The machinery of illusion & effect
Wheeler, Edward T.
THE MACHINERY OF ILLUSION & EFFECT WATCHING DAVID LODGE AT WORK EDWARD T. WHEELER Coming of age as a Catholic in the early fifties in London was not much different from growing up on New York's...
...The novels warn us unequivocally about the problems of mixing life and literature: "Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children...
...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...
...In one of a series 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...
...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...
...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...
...In miming the divine immanence and creative role he calls attention to the demise of the Absolute...
...The new dogmas have names such as "structuralism" and "semiotics...
...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...
...The tension that comes of sex in Nice Work is one of interpretation...
...Mark is one of many chief characters whom Lodge invites us to dislike...
...Robyn cried...
...The "How Far Can You Go...
...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...
...No flesh comes from that word...
...THE MACHINERY OF ILLUSION & EFFECT WATCHING DAVID LODGE AT WORK EDWARD T. WHEELER 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 novel also offers us a pastiche of narrative styles: epistolary form, newspaper clippings, advertisements, double flashbacks, and the "climactic" reconciliation as movie script...
...Yet, Lodge does not...
...Penguin, 1980...
...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...
...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 name of the game was Salvation, the object to get to Heaven and avoid Hell...
...The British Museum Is Falling Down, Penguin...
...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...
...1990...
...There is, however, little of the comic in the treatment of Mark Underwood and his suspiciously self-indulgent return to Catholicism...
...We have asked our essayists to give an overview of the author's works, showing our readers where and how this writer locates the central human drama, the big questions, the religious crisis of our time...
...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...
...Not that God is a joke...
...For we all like to believe, do we not, if only in stories...
...The same sort of Irish Jansenist spirituality and morality seem to have circulated in the boroughs of both metropolises...
...Changing Places is a very funny novel, one of perfectly balanced plots and self-advertised changes of narrative form...
...Our friends had started life with too many beliefs-the penalty of a Catholic upbringing...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It was like Snakes and Ladders/Chutes and Edward T. Wheeler's critical essay on David Lodge is another in our series of articles on contemporary Catholic writers of fiction...
...rather he leaves us signposts, invitations to gauge his particular narrative stance against those of his predecessors...
...the sacraments, good deeds, acts of mortification, enabled you to climb back towards the light...
...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...
...Souls and Bodies was issued first in England as How Far Can You Go...
...others, like Lodge, make the familiar familiar...
...Penguin...
...In The British Museum they are unfailingly comic, but as later narrators will tell us some indeed are tragic...
...Vic's notions of the signified and signifier are for Robyn ungrounded in any reality...
...Language is a system of differences...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...down there was Hell...
...Difference is life...
...Everything that you did was subject to spiritual accounting...
...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...
...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 speaker of the last voice-over is coyly unidentified...
...Is this book sold in North Carolina...
...Robyn is postmodern, a feminist, and certainly not at all tense about sex...
...His opposite number, Morris Zapp, occupies Philip's position through the same but considerably less turbulent period on the English campus...
...Life is the other way around"-so Adam Appleby of The British Museum...
...And what sort of jokes...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...ondition of meaning...
...The tone of the books makes a reader think that Lodge has invited them to be his dinner guests...
...And in that tension between extra ecclesiam nulla salus and "Do as you will...
...Some writers make the exotic familiar, some estrange the everyday...
...is for most of the faithful today a vital question...
...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 history of sexuality...
...Ladders...
...The spiritual accounting was keenest, of course, in the merits and demerits associated with sex...
...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...
...Vic reads romantic love and Robyn reads "fuck...
...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...
...1 became a voyeur of my own experience...
...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...
...Sex, needless to say, remains a constant...
...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...
...Small World, Macmillan, 1944...
...To start, literature can mythologize sex...
...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...
...Souls and Bodies...
...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 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...
...The plot defuses the tensions with Vic's return to his family life...
...Conscription for Jonathan Browne forces him, as it did his creator, to postpone a research degree in English literature...
...God and Hell disappear and the pill comes...
...They are participants in a government scheme to bridge the two cultures, to mix the ivory tower with the shop floor...
...Even now, it seems, I am not immune from the insinuations of Form...
...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...
...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...
...But repetition is death...
...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...
...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...
...Here is Lodge describing the mental equipment of his late adolescent Catholics: Up there was Heaven...
