0 Introduction

This thesis intends to document the presence and development of two major insecurities in the novels of David Lodge, the insecurities about Catholicism and academia. It is divided into two chapters. The first chapter, after extracting relevant data from biographical information, interviews and critical opinions about Lodge, traces the insecurity about Catholicism chronologically through Lodge‟s fiction. The second chapter, in a similar way, traces the development of the insecurity about academia.

For the needs of this thesis, the word “insecurity” is understood basically according to its dictionary definition, representing a state of being “uncertain or anxious about oneself; not confident” (The Oxford Dictionary of English). More specifically, it is a cognitive or ideological insecurity, finding inconsistency or dissonance between one‟s theory and practice, between mental contents (for example opinions or attitudes) and real world behaviour (biographical information) or between individual components within one domain (for example dissonant attitudes or contradictory behaviour). This delimitation is consistent with the definition given that the word “oneself” stands for both physical and mental integrity of an individual. In the case of Lodge, it means finding criticism of institutions which he is a part of at the same time.

The scope of this thesis is limited to the two central insecurities most widely distributed across Lodge‟s bibliography. Although there are many more to be found in

Lodge‟s novels, for example the insecurities about the establishment, writing or death, this thesis attempts to do an exhaustive coverage of the central insecurities instead of a survey of many minor insecurities.

Apart from other demonstrations of the insecurity about Catholicism, an important fact is that Lodge himself said about the succession of his novels that it

1 shows a gradually disappearing orthodox Roman Catholic, which alone suggests that there is some kind of a problem which is causing the disappearance. Having been brought up as a Catholic, Lodge began to address the issue of Catholicism early on in his bibliography. His first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), already examines the complicated position of Catholicism in a changing world, but its evaluation is mostly affirmative of Catholicism. The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), humorously critical of the Rhythm method of contraception prescribed by the Church, implies insecurity by showing the psychological damage done by Catholicism to married

Catholics. The most important novel in this respect, How Far Can You Go? (1980), analysed in minute detail in this thesis, is a large-scale narrative examining an unusually high number of characters over a time span of several decades. It directly targets Catholicism, its development in the second half of the 20th century and its influence on different social groups. There are many objects of criticism. Apart from the problem of contraception outlined in The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965),

Lodge criticises certain harmful features of Catholic upbringing and the literal, dogmatic interpretation of the Catholic teaching, and he contemplates on how

Catholicism can be integrated with scientific knowledge about the world and about human mental and physical health. He challenges the conduct of Vatican in the historical period ranging from the 50s to the 70s, but he also criticises the priests who are in direct contact with people for being obscurantist in the matters of the development of the Catholic theology. In the end of the novel, Lodge outlines a possible resolution of these insecurities in the form of something like the vital core of

Catholicism stripped of all the negative features, admitting the arbitrariness of belief.

This ending indicates that the criticism and ridicule found throughout the book are not aimed at an external phenomenon but rather at a part of Lodge‟s own biographical

2 background which he intended to answer for in How Far Can You Go? (1980).

Paradise News (1991), a novel narrated by a priest who left the Church, documents the fading of the most intense insecurity as Lodge‟s viewpoint moves out of the Catholic faith. However, there are still passages implying doubt about the institution. Therapy

(1995) is almost thoroughly secular, except for reminiscences of dealing with

Catholicism.

The insecurity about academia demonstrates itself by a development similar to that of the insecurity about Catholicism: it also increases in profundity and in the amount of text devoted to it over time, culminates in a single novel and then fades.

Being strongly influenced by Kingsley Amis‟s Lucky Jim (1954), the young academic

Lodge put the first indications of the insecurity about academia into The British

Museum Is Falling Down (1965). Its main protagonist is in the process of finishing his doctoral thesis, and he makes the first observations about the academic world indicative of the future world-renowned campus novels, such as overly detailed and uninteresting thesis topics and academic struggles for power. Changing Places (1975) and Small

World (1984) are both full of ridicule of certain aspects of academia, but as the criticism does not challenge the existence of academia itself, this thesis treats these novels as one stage of insecurity and chooses Changing Places (1975) to illustrate its features. The insecurity in Changing Places (1975) targets certain specific characteristics of British academia and the incompetence of some academics possessing power because of favouritism or tenure. The most important novel with respect to the insecurity about academia is Nice Work (1988). Co-occurring with Lodge‟s early retirement from a professor‟s chair at a university in 1987, this novel juxtaposes academia and industry and expresses profound insecurity about the entire academia as an institution. Apart from the problems already present in the previous novels, Nice

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Work (1988) opens the question of whether literary theory and other research fields which allegedly lack an economic justification have any objective meaning for society.

It does so by highlighting the statistical marginality of people interested in such inquiry and by setting it in the context of the physical operation of the world which, keeping people alive and safe, has to occur by definition before any intellectual endeavour takes place. Consequently, government funding of teaching such theoretical studies is questioned. Since the entire academia is viewed partly according to the laws of economics, tenure is challenged several times as violating competition. The most important passage of the book with respect to insecurity is a fictional letter in which a character announces that he is leaving academia and lists the reasons to do so. After having done away with academia both in fiction and in real life, Lodge wrote only one novel set into the academic environment. Thinks… (2001) shows the insecurity fading - it contains much less criticism than either Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) or Nice Work (1988).

David Lodge is known mainly as a writer of comedy. Examining the negative and insecure implications of his writing, this thesis argues that in order to study the complex literary significance of his work in the context of his life and the sociocultural situation in Britain, it is vital to be aware of and understand the underlying structures of insecurity in his bibliography.

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1 The Catholic‟s Insecurity

Take a writer who was brought up as a Catholic (Haffenden 147) and writes this sentence into his novel: “In fact there is no guarantee that Hitler is in Hell; he might have made an Act of Perfect Contrition a microsecond after squeezing the trigger in his

Berlin bunker.” (How Far Can You Go? 9) The heavy sarcasm of this sentence acquires an entirely new meaning when we realize that, seemingly mocking something external,

Lodge is attacking Catholicism, the faith which he was taught by his mother and with which he always identified, at least according to a 1985 interview: “I am a Catholic

[…]. Catholicism happens to be the ideological milieu I grew up in, that I know and write out of.” (Haffenden 152) As late as 2004, he is described as a “practising, if sceptical, Catholic” (Llewellyn). And he is a Catholic not only in practice but also in study – his seven hundred pages long master‟s thesis was titled “Catholic Fiction Since the Oxford Movement” (Haffenden 149) and as late as 1980 (How Far Can You Go?), he makes frequent allusions to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

Lodge himself commented on the obviously recurring theme of Catholicism by saying that in chronological reading, his novels give a picture of an orthodox Roman

Catholic becoming "less and less so as time went on" (Mullan). Intuition tells us that such a retreat is more likely to be caused by an abrasive insecurity than by impartial investigation of the “changes in Catholicism both in their comic aspect and as they impinged upon the most serious things in life” (Haffenden 153), a formal and cautious claim from the 1985 interview. A possible influence is the sociocultural change and the change of the Church itself – in Bernard Bergonzi‟s 1986 chapter about the decline of the Catholic novel, Lodge got close to admitting insecurity when he said that

“Catholicism itself has become a much more confused – and confusing – faith, more

5 difficult to define, mainly in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of Pope John and the

Vatican Council.” (Bergonzi 177)

There are several critical voices which imply if not insecurity, then at least a fundamental problem. Robert A. Morace, in his book Dialogic Novels of Malcolm

Bradbury and David Lodge provides, apart from Bakhtin-related theory, authoritative interpretations of individual novels:

Lodge neither abandons the Catholic novel nor nostalgically attempts to

perpetuate a dead form. Rather, he seeks to revitalize, or resurrect, the Catholic

novel by renegotiating the terms upon which it, and the faith on which it

depends, can be made viable in a postmodern, postChristian age. (Morace 188)

In this quote, Morace implies that Catholicism is not viable anymore and Lodge, being aware of and supposedly uncomfortable with this fact, exhibits active effort to

“renegotiate the terms” in order to reach equilibrium. Another relevant work, Terry

Eagleton‟s article “Silences of David Lodge” attempts to cover the unsounded background and implications of his novels:

Lodge‟s religious faith appears in his writing in peculiarly privatized, notional

form. He is, in effect, a thoroughly secularized author, whose Catholicism

makes little difference to his conventional liberal vision other than providing

him with convenient materials for social commentary and comic satire. […] His

writing is almost wholly unmarked by spiritual passion […] which would only

disturb the comic equipoise of his fiction. (Eagleton 96)

Here, Eagleton suggests that Lodge‟s vision is not influenced by his Catholicism.

