Thinks...

by David Lodge

  The sexual instinct, what a puzzle it is, what an enormously wide spectrum of emotions it generates. Ecstasy at one end, terror at the other. There was a horrifying story of a gang rape in the newspaper I read over coffee in the senior common room – it happened last September but the case has just come to trial. An Austrian woman, a tourist in London, got chatting to some youths aged fourteen (fourteen!) to seventeen, they seemed to her friendly and she went for a walk with them. Which was a bit naïve of her, perhaps, but it was broad daylight, and she probably thought of them as children (she is thirty-two herself, it said) and being a foreigner she probably didn’t understand their conversation too well, or read the signs in their body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, etc., for they must have been nudging and winking at each other, exchanging glances, sniggers, sotto voce comments. They led her to some deserted spot where they stripped her and raped her, ‘repeatedly’ the newspaper report said, then flung her naked into a canal, though she pleaded with them not to, and told them she couldn’t swim – which probably saved her life, actually, because she could, and managed to drag herself out of the canal on the other side. I pictured her, sobbing and shivering, bruised and bleeding, streaked with mud and slime, staggering along the towpath until she found somebody to help her. What struck me was that she said she survived this ghastly ordeal by ‘separating her mind from her body as much as she could’. I wonder what Ralph Messenger would make of that. It seems to me a good argument for dualism.

  Jasper Richmond came into the SCR while I was there, escorting a porter and a trolley loaded with cases of wine and boxes of wine glasses for the reception this evening. Professor Robyn Penrose of Walsall University is coming to give the H.H. Crosbie Memorial Lecture, an annual event endowed by the widow of some former member of staff here. I’ve been invited to the reception and to have dinner with her afterwards. The lecture is entitled, ‘Interrogating the Subject’. ‘It may be heavy going, I’m afraid,’ Jasper said. ‘Lots of jargon. She’s one of these Theory people.’ ‘Why did you invite her?’ I asked. ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ he said. ‘But some of my younger colleagues were keen to have her.’ He bared his teeth in a reflex leer. ‘I mean, as a speaker. Though I understand she’s quite good-looking too.’

  The news is dominated by Election coverage. Labour are holding on to their twenty-point lead in the polls, suggesting a landslide on May 1st. I find I have left it too late to register as a postal voter, and since Election Day is a Thursday, a teaching day for me, it looks as if I shall forfeit my vote. Though it would be theoretically possible to travel up to London and back in the morning, it would be an awful fag, and to be honest I’m not sufficiently motivated to make the effort.

  I’ve always voted Labour since I was a student, when nearly everybody I knew was automatically left-wing, but with decreasing enthusiasm and conviction as time went on. If Martin hadn’t kept me toeing the line I might have defected to the SDP, which he used to describe sneeringly as ‘the party for people who don’t really like politics’. New Labour seems indistinguishable from the SDP, which is fine by me, but my constituency is already a Labour seat, and they’ll hardly need my vote to win this time. Even Daddy, who has voted Tory all his life except for 1945, is talking about voting Lib Dem this time, or at least abstaining. He is thoroughly disgusted with the incompetence of this government and the sleaze with which it is tainted. Mind you, if Southwold goes Labour, the world really will be turned upside down.

