Small World
Murtaugh, Daniel M.
Commonweal: 344 Books: OF ROMANCE & MOCKERY SMALL WOBLD David Lodge Macmlllan, $15.95, 339 pp. Daniel M. Murtaagh IT'S really quite a good idea if you let it run. Think of professors as...
...Then your plot becomes the free-form of romance and a tissue of allusions to the original romances that professors in (and out of) the book will respond to with small spasms of self-congratulation...
...The novel's comic inventiveness also has a resonance of sadness...
...For they show that man's strivings are aimless to the extent that they are egotistical...
...The author, David Lodge, has created a large-scale satirical novel along the lines just described, and in Small World he does, let the idea run, with exhilarating results...
...In Small World, the American Express card replaces the library card and the professors eventually pursue the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism, the most attractive feature of which is that it is located nowhere — or wherever its occupant happens to be, a movable throne like the Arthurian siege perilous with which a character helpfully identifies it...
...Ariosto's wildly ramified plots (and Lodge's) are themselves a joke, but a joke with a serious point...
...What are you working on...
...31 May 1985: 345...
...What do I do now, they wonder...
...For one thing, the author's acknowledged debt to Ariosto puts him in a tradition of wry appropriation of Arthurian/ Carolingian tradition which sees the whole chivalric enterprise as absurd without losing a certain childlike wonder at it...
...And yet, the jets scream as they whirl the scholars errant around the world, "Wheeee...
...Like Swift in Gulliver's Travels, Lodge has a good deal of innocent fun with the details of his created world, filling it with puns, coincidences, and intricate little comic scenes worthy of Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd...
...Fun to contemplate with Morris Zapp the dissolution of the idea of the university as a stable physical entity, an institution which confessed its monastic origins in its very rootedness...
...they ask each other hungrily...
...You can bring the less learned or the less alert along a few pages later by an explicit reference to the literary source that you have been playing with...
...To these he adds an international collection of literary scholars with names like Textel, Siegfried von Turpitz, Fulvia Morgana, and Arthur Kingfisher, all of them humorous and yet also sinister embodiments of the corruption of literary studies...
...She is, apparently, part angel and part porn-queen, and she is maddeningly elusive...
...He thus nails down an allusion, implied by her name, to the heroine of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso...
...Think of professors as wandering pilgrims or knights errant...
...Before such quests the world itself becomes insubstantial, the mocking mirror of a disordered mind...
...Most of the characters' frantic theorizing and frantic movement are finally revealed to be a struggle with aging and a sense of emptiness...
...Small World takes i$ a number of characters that Lodge introduced in the 1979 novel Changing Places, principal among them Philip Swallow, professor of English at the University of Rummidge (something like Birmingham) and Morris K. Zapp, professor of English at Euphoria State (something like Berkeley...
...I don't think so...
...As I suggested in my opening paragraph, the learned jokes are eventually selfexplanatory, and much of the humor is both broad and precise in a way any intelligent reader can respond to...
...Early on Persse says, in his frustration, that it almost seems that she has a magic ring that can make her disappear...
...Augustine's vision of the soul forever restless in a world that is finally too small...
...That's the sort of trick Lodge plays in this novel, and it is worth pausing over...
...It's all grand fun amid the hustle and buzz of this crowded novel...
...The satire works because it is not too single-minded in its moral purpose...
...Some readers of this review may ask whether the fun of this novel is accessible only to English professors (or ex-English professors like me...
...Throughout the novel Persse pursues a beautiful graduate student named Angelica...
...Their romantic idealism, in its very foolishness, could now point a moral about all earthly goals, amatory or martial, which were pursued too singlemindedly...
...How can literary criticism...
...Actually, she has something at least as good as a magic ring: her stepfather is an executive at KLM and can give her unlimited flight privileges...
...When Ariosto and his contemporaries picked up the tradition, Arthur and Lancelot had already been carefully transformed into puppets acting out tall tales...
...This innocent poetscholar from Limerick is the novel's Percival, a simpleton savior whose vision of the grail is purer than those of the jaded knight-professors restlessly moving with him from conference to conference...
...In a brilliant comic finale, the Modern Language Association of America Convention as the grandest of tournaments, Persse restores to the Fisher King Kingfisher his lost powers of achieving an original thought and an erection...
...The last of this group, whose first and last names identify him with prototypes of once noble orders now infected and impotent, is the ultimate foil for the most important new character, Persse McGarrigle...
...writes one, and cannot finish the question...
...Morris Zapp concludes that even sex is a sublimation of the work ethic, standing Freud on his head and bringing us back to St...
...Think of international literary symposia as pilgrimage sites or, better, because of their temporary and often inconsequent nature, as knightly tournaments...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 11