However, this contrasts with Lodge‟s own words, describing himself as a Catholic.

There is a potential conflict between Lodge‟s sense of belonging to Catholicism and his intellectually sincere liberalism.

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Although Lodge does not explicitly subscribe to any kind of insecurity, he admits that while writing How Far Can You Go?, he was “drawing on a certain amount of painful personal experience” (Haffenden 153) and what is useful for this thesis – he states that he consciously tried to transform this personal issue in fiction: “I tried to do it [draw on painful experience] through a technique which would not be basically confessional or emotional and sentimentally involving.” (Haffenden 154)

Being aware of the fact that Lodge‟s (hypothetical) anxieties might require some semiotic unveiling, we may commence the quest of searching for evidence of a

Catholic‟s insecurity in his fiction. Although How Far Can You Go? is commonly considered as the culmination of the issue of Catholicism, let us begin to document what is likely the most pertinent of all anxieties at the very beginning of Lodge‟s writing career.

The Picturegoers (1960), Lodge‟s first published novel, “provides a rare fictional portrait of Catholic parish life, satiric in places indeed but basically affirmative” (Woodman 35). Lodge himself describes it as a “serious work of scrupulous realism”, despite it having its “moments of humour” (Haffenden 145), in a different interview as “a combination - Angry Young Man novel of a society à la

Graham Greene.” (Smith) Being also the beginning of Lodge‟s usage of binary oppositions, it “seems to stage a simple confrontation between the religious and the secular, specifically through the conflict of Catholic piety, and the licentiousness of

Hollywood.” (Head 238) In The Picturegoers, Lodge already negotiates a “conflict”, but there is too much affirmativeness to consider it a demonstration of insecurity.

The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) “moves a little away from the affirmative, and the associations of Catholicism are not always positive.” (Pimperl 9)

The issue of contraception and Catholicism, which was to reappear once more in How

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Far Can You Go? is the main theme of the novel. The British Museum Is Falling Down records a day in the life of Adam Appleby, who experiences intense anxiety caused by the possibility of his wife being pregnant despite the complicated “Rhythm method” of contraception. It is exactly this issue which Lodge uses in his first sharp, if comic, attack on Catholicism. This attack assumes the form of a short article, “Catholicism,

Roman, for a Martian encyclopaedia compiled after life on earth had been destroyed by atomic warfare,” (The British Museum Is Falling Down 11) mentally composed by

Adam while making tea:

As far as the Western Hemisphere is concerned, [Roman Catholicism] appears

to have been characterized by a complex system of sexual taboos and rituals.

[…] Martian archaeologists have learned to identify the domiciles of Roman

Catholics by the presence of large numbers of complicated graphs, calendars,

small booklets full of figures, and quantities of broken thermometers, evidence

of the great importance attached to this code. Some scholars have argued that it

was merely a method of limiting the number of offspring; but as it has been

conclusively proved that the Roman Catholics produced more children on

average than any other section of the community, this seems untenable. (The

British Museum Is Falling Down 12)

To perfect this evidence-based scientific account of what seems to have been central to

Roman Catholicism, Lodge ends the lengthy Martian encyclopaedia entry with an absurdly brief mention of the pillars of Catholic faith: “Other doctrines of the Roman

Catholics included a belief in a Divine Redeemer and in a life after death.” (The British

Museum Is Falling Down 12)

However, the subject of “the effect of the Catholic Church‟s teaching about birth control on the lives of married Catholics” (The British Museum Is Falling Down

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163), as specified by Lodge in the afterword, is obviously insufficient to describe a profound insecurity about the very foundations of Catholicism. Fifteen years had to pass and Lodge had to make two diversions – one into his post-war-England childhood in Out of the Shelter (1970) and the other into the world of academia in Changing

Places (1975) – before such insecurity came to be expressed.

How Far Can You Go? is “the first novel […] in which [Lodge] has actually made being a Catholic a serious, world-historical kind of situation” (Moseley 77).

Morace describes it as Lodge‟s “strongest and most compelling work, a novel in which he cultivates an artful simplicity in order to undermine the power of whatever is static and singular, in a word, monological” (Morace 172). It follows the lives of what is initially a group of ten young Catholics over the course of roughly two decades. Most of the indicators of insecurity are in the form of comic ridicule, which of course allows

Bakhtinian interpretations based on the subversive, hygienic function of comedy.

Nevertheless, the critique is harsh enough to assume that Lodge did more than just

“make sure that institutions are always subject to a kind of ridiculing criticism”

(Haffenden 166).

In the first chapter, entitled “How It Was”, Lodge describes a morning mass attended by all ten of his initial characters. In an attempt to summarize what exactly these people believe in, he exhaustively likens “the metaphysic or world-picture these young people had acquired from their Catholic upbringing and education” (6) to the game of Snakes and Ladders:

Up there was Heaven; down there was Hell. The name of the game was

Salvation, the object to get to Heaven and avoid Hell. It was like Snakes and

Ladders: sin sent you plummeting down towards the Pit; the sacraments, good

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deeds, acts of self-mortification, enabled you to climb back towards the light.

Everything you did or thought was subject to spiritual accounting. (6)

This condescending, but basically good-hearted metaphor becomes less generous when

Lodge introduces a cognitive simplification: “On the whole, a safe rule of thumb was that anything you positively disliked doing was probably Good, and anything you liked doing enormously was probably Bad, or potentially bad – an „occasion of sin‟.” (7) He continues with a market metaphor: “An indulgence was a kind of spiritual voucher, obtained by performing some devotional exercise,” (7) and a gambling metaphor:

There was also such a thing as plenary indulgence, which was a kind of jackpot,

because it wiped out all the punishment accruing to your sins up to the time of

obtaining the indulgence. You could get one of these by, for instance, going to

mass and Holy Communion on the first Friday of nine successive months. (8)

Apart from direct ridicule, the first chapter also implies an accusation that Catholic education threatens the integrity of its pupils by leaving them misinformed about human sexuality, which manifests itself in Michael‟s long-lasting fear that his masturbation is a mortal sin. In one of the comic highlights of this chapter, Lodge seems to criticise the overly literal teaching of the symbolic reception of the Body and

Blood of Christ:

At what point, Dennis cannot help wondering, does the miracle of

transubstantiation reverse itself, since it cannot be that Christ submits himself to

the indignities of human digestion and excretion? Is it as the host begins to

dissolve on the tongue, as it passes the epiglottis, or as it travels down the

oesophagus that Christ jumps from his wheaten vehicle and into your soul? (19)

This sarcastic thought process, despite being unable to raise serious doubts about

Catholicism, sets a firm basis for doubting the literal truth of the scriptures based on

10 science. Lodge also highlights the logical errors in the archaic and impersonal language of the prayers:

Adrian, who has a good logical mind, might well ask by what right he can

describe his heart as a sanctuary, and how Christ, being God, can give glory to

God, or putting that aside, why He should be bothered to do so in his, Adrian‟s

name, when he, Adrian, is perfectly capable of giving glory to God himself. (19-

20)

In passages like these, Lodge points to the fact that contemporary people need coherent systems of belief verifiable by themselves and that the symbolic nature of Catholicism is for many people either incorrectly grasped or simply not interesting.

The second chapter, entitled “How They Lost Their Virginities”, although mostly concerned with rather earthly matters such as the “irregular motions of the flesh” (12), gradates scriptural criticism:

„Do you mean,‟ she asked, her tulip-cut of glossy copper-coloured hair thrust

forward with the urgency of her question, „that if A prays to Jesus via Mary,

and B prays direct to Jesus, A has a better chance of being heard than B, other

things being equal? And if not, then why bother going through Mary?‟ (59)

With the target of its comedy similar to the previous quote, this scene ridicules the seriousness of a scientifically rigorous analysis of the Catholic teaching and implicitly suggests that literal interpretation is certainly not the right way to approach religion.

The third chapter, entitled “How Things Began to Change”, begins with a postmodern authorial intrusion, in which Lodge refers back to The British Museum Is

Falling Down and finds in reminiscence that

healthy agnostics and atheists among my acquaintance […] found the novel

rather sad. All that self-denial and sacrifice of libido depressed them. I think it

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would depress me, too, now, if I didn‟t know that my principal characters would

have made a sensible decision long ago to avail themselves of contraceptives.

(74)

We can see that Lodge identifies with the agnostic/atheist position on this issue, stating that Catholicism causes “self-denial and sacrifice of libido” to young married couples.

