Margin Versus Center In Postmodernist Fiction
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Table of Contents
POSTMODERNITY, POSTMODERNISM AND POSTERALISM 2
CHAPITER I 17
CHAPTER II – KINGSLEY AMIS’S LUCKY JIM 21
CHAPTER III – MALCOM BRADBURY’S EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG 32
CHAPTER IV – DAVID LODGE’S CAMPUS TRILOGY 40
THE TRILOGY 44
MAIN CHARACTERS – INTRODUCTION AND CAREERS 47
PHILLIP SWALLOW 50
MORRIS ZAPP 55
OTHER CHARACTERS 64
CONCLUSIONS 68
POSTMODERNITY, POSTMODERNISM AND POSTERALISM
A distinction must be made between philosophy and aesthetics – that is to say:
"postmodernity" as a historical epoch, associated with an "attitude", and succeeding the "modern" era, and
“postmodernism" as an aesthetic movement, situated in the continuation of the "modernist" aesthetics, which marks a break with the "realistic" aesthetic. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between "modern" and "modernist", as well as between "postmodern" and "postmodernist". The "modern" (or "modernity") is an "attitude", a "vision of the world" (whose origins go back to the Renaissance and were conceptualized in the Age of Enlightenment); "Modernism" (or "modernist" literature) is an aesthetic movement that affects a period of British literary history (the beginning of "modernism" is generally located in 1908, the movement reaching its peak in 1922).
Similarly, postmodern (or postmodernity) is an attitude, which challenges the modern vision of the world; postmodernism (or postmodernist literature) is an aesthetic movement that comes after modernism. However, we must not try to delimit periods that are too precise: literary and aesthetic movements emphasize a dimension that already existed but was not yet evident, and they do not succeed one another in a linear order. As Ibab Hassan writes:
“Modernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or a Chinese Wall ; for history is a palimpsest; and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future”.
For Lyotard, the "postmodern" is a "mode" of rejection of "modernity", which is itself a "mode" rather than an "epoch". It "is certainly part of the modern. Everything that is received, be it from yesterday […], must be suspected". Lyotard observes "the severe re-examination that ‘postmodernity’ imposes on the thought of the Enlightenment", perceived as totalitarian and tyrannical.
The whole modern way of perceiving the world is undergoing a crisis, not dissociable from that of the subject based on the notion of center or transcendental signified, and which comes from the tilting of the signifier into a position of superiority. Even if modernism, as aesthetic, is chronologically situated before the postmodern period, the beginnings of which are generally associated with the sixties, modernist aesthetics would have to be related to a postmodern epistemological crisis that had already begun to work.
A new break
A postmodernist (narrative) aesthetic, which occupied the forefront of English literature since the 1960s, and become strong in the years 1980-1990, was born of an epistemological crisis dating back to the 1960s and especially 1970, but which had already been under way since the middle of the 19th century, and which was a continuation of the process of "disenchantment" of the world, begun in the 17th century. Marxist critic Fredric Jameson notes "some radical break or cut, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s. As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement”. For Derrida, an event has occurred in the history of the concept of structure. He asks: "Where and how does this decentralizationtion take place as a thought of structuralism of structure? […] This production undoubtedly belongs to the totality of an epoch, which is ours, but it has always already begun to announce itself and to work".
Towards the primacy of the signifier
A few “proper name” have contributed to this change of attitude. Derrida cites as crucial influences Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger: If one wanted to […] choose some 'proper names' and evoke the authors of the speeches in which this production was held closest to its most frequent formation, it would be necessary to cite Nietzschean criticism of metaphysics, the concepts of being and truth, to which the concepts of play, interpretation and sign (the sign without present truth) have been substituted; The Freudian critique of the presence to oneself, that is, of consciousness, of the subject, of identity to oneself, of proximity or of property to oneself; And, more radically, the Heidegian destruction of metaphysics, ontology, the determination of being as presence.
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud take a close interest in the unconscious and to the forces that undermine the foundations of modern humanism. A first re-thinking of "modernity", which began with Marx and Nietzsche, resulted in the structuralism of the 1960s and 1970s. Marx calls into question the notions of universalism, fundamentalism and essentialism.
Nietzsche is considered the philosopher whose point of view on "modernity" is the most radically skeptical and which has contributed most to the demolition of ideas of progress and humanism. Nietzsche is the hub of entry into post modernity insofar as he rejects the very principle of "modernity": reason centered on the subject (as a source of independent consciousness ), Itself based on the presence of a "transcendental signified". While the Enlightenment saw reason as "an equivalent of the unifying power of religion" and Hegel "conceives reason as the reconciling self-knowledge of an absolute mind" Nietzsche abandons "the program as a whole" By its radical criticism of reason, which "bursts forth the rational envelope of modernity."
Nietzsche demystifies the great ideals by showing "how the essential moral feelings […] are born in man of a false explanation" and showing that men have the illusion of coming out of themselves, but are motivated by their fundamental instincts, especially by the desire for power. For Nietzsche, the ego is no longer an essence, but a fiction, an artifice, a fabrication. But it is clear that by proposing the pure and simple reversal of the models of thought of the Enlightenment concerning the philosophy of the subject, Nietzsche remains in the paradigm of modernity.
Jaques Derrida gives Freud a privileged place. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the psychoanalyst emphasizes the role of the unconscious and the irrational in the human personality and emphasizes the part of renunciation of self implied in all socialization. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he proposed a new model of the psychic apparatus: the ego, the id and the superego. Nietzschean criticism thus finds an extension – the subject is no longer master of himself and his unity is destructured, the part of the subconscious escaping his will. If he wants to integrate socially, he must abide by rules and thus sacrifice a part of himself. Beginning with Saussure, and above all with the application of his Lacan theories, the "postmodern attitude" insists on the play of signifiers that are putting themselves on endlessly. The influence of the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is radical. In his Course on General Linguistics (published in 1916), he shows that language is arbitrary, that is, there is an essential difference between words and things. In the section entitled "Language as a system of signs", he rejects the traditional conception of language as nomenclature -that is, a list of terms corresponding to so many things, as "transparent" – "conveyed by common sense" and "by the Bible", since this conception supposes ready-made ideas pre-existing with words.
Language as a system of signs – each sign unites a signified and a signifier – is arbitrary, since the sign unites not a thing and a name but a concept. The link between signified and signifier thus has no natural attachment to reality but is imposed by a linguistic community and depends on a social framework, that is, a world vision. The meaning is socially constructed, therefore linked to questions of ideology, and the possibility of representing reality is called into question. Language is autonomous, and must therefore be studied in and for itself. The subject is no longer perceived as the ultimate source of meaning-producing authority; it is itself a product of language.
Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every origin. Writing is the neutral, the composite, the oblique in which our subject flies, the black-and-white in which all identity is lost, beginning with the very body that writes. But it was Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) who, since the 1960s, began the most radical "deconstruction" of Western metaphysics since Plato.
Derrida's work, comprising more than eighty works, translated into several languages and world-wide studied, has had an extraordinary critical fortune because of his calling into question the very foundations of the mimesis of common sense, founded on logo-centrism. If Derrida is the French thinker who had the most impact on the American intellectual field, he did not find the recognition he deserved from the French university.
Since 1967, Derrida asserted that the deconstruction of Western thought involves questioning the concept of a sign based on a full presence. Reversing the subordination of the letter and the trace to the voice and the living word, Derrida refuses the subordination of representation to presence, thus calling into question the notion of center, origin, foundation, consciousness, of essence, of full presence. He frees writing from its submission to speech, from the primacy attributed to the allegedly original presence, from the immediate manifestation of self to self, which haunt the notion of transcendental ego. He shows that, since all writing is repeatable, it must be able to "function in the radical absence of any recipient", as in any "issuer" or "producer", which means a "break in presence". Writing "would be the possibility for the signifier to repeat itself".
To understand the postmodern attitude, one must go back to the modern attitude, the inherent contradiction of which already contained the seeds of its own subsequent challenge, namely, the process of "disenchantment" the world had lost its unity and if a dissonance had been introduced between the individual and the world, unity remained a goal, the primacy of the "transcendental signified" being maintained. The questioning of an absolute truth or a major signified or "transcendental signified" (of a whole metaphysics inherited from the Greeks), which began with the modern age, continues and the pattern is completely reversed when the signifier asserts its primacy. He then develops an acute awareness of the fact that we access the world through language, that the author and the world are only sedimentation of texts. When the signifier comes to prevail over the signified, the very possibility of an absolute signified collapses. The concept of "transcendental signified" is shaken at its base if it is understood that it does not come from heaven, but is produced by language, speech, and text. All western metaphysics based on the notion of transcendental subject is thus called into question.
The crucial importance of Joyce in the history of Anglo-Saxon literature says nothing else. Deprived of its transcendental foundation, the subject becomes purely a textual effect, a product of language, a discourse, an ideology; it is then only a fiction, an artifice, without intention, without authority: "What is thus contested is the idea of an identity." To the single traditional subject, center and origin of meaning, master of himself and of the world, is opposed a subject which is the product of discourse. This subject with fuzzy and moving contours is no longer stable, has neither center nor master. At the same time, the expressive and referential dimension of mimesis is questioned. The crisis of mimesis, like that of the author, is a crisis of literary humanism, and, at the end of the 20th century, innocence is no longer permitted. The questioning is even more radical than that of the seventeenth century, since it deals with the order of things: no longer invested with its former value of Truth, it is forced to exhibit its "fictionality", it is read in its turn as having been a history, a fiction, a myth. It emerges a clear awareness of the discursiveness of all presence. To sum up, the primacy of the signifier over the signified has two major consequences, which seem to question the very possibility of realism. The notions of autonomous subject and stable reality collapse together:
If it is the signifier that produces the subject, the latter is no longer the origin of meaning – he loses his authority (which makes him an author) and is no longer master, either of himself or of the world. If there is no universal human nature, which gives authority to the individual, if the subject is only an artifice or a product of history and language, if its position varies according to the discourse, its authority, its intention and its control collapse and it comes in fact to "die".
If it is the signifier that prevails, if there is no natural correspondence between language and the world that it reflects, if it is the signifier that dictates the signified, if it is the signifier language that builds reality, this language can no longer reflect a world, that would exist independently of it. And this external world is not necessarily coherent, for it no longer has a single immanent sense. Language, therefore, reflects only interpretations of the world, necessarily linked to a precise point of view and to the structures of power.
Modernism and postmodernism – the avant-garde
The "realistic" and "modernist" / "postmodernist" aesthetics, as well as the critical positions represented by the traditionalism of Lukacs (who wanted literature to retain its political role) and the postmodern position of Lyotard (literature must be cut off from the world), seem to be situated within a system based on binary oppositions. Now, if the evolution towards the primacy of the signifier seems irreversible, the fact that the myth (as story) is cut off from the world does not necessarily mean that literature can no longer comment on the world. It simply requires that it find other means of doing so than those of traditional realism.
We have seen that the shift from a literature of representation to a literature of expressivity or towards an art that focuses on writing has its origins in the early eighteenth century and coincides with the beginning of the modern era. This regime of expressivity, or regime of writing, which has concentrated on writing, can either say the world or withdraw from the world. Meaning and signified are separate, but the signified prevails. Everything happens as if the signifier did not succeed in detaching itself completely from its "transcendental signified". The world is "disenchanted", but the "enchantment" of the world remains in the realm of the possible. In the dominant type of the modern novel, the "classical realistic text", the story seeks to imitate the existing order of the world. We focus on language but on the language of the world, the language already existing in the world, the language that gives meaning to the world. In the other tendency of this regime of expressivity, the novel concentrates on the story as a subjective, or creative, or spiritual sense. This tendency, which Don Quixote already bore the germs, asserted itself in the romantic period, when an individualistic mode determined by absolute interiority prevailed. It gained the a superior status in modernist literature, then in postmodernist literature, called avant-garde, in which the signifier comes to prevail over the signified, making realism impossible. Modernis" aesthetics the so-called autonomous modernist aesthetics would be the first response to the crisis of mimesis and the subject, to a world that no longer makes sense. It is also linked to economic, political and social conditions, which make reality a nightmare: the First World War, Nazism, and Stalinism, have challenged established values and ideas, faith in progress and reason. Modernism would be a reaction to the loss of all landmarks, the death of God, the failure of Romantic reason and self, the questioning of the signified and the subject, a chaotic world. The disillusionment which leads to the refusal of the world, which is peculiar to romanticism, is increasing and the novel withdraws from the world. The world is not called into question: since it is too disappointing, we simply withdraw to focus on form; this is what the expression art for art suggests.
In short, the aestheticism of the modernist avant-garde would be a subjectivism, which makes arbitrary reality, which reduces the inner world of man to an abstract subjectivity, refusing all interaction between man and the world. This radical break between literature and the world results in dissolution of personality.
It is this artificial world, entirely governed by the verbal, in the literature before the 1930s, it was still possible to write in a state of ethical and moral weightlessness where only the pursuit of beauty was concerned. Thus the expression art for art would mean that the text is no longer "representational", should no longer reflect the outside world. Art no longer has a political, social or religious mission. Literature is no longer the testimony of knowledge, the extension of an authority, the tool of a moral conscience. But if the "disenchantment" of the world continues, "enchantment" remains a goal, aimed at becoming purely abstract and subjective. A subjective vision takes precedence over that of a failed world. We remain in a system of representation, the dominant mode remains "realism", but reality is moved to the imaginary. Literature no longer reflects the existing order, but represents an abstract and subjective order.
In the English literature, there is a social break with a new way of writing. It is the period from 1910 to 1930 that is generally considered to be that of modernism in English literature. More precisely: the birth of the movement can be fixed in the year 1908, while its peak will be associated with the year 1922: 1908 because Ezra Pound arrives in London, Ford publishes the English Review, T.S. Eliot publishes The Criterion (until 1929), and which appear in succession, Eliot's The Waste Land, James Joyce's Ulysses, William Butler Yeats's Later Poems and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. The most frequently cited writers of the movement are: Henry James (1843-1916), Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), James Joyce (1882-1941), Thomas Sterne Eliot (1888-1965), Edward Morgan Forster 1878-1939), David Herbert Lawrence (1885-30), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Ezra Pound (1885-1972), William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).
