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When the Professor Loses His Faculties: Uses of the Comic in David Lodge's Novel Deaf Sentence

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When the Professor Loses His Faculties: Uses of the Comic in David Lodge's Novel Deaf Sentence 61 HEINRICH VERSTEEGEN When the Professor Loses His Faculties: Uses of the Comic in David Lodge's Novel Deaf Sentence David Lodge's Deaf Sentence (2008) received widespread critical acclaim. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 (cf. British Council 2011), and it has been praised for its insightful account and "compassionate understanding" (Cunnen 2009, 34) of aging and mortality. Reviewers' opinions, however, were not quite so unanimous in their assessment of the novel's peculiar combination of funny and gloomy elements. At one end of the spectrum, the novel was called "deeply mel- ancholic" (Conradi 2008), and "a markedly doleful book" (Bray 2008, 59), while, at the opposite end, its major strength was located in "Lodge's comedic talent" (Strout 2010, xciii). Most reviewers, however, were unable to establish any specific aesthetic link between the contradictory styles of the narrative and were content to point out that it "evokes both laughter and tears" (Burkhardt 2008, 120) or that it "cannot be called a comic novel, though it is very funny" (Allen 2008, 21). As regards the comic element, Deaf Sentence is indeed reminiscent of Lodge's earlier campus novels. There is a professor of linguistics in a northern university town,1 who after taking early retirement still keeps in touch with his old faculty; there is an attractive female American student whose advances flatter the emeritus; and then there is the professor's younger wife, who, as a successful businesswoman, is too busy to keep track of her husband's academic, and other, pursuits. The comic potential of this character constellation is considerable (allowing humorous clashes between old and young, academia and commerce,2 British and American ways of life3 and, not to forget, the complications of a love triangle). Likewise, the tone of the narrative is also primarily witty and entertaining. But despite these comic elements, the novel's main subject matter is rather sombre, being about decrepitude, aging and death. Sexagenarian protagonist-narrator Desmond Bates is suffering from progressive hearing loss, which he interprets as an early, if symbolic, harbinger of death, indicated by the title Deaf Sentence and numerous other puns on the near-homophony of deaf and death. Desmond's father Harry Bates, an 89-year-old widower, almost equally deaf, incontinent, and his memory fading, leads an isolated life in his squalid house in southeast London, where he collapses following a stroke and dies a few weeks later, but not until Desmond has arranged for his life-support machines to be cut off. And the gloomy account of the dying father is framed (and punctuated, as it were) by Bates's depressing visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau immediately before the father's stroke and, just after he has decided to let his father die, his equally depressing memories of his first wife Maisie's assisted suicide. The novel ends with the father's funeral 1 Some reviewers seem to think it is the fictitious Rummidge from Lodge's campus trilogy (cf. Schaefer Riley 2008; Cunnen 2009, 34), but the actual town is not named in this novel. 2 Cf. Nice Work (1988), which thrives on the comic clash between academia and industry. 3 This is exploited for maximum comic effect in the contrast between Philipp Swallow and Morris Zapp in Changing Places (1975) and, to some extent, also in Small World (1984) (cf. Ahrens 1992, 281-82). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 27.1 (March 2016): 61-72. Anglistik, Jahrgang 27 (2016), Ausgabe 1 © 2016 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 62 HEINRICH VERSTEEGEN service, with the mysterious American student faking her own suicide, and with Desmond taking up lip-reading classes. The exact aesthetic connections between funny and gloomy elements, as well as their relative importance, are obviously somewhat puzzling in this novel. Although it has long been recognized that Lodge's novels, despite "their attractive comic surface, […] are by no means light-hearted entertainment only," but blend "comedy with pro- founder issues" (Draudt 2000, 241),4 in none of his previous works did these issues ever reach such a level of darkness and woefulness. I will examine this remarkable clash of moods in Deaf Sentence by drawing on theories of the comic, the tragic, and the tragicomic, and I will argue that funny and gloomy parts cannot be regarded as oppositional elements, dividing the novel up into a comical first part and a sombre ending, but that both are ambivalent and fluid modes of storytelling which comple- ment each other. I will also investigate how the ambivalent narrative modes corre- spond with the novel's thematic focus on the equally ambivalent notions of aging and dying