The characters of How Far Can You Go? are shown to us dealing with this problem:

“their spontaneity was destroyed by the tedious regime of calendar and temperature chart” (75) However, as opposed to The British Museum Is Falling Down, here we can find serious philosophical and historical narratorial questioning:

You may wonder why they all persevered with this frustrating, undignified,

ineffective, anxiety-creating system of family planning […] either you struggled

on as best you could without reliable contraception, or you got out of the

Church; these seemed to be the only logical alternatives. Some people, of

course, had left precisely because they could no longer believe in the authority

of a Church that taught such mischievous nonsense. More often, those who

lapsed over this issue retained a residual belief in the rest of Catholic doctrine

and thus lived uncomfortably in a state of suppressed guilt and spiritual

deprivation. […] it took a lot of misery and stress to screw them up to the point

of disobedience. (78-80, my emphasis)

This unexpectedly judgemental outburst on the issue of contraception verbalizes much of the implicit criticism found throughout the book. It specifies the damage done to people on multiple levels of human needs ranging from sexual frustration, anxiety and lack of dignity to feelings of suppressed guilt and spiritual deprivation. Moreover, it doubts the good intentions (“mischievous”) and sanity (“nonsense”) of the Catholic institution. Having thus commenced judging Catholicism instead of describing it, it is

12 possible that Lodge utilized his own latent overly critical voice when writing the speech about English Catholics of the Cambridge don Miles:

[…] they have absolutely no taste, no aesthetic sense whatsoever, so that as soon

as they begin to meddle with the styles of architecture and worship that they

inherited from the Counter-Reformation, as soon as they try and go „modern‟,

God help us, they make the most terrible dog‟s breakfast of it, a hideous jumble

of old and new, incompatible styles and idioms […] (83)

However peripheral, even “ghastly modern bas-reliefs in some kind of aluminium more appropriate to saucepans than to sacred art” (83) can constitute one‟s doubts about the representatives of his faith. The change in the Church is destabilising in the words of

Father Brierley, who “read the professional theological journals with much the same mixed feelings of shock and liberation as Michael read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the sexually explicit fiction that was published in its wake.” (89) He sees

a dangerous gap […] opening up between the sophisticated, progressive

theologians and exegetes on the one hand, and ordinary parochial Catholics on

the other. The latter still went on believing in the nativity story and the miracles

of Our Lord and all the rest of it as literally, historically true. (90)

The narrator mentions an “Order in the North of England”, which perceives biology and botany as “sensitive and potentially dangerous to faith and morals” (91) – here,

Lodge creates a comic effect by juxtaposing concrete disciplines of biology and botany, innocent in their sincere attempt to explain the world, with (Catholic) faith and morals, implicitly strengthening the inner conflict of an inquiring Catholic. The contraception issue returns when Polly has to respond to desperate, “harrowing” letters of Catholic wives:

13

frigidity caused by fear of pregnancy, hideous gynaecological complications

caused by excessive childbearing, and desertion by husbands unable to tolerate

the consequences of their own feckless fucking, the teeming babies and the

haggard spouse. „My God, the Church has an awful lot to answer for,‟ she

would mutter to herself, trying to find some comforting word for these pathetic

women that was not false or hypocritical. Yet, deep down, Polly still believed in

God, and, willy nilly, He was the Catholic God. (98)

This passage about Polly is one of the clearest demonstrations of the Catholic‟s insecurity – severe doubt about the Church and strong devotion to the Catholic God are present at the same time. Lodge demonstrates the doubt about the Church by pointing out that its reasoning is invalid: “the Church was in a state of certainty, but when the

Pope had made his decision, whatever it was, the Church would pass from one state of certainty to another” (105), which is to some “the last straw that broke the back of

[their] faith in Catholicism” (105).

Returning to the issue of contraception with great force in the fourth chapter entitled “How They Lost the Fear of Hell”, Lodge writes:

It is as difficult to enter into the mind of a Pope as it must be for a Pope to enter

into the mind of, say, a young mother of three, in a double bed, who feels her

husband‟s caressing touch and is divided between the desire to turn to him and

the fear of an unwanted pregnancy. (114)

This is one of the few straightforward emotional appeals that Lodge ventures to present.

Although it certainly does not tell us anything about Lodge‟s genius as a writer, it is an important statement regarding the insecurity about Catholicism, which puts human mental and physical health above the arbitrary laws of religious authorities. It also implicitly challenges the righteousness of an authority which threatens mental and

14 physical health. Lodge swiftly changes from the uncommon emotional tone into ridicule:

Thus it came about that the first important test of the unity of the Catholic

Church after Vatican II [...] was a great debate about not, say, the nature of

Christ and the meaning of his teaching in the light of modern knowledge but

about the precise conditions under which a man was permitted to introduce his

penis and ejaculate his semen into the vagina of his lawfully wedded wife, a

question on which Jesus Christ himself had left no recorded opinion. (115)

In the pages following this paragraph, Lodge attempts a large-scale historical explanation of the inner conflicts and anxieties which rose in the Catholic Church because of its stubborn position in the matters of contraception, if not a general

“stubbornness”. These pages could be quoted in full here since they probably constitute a significant part of Lodge‟s own grounds for insecurity, but for the sake of brevity, I will only quote the words expressing the most dissonant implications. The Church is made to appear self-contradictory in the claim that “the case for the ban [of contraception] had been fatally weakened by the admission that marital sex might be confined to the „safe period‟ with the deliberate intention of avoiding conception.”

(117) In the light of the medical opinion about sex, the narrator asks

why should not priests and nuns marry each other, and take vows of sterility

rather than chastity, forgoing the satisfactions of having offspring in order to

serve the community at large, but still enjoying the consolations of that

interpersonal genital communion which, the orthodox wisdom of the modern

age insists, is essential to mental and physical health? (120, my emphasis)

The conflict of Catholicism with human mental and physical health has already been pointed out, what is new in this passage is a call for a complete revision of the Church

15 and the implicit doubt that it is possible for an unchanging institution to maintain its power and meaning in a changing culture.

In the fifth chapter, entitled “How They Broke Out, Away, Down, Up, Through,

Etc.”, although, as suggested by the title, mainly following the biographies of the characters, Lodge formulates a description of a generalized Catholic‟s insecurity in the times of change:

So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties

ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the

foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stimulating and

slightly unnerving (142-143)

There is an unexpectedly judgemental suggestion of what might have caused this:

“[The characters] were weighed down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions”

(143, my emphasis). Lodge even offers a guide to working back to the fundamental questions:

they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece

by piece. But in matters of belief (as of literary convention [refers to authorial

intrusion]) it is a nice question how far you can go in this process without

throwing out something vital. (143)

In this elegant passage, Lodge indicates his writerly insecurity about what is the tolerable, aesthetic extent of postmodern authorial intrusion and maybe confesses to having the same kind of insecurity about questioning Catholicism as well.

In the sixth chapter, entitled “How They Dealt with Love and Death”, Lodge writes about the insecurity a well-read person is likely to feel in the matters of the concept of God:

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what was God? Kant said he was the essential presupposition of moral action,

Bishop Robinson said he was the ground of our being, and Teilhard the Chardin

said he was the Omega Point. Wittgenstein said, whereof we cannot speak,

thereof we must remain silent – an aphorism in which Austin Brierley found

great comfort. (169)

The infatuation of a doubting priest with astronomy gets across another kind of insecurity: “astronomical quantities tended to make all human thought seem both trivial and futile” (170). Human thought in this sense obviously includes the whole of

Catholicism. This philosophising leads to questioning the universal truths of

Catholicism in a hypothesis of life in space: “Had those creatures, like us, myths of creation, fall and redemption? Had other Christs died on other Calvaries in other galaxies at different times in the last twenty billion years?” (171) Lodge brings this to a comic contrast:

when the last day came and God closed down the Universe, gathering in the

stars and galaxies like a croupier raking in chips, He would reward the righteous

by letting them live with Him for ever in Heaven – that obviously wouldn‟t do,

as modern theologians admitted, and indeed took some satisfaction in

demonstrating.” (171)

Words of Robin, an atheist, identify a link between Catholicism and psychiatric disorder: “it encourages neuroticism. The kind of Catholicism Violet was brought up in

[…] Hell-fire sermons, obsession with sin, purity, all that sort of thing.” (186)

The seventh and last chapter, entitled “How It Is”, is special: it is short, written in a different style than the previous chapters and Lodge admits that one of the voices

(an unidentified voiceover in the transcript of a videotape) is his own: “those speeches do represent my own view as authorial narrator about the whole issue that I‟ve raised:

17 that would be a proper way to read the book.” (Haffenden 155) At the end of the book, although secure before, “the narrator takes a very much less secure position then, he‟s seen as part of the flux, as uncertain as are the characters of what is going to happen next.” (Haffenden 156)

Before Lodge‟s voice, the doubting priest recapitulates the history of

Catholicism:

Just think of all the misery and repression and suffering the Church has caused

in the past. Persecuting heretics, Jews. Torture. Burning at the stake. Terrifying

people with the fear of Hell. I think we should do penance for that daily.” (233)

Polly asks “[if they do not think] they‟re in any way superior to Protestants or Jews,

Hindus or Muslims, or for that matter, atheists and agnostics […] why be a Catholic at all, rather than something else, or just nothing?” (235) Tessa asks: “if it matters whether it‟s true, as long as it helps people to cope. And if it doesn‟t help people to cope, would it be any use being true?” (236)

The voice Lodge admitted to be his seems to be similarly anxious about liberalisation as the book indicates Lodge is about the Catholic institution, the Church:

“[the most fundamental change is] the fading away of the traditional Catholic metaphysic – that marvellously complex and ingenious synthesis of theology and cosmology and casuistry” (239). Then he seems to give a summary, a reconciliation of the anxieties:

We must not only believe, but know that we believe, live our belief and yet see

it from outside, aware that in another time, another place, we would have

believed something different […] without feeling that this invalidates belief.

(239-240)

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What immediately follows is a metaphor of religion as reading/writing fiction, only further validating its belonging to the author:

Just as when reading a novel, or writing one for that matter, we maintain a

double consciousness of the characters as both, as it were, real and fictitious,

free and determined, and know that however absorbing and convincing we may

find it, it is not the only story we shall want to read (or, as the case may be,

write) but part of an endless sequence of stories by which man has sought and

will always seek to make sense of life. And death. (240).

This thought is very interesting, as it states that it is important to believe and at the same time deny the universal truth of what one believes in, which is rather non- intuitive. To conclude that it was insecurity what lead Lodge to this vision is not inevitable, but certainly possible.

Paradise News (1991), the novel which deals most explicitly with Catholicism after How Far Can You Go?, is centered around a laicised priest who lost his faith long ago. What is new in this novel is the issue of post-Catholicism, where Catholicism is openly looked at from the perspective of someone who left the Church. And, as Pimperl in her thesis devoted to the Catholic content of David Lodge‟s novels remarks,

the most pronounced irony lies in the nature of Bernard„s life. He, the agnostic,

is the only person in the novel who truly and from deepest conviction lives a life

worth the epithet „spiritual‟ in the sense of acting according to the Golden Rule.

(Pimperl 58)

Lodge seems to be pointing out that “real” spirituality does not even correlate with adherence to a Church – the insecurity is based on the fact that a large part of the

Catholic community, which is necessarily also a part of Catholicism itself, cannot be

19 said to live a spiritual life. Material related to personal insecurity and its possible resolution can be found in the form of a dialogue early in the book:

When did you cease to believe in this God?

Perhaps when I was still training for the priesthood. Certainly when I was

teaching at St Ethelbert„s. I can„t remember, exactly.

You can‘t remember?

Who remembers when they stopped believing in Father Christmas? It„s not

usually a specific moment [...]

How could you go on teaching theology to candidates for the priesthood if you

no longer believed in God?

You can teach theology perfectly well without believing in the God of the

Penny Catechism. In fact there are very few reputable modern theologians who

do.

So what God do they believe in?

God as „the ground of our being‟, God as „ultimate concern‟, God as the

„Beyond in the Midst‟.

And how does one pray to that kind of God?

A good question. […]

But why should anyone wish to be religious if there is no personal God to

reward him for being so?

For its own sake. (Paradise News 57-58)

There is also scriptural criticism when the main character assesses what the Church gives its followers to read in this way: “Dip into the Missal at random [...] and you will encounter the same theme, endlessly repeated.” (Paradise News 189) Insecurity about what is being taught is often helped by personal truth-seeking – the main character, in a

20 lengthy lecture at the end of the book (too conspicuously intelligent to believe that it is not Lodge himself speaking), says: “It„s as if Jesus left this essentially humanist message knowing that one day all the supernatural mythology in which it was wrapped would have to be discarded.” (Paradise News 356) However, Pimperl finds that

“Paradise News is beyond poking fun at Catholicism, it enters upon the more general topic of man„s search for paradise, independent of any concrete religion” (Pimperl 68)

– a good way of pointing out that the climax of a Catholic‟s insecurity is somewhere in the past and Paradise News does but simmer in this respect, with existentialist thought occasionally pointed in the direction of Catholicism.

Therapy (1995) already exhibits a transition of Lodge‟s insecurity towards more general existential issues, but it can be seen as the conclusion of the Catholic‟s insecurity as it is a “conglomeration” of previous novels and contains an important

Catholicism-related ending device. Pimperl summarizes the Catholicism in Therapy as follows:

the Catholic theme is touched on in the narrative “Maureen. A memoir”

(Therapy 222-258). Here Lodge recurs to the topic of the Catholic ghetto, but

this time seen through the eyes of an outsider [...] [this narrative] is more or less

a conglomeration of elements taken from Picturegoers and the Denis/Angela

courting year in How Far Can You Go? (Pimperl 11)

What is interesting is that despite the relatively brief appearance of Catholicism, its associations are quite positive in the end, as it gets symbolically connected with love for a woman: “[Tubby] finds [Maureen] on her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and accompanies her through the last part of the way, and the experience in a way proves healing, more than any of the many therapies he had undergone up till then have.” (Pimperl 12)

21

Lodge‟s own words about the chronological reading of his novels showing an orthodox Roman Catholic becoming “less and less so as time went on” (Mullan) prove especially fitting. He proceeds from the affirmative tone of The Picturegoers (1960) and the ridiculing but not questioning The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), through heavy criticism in How Far Can You Go? (1980) the very title of which concerns dismantling the Catholic faith, to the post-Catholic account of Paradise News

(1991) and mere external observer‟s account with a nostalgic conclusion of Therapy

(1995).

22

2 The Academic‟s Insecurity

Chapter 1 dealt with the gradual disappearance of the orthodox Roman Catholic across David Lodge‟s novels as evidence of insecurity. However, it is difficult to compare Catholicism in Lodge‟s fiction with that in his life, as there are no biographical data available on the milestones of Lodge‟s faith or attitude towards the

Church. On the other hand, this is much easier with his insecurity about academia. The dates of Lodge‟s studies, fellowships, lectureships, publications and, finally, retirement, are well known. The highlight of biographical correlation is that in 1987, one year before Nice Work, as will be shown the most poignant critique of academia to appear in

Lodge‟s bibliography was published, Lodge resigned his professor‟s chair at the

University of Birmingham (an early retirement at the age of 52) to become a full-time writer – what co-occurrence could have been more telling?

In tracing Lodge‟s academic insecurity back to its roots, we have to go further than his first published novel. The first sign of Lodge‟s questioning of this peculiar institution was the enjoyment and inspiration he drew from Kingsley Amis‟s Lucky Jim

(1954), which he “read in 1955 „with exquisite pleasure‟ when he finished his degree at

University College, London, and […] was „deeply indebted‟ to its example” (Showalter

14), as quoted by Elaine Showalter in Faculty Towers, one of the central works on the campus novel after 1950. In addition to being “the source of the most of the academic novels that followed, the real origin of the genre” (Showalter 33), Lucky Jim‟s main character Jim Dixon “is critical of the cultural pretensions of academia” (Christopher

38), or, put in more aggressive terms, is a “vehicle for an attack on a dying tradition and suffocating institution” (Showalter 33). David Lodge‟s critical analysis of the paradox of the character of Jim Dixon exposes an insecurity-creating conflict which, observed and put forward by Lodge himself, possibly entered his fiction as well:

23

he tries – not very successfully – to show the outer world the image of an

industrious, respectable well-mannered young man, his mind seethes with

caustic sarcasm directed against himself and others […] he pretends to be a keen

young scholar and university teacher, when in fact he detests his subject and

despises his colleagues. (Language of Fiction 267).

This conflict might have made a smooth transition into the conflict between an academic‟s decorum and her/his awareness of the ridiculousness of the institution granting it, as we see it in Lodge‟s own campus fiction. The overall tone of Lucky Jim can be illustrated quite well by one of its most famous passages:

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article‟s niggling mindlessness, its

funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-

problems. […] His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the

typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool.