Formal “realism”, if attached to a historical description of life, is no longer viable and must be replaced by other formal conventions. The realistic novel which sought to reproduce as faithfully as possible a slice of life, imitating history and imitating the moral and social preoccupations of man as an individual, in novels with well-defined characters in sets perfectly planted according to a clearly constructed intrigue leading to an expected and often reassuring conclusion is no longer possible. The historical, cultural and psychological foundations of the reader, the consistency of his tastes, his values and his memories, put into crisis his relation to language. If the writers experiment with the language, they concentrate on the form, in order to try to reflect another reality, that of the psychic life (conscious and unconscious) of the characters, the inner life of consciousness, the flow of associations ideas, private vision. Impressionist techniques attempt to reflect the free association of ideas. The notions of intrigue and character are rejected. The text no longer being representative becomes abstract, geometric; the rigorous narrative structure leaves room for rhythm – repetition, images, and symbols – as the authorizing principle. Language is no longer referential but fragmentary, dislocated and allusive. Writers play with time, which is no longer linear, and the notion of cyclic time replaces classical linearity. There is no more fences, no solution. Irony predominates. The points of view are multiplying. The old notions of story and plot are abandoned, and the writing system refocuses itself on those moments of being which become the real structure of the text, a structure which can no longer be in terms of space, but in terms of duration. But for all these writers, the individual consciousness (whatever form it takes) makes possible to structure the world so that it makes sense.
We often associate with postmodernism the following formal characteristics: playful processes, multiple experiments, return to the texts of the past to subvert them, questioning mimetic function, mixing of genres, intertextuality, exaggerated sense of artificial, self-reflexivity, discontinuity, fragmentation, denial of fictional processes.
The narratives are recognized by this sign that the fiction which they propose to us is nothing but the dramatization of their own functioning . The term metafiction, a fiction about fiction, is associated with postmodernism and consists in the elaboration of fiction, including the artificiality of its conventions and narrative codes. The avant-garde postmodernist literature would only prolong the modernist aesthetic by hypertrophying the linguistic games.
Ihab Hassan notes, however, a break between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics: "But if much of modernity appears hieratic, hypotactical, and formalist, postmodernism strikes us as playful, paratactical, and deconstructionist." Hassan defines postmodernism by two terms: By indeterminacy, or better still, indeterminacies, I mean a complex referent that these various concepts help to delineate: ambiguity, discontinuity, heterodoxy, pluralism, randomness, revolt, perversion, deformation. […] I call the second major tendency of postmodernism immanences, a term that I employ without religious echo to designate the capacity of the mind to generalize itself in symbols, intervenes more and more into nature, act to itself through its own abstractions and so the muthos is thus removed not only from the world; it is also removed from the subject.
David Lodge saw David Beckett as one of the first postmodern British novelists: while among the modernists, form offered a semblance of order, an alternative reality in an incoherent world, in Beckett there is no longer the “mythical method of ordering, of giving a dimension and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary.”
For Lyotard, a postmodernist aesthetic is, like modernist aesthetics, a "sublime" aesthetic that leaves aside "the unpresentable" as "absent content" to focus on "form." Whereas in the aesthetic "modernist", "form continues to offer to the reader or to the viewer, thanks to its recognizable consistency, matter of consolation and pleasure", the aesthetic "postmodernist" goes further by refusing "the consolation of good forms", contenting itself with "making one feel that there is unpresentable"
The text is cut off from the world, dematerialized, torn from history and the human. Language works as a screen between oneself and the world, the reader losing himself in a writing that rejects all references, all history and all deep emotion, a writing that is confined to a purely spatial, fluid and changing present. The system of representation is thus invalidated: the subject has disappeared, reality has lost all meaning, and the text, which has become truly self-reflexive, reflects neither the order of the world nor a subjective reality.
In its beginnings, the postmodern attitude seems to have exacerbated the formalism of the modern attitude, to the point of depriving it of all foundation in terms of subjectivity. Since the subject is no longer unitary or master of himself or of the world, since it is only the product of language, power, social structures, etc., it disappears: there is no more free-arbiter, more subjectivity, more intention, more author. Since the world is text, language, speech, there is no longer a stable external reality. Since there is no more universality and unique value, everything is relative and anarchic. A blind determinism has replaced the free will of the autonomous subject of the Enlightenment, and a disorderly relativism has replaced the great Universalist project based on reason. In such a situation, art can only withdraw from the world. As we have already said, they take part in a modernist aesthetic only through their ironic vision, and are postmodernist only by their acute awareness that the subject is the product of a textual conditioning. Far from evacuating discordant reality and concentrating only on form, they struggle to expose this reality, showing how insupportable it is without the veil of meaning.
Criticism has not failed to note that this avant-garde literature is "antimimetic" and that the terms "autonomy", "intrusiveness" multiply in critical discourses to qualify modernist and postmodernist avant-garde aesthetics. In the postmodern context of the 1980s, Lyotard declares that literature must turn away from tyrannical "realism" with its "desire for unity, identity, security". He treats Habermas' ideas of "neo-conservatism" because he seeks to "bridge the gulf between the discourse of knowledge, that of ethics and that of politics". He laughs at those who wish to "bring artists and writers back into the fold of the community, or at least, if they are judged to be ill, give them the responsibility of curing it." He adds: "And there is no reason to expect from this task the least reconciliation between the 'games of language', of which Kant, under the name of faculties, knew that an abyss separates them and that only the transcendent illusion (that of Hegel) can hope to totalize them in a real unity." Lyotard then sees a complete break between aesthetics and ethics, and concludes that the only purpose is that of the best possible performance.
Conversely, it was indeed this famous "autonomy" of avant-garde literature that was perceived as "decadent" by Lukacs, for whom "modern subjectivism" denied all historicity. According to the Marxist critic, this literature which leads to the dissolution of the "real" and the personality, leads to "a true schizophrenic break", which draws towards the "pathological" and the "nightmare"; it is static and "unfit for change", reducing all action to a "nonsense", evoking "the ruin of the human world". Lukacs then pleads for a return to a realistic literature, the only one able to account for the political nature of man, to find meaning in the real, to consider movement and evolution as major themes , and, in short, to serve as a "mediation between the singular and the universal." Around the same time we find the same concern in Sartre.
These two a priori incompatible theories seem to disregard two things:
this evolution towards the primacy of the muthos and the signifier is irreversible (once lost, innocence cannot be found);
the fact that the muthos is cut off from mimesis does not necessarily mean that literature can no longer comment on the world.
We must not confuse, on the one hand, the primacy of language and the impossibility of the traditional realism linked to the death of the subject, with, on the other hand, the total impossibility of a link between literature and the world. It is only a question of seeing that, if literature is to comment on the world again, it must find other ways of doing so than those of realism. If the Lyotard’s analysis of the postmodern seems to me justified on many points – the failure of the Enlightenment project, the end of the metafiction, the impossibility of realism, the concentration of literature on form and a postmodernist aesthetic as a prolongation of the modernist aesthetic – the only observation of these characteristics cannot justify his argument against any political role for literature, and therefore for a radical break between ethics and aesthetics. The attempts of realism as well as those of modernism and postmodernism seem to me to be situated within a system of thought based on binary oppositions. Either we focus on mimesis or we are anti-mimetic. Individual and society either form one, or they are opposites. The tilting of the signifier into a position of superiority calls into question the very notion of subject, which ends by "dying". Either there is a truth based on metaphysics of full presence, or all is anarchic relativism. Such binary system forces us to choose between two positions as unsustainable as each other.
Postmodernism is a radical change in the nature of the social and economic environment. Against these it mobilized multiplicity, non-identity, transgression, and cultural relativism. This result, at its best, is a resourceful subversion of the dominant value-system, at least at the level of theory. Friedrich Nietzsche, to forget about its metaphysical foundations, acknowledges that God is dead and simply goes relativist. Postmodernism belongs to a transitional era, one in which the metaphysical, like some unquiet ghost, can neither resuscitate itself nor decently die. A postmodernist literature that withdraws from the world would simply sign the end of the human. Since its function is to tell the relationship between the world and man, the novel is simply forced to adapt. The novel cannot make a simple return to formal realism, for it cannot disregard the postmodern re-thinking of the subject, the nature of reality, the concept of mimesis, a single truth, of universalism, in short of all the notions connected with the Enlightenment project. He must therefore find new ways of reintroducing the human subject and of commenting on the world.
This brings me to the core of my remarks, namely that the term postmodern should be used to describe an attitude related to a certain historical period. The avant-garde of postmodernist aesthetics would be a continuation of a modernist aesthetic cut off from the world. The literature of the 1960s and 1970s would therefore be more neo-modernist than postmodernist. It would be mostly the literature of the end of modernity, whereas the literature of the 1980s would be based instead on a new "vision of the world", truly postmodern.
In The Modes of Modern Fiction, David Lodge notes an interchange in the novel of the first half of the twentieth century between what he calls the "modernist" novel, which is anti-mimetic, and the "anti-modernist" novel which returns to representation and the world. For example, the 1930s' writing follows the "modernist" trend of the 1920s, and a certain withdrawal from the world of 1940's writing characterizes the "angry young people" of the 1950s. For Lodge, 1930s writing was, “characteristically antimodernist, realistic, readably and metonymic”. He quotes Stephen Spender in a pamphlet of 1939 entitled The New Realism: "There is a tendency for artists to turn to reality, because the phase of experimentation in form has proved sterile." Lodge mentions Graham Greene, George Orwell and Christopher Isherwood as representing this current of the 1930s, which rebel against the formal experiments cut off from the world and turn to a committed literature, implying a resumption of certain realistic techniques. Similarly, Lodge noted that, disappointed by politics, many writers, like Greene, Waugh and Eliot, turn to religion. As early as the 1950s, there was once again a rejection of the modernist aesthetics and formal experiments, as well as of the romanticism. Indeed, it can be seen between 1954 and 1962 among the "neo-realists" a return to realism. These authors reinvent man instead of denying it and try to give a meaning to history: the character exists again, taken at the interior of an intrigue which situates it in time. The playwright John Osborne set the tone for the Angry Young Men, followed by Alan Sillitoe, Kingsley Amis, John Braine or John Wain – anti-intellectualists who "want to make a deep voice of feelings, sensations, and intuitions". On the other hand, novelists like Iris Murdoch, William Golding or Muriel Spark are not neo-realists because, if they wish to return to a so-called classical conception of literature to address moral and ethical questions, they do not, however, dismiss the decisive advances of modernism.
Around the 1960s and 1970s and above all from 1980 onwards, this trend was confirmed, and it became clear that the novel (and literary criticism) made a return to the world. Writers want to return to literature its ethical, political and social function, to reintroduce the author into writing, without however denying the formal advances of modernism. These writers attempt to preserve literature for its social and moral function while at the same time recovering the tools of modernism. In a work on Orwell, published in 1994, Regard spoke of a "third modernity" oscillating "between the twin abysses of art for art and orthodoxy". It "would allow the writer to act politically without sacrificing his aesthetic and intellectual integrity", he "wants to be paradoxically archaic, that is to say, etymologically, attached to a transcendental foundation". In 1987, Malcolm Bradbury, also noted the presence of a type of novel that seeks to combine realism and modernism: "That double haunting does seem to be a new feature of our writing, Relationship both with the fracturing spirit of modernism and the ways of nineteenth-century likelihood".
Finally, it should be noted that in the critical works on postmodernism there are constant references to a type of novel which does not correspond to the definition of avant-garde postmodernist aesthetics made up of formal games cut of the world.
As stated above, postmodernism is a response to modernism and is therefore concerned merely with “distinctiveness”, “divergence” and “individuality”. Elevated modernism is hardly ever engaged with the experiences of the cultural minorities and nor does it engage critical analyses of their experiences. People in the margin consider the relations between their sense of community and postmodernism as very weak. It is not possible for the group in the margin to deliberately connect its dialogue with the other dominating group that does not appear enthusiastic to associate. Though “postmodernism still has the potential to be an effective liberating space for the subjugated, it is seldom used for this end”.
Postmodern messages to the margins have been almost inexistent. The addressees for these discourses are typically from the centre. The single exception to this tendency is the university, where there is authentic apprehension for the “others”.
CHAPITER I
I.1. Campus novel
Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge belong among campus novel writers. This “small but recognizable subgenre” of contemporary fiction became popular in the 1950s with the publication of Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis and since that time a number of successors have developed together at universities. The novels of these authors are often compared with Lucky Jim and they also admit being inspired by Amis. The primary, but not the main, purpose of my thesis is to briefly introduce decades that are connected with the chosen novels and demonstrate contemporary social background, which is reflected in the fictions. Consequently I am going to introduce the authors, their academic experience and other works, because all of these factors influenced their novels. I am also going to illustrate humour in the campus novels Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis, Eating People is Wrong (1959) by Malcolm Bradbury, and campus Trilogy by David Lodge. The text of the thesis is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter I will introduce the genre of campus novel. The body of the thesis is formed in chronological order, therefore the post-war time and the period of the 1950s is connected with Kingsley Amis and his novel Lucky Jim. The following part deals with 1960s, Bradbury, and Eating People is Wrong. In the third part I analyze the 1970s together with David Lodge and his Campus Trilogy. All of these three chapters are introduced by a short outline of major changes and typical features of the given decade. The last part of the thesis is focused on a comparative study of these novels with regard to humor.
In Anglo-Saxon countries, especially in Great Britain, humoristic literature is represented especially by the Campus novel, a genre that became increasingly popular during the post-war decades. This genre is also labeled as “University novels” or „Academic novels“, and has taken university as its subject. Nevertheless, Bradbury is aware of the necessity to differentiate between terms “campus novel” and “university novel”. The genre of campus novel emerged after Second World War and is situated into real or fictional university surroundings and it is comic in its principle. The origins of university novels can be traced back to 1850s when the novel The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green by Cuthbert Bede was published. Notable authors of this genre are Zuleika Dobson or Copton Mackenzie, who published their works at the beginning of 20th century. Force of terms “academic novel” and “campus novel” are identical, the difference sequent on American origin of word “campus”. Lodge also take a term “varsity novel” into account. Main characters of these novels are students rather than teachers and their setting is Oxford or Cambridge University. These novels were popular before the war and were forerunners of campus novels. This literary genre has as well as other genres its subgenres and various trends. We should referred to Agatha Christie as a representative of respectable subgenre, which is called Campus murder mystery. In America was born trend that drew inspiration with scientific branch and it’s connected with such writers as Jonathan Lethem and Richard Powers.
