David Lodge - Nice Work (quotes)

 

"And there, for the time being, let us leave Vic Wilcox, while we travel back an hour or two in time, a few miles in space, to meet a very different character. A character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn't herself believe in the concept of character. That is to say (a favourite phrase of her own), Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that 'character' is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism. As evidence for this assertion she will point to the fact that the rise of the novel (the literary genre of 'character' par excellence) in the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of capitalism; that the triumph of the novel over all other literary genres in the nineteenth century coincided with the trimph of capitalism; and that the modernist and postmodernist deconstruction of the classic novel in the twentieth century coincided with the terminal crisis of capitalism.

    Why the classic novel should have collaborated with the spirit o capitalism is perfectly obvious for Robyn. Both are expressions of secularized Protestant ethic, both dependent on the idea of an autonomous individual self who is responsible for and in control of his/her own destiny, seeking happiness and fortune in competition with other autonomous selves. This is true of the novel considered both as commodity and as mode of representation. (Thus Robyn in full seminar spate.) That is to say, it applies to novelists themselves as well as to their heroes and heroines. The novelist is a capitalist of the imagination. He or she invents a product which consumers didn't know they wanted until it is made available, manufactures it with the assistance of purveyors of risk capital known as publishers, and sells it in competition with makers of marginally differentiated products of the same kind. The first major English novelist, Daniel Defoe, was a merchant. The second, Sanuel Richardson, was a printer. The novel was the first mass-produced cultural artefact. (At this point Robyn, with elbows tucked into her sides, would spread her hands outwards from the wrist, as if to imply that there is no need to say more. But of course she always has much more to say.)

    According to Robyn (or, more precisely, according to the writers who have influenced her thinking on these matters), there is no such thing as the 'self' on which capitalism and the classic novel are founded - that is to say, a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person's identity; there is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses - the discourses of power, sex, family, science, religion, poetry, etc. And by the same token, there is no such thing as an author, that is to say, one who originates a work of fiction ab nihilo. Every text is a product of intertextuality, a tissue of allusions to and citations of other texts; and, in the famous words of Jacques Derrida (famous to people like Robyn, anyway), 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte', there is nothing outside the text. There are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our 'selves' in language. Not 'you are what you eat' but 'you are what you speak' or, rather 'you are what speaks you', is the axiomatic basis of Robyn's philosophy, which she would call, if required to give it a name, 'semiotic materialism'. It might seem a bit bleak, a bit inhuman ('antihumanist, yes; inhuman, no,' she would interject), somewhat deterministic ('not at all; the truly determined subject is he who is not aware of the discursive formations that determine him. Or her,' she would add scrupulously, being among other things a feminist), but in practice this doesn't seem to affect her behaviour very noticeably - she seems to have ordinary human feelings, ambitions, desires, to suffer anxieties, frustrations, fears, like anyone else in this imperfect world, and to have a natural inclination to try and make it a better place. I shall therefore take the liberty of treating her as a character, ot utterly different in kind, though of course belonging to a very different social species, from Vic Wilcox" (p. 39-41).

*  *  *

    "'But doesn't it bother you at all?' Robyn said. 'That the things we care so passionately about - for instance, whether Derrida's critique of metaphysics lets idealism in by the back door, or whether Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is phallogocentric, or whether Foucault's theory of the episteme is reconciliable with dialectical materialism - things like that, which we argue about and read about and write about endlessly - doesn't it worry you that ninety-nine point nine per cent of the population couldn't give a monkey's?'" (p. 217).

*  *  *

    "'But repetition is death! Robyn cried. 'Difference is life. Difference is the condition of meaning. Language is a system of differences, as Saussure said'" (p. 351).

David Lodge, Nice Work, Penguin Books, 1989 (Secker & Warburg,1988).

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).