in the 21st century. The Tragicomic Fallacy Most reviewers have avoided the word 'tragic' for the more melancholic parts of Deaf Winter Journals Sentence, preferring terms like "pathos" (Burkardt 2008, 120) or "darker, more minor scales" (Kakutani 2009, C 29), and very few have used the term tragicomedy to clas- sify the novel as a whole (cf. Allen 2008, 21). This concept, however, has been sug- gested by one academic critic. Patrick Müller argues that Bates regards his own aging as a tragic affliction (cf. Müller 2012, 157), but then, similar to a character from a comedy of humours, cures himself from his melancholic/phlegmatic state of mind (cf. for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution 158) and learns to accept old age as a meaningful part of the cycle of birth, life and death (cf. 160) – a lesson which Müller calls a catharsis and a piece of universal wis- dom, a "consolatio philosophiae" (160).5 This interpretation sounds sleek enough, but it disregards the fact that Desmond Bates himself is anything but sympathetic to the wisdoms of "glib philosopher[s]" (Lodge 2008, 290). In addition,Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) the use of the con- cept of catharsis is also rather bizarre here, firstly because Müller treats it as an ele- ment of comedy, and secondly because the term, at least by common understanding, refers to an experience of the audience, or the reader, but not the protagonist. Müller's interpretation, thus, is neither entirely flawless nor is it helpful since it does not re- solve the problem of the ambivalent straddle between comedy and gloom that the novel performs. Indeed, both 'tragic' and 'tragicomic' are problematic attributes in connection with this novel. One would obviously have to stretch the notion of 'tragic' if one wished to apply it to natural processes of decay like growing old, losing one's hearing, or dying at a biblical age of 89. Not even the assisted deaths of Harry Bates and Maisie, who were both terminally ill, are tragic per se, and they are not presented as such in the novel. They are not described as personal crises brought about by a tragic hero's "mis- 4 A similar assessment is given by Walsh, who calls Lodge "[n]ot a comic novelist, exactly" (Walsh 2007, 268). 5 The term was originally coined in Boethius' treatise De Consolatione Philosophiae (cf. Boethius, 2002), though Müller does not make any explicit reference to this classical work. Nor can I see any useful link with Deaf Sentence – especially since Lodge's fiction is known for its empiricist, anti- philosophical stance (cf. Easthope 1999, 164) and Deaf Sentence does not seem to be an exception. Anglistik, Jahrgang 27 (2016), Ausgabe 1 © 2016 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) WHEN THE PROFESSOR LOSES HIS FACULTIES 63 taken choice of an action" (Abrams 1999, 322) or as misfortunes contrived by some impersonal power such as fate (cf. Cuddon 1992, 985). Rather, they are little more than case studies, to be understood as a contribution to the current debate about assist- ed suicide and the right to die. Nor does the less rigorously defined concept of tragi- comedy, in any of its various definitions, quite fit this novel either – neither the old Renaissance definition of tragicomedy as a story which "wants deaths […] yet brings some neere it" (Fletcher, qtd. in Foster 2003, 21), nor in the understanding of modern tragicomedy, as e.g. in the Theatre of the Absurd, in which "the individual is [...] a comic figure in a universe probably tragic or at best uncertain" (Foster 2003, 12). The novel clearly does not "want deaths," as it describes two in detail, and none of the suffering that is entailed in going deaf, growing old etc. in this book is the work of a tragic or uncertain universe. All these afflictions are universally known certainties – though uncomfortable ones. The problematic application of the concept of tragicomedy may well have been triggered by a – traditionalist – misconception of the terms 'tragedy' and 'comedy' which is encouraged in the novel itself. Where Bates, after many musings about his own aphorism "[d]eafness is comic, as blindness is tragic" (Lodge 2008, 13), finally reaches the supposed insight that "it seems more meaningful to say that deafness is comic and death is tragic, because final, inevitable, and inscrutable" (289), he offers an essentialist definition, suggesting that the concepts of comedy and tragedy are inherent properties of actual situations or even natural conditions – which they are not. Bates is a fallible narrator (and not just in this respect), and the novel itself bears ample evidence that its comic and its quasi-tragic effects do not derive from things as such, but from the perspectives which an outside observer, either a character or the reader, takes on things, or, rather, is made to take on them. This applies particularly well to the many representations of human frailty and inadequacy which form the thematic backbone of the novel.
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