The campus novel originated in 1940s at American universities. The first campus novel is considerd to be Groves of Academe written by Mary McCarthy. It was published in 1952 in United States. Successors of Groves of Academe were Randall Jarrell´s Pictures From an Institution and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. First campus novel written in Britain was Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. He together with Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge belongs to most famous authors of Campus novel. The main characters of campus novels are teachers of humanities. They are lecturers at the department of English; some of them even give lectures on English literature. They often clash with a chief of department or have views that are in conflict with views of theirs students, however the sense of their lives is not work their way up. Their lives are disarranged and go along with fairy or notable blunders. Characteristic themes of these novels are success or failure, love affairs, and students’ strikes; Hilský presents typical features of the genre. The Genre of Campus fiction is popular and read not only in academy environment but also off campus. Almost 200 titles of campus fiction were published in Britain between years 1945 and 1979 and more over 400 novels in United States. Lucky Jim was within two years after its first publishing reprinted 15 times. These numbers are well-spoken evidence of campus novel popularity. David Lodge explains the secret of campus novels success: “academic conflicts are relatively harmless, safely insulated from the real world and its somber concerns.” In the fifties, when the genre originated universities were a suitable scene for solving social and politics problems, which occurred in British society. They were places, where educational standards and cultural values were evaluated, and where a more benevolent society was formed. At the end of the seventies the campus novel became a typical novel genre, distinguished by satiric humor often escalating to farce. The genre was not constant in its form; it has naturally changed with development of society and universities themselves.
I.2. Education
After the end of World War II new social-reform laws were passed, and Britain became a welfare state. In 1944, Butler Education Act radically changed educational system in Great Britain. The school-leaving was raised to 16 years and secondary schools became free. The Act allowed university scholarships and social rise for pupils, notwithstanding their social background. Also Amis, Bradbury and Lodge, all of lower-class origin, benefited most from the provisions of this act.
I.3. Angry Young Man, The Movement
In 1956, revolutionary play Look Back in Anger by the young dramatist John Osborne, which was revolutionary in its bitterness, its language, and its setting, introduced a great boom of post-war British drama and influenced many contemporary writers. From the play Look Back in Anger is derived the title “Angry Young Men“, which is a label for the group of authors, who created a new character of young, frustrated, and individualistic intellectual that is not content with post-war social situation. He came from lower-class origin; Act of 1944 obtained education and opportunity of social rise to him. Typical example of this new prototype of character is Amis’s Jim Dixon. Other “angry” authors were Malcolm Bradbury, Allan Sillitoe, Colin Wilson, and John Braine. Despite of their label, they were independent, without a common programme. However, they were united by the style of their writing. “Angry Young Men” are associated with the group of poets, which was established during early 1950s. They are called “The Movement” according to the article title “In the Movement“, published in 1954 in the Spectacor. „The Movement” was a label given to Amis, D.J Enright, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, and Philip Larkin. In their poems they criticized the Welfare State and products of wartime planning. Contrary to “Angry Young Men,” they were not united by their class origin, but by antipathy to the cultural demands of Bohemia and Bloomsbury, and by elitism of Modernist writing.
CHAPTER II – KINGSLEY AMIS’S LUCKY JIM
Kingsley Amis, the English novelist, poet, critic and teacher was born on April 16, 1922 as the only son of a senior clerk, and grew up in lower middle class atmosphere at London’s suburban area Croydon. Had studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, where he was a contributor of verses to university magazines and a member of left wing political movement Labour Club.
After graduating at Oxford, he stayed there as a research student. From 1949 until 1961 he lectured on English at the University College of Swansea, and worked as Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University. After twelve years at Swansea, in the early 1960s, he became the Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Cambridge. As Bradford denotes, during his scholarly carrier Amis was not only giving lectures, he wrote also reviews, columns, published four collections of poetry, a collection of lectures on science fiction, five novels and a volume of short stories.
At St. John’s he met Philip Larkin, a colleague and close friend, who influenced his work. They shared a sense of satirical humor. Larkin was one of Amis’ early critics. He has been closely associated with Amis’ first novel Lucky Jim, as he consulted aspects of its plot and characters. In 1952 and 1953 Amis contributed two essays Ulster Bull and Emily Coloured to the journal Essays and Criticism. These contributions established lots of opinions about literature and criticism, which he followed in his work from 1950s to 1980s. In 1948 he married Hilary Bardwell, an Oxford student, which gave him a daughter and two sons. One of them, Martin Amis, became a writer like his father. During these times he was already considered to be a significant writer and a member of the literary group The Movement.
His novel debut Lucky Jim, published in 1954, gained a huge success. Within the first year of its publication there were 12,000 copies in print, and film rights were sold to British and also American production companies. It was University of Leicester, where his friend Larkin worked as a librarian, which inspired him to wrote this novel. This satirical novel could not be written also without inspiration from Amis’ own life, during which he worked as an overtaxed and under-paid lecturer at the University College of Swansea. The story reflects the Education Act of 1944, which enabled a larger number of lower-class people to receive University education. The success of Lucky Jim is based on explicitness with which Amis described variety of post-war social reality as it was experienced by a generation of young intellectuals. For this novel Amis got Somerset Maugham Award. It was times of Lucky Jim’s greatest fame when Amis was, despite of his disapproval, labeled as one of the „Angry Young Men. “
As well as his first novel, other novels of the 1950s depicted conditions in Britain, and reflected Amis’ own experiences. In his second novel That Uncertain Feeling there is reappeared Jim Dixon, the main character of his previous novel. In 1960 was published novel Take A Girl Like You, which became his favourite one among his novels. He drew from teaching experience during 1950s when he was giving lectures on science fiction at Princeton University. Critics have tended to agree with Amis’ own view, and this novel has been among the dozen best novels written in English since 1945 and attached acknowledgement of the British Book marketing Council in 1983. In 1962 he resigned his Cambridge fellowship in order to have more time for writing. From this year he lived with his new wife, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard mainly in London. In his novels of the 1960s Amis turned his satirical attentions to experimentations with content. These novels reflected more broadly the nature of human morality. The Anti- Death League touched the genre of science-fiction, The Green Man contained elements of mystery. The Alternation dealt with alternate history. He also experimented with imitations of the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming and in 1968 brought out his own Bond novel Colonel Sun under the pseudonym “Robert Markham.” Amis’ novels of 1970s and early 1980s reflected his increasing preoccupation with ageing and morality, decline of his health, temperamental disposition and drinking, factors that led to the breakdown of his marriage. All of these is obvious with broadly comic effect in his novels Girl, 20 , Ending Up, Jake´s Thing, Stanley and the Women.
After his separation from Howard he felt unable to live on his own, so he moved into the London house of his first wife and her third husband Lord Kilmarnock. Amis undertook to pay the household bills in exchange for security and companionship, he needed to work comfortably. This unconventional household lasted for the rest of Amis’s life. In 1986 he was awarded Booker Prize for the novel The Old Devils that is considered to be his most sentimental work. Another of his 1980s novels is The Folks that Live on the Hill, which was inspired by his life with his ex-wife and her new husband. By the beginning of the 1990s fame of Amis’s novel rose by screen adaptations of Stanley and the Women, The Green Man, Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You. In London newspapers one of his poems, selected from the collection The Amis Anthology, was published on a regular basis. He was also famous as a critic of wines and restaurants, as well as literature, and in 1990 he was made a Knight of the British Empire. In 1991 his Memoirs, collected various non-fictional autobiographical sketches, was published.
Amis died on October 22, 1995 as a result of contracted pneumonia. In his 50-year career he wrote more that 20 satiric novels. List of his works includes science-fiction, mystery, essays and criticism, poetry and collections that deal with various topics from sexual affairs to detectives.
Lucky Jim was published in 1954 and since then it has been reprinted many times, filmed and also translated into nine languages. The novel is notable at least for two reasons. Firstly, Lucky Jim is often considered to be the first campus novel set at a provincial university. Secondly, with the main protagonist, Jim Dixon, Amis introduced a new prototype of character. Lucky Jim is often considered to be the first campus novel. It is a witty, satirical novel.
The main protagonist, Jim Dixon, is a typical example of a young disenchanted intellectual, who is discontent with the post-war society and the role, this society put him into. As David Lodge in his introduction to this novel claims, the novel reflects the mood of young people who grew up in the 1950s. In the United States there was Holden Caulfield, who became a symbol for the young people. In Britain it was Amis’ Jim Dixon, who became a hero of a generation, a figure a many young people identified with. Another most renowned critique written by W. Somerset Maugham, published in The Sunday Times in 1954, describes these young people of the 1950s in more details. In this critical contribution Maugham exaggerated, demeaned, and preached down Dixon’s manners, attitudes, and views. These words are harsh and exaggerate Jim’s activities, although they fit his nature. It may seem that Jim Dixon is Kingsley Amis and Kingsley Amis represents young intellectuals of the 1950s:
“They do not go to university to acquire culture, but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners, and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious. They will write anonymous letters to harass a fellow undergraduate and listen to a telephone conversation that is no business of theirs. Charity, kindliness, generosity are qualities which they hold in contempt. They are scum. They will in due course leave the university. Some will doubtless sink back, perhaps with relief, into the modest class from which they emerged; some will take to drink, some to crime, and go to prison. Others will become schoolmasters and form the young or journalist and mould public opinion. A few will go into Parliament, become Cabinet Ministers and rule the country. I look upon myself as fortunate that I shall not live to see it.”
This attack shows contemporary atmosphere and ideas of a new literary generation. Jim Dixon is a junior lecturer of medieval history at some provincial university south of London. He hates his job and isn’t interested in his field. On the other hand he takes pains to keep his job. Lodge denotes, and we should only agree, that university is by no means Dixons’ popular surroundings. University social and cultural values were never close to him. He prefers pop music, pubs and non-academic company to Mozart, drawing rooms and academic company. Once, when he is asked by his colleague, why he has become a medievalist, Dixon gives a very simple explanation:
“No, the reason why I’m a medievalist, as you call it, is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialized in them. Then when I applied for the job here, I naturally made a big point of that, because it looked better to seem interested in something specific”.
Since Dixon starts working at university his life is followed up with a number of misunderstandings and blunders. He made a bad first impression when he inflicted a superficial wound on the Professor of English, two days later at the first faculty meeting he tripped up Registrar’s chair, and then he degraded the book written under Welch superintendence. In order not to lose his job, he starts to fawn upon his superior Mr. Welch, who decides whether he keeps his job or not. He says what Welch wants to hear, for the sake of appearances he see eye to eye with him, supports his opinions and even takes an invitation for a boring weekend of music and arts. Bad luck follows Jim further and gets him into many funny situations, situations that cannot be explained away. After the party he damaged Mrs. Welch’s bed sheets as he fell asleep while smoking a cigarette. Instead of confessing he rather tries to hide the damage. He deceives Bertrand and Mrs. Welch by dissembling his voice. After the College Ball he hijacks Barclays’ taxi. The novel reaches its climax in Dixon’s lecture on “Merrie England,” which represents the end of his university carrier. He comes drunk to the lecture, and accidentally parodies the voices of Professor Welch and other colleagues. It is no surprise he loses his job the very next day. In fact this symbolizes a delivery and a beginning of a new life. At the end, as the title cues, Jim becomes lucky; he gets a well paid job in London as well as a girl of his heart.
“The novel that changed a generation,” states the David Lodge’s recommendation on the back cover of the 1991 Penguin edition. “In his hilarious send-up of academic life, Kingsley Amis poked devastating fun at a very British way of life, and gave post-war fiction a new and enduring figure to laugh and laugh at.”
Essentially, this is an absolutely correct picture: Lucky Jim is undeniably a classic humorous story, an influential campus novel, and a work of fiction which detained and articulated the feelings of those who reached adulthood in the 1950s. Nevertheless Lucky Jim represents more than that. Lucky Jim is not, for example, constantly comical as its myth might determine new booklovers to wait for.
In Lucky Jim there are lots of happenings when not only that the mockery disappears, but even the condescending smile; paragraphs, generally related to Jim's sentimental teaching, that are unexpectedly serious in manner and significance. But I am going to talk about this aspect after honoring its humor. This originates from two springs, the comic of situation and the literary style; though the humor of situation is indivisible from the literary style, the vice versa is not true in any circumstances: the literary style can incite amusement by its self. But both are based on Amis's perfect aptitude of timing: the technique used to manage the progress of a certain scene, or the turn of phrase, to cause that fusion of astonishment and inevitability is the very essence of the comedy.
The comic of situation is highlighted by such sparkling images as Jim's disaster with Welches' bed-clothing and his hard work to hide the damage, his endeavors to mislead Mrs. Welch and Bertrand (Welches' son) on the phone by changing his voice, his lecture of “Merrie England” while being drunk and so on. All these scenes involve the breach of the generally accepted code of manners and enclose a component of farce; they fit in the tradition of English comedy which goes back to Elizabethan theatre and writing. The comedy created by Kingsley Amis is more innovative, and initiated a specifically new manner into English literature. The style is meticulously defined, but avoids the traditional “classiness”. It is cultured but unrestricted. While organizing an extensive vocabulary, he avoids all the customary strategy of comedy — funny periphrasis, parody, elegant indifference. The elegance of Amis’s style is the way he manages every day way of talking. It is a style frequently confronted and confirmed by its own frankness, full of surprising turnarounds and discouragement of unnecessary words and phrases accumulation, producing a invigorating novelty to the satirical examination of daily life.
Lucky Jim is the first classical British campus novel, the first to take as its central character a lecturer at a provincial university, and to find a rich scam of comic and narrative material in that small world. As Kingsley Amis confessed, the genesis of Lucky Jim is represented his visit at the University of Leicester, “I looked around a couple of times and said to myself, 'Christ, some-body ought to do something with this.' Not that it was awful – well, only a hit; it was strange and sort of developed, a whole mode of existence no one had got on to from outside”. Jim Dixon's concern about his opportunities in the academic world, his reliance on the support of a superior professor who he looks down to, is a persistent characteristic of the this kind of novel, and Professor Welch ('No other professor in Great Britain, he thought, set such store by being called Professor') is the archetype of non-intelligent, arrogance, weirdness and genuine ineptitude that British Universities appear to accept or, more, to promote in their superior professionals corps. But the University and campus life, the competition for promotion accompanied by small or big stratagems the problem of “academic” sex and other issues debated in campus novels are not present in Lucky Jim. The University campus, in this novel, is the personification of a conventional and insipid bourgeois environment, where Jim Dixon entered due to his education. First, Jim feels the revolt against the standards and conventions of this world; after a while he expresses this revolt.
