David Lodge - Small World (quotes)

 

   "I wouldn't call myself a structuralist," Morris Zapp interrupted, "A post-structuralist, perhaps."

    Philip Swallow made a gesture implying impatience with such subtle distinctions. "I refer to that fundamental scepticism about the possibility of achieving certainty about anything, which I associate with the mischievous influence of Continental theorizing. There was a time when reading was a comparatively simple matter, something you learned to do in primary school. Now it seems to be some kind of arcane mistery, into which only a small élite have been initiated. I have been reading books for their meaning all my life - or at least that is what I have always thought I was doing. Apparently I was mistaken."

    "You weren't mistaken about what you were trying to do," said Morris Zapp, relighting his cigar, "you were mistaken in trying to do it."

    "I have just one question," said Philip Swallow. "It is this: what, with the greatest respect, is the point of our discussing your paper, if, according to your own theory, we should not be discussing what you actually said at all, but discussing some imperfect memory or subjective interpretation of what you said?"

    "There is no point," said Morris Zapp blithely. "If by point you mean the hope of arriving at some certain truth. But when did you ever discover that in a question-and-discussion session? Be honest, have you ever been to a lecture or seminar at the end of which you could have found two people present who could agree on the simplest précis of what had been said?"

    "Then, what in God's name is the point of it all?" cried Philip Swallow, throwing his hands into the air. 

    "The point, of course, is to uphold the institution of academic literary studies. We mantain our position in society by publicly performing a certain ritual, just like any other group of workers in the realm of discourse - lawyers, politicians, journalists. And as it looks as if we have done our duty for today, shall we all adjourn for a drink?" - (p. 27-28).

*  *  *

"He tries to suppress his own knowledge of what comes next, tries no to see the crucial passage looming ahead. He is trying to trick his own brain. Don't look, don't look! Keep going, keep going! Gather all your strength up into one ball, ready to spring, NOW!

    The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism mantain its Arnoldian function of identifying the best which has been thought and said, when literary discourse itself has been decentred by deconstructing the traditional concept of the author, of 'authority'. Clearly

Yes, clearly...?

  

    Clearly

Clearly what?

[...] Rodney Wainwright slumps forward onto his desk and buries his face in his hands. Beaten again" (p. 140).

*  *  *

 "He [Rudyard Parkinson] had never heard of Philip Swallow, and a first book by a redbrick professor did not promise much. As he riffled the pages, however, his attention was caught by a quotation from an essay of Hazzlitt's entitled "On Criticism": "A critic does nothing nowadays who does not try to torture the most obvious expression into a thousand meanings... His object indeed is not to do justice to his author, whom he treats with very little ceremony, but to do himself homage, and to show his acquaintance with all the topics and resources of criticism" (p. 161).

*  *  *

"As usual, he wasted a great deal of time wondering which books to take on his journey. He had a neurotic fear of finding himself stranded in some foreign hotel or railway station with nothing to read, and in consequence always travelled with far too many books, most of which he brought home unread" (p. 165).

*  *  *

"For a man who claims to believe in the morally improving effects of reading great literature, Philip Swallow (it seems to Morris) takes his marriage vows pretty lightly" (p. 249).

*  *  *

"Do you know what she said? 'Professor Tardieu, it is not what you say that impresses me most, it is what your are silent about: ideas, morality, love, death, things... This notebook' - she fluttered its vacant pages - 'is the record of your profound silences. Vos silences profonds'" (p. 265).

*  *  *

    "Right, you can get anything you want by telephone in this city: Chinese food, massage, yoga lessons, acupuncture. You can even all up girls who will talk to you dirty to you for so much a minute. You pay bay credit car. But if you're into deconstruction, you can just watch all these trailers in a row as if it was one, free, avant-garde movie. Mind you," he added pensively, "I've rather lost faith in deconstruction. I guess it showed this afternoon."

    "You mean every decoding is not another encoding after all?"

    "Oh it is, it is. But the deferral of meaning isn't infinite as far as the individual is concerned."

    "I thought deconstructionists didn't believe in the individual."

    "They don't. But death is the one concept you can't deconstruct. Work back from there and you end up with the old idea of an autonomous self. I can die, therefore I am. I realized that when those wop radicals threatened to deconstruct me" (p. 328).

David Lodge, Small World, Penguin Books, 1995 (Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1984).