Are Novels Part of Our Cultural Malaise?
David Lodge, January 28th 1935 – January 1st 2025
Recently deceased, David Lodge is a zeitgeist sort of figure. Novelist and critic, he formed a sort of late duumvirate with Malcolm Bradbury. They were both red brick university Eng. Lit. chaps: and they wrote novels on the side. They even worked together. They wrote novels; they wrote criticism: Bradbury wrote books on modernism, for instance, and wrote one classic novel, The History Man, which is a genuine achievement, showing how awful universities became after the sexual and political revolutions of the 1960s. Lodge wrote a Campus Trilogy and works of criticism. I think the best thing Lodge did was to draw attention to something about literary style that is still not known very well, and should be known a lot better than it is. This is what I want to celebrate, and also to celebrate his part in laying emphasis on it. I have found mention of it in books by John Mullan (How Novels Work)and James Wood (How Fiction Works), but it should be taught to everyone of a certain academic level. Lodge tried to theorise it in his book Consciousness and the Novel of 2002.It is like Mandeville’s paradox or Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage or Newton’s infinitesimals or Bach’s well-tempered clavier, and just as good. Like them, it is a bit of a cheat: but it is also brilliant, and it helps unleash a modernity.
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‘A filthy boy stood on the doorstep. He might be scrubbed of all that dirt, eventually – but not of so many orange freckles. No more than fourteen, with skinny, unstable legs like a marionette, he kept pitching forward, shifting soot into the hall. Still, the woman who’d opened the door – easily amused, susceptible to beauty – found she couldn’t despise him. ‘You’re from Tobin’s?’ ‘Yes, missus. Here about the ceiling. Fell in, didn’t it?’ ‘But two men were requested!’ ‘All up in London, missus. Tiling. Fearsome amount of tiling needs doing in London, madam …’ He saw of course that she was an old woman, but she didn’t move or speak like one. A high bosom, handsome, her face had few wrinkles and her hair was black. Above her chin, a half-moon line, turned upside down. Such ambiguities were more than the boy could unravel. He deferred to the paper in his hand, reading slowly: ‘Number One, St James-es Villas, St James-es Road, Tunbridge Wells. The name’s Touch-it, ain’t it?’ From inside the house came a full-throated Ha! The woman didn’t flinch. She struck the boy as both canny and hard, like most Scots. ‘All pronunciations of my late husband’s… Read more »
Is that from the novel?
“ ‘Cousin, I see you are bored and dangerous this morning!’”
Seems like an odd turn of phrase for the mid 19th century. Did people really speak like that, then? It doesn’t ring true based on other books I’ve read from that period.
Yes.
I may not be her biggest fan.
I’ve read a couple of hers but so long ago I have forgotten everything about them.
Thank you, Dr Alexander. I read some of David Lodge’s novels around the time of serialisation on the BBC (1980s?). Good reads of their era.
Ditto, large volume of novels consumed between the ages of 14 and 19, but reading then stopped abruptly, as drained of all mental energy by demands of a university degree and leaving home for the first time. All I can recall reading in those three years is The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler.
A few items of teenage reading multiply re-read since – Nineteen Eighty Four, Slaughterhouse Five and Catch Twenty Two. Maybe it’s those numbers in the titles that somehow draw back. So it goes.
Dostoevsky, Sholokov and Pasternak read from cover to cover, but never seriously revisited. Big stuff. With all good intent, I did recently order Quiet Flows the Don from the library for a river journey down memory lane. Overwhelmed by over a thousand pages of small print.
Ivan Denisovich and Babi Yar re-read in retirement. Doesn’t get much darker than that. Those Russians know their stuff.
Hemingway also re-lived. Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
And yet the unaddressed idea is whether there are free indirect style novel reading people and other people who prefer constrained direct style novels.
Personally I dislike the recent ‘classic’ novels – they give me the pip and I never knew why. The best way to make me avoid reading a novel is to call it a classic.
I reject objectivity and subjectivity being blurred together as a literary style, or by implication as an attitude to life. Do all those Karens get their enthusiasms because they are driven by putting themselves in the positions of others (perceived victims)? Not so much liberalism but colonialism by inference.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves why self help books rarely help selves? It is argued that people find it very difficult to ‘know themselves’ so by implication they will struggle to ‘know others’. Which puts free indirect style novels on the entertainment rostrum, just like soap operas.
Thank you for an interesting article. I was a great reader in my teens. I often reference and not in a good way Roald Dahl’s Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch. Really horrid actually. What a nasty set of tales.
Nowadays I mostly read biography and memoir.
Isn’t all irony 1st and 3rd?