. 9
Another notion of Bakhtin’s eminently applicable to Lodge’s work is “carnivalisation”. The
aspiration of carnival is to uncover, undermine – even destroy, the hegemony of any ideology
that seeks to have the final word about the world, and also to renew, to shed light upon life,
projecting, as it does so, an alternate conceptualisation of reality. Dialogism is a fundamental
aspect of the carnival – a plurality of fully valid consciousnesses, each bringing with them a
different point of view, a different way of seeing the world. Lodge remains engagingly modest
about his critical work – and somewhat suspicious of the current state of academic criticism:

7
Idem, p. 56.
8
Idem, p. 161.
9
Bernard Bergonzi, David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 55.
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 “A vast amount of it is not, like the work of Bakhtin, a contribution to human knowledge,
but the demonstration of a professional mastery by translating known facts into more and more
arcane metalanguages. This is not an entirely pointless activity – it sharpens the wits and tests the
stamina of those who produce and consume such work – but it seems less and less relevant to my
own writing practice.”10
Lodge’s metafictional concerns did not prevent him from maintaining a firm grip on
realism, perhaps best exemplified in his novel Out of the Shelter (1970), a Bildungsroman of
sorts and probably his most autobiographical work. Its protagonist, Timothy Young, is 5 years
old at the beginning of the novel. The story deals with his youth, focusing on his extended stay in
Germany at the age of 16, which will prove a rite of passage for him in many respects. In his
presentation of Timothy’s increasing maturity, Lodge is to a certain extent indebted to Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Timothy is no Stephen Dedalus, however: a hard-working
grammar school pupil, he is kept in touch with the rest of humanity by his interest in sex and
football. Something of an oddity in Lodge’s opus and not a universal critical favourite, Out of
the Shelter is remarkable for its moving presentation of a restricted childhood and an adolescent
consciousness trying to overcome the limitations of family and environment. Lodge has never
attempted anything like it in his other novels; perhaps, as Bernard Bergonzi suggests, there may
be experiences which could be written about only once.11
Perhaps the finest blend of Lodge’s metafictional inclinations and the underlying realism
of his prose is to be found in the novel Therapy (1995), a story about a successful sitcom writer,
Laurence (“Tubby”) Passmore, plagued by middle-age neuroses and a failed marriage. The novel
is divided into four parts: the first part is written as a journal, the second part is written in
dramatic monologues, the third part consists of journal entries and a memoir, and the fourth part
is a narrative written after the events described in it happened and Tubby returned to London.
In Part One Tubby is “angsting” generally about life, the universe and everything, and
trying out a range of therapies to deal with what his physiotherapist calls “Internal Derangement
of the Knee” – IDK or “I Don’t Know”. Tubby starts writing a journal triggered off by a
description he had to write for his cognitive behaviour therapist. Before that Tubby only wrote
screenplays but no narrative texts. In the course of writing, Tubby reflects upon his problems and
depression. He recognises guiltily that he doesn’t always listen to his wife Sally but believes his
marriage to be in good shape. At the end of this part he is faced with his wife’s shocking
announcement: “Sally just came into my study to tell me she wants a separation. She says she
told me earlier this evening, over supper, but I wasn’t listening. I listened this time, but I still
can’t take it in.”12
In Part Two, the first-person narrative is apparently discontinued, and we are treated to a
series of “dramatic monologues” in the voices of various people involved in Tubby’s life at this
stage, including his wife. From these we are able to piece together an account of the breakup and
Tubby’s desperate attempts to do something about it with all the comic and even farcical
elements intact. Having read through them, however, we learn that they have all been written by
Tubby himself – as part of his therapy. Tubby’s clear-sightedness extends not only to the
breakup of his marriage but also to his increasing obsession with Kierkegaard. He stumbles on
Kierkegaard accidentally, while looking something up, and finds him hard going at first – “dead
boring and very difficult to follow” – but soon begins to recognise himself and even his fellow

10
David Lodge, After Bakhtin, quoted in Bergonzi, op. cit., p. 56.
11
Idem, p. 12.
12
David Lodge, Therapy, Penguin Books, London, 1996, p. 126.
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Britons in Kierkegaard’s description of the unhappy man, caught between hope and
remembrance. For him, the moment of happy remembrance is England’s winning the soccer
World Cup in 1966. Since then, “We’ve become a nation of unhappy hopers.” Strangely enough,
the intelligent and intellectually curious but not very educated Tubby finds himself identifying
with Kierkegaard, including the philosopher’s strange failure at romance, when he rejected his
fiancée in spite of being obsessively in love with her for the rest of his life. Kierkegaard’s own
struggle against depression as a source of inspiration enables the novel to achieve something in
the nature of an ultimate oxymoron – a Kierkegaardian comedy, naturally, with a somewhat
bitter flavour.
In the third part, written as a first-person narrative again, the reader finds out about
Maureen, Tubby’s first love and his first girlfriend. As part of his therapy he also writes a
touching “Memoir” of their relationship, evocative of youth and innocence and of a happier time,
both in his life and in the life of the nation. It is by writing down their story that Tubby realises
what his problem is: he betrayed Maureen by dumping her in front of their friends. This effort
inspires him to go and search for Maureen, who is now married to his teenage rival. In the fourth
part, he finds her engaged in a kind of therapy of her own – on the Way of St. James,13 mourning
the loss of a son. Tubby’s arrival enables Maureen to complete her pilgrimage when she is on the
point of giving up, and his attentions make her losses, including the loss of a breast to cancer,
somewhat less painful. It is there that Tubby comes to terms with his problems and finally finds
peace.
As opposed to most other novels by Lodge, Therapy is written as a spoken first-person
narrative, which may appear to go against Lodge’s regard for Bakhtin and the dialogic principle.
But as Bernard Bergonzi pertinently observes, Tubby’s manner of speaking, assertive but also
insecure, often pleading or argumentative, is always aware of other voices that have to be
answered. Indeed, in Lodge’s hands the monologue becomes ventriloquial or heteroglossic, 14
thus remaining faithful to the spirit of Bakhtin.

13
The pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, in northwestern Spain, where tradition has
it that the remains of the apostle Saint James are buried.
14
Bergonzi, op. cit., p. 59.
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