...and the host is expansive, witty, and titillatingly explicit about sex...
...one which had not been treated substantively by any other novelist...
...The source of the humor had particular historical circumstances-postwar society EDWARD T. WHEELER is chairman of the English department at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...Almost by way of a "cocked snook" the novel equivocates about how art might bring real life situations to some sort of closure...
...he says among other things that assessment of Christian belief is like reading or writing a novel...
...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...
...hangs over the swinging sixties...
...Rabelais's motto, "Do as you will...
...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...
...Later in an emotional prayer group meeting she experiences an illumination which sustains her to the novel's close...
...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...
...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...
...God, quite simply, does not come into Changing Places (1975), Small World (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...
...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...
...and as this title implies, it is a book about license...
...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...
...No, we are told, consider this: if God is a joke, then so is the novelist...
...His command of theory is such that he can make postmodernist theories thematic...
...How can he preserve the absolutism, the unironic refusal to intrude, if the supreme fiction of creation is really a put-on...
...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...
...The enlivening ingredients are his way with dialogue and, inevitably, sex...
...1962...
...AIDS to heterosexuals, we read "was only a cloud on the horizon, no bigger than a man's hand...
...That is not to say he has nothing new to offer...
...We see inexpert gropings, tortured attempts not to go too far, and watch wedding night encounters with their inevitable disappointments...
...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...
...Changing Places, Penguin, 1975...
...His impact and popularity, however, rest on his gifts as a comic writer...
...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...
...Largely those deriving from the sheltered childhoods bestowed upon them by their Catholic families, their naivete 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 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 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...
...What does the Catholic sensibility of a David Lodge have to tell us about out common world, about the state of our souls...
...How far can you go...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...the comic energy of this serious funny novel leaves us with the answer: wait and see...
...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 Books discussed in this article How Far Can You Go...
...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...
...Small World, which appeared in 1984, nine years after Changing Places, is built on the archetype of Romance...
...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...
...The church universal has an unmistakable parochial aspect in David Lodge's early novels...
...The tension in the scenes which follow is that of intention: what the act means and cannot mean...
...the plot unties enough loose strands at the close to allow us to believe that faith is an option...
...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...
...Ginger, You're Barmy...
...Long on Brian Moore (October 20,1989...
...Souls and Bodies' narrator identifies himself as the author of The British Museum and quotes a hilarious letter of praise from an appreciative Czech...
...sin sent you plummeting down towards the Pit...
...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...
...Changing Places, written five years earlier, offered alter-ego Philip Swallow a second sexual awakening without any Catholic traumas...
...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 hand which presides over this novel is manus hominis and not manus dei...
...In Lodge's most recent novel, Nice Work, the exotic becomes familiar (and vice versa) in a deconstruction of a cigarette advertisement-significantly the billboard is an icon is a rebus is a representation of the vagina and makes smoking ultimately a surrogate for rape...
...The novel is a reminiscence and is prefaced with these words: [my] whole story reeks of a curiously inverted, inviolable conceit...
...Previous articles in the series include Rosemary Booth on Mary Gordon (August 12,1988), John B. Breslin on Andre Dubus (December 2,1988), Robert E. Hosmer on Muriel Spark (April 21,1989), Daniel Murtaugh on William Kennedy (May 19, 1989), Paul Baumann on Thomas Kennedy (July 14, 1989), Elizabeth Beverly on Shusaku Endo (September 22, 1989), and J.V...
...1965...
...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...
...Language is a system of differences...
...And death...
...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...
...People who find religious belief absurd are often upset if a novelist breaks the illusion of reality he has created...
...In the equation he makes above between the divine creative activity and that of the novelist, he introduces a new set of tensions...
...One, Small World (1984), has recently been adapted for television in Britain...
...they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece...
...they put in holy card context fasts before Communion, the Hungarian revolution, and the letter to the pope given to the children at Fatima...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...How will the two women and two men pair off...
...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 contextual pun on the massage going on apart, there is a sign here which seems deliberately dropped...
...Penguin...
...Difference is the condition of meaning...
...With these models of the way the Word works, Lodge pursues the old demon in new guises...
...The sex isn't in the head in this book, it is in the remarkable and remarkably funny design...
...man's virility and, of course, reestablishes control of the realm of literary criticism...
...Nice Work...
Vol. 117 • September 1990 • No. 16