The longest and most important piece of continuous action in the novel, extending over six chapters and some fifty pages, centers on a ball, a device for bringing characters together that goes back as far as the eighteenth-century novel, and one which might equally well have been associated with some other hierarchical institution, such as a bank or a business. This brings us to the question of Lucky Jim's historical and sociological significance. The year of its publication the novel was highly praised for introducing the new literary genre and characters known as “the angry young men”. Other authors created works with similar characters that rejected the values of the bourgeoisie. Philip Larkin, a good friend of Amis, wrote two similar novels 10 years before Lucky Jim, but with little success. Larkin generously advised Amis while writing Lucky Jim and Kingsley Amis gratefully dedicated the novel to Larkin. The paternity of the syntagma “The Angry Young Men” belongs the Spectator magazine, which in a leading article referred to a number of writers and characters appearing in their works who strongly articulated their dissatisfaction with life in Britain of 1950s. Kingsley Amis and his Lucky Jim were included in this group. Amis repeatedly refused to be included in “the movement” as they called it, but the expression Angry Young Man followed him and his career. Even if these writers irrupted on literary scene in 1950s, the years were 1940s. The World War II has put a pause in their career and/or their studies. Lucky Jim is also conceived in 1940s, the traces of the World War II are present in the novel. One of Jim's student, Mitchie was a fighter on Italian front in a tank division while Jim was a corporal in Royal Air Force. There are some other references to the War in Lucky Jim. The ambiance of the novel is obviously impregnated by the post-war austerity and socialist ideas. At the time a young professor like Jim was really leaving in a rented room, with ration tickets, few clothing, counting his cigarettes for financial reasons, a car of his own being an unimaginable dream. At the opposite pole is the lifestyle of Welch family. They are wealthy bourgeoisie in a provincial town. They leave in a big house, with servants, their sons with artistic preoccupations (Michael- a painter, Michel – a writer) appearing like “last Mohicans” of a fainted bohemian life. As for Jim, his socialism is a basic one, with no political implications. It is rather a state of mind and emotion than a political attitude.
Of course, after the War, the British society has known a deep democratization process with visible results in the education field also. Even if the Universities had a large number of senior professors from “old academic”, the new comers were different and opened to social daily life. The new life style of young academics that rejected the values of old academic life and bourgeoisie was difficult to be integrated and accepted by in the stuffy campus society. These young professors, just like Jim Dixon, were listening to the music of their generation (rock, pop), preferring the pubs to the classy restaurants, and hanging with ordinary people instead of academic ones. Jim himself was feeling a deceit as teacher. He feels that he’s wasting his and students’ time, vice versa being also true. Nevertheless, when he lost his job at the university he strongly considered to open his private school if no other opportunity would have been available. As Kingsley Amis stated in his Memoires, the professorate was almost the only option for many young University graduates, at least in the field of humanities, because the access in the other professions was restricted by the “old guard” of educated people. These young academics were the model and the readers of Lucky Jim.
It became classical for the illustration of despise and derision of academic pretentions (and largely quoted) as Jim assesses his own essay: “In considering this strangely neglected topic?,' it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. 'Let's see,' he echoed Welch in a pretended effort of memory: 'oh yes; The Economic Effect of the Developments us Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485”
It is important to notice that Jim Jim is just as critical with his own work as with others. In the major part of the novel, the revolt sensed by Jim toward the ridiculous values of the academic bourgeoisie, is an inner revolt, a psychical one, rarely expressed by making funny faces whem he believes that no one sees him. Jim’s wish for brutal acts against people who dominated him is transposed in his mental scenes full of funny and childish images: he sees himself beating Welch with a bottle on the head and shoulders, sinking his feet in the toilet bowl and so on. But after having this kind of mental revenge, Jim confesses to himself: “He'd never be able to tell Welch what he wanted to tell him, any more than he'd ever be able to do the same with Margaret.” Only when his rebellion is physically expressed, voluntarily or not, Jim becomes a real “angry young man”. He physically confronted Bertrand, putting him down, The first occasion on which Jim's inner and outer speech exactly coincide comes after he fights Bertrand and succeeds in knocking him down. “The bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation, Dixon thought. `You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation,' he said”. After the episode, Jim's fate starts an upper evolution though the near reality appears to have bad signs. Even his alcoholic lecture on Merrie England proves to be liberation eventually.
The emotional ties that bind him to Margaret were broken. In the end he gets a good job, and the girl he dreams about. Is almost the happy end of a fairy tale, with a Prince, Princess, Witches, and other fantasy characters. The two women in Jim’s love life, Margret and Christine not only they are very different characters but the power of their portray is unequal. Christine, a blond, beautiful and appetizing young woman is after all very banal and ordinary. Her discussions with Jim are very banal and the exceptions are rare. Margret on the other hand, is not a beauty she is neurotic and skinny, but more interesting by far. She claims Jim’s fidelity as the University claims his professional loyalty. He did not want to be a teacher at the University, but he had no other chance. He is involved in this tense and odd relationship with Margret though he does not love her or he has no desire for her. In Chapter XVI, he finally took the courage to admit all these to Margret, she becomes hysterical but after the inherent crisis, she becomes rational and sees the reality of their situation and her behavior: “I just couldn't take what you said, that's all. I thought to myself, I can't bear it, I must stop him, and then I simply lost control of myself. Nothing more to it than that. And it was all so silly and childish, because you were absolutely right, saying what you did. Much better to clear the air like that. I just behaved like a perfect idiot.” Apparently, Jim is free to follow his recent established relationship with Christine, without having any other duty or attraction to Margret. But this is not entirely true. He remains in a state of mental or sentimental submission to Margret, as we can see from the scene when Bertrand confronted Jim and accused him to attract Christine away from him. Jim courageously defend his position; suddenly both women enter the room and Jim realizes that the woman with whom he would prefer to have tea the next afternoon is not the virginal Christine but the neurotic Margret. As much as he tried to hide it from himself, the revelation was there, in his mind and soul, and make him sick.
“He remembered a character in a modern novel Beesley had lent him who was always feeling pity moving in him like sickness, or some such jargon. The parallel was apt: he felt very ill.” The novel Jim think about is probably The Heart of the Matter by Graham Green, as David Lodge suggest in his Introduction I referred to. At the time Amis Kingsley worked at Lucky Jim, Graham Green was the most successful modern British writer. Naturally, the rising star Kingsley Amis wanted to challenge Green’s position and to be different from him. So, his character, Jim Dixon is able to achieve a good destiny unlike Green’s character, Scobic. Unlike Scobic, Jim does not have regrets and no desire to bear the burden of guilt or pity. And that is because the author gave him the chance to free himself of these destroying feelings. Jims discovers Margret’s fake attempt of suicide, consequently the great emancipation from her sentimental tutelage finally happened. As he put it in a discussion with Christine: “I'm sticking to Margaret because I haven't got the guts to turn her loose and let her look after herself, so I do that instead of doing what I want to do, because I'm afraid to.”
As for Margret, her entire story is not in Lucky Jim or in another Amis’s novel. Other women writers have told her story in the British novel.
Jim is also rewarded with a new, much better paid job in London, where he wanted to live. With his Princess of course.
CHAPTER III – MALCOM BRADBURY’S EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG
The period of post-war austerity was replaced in the next decade with period of development, material comfort and relaxation. New appliances, technology and modern services influenced daily life in Great Britain starting with working environment, domestic household tasks, free time, the position of women, to education. Notwithstanding the precarious monetary circumstance, the normal individual's expectations for everyday comforts and week by week compensation rose and individuals could appreciate more prominent opportunity and new methods for amusement because of many work sparing gadgets. Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister between 1957-1963 from Conservative Party, is frequently quoted with his saying “Most people have never had it so good”.
The most essential change in after-war Britain was the progressive separation and the finish of British Empire, which prompted new finding of national and individual character. Marwick claims that after the provincialism, which ruled in first part of the fifties, there was a turn into a time of openness to comportment and thoughts from United States and Europe.
This kind of revolution (social and cultural) in the sixties shaped many interrelated information, diverse in quality or in class, which changed British thoughts and practices. This “new way” was perceived as an attack on British comfort, preconception, platitudes, and rigidity of society. This inspiration opened large windows to Europe, USA, Asia and to populism, working class and youth. The sixties was the age of youth. The cause of this is possibly because there were young people who produced new industrialized and technological society. The youth were linked with free expression of sexuality, articulated their disrespect toward establishment by having sex affaires outside marriage institution, girls and young women were warring miniskirts, young men and women were warring hot jeans and pants, trying drugs, LSD and cannabis were “in vogue”, and listening Beatles Rolling Stones.
The characteristic of the sixties was the relaxation of life. The first significant indication of conservative morals lessening is the publishing in 1960 of the hot novel of D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The publishing house Penguin Books was blamed for diffusion of vulgarity and immorality; the result was a paradox: the sexual topics, previously covered by a socially decent silence, real taboos, became openly discussed. The debate resulted in a number of parliamentary acts on sexual issues which conferred more liberty.
These laws were also a result of partially feminist movement, which started to grow stronger that years.29
Due to this liberalization the reform in education was significant. The comprehensive teaching has been adopted in grammar schools and secondary ones. Numerous universities had been brought to date, and undeniably modern universities have been set up. British high education system became very efficient and famous.
Malcom Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of a watchman. His family moved to London in 1935, but he returned to Sheffield in 1941 with his brother and mother. The family later moved to Nottingham and in 1943 Bradbury attended the West Bradford Grammar School where he remained until 1950. He taught English at the University of Leicester and obtained a first-class degree in English in 1953. He continued his studies at the Queen Mary College of the University of London, where he obtained his MA degree in 1955. Between 1955 and 1958 Bradbury taught at the University of Manchester and Indiana University in the United States. He returned to England in 1958 for a heart surgery; Given his medical status, he was not expected to go beyond middle age.
He accepted his first teaching position as an adult education tutor at the University of Hull. With his study on Evelyn Waugh in 1962, Bradbury formally began his career as a writer and publisher. From 1961 to 1965 he taught at the University of Birmingham. He completed his doctorate in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962 and later moved to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, was published in 1965), where he served as professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the course of the Master in Creative Writing, which was attended by Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983 and Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987. He retired from academic life in 1995.
Bradbury received the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1991 for his services to literature and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honors 2000, also for his services to literature.
Bradbury died at Colman Hospital in Norwich. He was buried on December 4, 2000 in the atrium of the parish church of St Mary in Tasburgh. Although he was not an orthodox religious believer, he respected the traditions and socio-cultural role of the Church of England and enjoyed visiting churches in the spirit of Philip Larkin's "Church going" poem.
While in hospital, he completed his first novel, Eating People is Wrong. At the University of Hull he met David Lodge – fellow lecturer at University and writer. They established a lifelong friendship.
The styles of Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury have sometimes been confused by some readers, and have often been compared by critics but also by other writers. In Coming From Behind, by Howard Jacobson, the protagonist named "Bradbury Lodge" is a hypothetical house where literary and academic celebrities would meet; In Floating Down to Camelot by David Benedictus, a student regrets not having enrolled in an East Anglia university because "Bradbury is there and Lodge is in Birmingham". The two writers have very often amused themselves in their novels to refer to their respective works and have played this amalgam. In Rates of Exchange, for example, Bradbury refers to a writer, Brodge, who wrote Changing Westward (a mixture of Changing Places and Stepping Westward). In My Strange Quest for Lie: Structuralism's Hidden Hero, the post face would have been written by Michel Tardieu (Professor of Structuralism at the University of Paris, who is none other than a character from A Tiny World), and translated by … David Lodge. As for the latter, he inserts a passage in A Tiny World, in which two anonymous novelists, but strangely resembling the two writers, are in full conversation. Finally, in La Vie en Moinoudine, Desmond remarks that it would not surprise him to appear one day, under barely disguised features, in a university novel.
Bradbury spend almost all his life in the academic environment, consequently all of his novels are placed in this milieu he is familiar with, but he disagreed about his novels being “campus novel”: „but they are not, I believe campus novels, rather novels about self-aware intellectuals capable of irony and doubt, concerned with the issues of change and liberation, the problems of humanism, and so might well have been in other settings”
The key theme in Bradbury’s novels is humane progressive ideals, since he treats the transformation of liberal position of English society in the last 50 years of Twentieth Century. As Bradbury acknowledged, the center of his novels is the liberal crisis.
Similar to the first novel, Bradbury’s next novel Stepping Westward was also marked with humorous liberal realism, being inspired by the period spent at the University of Indiana. A sad book, but nevertheless comic is The History man, which has been awarded with the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize. Also his next work, Rates of Exchange, was very well received by readers and critics, and Bradbury won Booker Prize. In the compilation of short stories Who Do You Think You Are? he parodied various techniques of modern British and Nord American writers.
As scholar he published a series of valuable studies such as: From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature and The Modern American Novel, both considering the north-American literature from the English perception. As for British literature he wrote Atlas of Literature (which includes over 80 essays on how writers and places are connected by literature) and The Modern British Novel. He wrote essays on E. M. Forster (author of A passage to India) and Evelyn Waught (Writers and Critics: Evelyn Waugh), two writers very highly regarded by Bradbury.
His academic activity led him all over the world, as visiting lecturer and professor. He also was a very well rated TV script writer.
“Rather unusually for a young writer's first novel, “Eating People Is Wrong” has a 40 year-old hero, Professor Treece, Head of English at a provincial redbrick university. This allows Treece to represent a theme that consistently fascinated Bradbury, the liberal's sense of being an impotent spectator of, and at times an involuntary collaborator in, the cultural decline which he observes going on around him. Treece finds the brash, socially mobile Britain of the 1950s, where university teachers vandalize the learned journals in their own common rooms, a distracting and demoralizing climate in which to cultivate beauty and truth, but fails to live up to his own high ideals. Succumbing irresponsibly to the charms of a pretty postgraduate, he drives an unstable but gifted student into madness and is punished by his own comically horrendous hospitalization in the last chapter”.