„Let‟s see,‟ he echoed Welch in a pretended effort of memory: „oh yes; The

Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to

1485.‟ (Amis 14-15)

A very similar comic feature can be found in Lodge‟s first academia-related novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down. Despite the fact that in the fictional

Britain of this novel, Kingsley Amis is named “Kingsley Anus”, Adam Appleby does work on a thesis with a similarly exhausting title as that of Jim Dixon, which “had originally been, „Language and Ideology in Modern Fiction‟ but had been whittled down by the Board of Studies until it now stood as „The Structure of Long Sentences in

Three Modern English Novels‟.” (The British Museum is Falling Down 48) Adam

Appleby makes certain observations about academia which are indicative of what can be found in Lodge‟s future academic novels:

24

[Briggs] was talking to Bane, who had recently been appointed to a new Chair

of Absurdist Drama, endowed by a commercial television company. This I

knew, had been a blow to Briggs, who was the senior man of the two, and who

had been looking for a Chair for some time. […] His best chance of promotion

lay in the retirement of the Head of Department, old Howells, who was always

raising Brigg‟s expectations by retreating at the beginning of term to a Swiss

sanatorium, only to dash them again by returning refreshed and reinvigorated at

the beginning of the vacations. (The British Museum is Falling Down 66)

This observation connects several threads of insecurity. It reveals an aspect of academia which the general public is unable to see – the struggle for power, the anxiety connected with it and the often random outcome disregarding skill or experience. At the same time, it criticises the lazy, escaping tenured professors who cannot be made redundant by means of the extreme example of Howells, who spends each term in a sanatorium. However, apart from these two seeds of an academic‟s insecurity, The

British Museum is Falling Down is mostly concerned with being swift and funny and, as was already said in Chapter 1, the theme and frame of the book is the problem of

Catholicism and the Rhythm method of contraception. Proper ground for an academic‟s insecurity has not yet come.

Changing Places (1975) is a novel about two professors taking part in an exchange scheme between a major American university and a minor British university.

This frame enabled Lodge to conduct a large scale investigation of the differences between the academic systems, notions and environments of the United States and the

United Kingdom. Being an academic himself, he seized the opportunity and provided the reader with detailed description of the disadvantages (and, less obviously, advantages) of both systems, creating a binary structure of which neither extreme is, for

25 different reasons, shown to be acceptable. However, the evidence of insecurity about academia in Changing Places is related only to its “absurd and ridiculous aspects”

(Haffenden 161), not (yet) to serious, philosophical doubt about its importance. Early on in the novel, Lodge surveys the different distributions of difficulty in the process of education particular to each country and the implications for the following academic career:

In America, it is not too difficult to obtain a bachelor‟s degree. The student is

left very much to his own devices, he accumulates the necessary credits at his

leisure […] It is at the postgraduate level that the pressure really begins, when

the student is burnished and tempered in a series of gruelling courses and

rigorous assessments until he is deemed worthy to receive the accolade of the

PhD. […] He is well primed, in short, to enter a profession as steeped in the

spirit of free enterprise as Wall Street […] Under the British system,

competition begins and ends much earlier. Four times, under our educational

rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut – at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus,

eighteen-plus and twenty-plus […] Finals, the very name of which implies that

nothing of importance can happen after it. The British postgraduate student is a

lonely, forlorn soul, uncertain of what he is doing or whom he is trying to please

[…] tenure is virtually automatic in British universities […] (15-16)

Regardless of how much damage by the British system does Lodge feel to have suffered, these words question its selection of people and the underlying psychological conditioning, and thus mediate insecurity about the very roots of the institution. A more general critique can be found in the fact that “a man with genuine love of literature in all its diverse forms [with] undiscriminating enthusiasm” (17), due to not “settling on a field to cultivate as his own” (17), is left as “a child in a toyshop – so reluctant to

26 choose one item to the exclusion of others that he ended up empty-handed” (17) - he is not able to compete well in academia and his career progresses slowly. A possible insecurity can be found in the American character‟s criticism of other literary scholars:

Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of

literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who

wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud […] Their pathetic attempts at

profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode.

They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, „I want to raise some

questions about so-and-so‟, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual

duty by merely raising them. (45)

Although this is obviously an extreme position which contributes to the comedy, it is very unlikely that Lodge wrote the passage without espousing at least a seed of such feelings. Regarding the question of incompetence connected with favouritism in academia, there is a character, a Head of Department who has never published and is first mentioned in his absence, “Shooting wild pigs” (62) in Hungary. His getting the

Chair is explained in this way: “the Vice-Chancellor in those days was a huntin‟, shootin‟, fishin‟ type. Took all the candidates down to his place in Yorkshire for a spot of grouse-shooting. Naturally Gordon made a great impression.” (90) British educational practice is criticised when an American describes a tutorial:

Did I say system? A slip of the tongue. There is no system. They have

something called tutorials, instead. Three students and me, for an hour at a time.

We're supposed to discuss some text I've assigned. This, apparently, can be

anything that comes into my head, except that the campus bookshop doesn't

have anything that comes into my head. [...] one of them writes a paper and

reads it out to the rest of us. After about three minutes the eyes of the other two

27

glaze over and they begin to sag in their chairs. It's clear they have stopped

listening. [...] I ask for comments. Silence. They avoid my eye. I volunteer a

comment myself. Silence falls again. It's so quiet you can hear the guy's beard

growing. Desperately I ask one of them a direct question. 'And what did you

think of the text, Miss Archer?' Miss Archer falls off her chair in a swoon. (125)

In this passage, Lodge highlights the discrepancy between theory of education and the practical possibility of it, between the imagined, active student and the reality of many incompetent and disinterested students, between the ideal university and a specific, small university with limited resources (absence of books). Although less pronounced, there are also doubts about the American system in the novel. A British professor writes from America that “there‟s a lot to be said for the English system of clandestine patronage. Here, for instance, it‟s a jungle in which the weakest go to the wall.” (133)

Although happening at an American university and concerning American cultural issues, this passage criticises academic favouritism in general:

„Well, I have to admit Phil...„ Luke Hogan sighed. „To make you an offer

appropriate to your age and experience, we should expect a book or two. Now if

you were black, of course, it would be different. Or better still, Indian. What

I wouldn‟t give for an indigenous Indian with a PhD,‟ he murmured wistfully,

like a man on a desert island dreaming of steak and chips. (182)

Even in Lodge‟s early campus novel Changing Places, there are hints of a deeper insecurity, although it does not yet attempt to contemplate it. In a handout written by protesting students, a teach-in is advertised addressing these questions: “What is the role of the University in modern society? What is the social justification of University

Education? What do ordinary people really think about Universities and Students?”

(163)

28

These questions are considered to their full potential in Nice Work (1988), apart from the common criticism of the “absurd and ridiculous aspects” (Haffenden 161) of academia. This is enabled by Lodge‟s structuralist juxtaposition which, for the first time in Lodge‟s campus novels, does not consist of two professors, but of a representative of academia and a representative of industry management, thus severely exposing the philosophical question of idealism versus pragmatism in the attitude towards academia.

Let us identify the less serious aspects of Lodge‟s insecurity first. In the description of Vic Wilcox‟s (the industry management representative) commute to work, the narrator points out that “the University day begins too late and finishes too early to inconvenience Vic himself” (29), implying a hidden doubt about the efficiency of the institution in contrast with the competitive company of which Wilcox is the managing director. The University seems to Wilcox “like a small city-state, an academic Vatican, from which he keeps his distance, both intimidated by and disapproving of its air of privileged detachment from the vulgar, bustling industrial city in which it is embedded” (29), stressing the elitist appearance of academia. Taking place in Margaret Thatcher‟s Britain, the plot contains many references to the economic insecurity of academia which manifested itself in “cuts, […] tightening belts, deteriorating staff-student ratios.” (54) At one point, this process is described in this way: “They are systematically destroying the finest university system in the world.”

(307) Robyn Penrose (the academia representative), a female aspiring for a permanent job at the university, criticises favouritism by wondering whether there is a

“promotions-and-appointments couch somewhere in the room” (65) when she suspects the Dean of taking advantage of his position. Philip Swallow, a character of three of

29

Lodge‟s novels, who is the Dean in Nice Work, verbalizes an almost apocalyptic insecurity:

„I feel as if, by the time I retire, I shall have lived through the entire life-cycle of

post-war higher education. When I was a student myself, provincial universities

like Rummidge were a very small show. Then in the sixties, it was all

expansion, growth, new building. Would you believe our biggest grouse in the

sixties was about the noise of construction work? Now it‟s all gone quiet. Won‟t

be long before they‟re sending in the demolition crews, no doubt.‟ (65)

This remark rounds up the economic insecurity of academia and sets it into the context of the rise and fall of the British educational system, implying that the economic problems seem to be a unique, historically significant phenomenon leading to complete destruction rather than a mere temporary situation.