  TUESDAY 8TH APRIL. The ‘Subject’ in Robyn Penrose’s lecture title turned out to be a kind of multiple pun, meaning the subject as experiencing individual, the subject of a sentence, the subject of a political state, and the subject of English Literature in the university curriculum. As far as I could follow it the general argument was that the Subject in all these senses is a Bad Thing, that there is some kind of equivalence between the privileging of the ego in classical psychoanalysis, the fetishization of formal correctness in traditional grammar, the exploitation and oppression of subject races by colonialism, and the idea of a literary canon: they are all repressive and tyrannical and phallocentric and have to be deconstructed . . . It was quite a dazzling discourse in its way, juggling all these conceptual balls in the air, especially when delivered by a tall, handsome, youngish woman in a smart black velvet trouser suit, her flaming red hair swept up at the back with a silver comb, and long silver earrings swinging and glinting as she swept the audience with her confident gaze. But it depressed me that the awed-looking young people in the audience were being given such a dry and barren message. Where was the pleasure of reading in all this? Where was personal discovery, self-development? But the argument didn’t allow for the self, the very idea of the self is a miss-reading or ‘mister-reading’ (or myster-reading?) of subjectivity, apparently. The individual is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed continuously by the stream of semiosis into which she is thrown by the acquisition of language (I think I got that right, I was taking notes). The metaphor of the stream reminded me of the poor Austrian woman flung into the canal by the louts who had just raped her, and I thought it wouldn’t be much consolation to her to know that this was in some obscure and indirect way the fault of compulsory Shakespeare in English Literature syllabuses . . . Towards the end of her lecture Professor Penrose began to invoke analogies from computing. The Windows that allow you to move effortlessly between different programs running at the same time was offered as a metaphor of the decentred self. It struck me as I listened that there was a queer kind of correspondence between what she was saying and what Ralph Messenger says. Both of them deny that the self has any fixed identity, any ‘centre’. He says it’s a fiction that we make up; she says it is made up for us by culture. It’s alarming that there should be so much agreement on this point between the most advanced thinking in the sciences and the humanities.

  I sat next to Professor Penrose at dinner (a fairly horrid meal in a private dining room in Staff House) and found her much more sympathetic than I expected. I don’t think this was because she had read some of my novels and spoke intelligently about them. She has a daughter aged four whose father doesn’t seem to be in the picture, and is much preoccupied with the logistic problems of being a single parent and head of Communications and Cultural Studies at Walsall. It’s one of the new universities (odd to think that Gloucester once had that status, its buildings now seem so worn and weathered on the outside, scuffed and threadbare inside) that were created from the old polytechnics. Robyn Penrose was appointed there just a couple of years ago with what she described as ‘a mission statement to upgrade their quality assessment in research and teaching’. She deployed this management jargon with the same smooth competence as she had displayed in literary theory. I got the impression that she cracks the whip over a recalcitrant and resentful staff of mostly older men, spurring them on to achieve higher and higher productivity, like an old-fashioned factory boss. But she seemed more interested in discussing infant ailments and gender stereotyping in nursery schools with Annabelle Riverdale, who was sitting opposite her at dinner. There are curious contradictions between her literary theory and her professional practice and between both and her personal life. But she probably regards consistency of character as an exploded concept.

  Marianne Richmond accosted me at the reception after the lecture and persuaded me to buy a £5 ticket for a duck race she’s organizing next Sunday at Bourton-on-the-Water, to raise money for some charity connected with Oliver. It’s a more developed form of Pooh Sticks. Lots of numbered plastic ducks are tossed off a bridge into the river to float downstream, and the first one to pass the finishing post wins a prize for the person with the corresponding number on their ticket. It sounds more fun than the average raffle, and I coughed up my fiver cheerfully. We exchanged opinions about the lecture and I said I wished Ralph Messenger had been there, because I would have liked to know what he thought of it, at which she looked at me rather sharply, as if I had revealed a closer acquaintance with him than
she was aware of. She has no idea, of course, that I know about her ‘game’ with him – nor, I trust, that he has since turned his attentions to me. The Glovers were there, unable to talk about anything but the Election. Now that Blair looks likely to win by a landslide, Laetitia is speaking more approvingly of New Labour, positioning herself to bask in the glory of victory. They are having an Election Night Party and she promised to send me an invitation.

  WEDNESDAY 9TH APRIL. Ralph Messenger rang me up this morning – I was working at home. ‘Don’t you check your Email?’ he said. ‘Every other day,’ I said. He roared with laughter. ‘Most of my colleagues check theirs every twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘I sent you a message yesterday morning.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘shall I look it up?’ ‘No, don’t bother,’ he said, ‘it was just to suggest we had lunch today. I want to ask you a favour.’ ‘What kind of favour?’ I asked warily. ‘Nothing you could disapprove of,’ he said.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I agreed. It seemed to me that to refuse would be an exaggerated gesture. Enough time has passed since he propositioned me, and I made myself perfectly clear then, and in our subsequent Email correspondence. Now that the air has been cleared, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t resume a friendly relationship. ‘Staff House or pub?’ he said, and I prudently opted for the former.