It comes as no shock then when this story ends on a hospital area. Certainly Bradbury does not hide the truth that the novel is about how he anticipated his future to have advanced. Malcom Bradbury explains that Stuart Treece (the main character of the novel) is a projection of young Bardbury at the age of 40. Stuart Treece is a professor at the redbrick University of Leicester (a typical provincial city), which is exactly what the 20 years old student wanted to become, “which either says a lot for the power of fantasy, or the ironic workings of fate” as he put it.
Malcom Bradbury is very reserved when it comes to the notion of “campus novel” and the resemblance with the theme of Lucky Jim. He says:
“When the book appeared in 1959, it was, I remember, described as a "campus novel," and often compared with Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. This is not so surprising, but not quite what I intended. I began the book well before Lucky Jim appeared, and then wrote and re-wrote it several times during the decade.”
As for setting the novel in the provincial town of Leicester, Bradbury confirms that the William Cooper's novel Scenes from Provincial Life, strongly influenced his own novel.
The author states that he did not intend to write about the actual life in the University campus, but he used it as a metaphor for the social and political changes taking place in the end of fifties and the beginning of sixties. Is about how the intellectuals perceived the wind of changes, about their power to understand the years to come, to adapt to this new era. He also gives a full explanation of the literary, philosophic movements (modernism, postmodernism) affected the life of “intelligentsia”.
“This was a time when the Modern movement seemed over, the days of Bloomsbury over and gone, and the way the novel chose to renew itself was by paying a close, realistic attention to ordinary, contemporary English life. Realism came back, and, thanks to the influence of writers like George Orwell, William Cooper and Angus Wilson, a kind of radical common-sense became the prevailing style of the Fifties novel. In fact the period was one of realistic retrenchment, and fascination with the suddenly changed climate of the post-imperial, welfare state postwar world. Despite the fact that the Fifties became known as the Angry Decade, its tone was not particularly political, and more concerned with cultural and moral reassessment. Not just the Modernist experiments but the radical left-wing politics of the pre-war years were over, after Fascism and the spread of Communism in Eastern European totalitarianism was the enemy, and it was an age of liberalism, of individualistic values and personal relations.” The anxiety of an unknown future touches the main characters of the novel.
Professor Treece and Emma Fielding are “products” of the romantic third decade of 20th century and seems to be somehow lost in this new era, still attached the decency of the traditional way of life, uncertain about their intellectual and social role in the new liberal order. Even his students disappoint him with their lack of originality which prevents them to be the vectors of changing.
“The liberalism that makes Treece virtuous also makes him inert, and leaves him with a disappointing, indeed an ironic, world on his hands.”
Treece’s place, the campus, is still warm, still untouched by the social tumult from “outside”. Time of new liberalism and political correctness did not arrive yet, multiculturalism, materialism and all postmodern concepts were far away.
Eating people is a bitter-sweet comedy, talking about the liberty of every person to choose his own path in life, a swing between ideals and real life, between nearly heroic actions and their boring outcome. The novel represented Bradbury’s starting and returning point in writing, because, as he says “Yes, even in the streetwise Nineties, eating people is, still, wrong.”
Eating people is an interesting novel. In the main character of conceitedly open-minded University professor Stuart Treece, Bradbury introduces the reader with a personage as mysterious as they come. On the edge of middle-age and living an ascetic life on his own choice, Treece is a person who does not have something or someone to rely on, an anchor, a man who simply exists in the emptiness that is United Kingdom in 1950s.
Attached to the single fixed point of reference of his life – his liberal self – Treece observes the surrounding world with a combination of indifference and fascination. Treece teaches in a provincial remote university somewhere Northern England. Bradbury portrays a rather suppressing world of worthless seminars and similarly pointless tea dances. Blimey is truly a unexciting and unsuccessful world.
Salvation is represented by Emma Fielding, a good-looking student whose kindliness and warmth menaces to devastate both her life and those of her much adult lover. As anyone can expect this love affair is hopeless from the beginning.
Even though there are definitely some well carried out scenes in the novel, the young Bradbury does tend to induce controversy time to time. The society and culture that have been emptied of ethics and artistic honesty is a persistent theme throughout the novel. Except for Treece and Emma, a large variety of characters appear in the novel without actually rising. Personages such as the bizarre Louis Bate – the new working class academic and unwanted admirer of Emma – are fugitively sketched without being developed which is probably understandable for a writer at his first novel.
As for Willoughby, a charming young academic who appears unexpectedly rather late in the book, most probably as a direct opposite to Treece’s settled and calm respectability, the same unfinished deployment occurs. Sometimes the author gives the impression that he’s stressed to finish or polish these characters and completely comprehend what each one stands for.
It is not my intention to affirm that Eating People is Wrong is only a piece of a young writer, his first attempt. That would be wrong and not true. With Stuart Treece, the author designed a man of his epoch; for Treece most likely the future will bring down his philosophy of life as time goes by.
It is certainly a positive action to expose the duplicity and self-satisfaction of the academic broadminded liberal embodied by Stuart Treece. It is rather comic as well. Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong shows us once again that between the old world and the new one rest indefinable surroundings which cannot be easily abandoned.
CHAPTER IV – DAVID LODGE’S CAMPUS TRILOGY
In distinction to the flourishing sixties, the seventies are characterized by economic recession, violent behavior, war, racial confrontation, terrorism, and social changes. On the other hand the seventies are the epoch of open-mindedness and abrogation of elderly social stereotypes.
Computers and automatics changed the economy and it became difficult to find jobs considering also the recession. The unemployment rate was high, as well as the insecurity of jobs. Strikes at large scale effectively erupted.
Britain’s bad economic status was frequently related to the rigid class system. The liberalization of sixties did not touch essentially the English rigid class system. Racial inequities were even deeper that class differences. The immigrants from former British territories (Indians, Pakistani, Mauritanian, and others) were subject to racial discrimination. Even some of them were well educated persons; they had to take humble jobs, unwanted by white English people. The key problems were the awful lodging conditions, high unemployment rate of youth, criminality, and police persecution.
The seventies are named “ungovernable” because all the above. It was not a wind of change as in sixties, but a real storm of changes.
DAVID LODGE’S BIOGRAPHY
David Lodge is from a modest Catholic family living in Brockley (Lewisham district) in the southern suburbs of London; his father and mother were respectively musician in a dance orchestra and secretary.
As a child, it was marked by the Second World War (London bombing) and then by its consequences. In 1951 he came on holiday to Heidelberg at the invitation of his aunt who worked at the headquarters of the American army, he was surprised at the difference in the situation between the United Kingdom, where rationing was still in progress, and the countries of the continent, Belgium, France and even occupied Germany.
Passionate about reading, he was very early attracted by writing; his first publication took place in 1950: a short story, in the newspaper of his high school.
In 1952 he was admitted at the University of London, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1955. He then served two years in the Royal Armored Corps, In the Royal Tank Regiment, at Bovington camp (Dorset), following his refusal to attend a reserve officer training. The journey of David Lodge as soldier is taken again to evoke that of the narrator of Ginger, You're Barmy (1962), Jonathan Browne. Released in August 1957, David Lodge returned to the University of London where he obtained a Master of Arts (MA) in 1959, with a thesis on British Catholic novelists.
During this period, he wrote a first novel at the age of 18 (1953), "The Devil, the World and the Flesh" ("unpublished, thank God"). His first publication for the general public dates from 1960. (The Picturegoers).
He married in 1959 Mary Frances Jacob, also a graduate (MA) from the University of London, and they will have two children in the years 1960-1963. In 1959-60 he worked in London as an English teacher for the British Council. In 1960, he obtained a post of lecturer at the University of Birmingham where he prepared a thesis (Ph.D.) of English literature.
In 1963, he participated with Malcolm Bradbury and a student, James Duckett, in the production of Birmingham Repertory Theater, played in the fall of 1963. Through this theatrical experience, he discovered a certain comic talent, which he exploited in his next novel and in a general way thereafter, while the first two were quite serious and realistic.
In 1964-65 he stayed in the United States through a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship scholarship, which required the beneficiary to travel a minimum of 3 months out of 12 in the United States with a car supplied by the company. From August 1964 to March 1965, the family stayed in Providence (Rhode Island); David Lodge studied American Literature at Brown University. Then they leave on a trip to San Francisco. During this period, devoid of teaching duties, he wrote quite quickly his third novel, “British Museum is falling down”.
From 1967 to 1987, he pursued his academic career at the University of Birmingham, becoming a professor of English literature in 1976, while writing numerous other essays and novels. In 1969 he spent six months as an “associate professor” at the University of Berkeley, the second important American experience in the continuation of his theoretical and fictional work.
In 1987, he left the university, with the title of honorary professor, to devote himself entirely to writing, but also because of a hearing problem and the consequences of the policy of Margaret Thatcher; In the novel he wrote at that time, Game of Society (1988), one of the characters left the university, because “the government no longer plays the game”, to become a trader.
After his retirement, he directed his theoretical work to the general public. In 1991, the newspaper The Independent proposes to him to keep a column on the novel in its Sunday supplement, taking the continuation of a poetic column Ars poetica held by James Fenton14. The column receives the name of Art of fiction and, once completed, is published after a number of changes15 (The Art of Fiction, 1992).
David Lodge received the following distinctions:
• Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1997 in France;
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998 in the United Kingdom.
The first published novels evoke postwar England (The Picturegoers, 1960) – a theme which, moreover, marks other later novels through the childhood memories of certain characters (News of Paradise, 1992), the period of war (Outside the Shelter, 1970), his transition to military service in the 1950s (Ginger, you're Barmy, 1962).
Another important theme is the role of the Catholic religion in British society, particularly in its relations with sexuality (How Far Can We Go? 1980,) News of Paradise, Therapy.
Several of his novels from the 1970s depict ironically the academic worlds (Change of Places, A Small World, Game of Society) around a Midland fictional university, "Rummidge", with recurring characters, including the American teacher Morris Zapp, who aspires to be "the world's best paid literature teacher" and his more modest British counterparts in economic terms. He returns with Secret Thoughts, located in another fictitious university, but in a real place, Gloucester.
Beginning in the 1980s, he broadened the scope of his novels: the corporate world in Game of Society, the world of television in Therapy, and touched on varied themes, for example, the Hawaiian Islands and tourism in News Paradise, Deafness and Alzheimer's Disease in A Deaf Sentence.
He has been present in British literature since the 1960s and became a consecrated author with the 1975 Hawthornden Award for Change of Places and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1980 for How Far Can We Go? and the Sunday Express Book of the Year in 1988 for Board Games.
Two of his first novels were reissued during this period (Ginger, you're Barmy, 1962/1982 and The British Museum is falling down, 1965/1981).
His notoriety in the general public is also attested by his presence in the world of television in the 1980s and 1990s. Two of his novels have been adapted, as well as a play. He adapted Martin Chuzzlewit from Charles Dickens and participated in a documentary about a linguistic colloquium in Glasgow: Big Words – Small Worlds.
His novels were published in pocket format in the 1960s by Pan and Panther Books, by Penguin Books from the 1980s, by Vintage Publishing16 (Random House Group) since 2011.
The complete work
He has written fiction novels: The Picturegoers – 1960, Ginger You're Barmy – 1962, The British Museum Is Falling Down – 1965, Out of the Shelter – 1970, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses – 1975, How Far Can You Go? (US edition: Souls and Bodies) — 1980, Small World: An Academic Romance – 1984, Nice Work – 1988, Paradise News – 1991, A David Lodge Trilogy – 1993 – comprising Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work, Therapy – 1995, The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up: And Other Stories – 1998, Home Truths – 1999, Thinks … – 2001, Author, Author – 2004, Deaf Sentence – 2008, A Man of Parts (H.G. Wells) – 2011
He also published nonfiction works: Language of Fiction – 1966, The Novelist at the Crossroads – 1971, The Modes of Modern Writing – 1977, Working with Structuralism – 1981, Write On – 1986, After Bakhtin – 1990, The Art of Fiction – 1992, Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader — 1992, The Practice of Writing — 1997, Consciousness and the Novel — 2003, The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel – 2006, Lives in Writing — 2014
He also published an autobiography: Quite a Good Time To Be Born: a Memoir and affired himself as a play writer with: The Writing Game – 1990, Home Truths – 1999 and Secret Thoughts (based on Thinks…) – 2011
Some of his works were adapted for television: Small World – 1988, Nice Work – 1989, Martin Chuzzlewit – 1994 and The Writing Game – 1995
Two places with fictitious names are recurring in the work of David Lodge: the town of "Rummidge" and the London neighborhood of "Brickley".
THE TRILOGY
David Lodge wrote Changing Places after being a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkley. Small World is inspired by David Lodge’s own travels around the world to conferences on many topics. Lastly, living and teaching in the industrial city of Birmingham gave him the sense of the difference between academic world and industry as he shows it in Nice Work.
The author admits that he is inspired by his own life and experiences, but at the same time he denies that the features and plots in the novels are “autobiographical in any simple, straightforward sense”. In the same article David Lodge concedes that he has a “fondness for binary structures”. The two professors exchanging their jobs, cultures, wives and to some extend some of their character traits as well (Phillip gains experience and Morris tolerance and humanity), may serve as a good example of the binary structures. The structure is also pointed at with the characters of Vic Wilcox and Dr. Robyn Penrose who are juxtaposed in Nice Work and also the Pabst twins in Small World. Throughout the novels he also makes a distinction between the university and the outside world; his aim is to bridge the gap between the university and the outside world; he wants to bring the university closer to the ordinary people and he also wants those two worlds to connect, to understand each other.
Another claim Lodge makes is a statement about comedy: “I use comedy to explore serious subjects”.
This may lead us to the Lodge’s picturing of the British and American universities. He is sure to describe both in a rather comical and humorous way; each for quite different reasons. He makes the point that the British universities are too traditional but on the other hand the American universities are modern too much; there are too many student disturbances, strikes and political problems. He seems to look for something in between of those extremes. We can assume that he favors the American educational system a little because he pays more attention to making fun of British schools. David Lodge makes a claim not about comedy, but goes a step further and tells the reader why he uses parody in his works. He clarifies that when using parody, the author may approach the given problem with a great deal of irony. David Lodge is one of the novelists that perfectly master the device of parody. He is careful when using the device not to be too harsh but at the same time he makes sure that the parody is easily recognized so that every ordinary reader may enjoy his comic novels.
