DAVID LODGE

His work is a very good example of this trend away from realism and towards formal
experimental. His first novels were realistic, then they turned experimental. He was always a
compromiser between realism and experimentalism. He is always trying to reconcile opposed
positions. Although his work became increasingly experimental he never relinquished those
aspects of realism that considered important to history and moral values (story telling, fidelity,
creation of characters). Layered fiction: his fiction has different layers. It can be enjoyed by the
academics and educated readers aware of the experimental forms in his novels, but also they
can be enjoyed by ordinary readers who enjoyed the novel on a surface level.

He was one of the most important literary critics in England for many years, as well as a
compromiser. He modified his initial critical approach, making it more structuralist, but only
assimilating those aspects of structuralism that helped to improve the model of critical
practice to which he belongs (Anglo-American empiricism and liberal humanism). He has
rejected all aspects of structuralism that can destroy the tradition of Anglo-American criticism
and humanism. He has attached the way in which post-structuralism rejects the idea of the
author as an originator and composer of the text. He also criticized the mimetic functions of
literature and language. Before post-structuralism, writers and critics believed that literature
could represent the world truthfully, which is mimesis.

Lodge is recreating two different cultures and two different systems in Changing Places. Tom
Hardy did that in Tess. The Death of the author: the author is not the origin of text, his only
power is to mix writings. A text is made of multiple writings taken from many cultures and
entering into different relationships. The only thing that the writer is doing is mixing these
writings. The one who creates meaning is the reader. Post-structuralist critics believed mainly
this.

Lodge has rejected this idea as it does not answer to his experience of writing a novel. Writing
a novel involves making decisions and choices all the time (who is going to be the hero, from
which angle will the story be written…). This idea that the author is the one to write becomes
more obvious in the case of comic books because what makes us laugh does not happen by
accident. What he finds contradictory is critics saying that authors do not exist, but more than
ever people are interested in authors as human beings. Writers are interviewed and invited to
conferences now, no one wanted to see them before. This impressive interest came in the last
decades of the 20th century. Reading is active, not passive. Readers produce meanings that
the authors were not aware of. The readers fill gaps in the novels. 20/12 Post-structuralism
also rejects the idea of the unique autonomous individual. Lodge agrees that the individuals
change through history but this does not mean that the individual exists. Literature reproduces
what is inside the minds of fictional characters.

Lodge believes that characters are the most important element in the novel. When we read
one of his novels, what we get is knowledge of human heart and life. His novels are based on
his own experiences and on the environments he knows best. However, this does not mean
that they are autobiographical. He describes lower middle class families which live in South
London suburbs. As a matter of fact, his family belonged to the lower middle class. He has
described childhood spent in war-time England and adolescence spent in post-war England. He
has also described life as a graduate student and literary professor, as well as his marriage and
three children. Finally, he described the changes in the catholic church after WWII, especially
in his first novels. In fact, he wrote a very interesting chronicle of these changes. He is very
much concerned with the attitude of individual catholics towards church teachings regarding
sex and birth control. He analyzes how individual catholics react to that. Catholics were a
minority in England, they took their beliefs very seriously. Lodge started writing in the 50s as
influenced by the realistic writers of that decade. He has described his novels as essentially
serious works of scrupulous realism. He recognized that

The Picturegoers (1960) is an immature work, so he cannot read it without embarrassment.

Although it is immature, it has shown his promising future as a novelist. It is an alternation of
fiction, tone and rhythm as a shift from the description of the inner thoughts of one character
to the inner thoughts of another character is really impressive. Lodge believes that the more
the characters are allowed to speak for themselves and the less are explained by the narrator,
the stronger will be our sense of individual freedom and our sense of freedom of
interpretation. They reveal themselves as individuals. For example, Philip and Morris are
known from their comments and expressions, not by the narrator. The Picturegoers is a
catholic novel about a young man who loses his faith and recovers it. It follows the fortunes of
a number of characters who attend the same church or cinema. This was not his first as the
publishers advised against its publication.

Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962) criticizes the National Service, futility, dehumanization and the
lack of individual freedom. When it was published, it was associated with the Movement
(Angry Young Men) because it criticizes an institution. However, Lodge has always rejected this
idea. He admits that there is anger in Ginger, but the anger of a young clever man aware of the
exciting possibilities of self-fulfillment through education but he finds his progress interrupted
for two years through compulsory enlistment in an institution with which he cannot identify
himself. That is the anger behind the Angry Young Men. In fact, Lodge was obliged to do the
service and interrupt his degree for this reason. He has also admitted that he delayed writing
this novel in order to control his anger. His aim was not to denounce or destroy an institution
but reflect his own experience. Writers of the Movement belonged to the lower middle class,
they had access to secondary education (Education Act of 1944), got drugs and became
professors in red-brick universities. This happened to Lodge, that is why many critics
associated him with the Angry Young Men. Although he never wanted to be associated with
them, he has recognized the ethical and aesthetic limitations. He has always said that he is in
debt with them because they made it possible for people like him with no privileged
background and no influential friends in the literary market place to become a writer. Out of
the Shelter (1970) is a combination of the Bildungsroman (a German term used to describe the
passage from childhood to maturity but also the recognition of one’s occasion) and the
international novel of conflicting ethical and cultural codes. It talks about a young man who
goes to Heidelberg to spend some weeks with his sister, who is working there for the
Americans. He achieves maturity there and realizes what he wants to be in life, he finds his
occasion. It is based on what Lodge saw there. Food was rationed in England at the time, life
was very hard, so living in Germany was a great experience for the narrator and Lodge too. He
describes the contact with two different cultures: the American (allies as the good ones) and
the German (the bad ones).
The British Museum is Falling Down (1965) is Lodge’s first experimental novel. He has admitted
that comedy liberated him and allowed him to write his first experimental work. It offered him
a way of reconciling a contradiction of which he was aware between his critical admiration for
the modernist writers and his own creative writing, which was mainly realistic. Concerning its
religious background, Pope John XXIII called for a second Vatican Council in 1962 in order to
reinterpret the catholic faith to the modern world. In the same year he set up a commision to
study problems concerned with family, population and birth control. Pope Paul VI succeeded
him the following year and charged the commision with the task of examining the churches’
teaching on birth control. By the time of this novel, many catholic people were very optimistic
as they thought that they could be a change concerning this commision, so they could use the
baby pill. The novel is about a 20-year-old man called Adam who is married, poor and a
catholic research student. It describes 24 hours in his life. When it starts, his wife tells him that
she thinks she is pregnant again, as they already had three children. He is very anxious as he
only has a grant for research. During the day, he is so obsessed with the situation that he
experiences hallucinations, daydreams and fantasies. Every time he suffers that, a writer is
parodied, most of them modernist. That is why the element of experimentalism in England is
falling down through parody and pastiche. Lodge gives us clues to guess who he is parodying:
titles of novels, references to the author… Lodge always wants to introduce parody and
pastiche in a natural way. None of the critics were aware of these elements. Lodge had to
explain this after publishing this novel (British Museum). The novel has a happy ending and
Adam’s wife is not pregnant. The whole novel is told from Adam’s point of view with the
exception of the epilogue. Lodge wanted to show Barbara’s point of view, that is why the
epilogue is a monologue of Barbara’s point of view. By doing that, Lodge is parodying the end
of Ulysses by James Joyce, when Molly gives her point of view. This was his first campus novel
as it was the first in which Lodge criticized the university. He agrees with Bakhtin, who believes
that comedy fulfills a valuable hygienic cultural function. Comedy may show that the
institutions are always subject to ridiculing criticism. He has always questioned, satirized and
ridiculed the profession to which he belonged for a long time. He really wanted to destroy the
ideal vision we have about academics. The very first campus novel was Lucky Jim (1954) by
Kingsley Amis. The British Museum is Falling Down revealed a new concern with
experimentalism that he developed in his later novels: Changing Places, How Far Can You Go?
(experimentalism through the use of metafiction, changes in the catholic church after WWII)
and Small World (parallelism, flashbacks, different styles, metafiction).

How Far Can You Go? (1980) is written in a very traditional way. It is set in the landscape of the
cold London morning in 1952. It describes the church and the aid young people attending
mass. The narrator starts telling how he has created the characters and the names he has
given them, so we find metafiction since the very beginning. He makes reference to The British
Museum is Falling Down to let the readers know that he has used the same method in both
novels.

The subtitle of Small World is an academic romance, a novel in which Lodge reproduces the
themes, structures and characters of traditional English romances (medieval, Renaissance,
romances). The element of experimentalism is present through the use of intertextuality. The
main characters behave like characters in the English romances. For example, we have
Percival, a virgin in medieval romances and also in this novel. Everyone is looking for the Holy
Grail: Percival is looking for a woman, academics are looking for a better job. Another
character is Kingfisher, based on the fisher king of medieval romances. Kingfisher was the most
important man in the academic world. The problem was that he could not have sexual
relationships nor produce any new idea as a critic. Percy asks the right question to Kingfisher
and he gets cured. In the romances by Shakespeare, usually a daughter is discovered at the
end of the novel. In Small World, the protagonist had twins with another academic some years
ago. This is also a campus novel as the world of conferences is criticized, as well as the
academic world in general. Concerning metafiction, we have academics as main characters.
They usually talk about the work. Lodge gives the readers clues about the novel he is writing
through these conversations.

In Nice Work (1988), realism comes back to dominant position. It has two main characters:
Robyn (a feminist, university lecturer and post-structuralist) and Vic (a businessman who works
very hard). When the novel starts, the university has decided that people should know more
about the business world. Someone from the university world follows someone from the world
of business and the other way around. When Lodge started writing it, the best way to be
truthful to Robyn’s world would be post-modernism and experimentalism. As the novel goes
on, Lodge decides that realism is the best option to describe the conflict between the two
characters, Robyn and Vic. Although realism comes to dominant position, experimentalism
does not disappear completely. It is present through the use of intertextuality and the
intertextual game with the Victorian novel and the industrial novel. Robyn gives a lecture
about the industrial novel and everything she says about this novel in the 19th century
happens in the 20th century too. Lodge has also explained that between the 60s and 70s
writers had to be experimental and antirrealist to become a successful writer. We have many
realistic novels written in the 80s as it was very difficult for writers to ignore the political
problems and social changes in England (riots, unemployment). Nice Work is a comic novel but
not as comic as Small World. There were not enough jobs for everyone and many people were
sacked. Also mention Paradise News (1991), Therapy (1995), Thinks… (2001), Author, Author
(2004), Deaf Sentence (2008) and A Man of Parts (2011)