LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/10. DAVID LODGE (28 January 1935)

● In his first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), published when the author was twenty-one, two Desperado features are already visible: the love of incident (there are several stories, and they all converge in the end), and the irony that mocks at our expectation of an end, whether happy or not, while apparently fulfilling it.

● One of the characters in The Picturegoers touches upon the theme of teen-age violence, connecting Lodge to Burgess, Lessing, Golding. Harry travels from attempt at rape and brutality of reaction to finding a mate and a place in life, just like Burgess’ Alex.

● Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962) reminds the reader of Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, but an ironical version of the issue, although the IRA is present in both. The difference is that Lessing is bitingly bitter, while Lodge resorts to a relaxed irony. Mike, the character swallowed by the IRA, is the bad student who ruins his own life, yet becomes the ideal hero. Lodge does not miss his chance to mock at the traditional reader’s fondness of the brave hero riding his white horse into happiness.

● A true Desperado, Lodge writes for fun. A less usual turn for a Desperado, though, he is not obsessed with being unique or complicating the puzzle. His story is linear, his novelty very well hidden but definitely there. Lodge blows the traditional narrative up from inside it. He mocks at the story while feeding it to us. We feel fooled, and he leaves us, smiling at our credulity. His last lesson in each novel is, Be cautious, things have changed, literature has changed, your tastes are old-fashioned.

● Lodge himself calls his novels ‘comic’ (see The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965), mentioning the influence of Malcolm Bradbury, his old friend and collaborator, as he says. Both writers are also critics, so they definitely realize which way they are going. Mocking at other texts, textual irony, is clearly present in Lodge’s confession that he tries to mimic Conrad, Greene, Hemingway, Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Snow, Woolf.

● Americans returning to their English origins is a theme that Ishiguro touched upon, too, and Bradbury, among others. The Jamesian defection to Europe is replaced by the mock-heroic ode to the greedy American, who thinks everything cultural should belong to his space alone, and tries to move Europe there, positive that American culture is at the top.

● The real hero of Lodge’s early novels is humour. People matter less. The author hates to confess, he tries to invent, rejecting autobiographical texts. Out of the Shelter(1970) has certain personal notes, though. The hero of this novel embarks on a constant progress out of the shelter of family, geography, childhood, even the concrete shelter against bombs, which is blown up at the very beginning. This novel has more symbolical force than those before. The shelter is oppressive, and this feeling of the world closing in on his hero is what Lodge wanted to convey, probably. Fear often corners this brilliantly ironical writer, who never gives in to sentimentality, but betrays here the need for a good hug, for the sympathy of the reader. Which he amply gets.

● Out of the Shelter deals with American subtle (or not so subtle) invasion in many ways, from the military presence in a defeated Germany, to an envied welfare, and to emigration. The theme haunts Lodge, who taught at Berkeley himself (1968). Exile is guilty, though, and, in Nice Work, it is avoided altogether. In spite of their avowed internationalism, Desperadoes are desperately national. The more loudly they clamour they believe in the universal man, the more closely bound to geographical peculiarities their characters are (see Ishiguro, Rushdie, Ondaatje, Lessing).

● The trilogy Changing Places (1975-1989) focusses irony on the academic world in England (Birmingham, alias Rummidge) and America (Berkeley, alias Plotinus, in the state of Euphoria), being ‘A Tale of Two Campuses.’ An American academic, main hero, too, is driven by the urge to write the absolute book, to exhaust an author (he starts with Jane Austen, preeminently British). Incidents flow incessantly, and with Lodge they are all hilarious, intelligently built so as to make us see the irony of the world, not just laugh at superficial jokes. Lodge works with humorous patterns of his own creation. He identifies essential features, and coins situations to express indirectly what otherwise might sound like a tedious report or faults. The academic world is Bradbury’s target, too. Barnes does not spare it, either. Swift touches upon teaching school, but he is lyrical, not ironical. Lodge frees us from all obligation to side with anyone, by keeping emotion at bay. Although a sensitive, easily-hurt author, Lodge gets the better of his lyrical impulse, by wearing the shining armour of a smile.