The serious, ideological academic‟s insecurity begins with the first conversation on this issue between Vic Wilcox and Robyn Penrose:

„Why aren‟t they studying something useful, then?‟

[…]

„Because they‟re more interested in ideas, in feelings, than in the way machines

work.‟

„Won‟t pay the rent, though, will they – ideas, feelings?‟

„Is money the only criterion?‟

„I don‟t know a better one.‟ (115)

Here surfaces the question of whether academia (or certain departments) is economically viable in the context of the physical operation of the world, which has far-reaching implications for the question of government funding of universities. The dialogue continues with an even stronger formulation:

30

[Wilcox:] „You think the universities should expand indefinitely?‟

[Penrose:] „Not indefinitely, but -‟

„Enough to accommodate all those who want to do women‟s studies?‟

„If you like to put it that way, yes,‟ said Robyn defiantly.

„Who pays?‟

„You keep bringing everything back to money.‟

„That‟s what you learn from business. There‟s no such thing as a free lunch.‟

(115-116)

By noting the theoretical possibility of an excessive interest in these fields and the necessary increase of financial inefficiency as a result, Wilcox implicitly questions any funding that these fields might receive. This conversation causes Robyn Penrose to admit some truth in his position and she plays the role of a “devil‟s advocate” in a conversation with her academic friend Charles:

[Penrose:] „Well, when Wilcox starts getting at me about arts degrees being a

waste of money […], I find myself falling back on arguments that I don‟t really

believe any more, like the importance of maintaining cultural tradition, and

improving students‟ communicative skills‟ […]

[Penrose:] „[…] doesn‟t that make us rather marginal?‟

[Charles:] „[…] We live in a de-centred universe.‟

„I know,‟ said Robyn. „But who pays? […] That‟s always Wilcox‟s line. ‘Who

pays?’ ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’ I expect he‟d say there‟s no such

thing as a free seminar on deconstruction. Why should society pay to be told

people don‟t mean what they say or say what they mean?‟

„Because it‟s true.‟

„I thought there was no such thing as truth, in the absolute sense.‟ (218)

31

This dialogue shows the influence of the new, practical viewpoint of economics and the broader society on hitherto unchallenged assumptions of academic insiders. The subjectively important ideas and values of academia are made to look rather weak in comparison with the implications economics eventually has on human survival and with raw statistics which say that humanities are of marginal interest to the majority of people. The question of funding does not concern only research but also free tuition and accommodation for students. When Robyn Penrose shows approval of the clean, expensive campus of the university, Vic Wilcox says:

„I‟m surprised you defend this elitist set-up, considering your left-wing

principles.‟ He gestured at the handsome buildings, the well-groomed grassy

slopes, the artificial lake. „Why should my workers pay taxes to keep theses

middle-class youths in the style to which they are accustomed?‟ (240)

Robyn Penrose, although initially disapproving, later argues in a similar vein with her parents, calling the phenomenon an “absurd migration of well-heeled youth going from

Norwich to Brighton or from Brighton to York. And having to be accommodated in expensive halls of residence when they get there.” (307)

The Shadow Scheme, under which Robyn Penrose has to observe Vic Wilcox‟s work, is introduced by the Vice-Chancellor of the university in a letter which identifies a

“widespread feeling in the country that universities are „ivory tower‟ institutions, whose staff are ignorant of the realities of the modern commercial world.” (85) – an issue to think about for anyone working in the ivory towers. Getting only a brief mention in this letter, this issue develops into serious insecurity when Robyn Penrose realises that she, in her own academic contemplation, has been elitist:

There must, she reflected, be millions of literate, intelligent people like Victor

Wilcox walking about England who had never read Jane Eyre or Wuthering

32

Heights, though it was difficult to imagine such a state of cultural deprivation.

What difference did it make, never to have shivered with Jane Eyre at Lowood

school, or throbbed in the arms of Heathcliff with Cathy? Then it occurred to

Robyn that this was a suspiciously humanist train of thought and that the very

word classic was an instrument of bourgeois hegemony. (202)

This interesting twist in Robyn Penrose‟s thought process constitutes a part of the insecurity about academia on its own, in that it does not need the opposite ideological position of Vic Wilcox to occur. Here, academia comes close to using its own theoretical device to question its own righteousness by accusing itself of an analogue of bourgeois hegemony, which could be found in academia‟s maintenance of power and separation from the world. Although defending the universities as the “cathedrals of the modern age” (241) in front of Wilcox, in a conversation with her parents, she seems to have already refuted the idea of universities as cathedrals:

„But why shouldn‟t universities be in nice places rather than nasty ones?‟ said

Mrs Penrose [mother] plaintively.

„Because it perpetuates the Oxbridge idea of higher education as a version of

pastoral, a privileged idyll cut off from ordinary living.‟ (307)

The question of whether tenure is a positive phenomenon due to academic freedom, or a negative phenomenon because of the lack of competition and possible moral hazard of the tenured person who does not need to maintain the standards anymore, can be found in this passage:

Wilcox seemed more struck by her colleagues‟ security than by her own

vulnerability. „You mean, they‟ve got jobs for life?‟ he said.

„Well, yes. But the Government wants to abolish tenure in the future.‟

„I should think so.‟

33

„But it‟s essential!‟ Robyn exclaimed. „It‟s the only guarantee of academic

freedom. It‟s one of the things we were demonstrating for last week.‟

„Hang about,‟ said Wilcox. „You were demonstrating in support of the other

lecturers‟ right to a job for life?‟

„Partly,‟ said Robyn.

„But if they can‟t be shifted, there‟ll never be room for you, no matter how

much better than them you may be at the job.‟

This thought had crossed Robyn‟s mind before, but she had suppressed it as

ignoble. (115)

This shows the conflict of the general principle of permanent competition as a beneficial force in any market and the notion of academic freedom ensuring that professors are independent from their superiors and from the twists of politics and ideology. It is highlighted in the specific case of a young lecturer who might contribute more to academia than many tenured professors based on skill but who can still be easily denied tenure for want of “room”. This issue reappears in a remark of Charles:

[Penrose:] ‟[…] It‟s not uncommon, apparently, to get rid of people like that.

There‟s no procedure for remedial training. If someone‟s promoted to a higher-

level job, and they‟re not up to it, there‟s no way of dealing with the problem.

Don‟t you think that‟s incredible?‟

„Not really, it applies to several full professors I can think of at Suffolk,‟ said

Charles. „Except you can‟t fire them.‟ (156)

In a different conversation, Charles‟s voice unconsciously opens the issue of the justification of tenure by highlighting what the university will lose if it will not, despite her superior competence, give a job to Robyn Penrose because of the number of already tenured professors:

34

„The irony is that she‟s easily the brightest person in the Department,‟ he said.

„The students know it, Swallow knows it, the other staff know it. But there‟s

nothing anybody can do about it, apparently. That‟s what this Government is

doing to the universities: death by a thousand cuts.‟ (183-184)

Although Charles‟s interpretation attributes the problem to government cuts, the reader cannot help seeing a reference to the insecurity about tenure in the context of previous critical passages. It reiterates the frustration of a skilled young academic who is unable to enter competition and the frustration of a university which is unable to benefit from her/his skills. The United States, represented only briefly in Nice Work (1988) by

Morris Zapp, another of Lodge‟s recurring characters, seems to stand as the country offering redemption in this respect: “there were still places in the world where scholars and critics pursued their professional goals with zestful confidence” (327). However, in the warning words of Philip Swallow, there is an indication that the situation in the competitive opposite of Britain has its adverse consequences as well:

American academic life is red in tooth and claw. Suppose you get the job – the

struggle only begins. You‟ve got to keep publishing to justify your appointment.

When the time comes for your tenure review, half your colleagues will be trying

to stab you in the back, and not speaking to the other half. (360)

In these sentences, Lodge makes it clear that the insecurity is not a mere longing for the

American system, but rather a problem of standing between proper academic freedom which does not allow for competition and proper competition which limits the academic freedom. The next issue is the question whether academia is the universal interest/the ultimate solution for creative leisure or only a hobby of a small fraction of society:

35

„What we should be doing is spending more money preparing people for

creative leisure,‟ said Robyn.