David Lodge is also a literary theoretician and “his campus novels largely coincide and overlap with his scholarly work” and vice versa. He includes the debate about literature into his novels; and in fact those debates are very appropriate for the genre of campus novels.
In his novels Lodge implies and employs his critical attitude to the rise of critical theories in the academy in a comical mode. It can hardly be a mere coincidence that the novel Small World (1984), is built on a parody of what Lodge saw as then the latest fashion in literary criticism.
David Lodge even pokes fun at Morris Zapp for taking to various theories; mainly for going around the world to conferences and talking about the theory of deconstruction. Morris presents a claim that a language is only a code and that “[…] every decoding is another encoding”. On the contrary, Phillip Swallow, a literary historian with rather traditional views, is in Small World shown as a more positive character. He is portrayed in a positive way although David Lodge created Swallow to look foolish and old-fashioned; in other words he was created as a figure we will feel sorry for. The author continues with parody in Nice Work where he introduces the “Shadow Scheme”. It is employed for the purpose of degrading the seriousness of the British higher educational system. The university is forced to cooperate with something that is as down-to-earth as daily work in an engineering company in Rummidge. With mentioning Rummidge, we are getting to the cities where the novels are set. It is very interesting how masterfully Lodge chose and described the cities so I will deal with the setting briefly.
The place name Rummidge appears through all three novels. It is, as the author says, “an imaginary city, with imaginary universities and imaginary factories, inhabited by imaginary people, which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world”. There are clear cues that confirm our assumption that Birmingham is what the author had in mind. We would be able to make the right guess even if the author did not mention the city’s name in the Author’s note. If a reader knows that Lodge comes from and for many years lived in Birmingham, he cannot fail to connect those cues to the city of Lodge’s origin. He supports the resemblance by describing the city as a city where industry co-occurs with higher education and still further supports the idea at the beginning of Changing Places. He says that Morris Zapp’s view of Rummidge was “a vista of dank back gardens, rotting sheds and dripping laundry, huge, ill-looking trees, grimy roofs, factory chimneys and church spires” (Changing Places). The University of Euphoria is fictional and so is the University of Rummidge. Since Lodge admits that his works are based on reality, the suggestion that the University of Euphoria represents the University of California, Berkley, where he worked as a Visiting Professor in 1969, should be taken into account. Other place names and names of the cities where the conferences are held are the same as in the real world; the meetings take place in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Honolulu, Heidelberg and so on.
MAIN CHARACTERS – INTRODUCTION AND CAREERS
Until the middle of the nineteenth century the literary characters that came from the academy ground were usually students and they were portrayed in very negative way in most works. They were described either as villains or as fools. Since then the situation began to change slightly. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the situation improved and mainly the Oxford students and teachers became very much respected. Since the 1950’s and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, also the teachers of smaller provincial campuses began to be regarded closely and the genre of the campus novel as such, portraying mainly teachers, came to existence. Nonetheless, we can still find characters in contemporary campus fiction that are portrayed as the fool-types figures; either on the whole or just partly. A perfect example is one of the professors of David Lodge’s campus fictions, Phillip Swallow.
The main characters of the campus trilogy by David Lodge are two professors; this confirms Lodge’s statement about his liking to have binary structure in his novels. Those two professors and their families appear in all three novels, although in the last novel of the trilogy, Nice Work, they appear only for brief moments. Nevertheless, they are the connecting points in the novels together with emphasis on the university setting, which is also important in the trilogy.
The first professor is Morris Zapp of the State University of Euphoria (Euphoric State) placed in United States of America, more precisely in California. The second professor is Phillip Swallow from the University of Rummidge in the United Kingdom. They both get involved, reasons are different, in an exchange scheme between their home universities. This scheme began a long time ago because architects of both campuses had independently the same idea about their design; they placed a replica of the leaning Tower of Pisa on its ground and the academic change was started to confirm this similarity. The professors taking part in this scheme exchange posts for six months; they should also exchange their salaries. But the American professors would not go to England if they were to earn as little money as their English counterparts in their job.
Lodge here tries to draw attention to his personal experience of the money problem. He criticizes the British universities for not valuing its staff. As a consequence, the most brilliant British teachers, of course, leave to teach somewhere in America. In the novel, he accentuates the low salary of teachers in Britain by letting the Euphoric University pay the difference between what the American professors get in Rummidge and what they earn at home. He comes back to this theme at the end of Nice Work when he makes a university “hero” of Robyn Penrose who rejects the offer to teach in the United States and stays in Rummidge even though the salary and the background is in no way comparable. However, she is not motivated by money any more as she inherited a large sum of money from her uncle. She just wants to teach and to stay in Rummidge seems much more comfortable than moving to the United States. Nonetheless, the British professors going to the USA get the pay of their counterpart, so they experience quite a comfortable life. Moreover, the Euphoric State, being one of America’s major universities, has many more attractions to the professors than the unknown University of Rummidge. Euphoric State is able to pay the most distinguished scholars; there are a lot of laboratories, libraries and access to enormous research grants.
The money difference and also the difference in the facilities give the reader an idea of the qualities of professors who usually go through this scheme. In Rummidge there are many professors that are eager to experience the exchange, so the English University is able to choose the teacher that is to represent it in the United States. The professors, then, are usually older and very sophisticated teachers. Most of them, Phillip Swallow included, are attracted not only by the background and experience that is offered to them but also by the salary.
When talking about the places involved in the academic exchange, we cannot forget the significance of the place names. Lodge did not give them their names for no reasons as we will see. Throughout the whole novel Changing Places, Lodge employs the comic attitude when using the place names. Rummidge is mistakenly called Rubbish by Désirée and the city is really not very nice place as we have seen from the Morris Zapp’s view of the city and Désirée’s mistake of calling it Rubbish is, in fact, not far from the true image of the city. Moreover, when we think about the name of the place in America – the State University of Euphoria or the Euphoric State – it may suggest something about its character. However, the name does not apply to the university only; the university lies is the State of Euphoria. From the name it may be assumed that there are no problems, people are experiencing nothing but euphoria there. Lodge, however, explains his aim of giving it the name in Changing Places when he says that the students in their Bachelor’s studies get most credits for their leisure. Under the label “leisure”, he imagines activities like sunbathing, swimming, playing beach volleyball and other such activities. In comparison with Rummidge students, whose curriculum is made only of tutorials appropriate for their studies, the Euphoria students are really experiencing kind of euphoria during their Bachelor studies. Also the teachers live different life from their Rummidge counterparts. Lodge uses the stereotypical view that people have about the British and Americans; British teachers are very conservative in their clothing and opinions and the American teachers are “free”, easy-going and very relaxed. The American teachers in this novel are teaching at the Euphoric State; so they are mostly young, very attractive; or, if not attractive, they are at least catching with the latest trends in fashion. They get paid a considerable amount of money, so they usually drive very nice, expensive and luxurious cars and they also enjoy themselves a lot; throwing parties for other members of the staff is quite common.
There is also a difference between the professors of Rummidge and Euphoric State who are involved in the exchange. The European professor feels “like a boy in wonder” on his arrival to the State of Euphoria. Lodge gives us the description of typical American professor arriving in Rummidge:
“American visitors to Rummidge tended to be young and/or undistinguished, determined Anglophiles who could find no other way of getting to England or, very rarely, specialists in one of the esoteric disciplines in which Rummidge, through the support of local industry, had established an unchallenged supremacy: domestic appliance technology, tyre sciences and the biochemistry of the cocoa bean”. (Changing Places).
The older members of the University staff are not interested in going overseas for that kind of experience; as Lodge states “if the truth were told, [University of Euphoria] has sometimes encountered difficulty in persuading any of its faculty to go to Rummidge” (Changing Places). They are attracted neither by the salary, nor by the background and reputation of the University. The characters of David Lodge’s university novel Changing Places, however, do not confirm this claim and they do not fulfill the stereotype either.
Phillip Swallow is not as sophisticated and distinguished teacher as were his predecessors and Morris Zapp is in no way undistinguished; on the other hand, he is very acknowledged and well-known on the academic ground. Each of the professors becomes part of the scheme for quite different reasons from their predecessors. Phillip Swallow is sent there so that the Head of the Department does not have to promote him and Morris Zapp tries to solve his personal problems by leaving the United States of America.
PHILLIP SWALLOW
Phillip Swallow is in his 40s. He teaches at Rummidge, Great Britain. He comic figure has something leading to Don Quixote figure: skinny and tall (about six feet), having poor confidence in his capacities and capabilities, losing his hair at his temples and smoking pipe, of course. Philip easily recognizes that he is stuck in his own way of life. At that moment, he judges himself with severity, but finesse and realism.
Poor Philip is pitied a little by the reader who laughs gently of him. He leads a narrow life, is aware of it, and yet he does not seem to want to change it. His life is so shabby that at the beginning of the novel he is happy to contravene his family habits at the thought of staying in bed on Sunday morning with his pack of cigarettes!
The amused pity of the reader is accentuated by the fact that Rummidge University does not know what to do with Philip, not to say “do not know what to do about Philip”. He is given a safe course, without worrying about whether it is his specialty or not. As it is not, Philip looks ridiculous. When a student is advocating the boycott of the courses, he is embedded in Philip’s course. Everything goes against him, and yet he manages to do his two quarters.
In Euphoria he started to look at himself as being too old and to be envious of the students: “he envied them, the world of thrilling possibility in which they moved, a world of exposed limbs, sex manuals … erotic music and frontal nudity on stage and screen” (Changing Places). The same jealousy is manifested towards the teachers of Euphoria University. They behave and look free just like their students. Phillip starts to imitate them and adopts their style of clothing and action. In old England he would be making a fool of himself; fortunately this is Euphoria, USA.
He is a happy married man, as he claims. His wife, Hilary, gave him three children: Amanda, Robert, and Matthew. Philip family is a traditional one: husband goes to work; wife takes care of the children and the house. They have a unified, crises-free, unbroken relationship. Visiting America has a significant impact on the appreciation of his own marriage, revealing its unsatisfactory parts.
Phillip Swallow does not entirely fit the prototype of British professor involved in the exchange. He is the conservative type but he does not have a field of research; he is described as that kind of person who tries to handle too much, to read every book, know about every topic; he is eager not to leave out anything and as an outcome he does not do anything properly. Lodge uses a metaphor that “Phillip Swallow is running between the bookshelves in the library as a small boy in a toyshop. They both want everything and end up empty-handed”. (Changing Places). He is very clever but not very ambitious; as a result he has never published a single book and does not have a PhD. As it is discussed in Changing Places, he is a typical output of the British educational system, which Lodge devotes a lot of time to criticize. He does so from his own experiences. He knows the problem from the inside because he underwent the process himself as a student of a British university. Phillip has reached his peak at the Bachelor’s level. Until then he had to undergo so many examinations and tests that doing the Bachelor’s Exams is just about enough a person can handle. Moreover, being a postgraduate student in Britain is not much in fashion. In this part of the book, Lodge does not criticize and parody the qualities that the characters have, but what they do not have; in particular the PhD. degree of Phillip Swallow. He tries to make his readers conscious that the British society does not value education as high as PhD. and British educational system does nothing to change it. Phillip Swallow in his student years represents the majority of British students – he has never been interested in becoming a PhD. student. In Great Britain there were no pros of having the degree at the time. For most people, it was just too much trouble and some years wasted with a nonsense research. A PhD. student in [anonimizat] is not thought of as a brilliant person. He is more despised than praised.
Phillip Swallow is asked to go to the USA only because the head of the English Department in Rummidge, Gordon Masters, wants to promote another professor, Robin Dempsey. Gordon Masters is able to promote just one of them. Robin Dempsey deserves the promotion more for he has published several books, but Phillip is a more senior member of the staff. Gordon solves this clash by asking Phillip to take part in the exchange. He thinks that it will be less embarrassing to promote Robin in Phillip’s absence. In the end, however, Gordon Masters is forced to early retirement due to mental disorder and the new Head of the Department, Rupert Sutcliffe, decides, under the influence of Morris Zapp, to give the promotion to Phillip.
Since the promotion, Phillip’s career has been going in the right direction. At first nothing very exceptional happens, only after several years, he becomes the Head of the English Department in Rummidge. He publishes only one book about literature and William Hazzlit. The book becomes his weak point shortly after publishing. It does not raise much attention of reviewers and that hurts Phillip very much. He does not know that it is not because the book is bad, but because the publisher made a mistake and did not distribute it. As a matter of fact he will never learn about this mistake. However, the book does become a success later and Phillip gives credit for that to Morris Zapp because he asked Morris to read the book and review it if it was any good. The book being on a conservative topic was actually despised by Morris who thought of it as old-fashioned. If the book and Phillip Swallow are compared, the book seems to represent the whole personality of Phillip and the book and Phillip Swallow together become representatives of the traditional English school of literary criticism. This traditional English school is in opposition to the modern thinking about poststructuralist theories and deconstruction. Those modern theories are the fields of Morris Zapp and those professors with their philosophies are once again set to be opponents.
Before Phillip became the Head of the Department, he was scarcely known as a scholar outside the Department. Once he is given the position, he has access to various travel grants for conferences and he really uses them up. During the course of Small World he does not miss any conference. Other members of the Rummidge staff think that he travels too much. Rupert Sutcliffe remarks that at that time: “Phillip Swallow was for ever swanning around the globe on some conference jaunt or other” (Nice Work). The staff think that he more present at the conferences than in University, which is probably true and Rupert Sutcliffe adds a further bitter remark “a waste of time and money, in my opinion, those conferences” (Nice Work).
All the traveling is the main plot of the novel Small World which talks about the changes that happen to the universities. The idea of the novel was born out of the author's personal experience. After participating in Zürich in June 1979 at the James Joyce Symposium, the next destination of Lodge was Israel, where he was to attend another conference. It was the time when a novel dedicated to the pilgrimage (in the postmodern way) was decided from one conference to another. Conferences become the core of communication between specialists belonging to one field or another, constituting the matter of spatiality within the novel as a structuring element. There are the places where the trajectories of the protagonists intersect, they are the centers of some accumulation of tensions that lead to the outcome. Prologue of Small World begins with the famous rows of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. The author notices the equivalence between the present day and the day of Chaucer's pilgrims. Conferences today, as well as the pilgrimage of the past, offer the pleasures and diversities of the journey. In terms of temporality, the action of the novel takes place at a time when the socio-economic theories of globalization are still in sight.