● Hybridization of literary genres is pushed to its comical extreme by the end of the first novel in the trilogy, Changing Places (1975). After parody, used before, Lodge resorts to combining devices of drama, script mainly, ending the novel with an argument among characters, followed by a parallel between a book and a movie. The mobility of Lodge’s mind allows him to be at ease whatever somersaults he chooses to attempt in his many-sided novels. Apparently they are just fun, but a closer inspection reveals a moral system, an aesthetic set of rules, a participation of the narrator to the narrative in a thousand obscure ways, which we have to find out. Finding out the author’s point is the real suspense of Lodge’s novels. What we find is less interesting, though, than what we learn about the act of reading, which is a constant search. In contrast to what other Desperadoes do, this search is not tense and grim, but serene and fulfilling. The reader learns how to know himself, and Lodge helps him all the way. Helping the reader across the maze of Desperado fiction is more precious to Lodge than actually building a maze of his own. He is a critic even when he thinks he is only a novelist. And in his criticism, he is a novelist, too, which shows how much of a hybrid the Desperado author has become.

● Displacement could not be absent from Lodge’s arsenal of Desperado major issues. Nice Work (1989), a truly remarkable novel for its plot, characters, irony, involvement, social view, aesthetic choices, relies upon a heroine who was born in Australia and almost emigrates to America, but thinks better of it, in the end. Possibly without realizing, Lodge also builds a bit of a dystopia in it, too. In communism, pupils used to be forced to spend a day in a factory every week. Robyn Penrose is assigned to be the ‘shadow’ of Victor Wilcox, ‘Managing Director’ of a factory. Although she has written a dissertation on 19th century industrial novel, she feels lost in Vic’s factory, which may remind a lot of former pupils under the communist rule what it felt like to waste six hours among workers who could not care less about schools and education. The pattern of the novel relies upon displacement (from the academic world to that of industry and vice-versa) and dystopia (defamiliarization of the usual, everyday environment makes the heroes see their world with better awareness). Robyn begins as an academic without a prospect, and ends with a steady job and a published book, giving up love-interest altogether (another ironical hint at traditional narratives which chose to end in the happiness of the couple). Vic begins as a well-off, stable capitalist, who loses his world and is rescued by an Australian inheritance Robyn invests in his plan to find another foothold. Literature helps out hard fact. Woman backs man, while refusing romance flatly. They both end up displaced (bewildered by their new positions), but rescued from dystopia (end of the previous way of life, menace of nightmare coming true sometime). The architecture of the book is perfect. Its Desperado author combines every device he can think of, with such good mastery of the form of the novel that it takes us a while to become aware of the complexity of this apparently tame, traditional story. Lodge hates to shock. His Desperado zest for uniqueness is cushioned in a layer of soft inertia. He allows his reader to take his time, wake up, drink his coffee, and finally get to work. It takes rereading, re-thinking, actually, to unveil the hidden intention of complication.

● Souls and Bodies (1990) is another confrontation of Catholicism with sex. This is a theme Lodge can claim as his own among Desperadoes, who are free from all restrictions as far as their love-life is concerned. Lodge’s discreet treatment of characters, his unwillingness to reveal their thoughts, make him a Desperado. He pushes the reader under a shower of stories, is always hungry for humour, always narrates tongue in his cheek. After the stream of consciousness, writers are excessively aware of inner revelations and are no longer content with mere facts. A true Desperado, Lodge forgets about the stream of consciousness, and dives into whirlwinds of incidents.

● Paradise News (1991) mixes third-person narrative, letters, diary, intertextuality (echoes, in Bernard’s mind, from literature). Catholicism and the vocation of the Church are pushed aside. The inner life wins the battle. Love-life replaces faith. Against all recent rules, the novel ends in the promise of a happy couple, though this serenity is bitter, coming quite late. Lodge manages here to smash everything, the idea of smashing everything included. This can hardly be a return to tradition, though. After so many twists and turns, we stand and stare at a David Lodge who now poses as a Desperado of simplicity. In this contest of Desperado versus Desperado, literature wins.

by VIC (Cristina Ioana Vianu)