„Like women‟s studies?‟

„Among other things.‟

„Men like to work. It‟s a funny thing, but they do. They may moan about it

every Monday morning, they may agitate for shorter hours and longer holidays,

but they need to work for their self-respect.‟

„That‟s just conditioning. People could get used to life without work.‟ (126)

In this dialogue, Vic Wilcox implicitly questions the universal appeal of theory to the general population presumed by theorists themselves. The question whether theory is of universal interest is linked to the descriptions and demonstrations of the insecurity of the main character. Robyn Penrose‟s academic insecurity is described as a large-scale phenomenon affecting the whole worldview of a person:

Flitting backwards and forwards across the frontier between these two zones,

whose values, priorities, language and manners were so utterly disparate, Robyn

felt like a secret agent; and, as secret agents are apt to do, suffered occasional

spasms of doubt about the righteousness of her own side. (216)

Her situation being thus outlined, Robyn Penrose verbalizes and stands for most of the profound insecurity hidden in Nice Work (1988). In a dialogue with Charles, she shows that she already admitted some truth in Wilcox‟s position when she questions the importance of academia to the society as a whole:

„You know,‟ she mused aloud to Charles one day, „there are millions of people

out there who haven‟t the slightest interest in what we do. […] Of course they

don‟t know what we do, but even if one tried to explain it to them they wouldn‟t

36

understand, and even if they understood what we were doing they wouldn‟t

understand why we were doing it, or why anybody should pay us to do it.‟ (217)

The assumption that theory is of universal interest is challenged on multiple levels –

Robyn Penrose claims that the public is not aware of, does not understand, does not see the goal of and does not see the financial worth of the goal of theory. The concepts

“goal” and “worth” are important parts of the generally accepted paradigm of human action as goal-based and of the validity of the laws of economics with relation to human survival, which is represented and perpetuated by Wilcox and which seems to be in conflict with the humanities as presented in the book. The final words which mention paying also refer back to the question of funding, demonstrating that the threads of insecurity are indeed entangled. Robyn Penrose goes ahead and lists some of the most abstract theoretical problems as representative of academia:

„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 reconcilable

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?‟ (217)

This selection of particularly non-practical problems based mostly on an arbitrary reconciliation of abstruse theoretical constructs is certainly biased against academia, but the reason behind its bias is to fully expose the conflict between the theoretical extremity of academia and the utilitarian extremity of economics represented by

Wilcox‟s industry. During a flight, in an expression of wonder over the complex

37 physical operation of the world, Robyn Penrose accepts the possibility that academia might be of marginal interest to the society:

The housewife, switching on her electric kettle to make another cup of tea, gave

no thought to the immense complex of operations that made that simple action

possible: [follows a page of minute details of the production of the kettle and its

parts][…] Would we all be better off boiling our water in a pot hung over an

open fire? Or was it the facility to do such things at the touch of a button that

freed men, and more particularly women, from servile labour and made it

possible for them to become literary critics? (269-270)

This is a highly important point with respect to insecurity in that it allows for the interpretation of academia as an enterprise inherently secondary to the physical operation of the world. Even Morris Zapp, a character of Lodge‟s previous campus novels who makes a brief appearance in Nice Work, makes a modest remark indicating hierarchy of importance in academia based on subject matter:

„I have a contract with Euphoric State that says nobody in the humanities is to

be paid more than me. If they want to hire some hotshot from one of the Ivy

League schools at an inflated salary, they have to pay me at least one thousand

dollars more than he‟s getting.‟

„Why restrict it to the humanities, Morris?‟ said Swallow.

„You have to be realistic,‟ said Zapp. „Guys that can cure cancer, or blow up the

world, deserve a little more than us literary critics.‟ (329)

The character of Charles, despite not appearing very often in the text, produces the most important passage on an academic‟s insecurity in Lodge‟s bibliography. It takes the form of a letter which Robyn Penrose later calls his “apostasy” (322), in which he, a lecturer at the University of Suffolk, tells her that he is leaving academia to

38 become a financier. He writes that he was led by “a feeling that, as a university teacher, especially at a place like Suffolk, I‟ve been left behind by the tide of history, stranded on mudflats of an obsolete ideology.” (311) This sentence alone is a highly serious claim, a condensation of the philosophical insecurity dispersed throughout Nice Work, which directly questions the very ideological basis of academia. In the letter, he addresses both the less and the more serious aspects of the insecurity found throughout the book. These sentences question both elitism and tenure:

As to our universities, I‟ve come to the conclusion that they are elitist where

they should be egalitarian and egalitarian where they should be elitist. We admit

only a tiny proportion of the age group as students and give them a very labour-

intensive education (elitist), but we pretend that all universities and all

university teachers are equal and must therefore have the same funding and a

common payscale, with automatic tenure (egalitarian). (312)

This passage presents a concise integration of a number of insecurities. It challenges the whole structure of the British educational system by accusing both student selection and teacher selection of being the exact opposite of the ideal state. However, this is still a relatively superficial insecurity because there is a solution - Changing Places (1975) shows the United States as the answer to exactly this problem (see page 26). Delving into a much more profound insecurity, Charles indicates that theoretically, there is no added value in academia in contrast with other activities:

But, you will ask, what about the ideas to which we have dedicated our lives for

the last ten years, what about critical theory and all that? Well, I see no

fundamental inconsistency. I regard myself as simply exchanging one semiotic

system for another, the literary for the numerical, a game with high

39

philosophical stakes for a game with high monetary stakes – but a game in each

case (313)

This again shows an instance of academia using its own theoretical device to question its own position. The values and attitudes of an academic which bind Robyn Penrose and which to some point bound Charles now seem to be stripped of the truth behind their emotional and ideological content and equated with the values and attitudes belonging to any other vocation. Charles also makes a parallel between the Catholic‟s insecurity and the academic‟s insecurity:

To be honest, I have had my doubts for some time about the pedagogic

application of poststructuralist theory, doubts that I‟ve suppressed, as a priest, I

imagine, suppresses his theological doubts, hiding them away one by one until

one day there is no space left in which to hide them and he finally admits to

himself and to the world that he has lost his faith. (313-314)

This simile is central to this thesis because it allows for the interpretation of the issue of

Catholicism and the issue of academia in Lodge‟s fiction as being of the same nature, with similar psychological motivation and similar chronological development, thus rendering them complementary and self-sufficient as a thesis topic. To perfect this statement of insecurity, the letter mentions a situation very similar to that of Lodge at the time of writing:

[…] universities could only balance their books by persuading people to retire

early, often the very people they can least afford to lose. For those who remain

the prospects are bleak: bigger classes, heavier work loads, scant chances of

promotion or of moving to a new job. (312)

This is a demonstrably autobiographical statement, corresponding closely to the situation of Lodge‟s early retirement, with him being in the role of the person “they can

40 least afford to lose” (312). In the interview with Amanda Smith, Lodge‟s reaction to a question about his early retirement is described in this way:

he carved out a situation […] eventually going part-time and then taking early

retirement, what the English refer to as being made redundant. Really, it's daft,

Lodge says. They paid me to go away. They didn't really want to, but they had

to accept offers of people over a certain age in order to balance their books,

which is really crazy. (Smith)

Lodge even uses the same words as in the quote from Nice Work (1988). The situation is conspicuously similar to the situation of having to dismiss valuable professors described several times in the novel. The “bleak prospects” of Charles‟s letter can be found in Lodge‟s words in the interview with Julia Llewellyn:

It was the right time to leave. All my former colleagues say: 'You are well out of

it.' There's a weary disillusion to university life now and that's a shame because,

when I was there, there was excitement, a joie de vivre. Now it has become like

a machine, servicing large numbers of students, and much less attractive and

interesting. (Llewellyn)

The co-occurrence of the manifestation of serious ideological insecurity about academia (Nice Work, 1988) and the real-life early retirement of David Lodge (1987) marks not only the end of Lodge‟s everyday academic concerns, but also of the academic‟s insecurity in his fiction. The only post-1988 novel concerning academia out of a total of six novels, Thinks… (2001), returns to juxtaposing two people belonging to academia but on the opposite sides of theory – and thus to the less serious, if any, insecurity.

To conclude the chapter, let us briefly summarize the development of the academic‟s insecurity in Lodge‟s fiction. The first novel in which it is present, The

41

British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), has a rapid tempo and gives only an indication of the “absurd and ridiculous aspects” of academia which are later fully developed in

Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984), of which I chose the former to demonstrate this. The philosophical insecurity about the importance and ideology of academia can be found in Nice Work (1988), where it culminates in an “apostatic” letter of one character, whose insecurity was strong enough to make him resign from his post at a university. This development corresponds to the biographical data of Lodge‟s involvement in academia, from the beginnings of his academic career and a Harkness

Commonwealth Fellowship to the USA in 1964-65 (Haffenden 145) to his early retirement in 1987.