David Lodge claims that there are no small campuses any more but that there is one big, global campus and it becomes smaller and smaller because of the advances in the technology of communication and traveling.
In Small world, the action takes the reader from England, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, back to England, then to Turkey, France, Australia, Germany, Japan, Israel, In Chicago, New York … The novel can be interpreted as a parody of the legends about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, with their famous adventures, among which the search for the Holy Grail. The protagonist of the Lodge's legend is a young university assistant who initiates the world of university conferences. In this initiatory ritual, Parsse McGarrigle, the hero of the novel, falls in love with Angelica, a young woman as beautiful as intelligent. Lossing him, the young man starts in a fiery pursuit that will carry him all over the world. He is not the only modern (post) modern knight in search of the Grail: Morris Zapp, Fulvia Morgana, Michael Tardieu, and von Turpitz, even the more reluctant Philip Swallow, were among those who walked the world like old knights in search of fame, glory, social or professional privileges. Their roads intersect accidentally and at the same time constantly; Verbal duels turn the conferences into real intellectual tournaments. The behind-the-scenes intrigue and the poisons and daggers hammered in the back are replaced by modern make-ups such as: demolition reviews in prestigious magazines, intellectual property theft, gossip, claw, and snoring. The Grail of Universities is the chair sponsored by UNESCO, the job paid with a very high salary, the beneficiary having nothing else to do but enjoy and take advantage of all the privileges offered by the post.
His academic career does not end with being the Head of the English Department. In Nice Work he becomes the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Rummidge. He has grown older, has shaved his grey beard, and suffers a kind of deafness. Through his weak chin and the bad hearing, later also through his hearing aid, he is viewed as even more comical character. Without his hearing aid he can hear all vowels but no consonants and mistakes words like “tea” for words like “pee” (Nice Work). He is also not able to travel any more as a consequence of the governmental cuts in the British higher education; Rupert Sutcliffe feels a satisfaction at this point “now it seems that the cuts have clipped his wings” (Nice Work). Throughout the whole novel Nice Work it is clear that David Lodge does not take Phillip as a centre of his criticism; he is rather trapped with the cuts imposed on him and the University by the government, he complains that being a Dean in that period “is responsibility without power” (Nice Work). David Lodge pays much more attention to criticize the overall situation in the 1980’s in Great Britain when the government of Margaret Thatcher started the cuts in almost every sector of social and economic life. Lodge, thus, reacts on the situation in the real world and lets Phillip solve this uneasy situation. Phillip, as well as many Deans in the real world, has to deal with cuts, he has to force the members of the staff into early retirement and cannot accept any more young lecturers. It is the case of Robyn Penrose in Nice Work who is able to get only a temporal appointment after a long search but no permanent one, no matter how good she is. Lodge seems to create Robyn as a character that should represent his views on schooling. He seems to have the idea that university teachers should be sure of their jobs; otherwise they cannot pay full attention to their teaching and research. He puts Vic Wilcox in opposition with Robyn. He, as a businessman, stands for the opinion that the rule of supply and demand is the best one even in the case of universities.
MORRIS ZAPP
Morris Zapp is teaching English literature, just like Philip Swallow, at Euphoria University. He is quite the opposite of Philip despite the fact they have the same age. Daniel Ammann describes Morris Zapp in his work David Lodge and the Art-and-Reality Novel as always “chewing a fat cigar, wisecracking even in grotesque situations”. As when being kidnapped in Italy or when he was the only man on a plane and found out that all the women there were going to have abortion in England, his response was quite amusing: “Holy mackerel!” (Changing Places). He has a sort of arrogance, and a high self-esteem: “Morris Zapp never apologized” (Changing Places), instead he furnishes the “famous Zapp Stare” (Changing Places ). As his flight crosses the ocean, Zapp who cannot swim becomes anxious. He tries to reach the life jacket under his seat and he panics for not finding it. During the flight he discovers he is the only male on the plane. All passengers were women going to more liberal England to have abortion. He becomes acquainted with his seat neighbor, Mary Makepeace, whom he will later help to solve her problems, proving that he is not so insensitive and misogyn as his wife claimed.
Yes, his wife, because he also has a family. He is at his second marriage. His daughter from the first marriage, Melanie Byrd, is a student at the same University where her father is teaching; so she prefers to use her in order to avoid association with her father’s name. His current wife is Désirée, a very intelligent woman with clear ideas and speech. She becomes an active feminist. She wants to divorce Zapp not only because she is tired of the frequent adventures of her husband with his female students but also because she wants to get involved directly in the Women's Emancipation Movement. Morris tries to persuade her to wait another six months to give their marriage a second chance. She agrees with this postponement, but says she will surely divorce after the six months, so this period does not matter anymore. Together they have twins: Elizabeth and Darcy, the inspiration for their names being Jane Austen's novels. Zapp is a recognized expert in Jane Austen and the success of his career was built on studies dedicated to the work of the English writer.
During the trilogy, Zapp moves his interest to the modern areas of literary theory, to deconstruction. Maurice Zapp, just like Phillip Swallow, is the result of his country educational system.
“In America it is not too difficult to obtain a bachelor’s degree. The student is left very much to his own devices, he accumulates the necessary credits at his leisure, cheating is easy, and there is not much suspense or anxiety about the eventual outcome. He (or she) is therefore free to give full attention to the normal interests of late adolescence – sport, alcohol, entertainment and the opposite sex. It is at the postgraduate level that the pressure really begins, when the student is burnished and tempered in a series of gruelling courses and rigorous assessments until he is deemed worthy to receive the accolade of the PhD. By now he has invested so much time and money in the process that any career other than an academic one has become unthinkable” (Changing Places).
Morris has gone through the exact process of American schooling. He already published articles while he was still a graduate student; till now he has written five outstanding books, four are devoted to Jane Austen and as he claims there is nothing more that could be written about her from the point of view that he took. To confirm his exceptionality, he was offered a first job at the Euphoric State which is one of the American leading universities. Other, less brilliant professors started their career usually by teaching on smaller campuses and only after a while they could proceed to better paid jobs and more well-known universities. In the course of Small World the question of UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism comes up. Until then the dream of Morris Zapp was to become the best paid professor in the world. At present, he could be regarded as one of the professors with the biggest salary already. When he realizes that he could now fulfill his dream, without moving anywhere and without taking a huge burden of work, he becomes interested in the chair. He is never mentioned as getting the UNESCO Chair, but in Nice Work he admits achieving his goal: “I have a contract with Euphoric State that says nobody in the humanities is to be paid more than me” (Nice Work).
When writing Small World, David Lodge has probably paid much attention to the present state of criticism and he chooses to talk about the fashionable fields. He, as shown on the character of Morris, shifted his interest from literature and literary texts towards linguistic topics, post structuralism and the theory of deconstruction. Eva Lambertsson Björk says that “the campus tales become increasingly pre-occupied with metafictional concerns, theory and intertexts”. Morris Zapp, like many other characters, is attracted by the theory of codes and he loses interest in the work of Jane Austen. On this example we may see how David Lodge puts Morris and Phillip in opposite. Morris Zapp keeps pace with the period and its fashion; as a result he changes his academic interests. He leaves the theme of Jane Austen and also abandons his dream of writing everything about Jane Austen and her works from every possible point of view and begins to pay attention to post stucturalist theories as it becomes a fashionable topic in academic circles. Phillip Swallow, on the other hand, never intervenes into the discussion on the topic of deconstruction and post structuralism. He is faithful to reading literary works for their meaning not because he would like to talk about decoding all the meanings involved. David Lodge, as a literary critic, discusses the theory of deconstruction, but from the novel Small World a reader could say that he is in favor of the traditional approach represented by Phillip Swallow. We can make this conclucion because the author promotes Phillip within the university as well as he makes him more acknowledged in the world. Phillip even gets a nomination for the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism.
When talking about relationships in these campus novels, I would like to concentrate on the relationships that develop on the university ground or are connected with the setting. Those relationships can be either between colleagues or lovers. At any rate, the relationships dealt with in the campus trilogy are mostly of sexual nature. Those relationships may be of various character; they may have a very short duration or a very long one; they can be very calm or extremely intensive, there may or may not be love involved, they may be kept in secret or not and also there may be a child as an outcome of the relationship or the relationships may end without an offspring.
It is not to surprise us that neither of the main characters has a really good friend. The relationships on academic ground are mainly described as rivalry not as friendships. It is natural that each of the teachers wants to be the best one and they do not count on loyalty and friendships. The case is worse with ambitious Morris Zapp than subservient Phillip Swallow who is not an ambitious and thus more likely to keep a friend. Nonetheless, I would like to talk more about the sexual relationships of the main characters, sometimes their adulteries.
David Lodge again reacts to the situation at the time when his works were written. He is a religious person and here he brings in the question of religion. He mostly uses the views he himself experienced – the views of a Christian. In Changing Places he describes Phillip as a very shy man. He is, in fact, rather conservative. He is used as a tool for the author to point at the difference between America and Great Britain in the 1970’s. Britain was much more conservative country because many of its people were religious. It was quite common for the pious inhabitants not to have sex before getting married and the divorce was, among them, still considered as something immoral and as something that is not right. David Lodge also takes into account that the characters of his novels are not brought up in the liberal 1970’s. At that time they are in their forties or so, so they still keep part of the morals they were brought up in. Those views are rooted so deeply in David Lodge and the British society that we can spot some signs of it much later in Nice Work when the idea of divorce comes to Victor Wilcox’s mind then the author says this: “Vic had old-fashioned ideas about marriage. A wife was not like a car. You couldn’t part-exchange her when the novelty wore off, or the bodywork started to go. If you discovered you’d made a mistake, too bad, you just had to live with it” (Nice Work). As a total opposite seem the morals and character of people in the United States of America. People, even older ones, who were also brought up in a conservative manner, are much more open to changes. America just went through sexual revolution and not only youngsters adapted to it. Even the middle-aged people, as Morris and Désirée enjoy the benefits that the revolution brought them. They and other people in the United States are, in no way, conservative. The fashion is also a lot more provocative. The older people familiarized themselves also with the more open view of sex as well and also transformed their ideas about divorces, so the divorce rate is incomparably higher within the same age group.
Thus in Changing Places the sexual relationships taking place in Rummidge are rather hidden from the public – nobody knows for sure that Morris Zapp has an affair with Hillary Swallow; there are only the rumors. On the other hand the relationships in Euphoria are not hidden at all. Phillip even states in Changing Places that “telling the truth with a jesting air was, he had discovered, the safest way of protecting your secrets in Euphoria” (Changing Places). So Phillip went around the University and admitted living with Désirée Zapp. He was never actually asked whether he had an affair with her or not and he never dared to open his heart to anybody.
The situation becomes a little different as we proceed to Small World and the 1980’s. In Small World, as we notice, Lodge pays much more attention to lovers and their affairs. This is his response to the conversion of the response to sex in Great Britain. USA approach on sex matter crossed the Ocean and arrived in United Kingdom. British approach becomes more liberal even libertine as the morals declined. Lodge in Small World describes sex and relationships in the most open way from all three of the books.
In Nice Work the sexual relationship becomes different. Usually it was the man who started them and took advantage of them. Here, the feminist scholar, Robyn Penrose is the one who is in favor of plain sex; she does not want to continue in a relationship with Vic Wilcox, who is in love with her and is determined to get divorced and marry her. She constantly tries to send him away but he follows her “as a faithful dog” (Nice Work).
The British professor Phillip Swallow, as I already mentioned at the beginning, is not a particularly self-confident man, he thinks that he lives in a happy home with his wife and children. He is a very faithful and loving husband, who never thought about being unfaithful to his wife, at least until his departure for the American journey.
Just as he rents an apartment in a slide area of Plotinus, he takes liking to a girl living downstairs. Her name is Melanie Byrd. This is a funny moment since she is a daughter of Morris Zapp and he is later involved in an affair with Morris’s wife. One night, he comes back to his apartment from a party thrown by one of the Euphoric State staff. He is keyless and a little drunk; then he is invited to a party with the youths downstairs. He joins them and gets a little high and even drunker. During the party it is for the first moment he feels that he could be part of the youth group; he participates in all activities; only when the youths are about to start an orgy he stands up and leaves. Melanie asks him whether she could possibly stay over night at his place and he puts her up for the night in his study. During that night they make love. It is the first time that Phillip was unfaithful to Hilary and is confused. He admits to Melanie that he is a kind of virgin; it was the first time he made love to a woman apart from his wife. As a matter of fact, we can find two more “virgins” in the trilogy. The first is Persse McGarrigle in Small World; he is a virgin in a very literal sense of the word and also a virgin in post structuralism. Then there is one virgin similar to Phillip Swallow. It is Victor Wilcox in Nice Work. He, similarly as Phillip, admits that “I’ve never slept with a woman other than my wife” (Nice Work). Those characters have one thing in common. All of them lose their virginities earlier or later during the story and none of the women, who they lose their virginities with, seems to be in favour of the pair staying together. Melanie Byrd tries to avoid contact with Phillip and finds a new boyfriend, Lily Pabst leaves and Robyn Penrose does not believe in the concept of love at all.
After Phillip slept with Melanie, he feels guilty and sends Hilary a bunch of flowers and a letter with his confession. He, however, falls in love with Melanie and becomes obsessed with her. He even lets her new boyfriend, Charles Boon, whose company he does not enjoy, to live in his apartment in a spare room. He gets involved in the disturbances over the Garden only to be close to her. Shortly after this affair, we are still dealing with Phillip who is really much the same man that left Britain. Things begin to change when Phillip starts a relationship with Morris Zapp’s wife Désirée.