42

3 Conclusion

To follow the chronology of Lodge‟s insecurities – to see the brought-up

Catholic observe a conflict in The Picturegoers (1960), notice a practical problem in

The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), challenge the assumptions of faith in How

Far Can You Go? (1980), narratorially leave the Church to write Paradise News (1991) and, finally, approach the existential question from a secular viewpoint with only a nostalgic reference to Catholicism elucidates not only Lodge‟s personal development but also the development of Catholicism in England in the historical period between the

1960s and 1990s and maybe even the change of mind of an entire generation. Similarly, to see the aspiring academic notice some peculiarities in academia in The British

Museum Is Falling Down (1965), to see the successful professor ridicule every absurd aspect of academia in Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984), to see the discontented professor amidst government cuts doubt the place and meaning of academia in contemporary world in Nice Work (1988) and finally to see the retired professor return thematically to academia only as the scene, not an object of criticism in

Thinks… (2001) mediates much about the situation and feelings in academia between the 1970s and 1990s.

Although the insecurity about Catholicism together with the insecurity about academia are the major couple of insecurities defining Lodge‟s literary career, they are far from being the only ones. To mention just a few examples, an insecurity related to the establishment can be observed in Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), a critique of the

British National Service. There are also several insecurities related to Lodge‟s academic specialisation – an insecurity related to choosing between postmodern criticism and traditional humanist criticism can be found in Small World (1984) and an insecurity of choosing between science and arts as the way to approach the human

43 condition underlies Thinks… (2001). The insecurity about death and aging, briefly and randomly appearing in Lodge‟s bibliography, comes to full fruition (to date) in Deaf

Sentence (2008). Another direction for a follow-up study is to pick a specific part of the insecurity about Catholicism, for example the issue of Catholic upbringing, the relationship of Catholics to the Pope or the conflict of human sexuality and

Catholicism, or of the insecurity about academia, for example the question of tenure or the alleged uselessness of humanities, and set it into the historical context of the issue in question.

Investigating the two insecurities defining Lodge‟s bibliography is a partial, but important step on the way to understand Lodge‟s literary career as a coherent whole, where novels are tightly interconnected both with each other and with the author‟s biography, thereby enriching the interpretation of each individual novel with meanings from all the other available texts.

44

Primary Sources

Lodge, David. How Far Can You Go? 1980. London: Penguin, 1981. Print.

---. Nice Work. 1988. London: Penguin, 1989. Print.

Secondary Sources

Amis, Kingsley. 1954. Lucky Jim. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.

Bergonzi, Bernard. “The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel”, in: The Myth of

Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature. New York: St. Martin‟s Press,

1986. 172-187. Print.

Christopher, David. British Culture: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Eagleton, Terry. "The Silences of David Lodge." New Left Review.

(November/December 1988): 93-102. Print.

Haffenden, John. "David Lodge." In Novelists in Interview. New York: Methuen, 1985,

145-67. Print.

Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.

“Insecure.” The Oxford Dictionary of English. Second edition (revised). 2005. Print.

Llewellyn, Julia. "Bad Reviews Spoil My Lunch." Telegraph. 23 Aug 2004 (2004).

Web. 11 Oct. 2012.

my-lunch.html>.

Lodge, David. Changing Places. 1975. London: Penguin, 1992. Print.

---. Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel.

1966. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

---. Paradise News. 1991. London: Penguin, 1992. Print.

45

---. The British Museum is Falling Down. 1965. London: Penguin, 1983. Print.

Morace, Robert A. The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge.

Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. Print.

Moseley, Merritt. David Lodge: How Far Can You Go?. San Bernardino, California:

Borgo, 1991. Print.

Mullan, John. "Small World by David Lodge: Week Four: Readers'

Responses." Guardian. Friday 27 January 2012 (2012). Web. 11 Oct. 2012.

club>.

Pimperl, Judith Terezija. "David Lodge as a Catholic Novelist" MA Thesis U of

Vienna, 2008. Print.

Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel And Its Discontents (Personal

Takes). Philadelphia: UP of Pennsylvania, 2005. Print.

Smith, Amanda. “An Interview with David Lodge.” Publishers Weekly, Vol. 236, No.

7, August 18, 1989. Print.

Woodman, Thomas. Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature.

Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991. Print.

46

Resumé (čeština)

Tato bakalářská práce zkoumá nejistoty přítomné v románech Davida Lodge.

Soustředí se na dvě nejrozšířenější nejistoty definující Lodgeovu bibliografii, a to nejistotu ohledně katolické víry a nejistotu ohledně akademického světa. Každou z těchto nejistot práce zkoumá chronologicky od prvních náznaků přes nejintenzivnější demonstraci až po postupné vymizení. Romány s nejintenzivnější demonstrací jednotlivých nejistot jsou jako primární zdroje podrobně analyzovány. Kromě materiálu z Lodgeových románů práce cituje životopisné informace, Lodgeova vyjádření v rozhovorech a relevantní názory kritiků.

Nejistota ohledně katolické víry je dokumentována v její začátcích v románu

The Picturegoers (1960). S větší silou se objevuje v románu The British Museum Is

Falling Down (1965), kterého humor je z veliké části založen na otázce katolické víry a antikoncepce. Primární zdroj této práce v otázce katolické nejistoty, román How Far

Can You Go? (1980), je její vyvrcholením, rozsáhlou kritickou studií hledající místo katolické víry v současném světě. Početné pasáže dokumentující katolickou nejistotu jsou objektem podrobné analýzy. Následující román, ve kterém se nachází katolická nejistota, Paradise News (1991), je vyprávěn pohledem kněze který opustil církev,

čímž Lodge odstranil základní část nejistoty založenou na konfliktu pochybností o katolictví s faktem přináležení k němu. Poslední román, ve kterém se nachází rozeznatelná nejistota ohledně katolické víry, Therapy (1995), má ateistického vypravěče a obsahuje pouhé ozvěny katolické nejistoty z předešlých románů.

Začátek nejistoty ohledně akademického světa tato práce nachází v románu The

British Museum Is Falling Down (1965). Z akademických románů, kterými se Lodge proslavil, je dokumentována lehká nejistota související s absurdními vlastnostmi akademického světa v románu Changing Places (1975) a vážná nejistota sahající k

47 samotnému významu akademické práce v humanitních oborech a pozici univerzit v společnosti v románu Nice Work (1988). Tohle vyvrcholení vážné nejistoty je přepojeno s Lodgeovým odchodem do předčasného důchodu z pozice profesora na univerzitě v roce 1987. Román Thinks (2001) je citován jako návrat k lehké nejistotě.

48

Resumé (English)

This bachelor‟s thesis is concerned with insecurities present in the novels of

David Lodge. It focuses on two most frequent insecurities defining Lodge‟s bibliography, namely the insecurity about Catholicism and the insecurity about academia. Each of these insecurities is researched chronologically, from the first indications through the demonstration of the highest intensity to the gradual fading out of the insecurity. The novels showing the most intense instances of each insecurity are analysed in detail. Apart from Lodge‟s novels, this thesis quotes biographical information, Lodge‟s statements in interviews and relevant critical opinion.

The beginnings of the insecurity about Catholicism can be seen in The

Picturegoers (1960). It appears with greater force in The British Museum Is Falling

Down (1965), the comedy of which is largely based on the question of Catholicism and contraception. The primary source of this thesis with respect to the Catholic insecurity,

How Far Can You Go? (1980), is its culmination, an exhaustive critical study searching for the place of Catholic faith in the contemporary world. Numerous passages documenting the Catholic insecurity are subject to a detailed analysis. The following novel containing the Catholic insecurity, Paradise News (1991), is narrated by a priest who left the Church – by means of this narrator, Lodge removed one of the central issues of the Catholic insecurity, which is the conflict of doubts about Catholicism and the fact of belonging to it. The last novel containing a recognizable insecurity about

Catholicism, Therapy (1995), is narrated by an atheist and contains only echoes of the insecurity of previous novels.

The first novel with a noticeable insecurity about academia in Lodge‟s bibliography is The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965). Of the campus novels which made Lodge famous, this thesis documents the superficial insecurity about the

49 absurd aspects of academia in Changing Places (1975) and the profound insecurity reaching as far as the very meaning of academic work in the humanities and the position of universities in the society in Nice Work (1988). This culmination of profound insecurity is shown to correlate with Lodge‟s early retirement from a chair at a university. Thinks... (2001) is quoted as the return to a more superficial insecurity.

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