With Désirée his character slowly starts to change. Phillip moves to Désirée’s house because his apartment, standing on the slide area, really moved and slid by several meters and the whole house became unsuitable for further accommodation. The relationship starts in a rather strange way. Most of the other affairs in the trilogy start with the two people making love together, as Joy and Phillip, Melanie and Phillip, Morris and Fulvia, Rodney Wainwright and Sandra Dix, and many others. Then the relationship either develops or the couple splits. Nevertheless, Désirée and Phillip live together for quite a while without having sex, like a brother and sister and they both seem to like it this way. However, couple of weeks later the relationship becomes a sexual one and Désirée does not conceal her disappointment over it: “Now we’re having an affair, like everybody else. How banal” (Changing Places). While living with Désirée, Phillip gains a few pounds in weight and much confidence; he realizes the mistakes that he and Hilary had made during their marriage. He experiences something new and exciting and unfortunately forgets and detests his old way of living. He does not really want to go back to England because he fears that he will become that quiet, frightened and conservative professor as he had been before he arrived in America. It is the first time in the trilogy that Phillip is a little satisfied with himself and feels that his life is going in the right direction.
There is one more turning point as to Phillip’s relationship to women. As he becomes the Head of the Department, he is allowed to travel a lot to various conferences and enjoys the free mood that rules them. Morris Zapp’s claim confirms the mood, he says: “Nobody pays to get laid at a conference” (Small World). David Lodge makes a comment on the topic of academic discussion and sex existing side to side at conferences. In Write On Lodge claims that “it is precisely the tension between professional self-display and erotic opportunity […] that, among other things, makes the conference such a fascinating human spectacle, and such rich material for fiction”. In Small World Phillip kind of enjoys those pleasures in full; in Nice Work, his colleague, Rupert Sutcliffe explains to Robyn that Phillip “has a bit weakness where women are concerned”. It is true, but Phillip does not experience this weakness only at the conferences, he also had affairs with his students in Rummidge, for example with Sandra Dix who then tried to blackmail him and the University. Nevertheless, his affair with a married woman, Joy Simpson, may be pointed at as an example of his conference sins. They meet when he is about to go home from one of his conferences in Italy but his plane has an accident. Joy’s husband, the British Council man, came to pick him up at the airport at night and offered him to spend the night in his house. J. K. Simpson had to leave for some other place during the night and Phillip used the situation for the affair. This affair, however, is one which continues; the lovers meet at conferences. Three years from its beginning, Phillip learns that Joy’s daughter, Miranda, is also his daughter. But eventually, he loses them because he is not able to divorce Hilary and continues to live with her.
All Phillip’s extramarital relationships through the novels have something in common. Hilary never seems to be angry with him and never thinks of divorcing him, except when she is in love with Morris Zapp. And one more thing, all the affairs take place away from his house. At first, there are the two affairs in America, then Joy Simpson in Italy with who Phillip meets on various conferences and some affairs take place on the university ground; he has never had a lover to come to his house. Lastly, all the relationships eventually end and Phillip comes home back to Hilary, his loving wife.
Morris Zapp’s relationships are different from Phillip’s as their character traits differ completely. He does not have many friends from his field. He is very competitive and always wants to be the best and most of the time he is successful in it. For the professors are usually competitive and very jealous of the other’s achievements, it is not an easy job to make friends of the people you defeated on the academy ground. As I have said at the beginning he does not have a particularly good relationship with his wife, who has decided to divorce him. She has a good reason for doing so, one could say. Her husband, like many other teachers within the University of Euphoria, took the advantage of being a distinguished scholar and had several affairs with his students. In Euphoria, Morris has few acquaintances there, all of them are his fellow teachers, for example professor Hogan, Howard Ringbaum and Sy Gootblatt.
On a plane, flying to Rummidge for the first time, he talks to one of the woman, Mary Makepeace and it is the first time that Morris talks to a single woman and does not want to sleep with her. Well, only after he learns that she is pregnant. It is also one of few relationships in the trilogy that is between man and a woman and is just a friendly one. Morris helps her by persuading Hilary to let her live in the house and give birth to her child. Morris’s other relationships are sexual ones. We can talk about his affair with Hilary, the only woman in England. He could not resist and broke his promise to himself that he will not have sex during his teaching in Britain. He wanted to show Désirée his determination to save their marriage and show her that he has changed. His plan failed.
Morris also makes acquaintances among the Rummidge staff. At first they seem to keep a distance between him and themselves. They talk to each other but take no notice of Morris. He feels lonely and when Hilary comes to his office to look for a book and leaves so early without an invitation to dinner or something, he feels desperate. He does not only miss company of a person apart from Dr. O’Shea, he also longs for a home-made meal “he was tiring rapidly of TV dinners and Asian restaurants, which was all Rummidge seemed to offer the single man” (Changing Places). The staff’s attitude changed when the Head of the Department, Gordon Masters, comes from his hunting trip. All of the sudden, the teachers notice Morris and start to be very friendly:
“Evidently the return of Professor Masters was the signal for which the rest of the faculty had been waiting. It was as if some obscure taboo had restrained them from introducing themselves before their chief had formally received him into the tribe. Now, in the Senior Common Room, they hurried forward and clustered around Morris’s chair, smiling and chattering, pressing upon him cups of tea and chocolate cookies, asking him about his journey, his health, his work in progress, offering him belated advice about accommodation and discreetly interpreting the strangled utterances of Gordon Masters for his benefit.” (Changing Places).
Gordon Masters was really a “chief of a tribe”. He ruled the whole university and nobody dared to oppose him in any issue. He is said to forget himself in a war or on a hunting trip and order everybody; he never asks anybody to do anything. The teachers, thus, seem to be affraid to talk to Morris until they have the permission from Gordon. Once they are “permitted” to talk to him, they throw away their British calmness and welcome him wholeheartedly; they also offer help and advice to the newcomer. After the early retirement of Gordon Masters, the University lacks any rule and Morris is seen as an experienced advisor. They start to rely on him and at the end of the period designed for him to stay in England, he is offered a job in Rummidge. He does not make any more acquaintances on the academic ground during Small World because he is a very competitive man. The only person that could be regarded as a friend to him is Persse McGarrigle for whom Morris become a kind of advisor, guide and support at the conferences.
He also has sexual relationships during the course of the trilogy. The first is the Italian scholar Fulvia Morgana, who has a name derived from the famous witch of Arthurian legends. She is also portrayed as one; and Lodge also uses here the stereotypical viewing of “successful female intellectuals [who] are necessarily either frigid or sexually deviant in one way or another”. Lambertsson Björk sees another example of “sexually deviant” woman in Robyn Penrose. She also does not fulfill the stereotypical view of a woman wanting to find the man of her dream and live happilly ever after. She is quite independent and skeptical about love relationship and it serves as a good character trait for Lodge to poke fun of.
OTHER CHARACTERS
Changing Places
This novel is wholly devoted to the main characters I was talking about earlier. Nevertheless, there are some more characters that are interesting to mention. Hilary Swallow and Désirée Zapp in particular. Those two women do not have much in common; the only exception is that they like the husband of the other. Désirée is a strong feminist who is interested in writing her book about men and in Nice Work she is acknowledged by Robyn Penrose as a representative of “vulgar feminism”. Hilary, on the other hand, takes care of her family as a perfect woman. She devoted her whole life to her family, never finished her studies because she married Phillip and had children with him. Only later in the story she employs herself with marriage guidance and she is successful in her job – for she saves her own marriage.
Small World
The novel Small World is the novel from the trilogy where David Lodge employs most characters. The most prominent one is young lecturer Persse McGarrigle who in Hilský’s view represents one of the knights on the quest for a Grail. However, he is different from the other characters. Hilský says that Persse represents, apart from the knight figure, a virgin (Hilský 119). He is a virgin in a literal sense of the word; for the major part of the book, anyway. He also represents a virgin when we talk about the poststructuralist theory. Before he met his beloved Angelica, he has never herded anything about such theory. Angelica inspired him to intelectual growth and he became a little interested in the field. From this point of view, Persse has much in common with Phillip. They both, at the same time, know hardly anything about the modern theories. Moreover, they do not fall in love with those views and stay faithful to their interpretation and readings of literary works. When we turn back to Perrse, the main quest stays the same as in the old Arthurian legends; he is trying to find the woman of his heart and he keeps truthful to his beloved Angelica Pabst. Her constant leaving encourages him to pursue her.
Nice Work
The novel Nice Work deals with the clash that arises from the scheme designed between the Rummidge University and a local engineering company. A young lecturer is to become a shadow of a Managing Director in the company. Their characters and ideas are at the beginning deliberately diametrically opposed as well as industry and university is representing different ideas. The shadow scheme, nevertheless, fulfills its purpose only on the personal level as Lambertsson Björk stated. She also asserts that the friendship and respect of the main characters became possible only because “both Robyn and Vic appear to redefine their own contexts in the course of the novel, and at the same time gain greater knowledge of the other’s community”.
The novel being part of the trilogy, David Lodge employs here elements very similar to those that he used in the previous novels. He criticizes, as I have mentioned earlier, the cuts of the government of Margaret Thatcher in the university funding. He also ridicules both Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox, but he seems, according to Lambertsson Björk, to favor Victor. She says that “the characterization of Vic Wilcox is vivid and sympathetic”. She argues that the favourism is to be seen from the description of the character that Lodge gives us. In the case of Vic “the reader is presented with a complete character. Robyn, on the other hand, remains only a type, a crude caricature of a ‘liberated’ woman”.
Both characters could be compared to the main characters of the trilogy. Robyn has some character traits similar to Phillip in the previous novels; we could say that they both care about other people. As an example may serve Robyn’s care about the future of Danny Ram, one of the workers in the foundry. At the opposite end stands cruel Vic Wilcox, who cares about nothing but business; it is the same case as Morris Zapp who is also interested in nothing more than his scholarly achievements. In addition, we can also find a parallel between the character of Vic and the author. They both say that their work is all they can do well and the list of things that they have never done is remarkably similar. Eva Lambertsson Björk claims that the author “in answer to the question of why he writes, Lodge claims that he does so because it is the only thing he os really good at and that it is now too late to start over again with something else”. Her claim is supported by David Lodge’s statement: “I shall probably never learn, now, to ski or to windsurf or to play a musical instrument or to speak a foreign language fluently”. In addition Lambertsson Björk points out that Vic Wilcox works in the position he does because it is the only thing that he is good at and that it is too late to learn anything else. Vic Wilcox explicitly states the things he has never done; the first few things are noticeably similar to the things that David Lodge has never experienced:
“I’ve never skied, I’ve never surfed. I’ve never learned to play a musical instrument, or speak a foreign language, or sail a boat, or ride a horse. I’ve never climbed a mountain or pitched a tent or caught a fish. I’ve never seen Niagara Falls or been up the Eiffel Tower or visited the Pyramids. I’ve never . . . I could go on and on.” (Nice Work).
So neither Vic Wilcox nor David Lodge has never skied, surfed or windsurfed, they have never learnt how to play a musical instrument nor have they never learnt to speak a foreign language fluently. Otherwise Vic Wilcox does not seem to be autobiographical. He is a businessman representing the industry and Lodge represents the academe. In this respect, Lodge is obviously much closer to Robyn Penrose.
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.
We have been looking at the comical aspect of three of his campus novels and also of the difference that he makes between the characters; mainly the American and the British. The two characters are both subject to Lodge’s parody. He makes fun of both of them. Morris Zapp is shown as acknowledged scholar but without much success in his private life; he is divorce twice by the end of Nice Work. Phillip Swallow, on the other hand, is not such an outstanding scholar, but his family loves him and he has a nice and steady relationship with his wife.
Both characters, however, have several love affairs within the story line. The course of the affairs differs since the character traits of its actors are not the same. Phillip is very shy and serious about the relationship to women (except for several affairs with the students in his office) and Morris is the one who is looking just for sexual pleasure.
Then we were also dealing with other characters that are of any significance in the novels and we were discussing their overall role in the books and also their relationships to the main characters of Morris Zapp and Phillip Swallow. I also tried to include some of Lodge’s views and to draw a parallel between the author and any of his characters whenever it was possible. As an example may serve the list of “never done” things of Vic Wilcox which is almost identical to the author’s.
CONCLUSIONS
In the light of the works analyzed, it is clear, that in the postmodernist historical narrative the willingness to present any reconstruction of events as partial, provisional, culturally or ideologically located is ultimately fictitious. Perfectly illustrated by Kingsley Amis, Malcom Bradbury and David Lodge, postmodernist writers redefine the positivist history as the historical sublime, a desired horizon that can never be reached but only approached, something we know we cannot learn, and something we can only desire. As a result, all the three writers look increasingly ironically and skeptical of the possibility of a historical knowledge that is consistent and definitive, questioning every narration that is intended to be all-encompassing.
Aware of the inherent dangers of natural desire to reduce the dissonance of multiplicity to form, they propose to deconstruct this desire as the desperate attempt of rewriting the past to gain control over it. The postmodernist texts, in providing the reader with patterns of unstable and momentary connections, endless interceptions aimed at volatile or non-existent goals, characters that look or suddenly dissolve into nothingness (as in Malcom Bradbury novel), events first represented as real and immediately after moving to a dreamlike or unreal dimension (Jim Dixon’s inner rebellion), they show how all meanings are relative and arbitrary, provisional and never definitive, and how foolish and counterproductive to artificially provide an accomplishment of action. They recover in a different way that specificity that modernism recreated artificially: in the playful and multiform dimension of divertissement, the joke, in the random coincidences that determine the pattern of the plot and history, in the use of forces and elements which cannot be controlled or can be traced back to a closed system.
Kingsley Amis, Malcom Bradbury and David Lodge show a world that changes while it changes. Some of their characters try to adapt to the new world, some of them resigns. But all are convincing in their effort to meet the future, each in its own way. In a more and more disordered world, their authors and characters blend between the temptation of the center and the comfortable placidity of the outskirts. None offer solutions or answers. I just live.
Humor covers a dramatic dimension of a changing society on an unknown road. University campus is a world in itself, but it does not exist outside of society, it is not self-sufficient. People who populate this specific world are the same people who tempt the uncertain future into a world whose values are so volatile. Their values are under the pressure of change, and humor helps to release tension. So the reader is giving a seemingly easy novel about such a serious world. It is the merit of the three authors to lead us through the labyrinth drawn by a long road whose end is not seen by the authors, their characters or the reader. As any successful end, the end of campus novels is always open.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Bradbury, Malcolm, The Atlas of Literature, De Agostiny ed., London, 1996), in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London, Cambridge University Press, 2011
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