  LATER. Pity about the choice of Staff House. Apart from the food it was an agreeable and interesting lunch. Ralph was very amusing about the excessively rich cuisine in Prague, but at least it sounded enjoyable as well as indigestible. The favour he wanted to ask turned out to be my participation in a conference his Centre is hosting at the end of the semester. It’s something called the International Conference on Consciousness Studies, known as Con-Con to its habitués, which Ralph described as a travelling circus that sets up its tent every summer in a different location, and this year it’s Gloucester’s turn. ‘It’s not a straight academic conference where you get specialists in a single subject chewing the fat with each other,’ he said. ‘It’s genuinely interdisciplinary, and you get some fringe people, nutcases and cranks, as well as some of the biggest wheels in cognitive science. I think you might find it interesting.’ Apparently it’s the custom to invite somebody to give a short address at the very end of the conference called ‘Last Word’, summing up their impressions of the event, and he wanted me to do it. I was quite flattered, but said I wasn’t qualified, I wouldn’t be able to understand what half the speakers were saying. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘The idea of the Last Word is to get a view that hasn’t already been heard at the conference. Last year, for instance, it was a Buddhist monk. Another year it was a zoologist. We’ve never had any literary input before.’ ‘That certainly seems a serious omission for a conference on consciousness,’ I said, ‘but why don’t you invite a proper academic, like Robyn Penrose?’ I told him about her lecture.

  ‘Oh I can’t stand those people,’ he said, ‘postmodernists, or poststructuralists, or whatever they call themselves. They’ve infiltrated Con-Con lately, caused no end of trouble.’ I was surprised he was so hostile, and asked him why. ‘Because they’re essentially hostile to science. They’ve picked up some modern scientific ideas without really understanding them and flash them about like a three-card trick. They think that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger’s Cat and Godel’s Theorem license them to say that there is no such thing as scientific proof and that science is only one interpretation of the world among others equally valid.’ ‘Well, isn’t it?’ I said, just to be provocative. ‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘Its explanatory power is of a quite different order from, for example, animism or Zoroastrianism or astrology.’ ‘Well, I grant you that,’ I said, ‘but those examples are rather extreme.’ ‘Choose your own examples,’ he said, with a challenging lift of his chin. I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head. ‘Since the Enlightenment,’ he said, slipping into lecture mode, ‘science has established itself as the only true form of knowledge. This has created a problem for rival forms – they’ve had to either take it on board, try to make themselves scientific, and run the risk of discovering that there’s no foundation to their conceptual world – like serious theology, for instance – or put their heads in the sand and pretend science never happened – like fundamentalist religion. These postmodernists are mounting a last-ditch defence of their disciplines by saying that everybody is in the same boat, including scientists – that there are no foundations, and no sand. But it’s not true. Science is for real. It has made more changes to the conditions of human life than all the preceding millennia of our history put together. Just think of medicine. Two hundred years ago doctors were still bleeding people for every ailment under the sun. If you had cancer, would you consult a postmodern oncologist who thought reflexology and aromatherapy were on a par with surgery and chemotherapy?’ ‘Not when you put it like that,’ I said. ‘But aren’t there areas of human experience where scientific method doesn’t apply?’ ‘Qualia, you mean?’ he said. ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of happiness, unhappiness. The sense of the sublime. Love.’ ‘Of course that’s the big unsolved problem,’ he said. ‘How to connect brain states, which can be observed, to mind states which, at present, can only be reported. But if you’re a scientist you must believe there’s an answer to be found. That’s what the Centre is for.’ I asked him if he thought that one day somebody, a new Einstein, would wake up in the morning and have an idea like Relativity which would solve the problem of consciousness at a stroke. ‘To be honest, no. I think it’s more likely that the problem will be solved by a computer than a human being. The question is, will we recognize it when we see it?’

  THURSDAY 10TH APRIL. Good workshop this afternoon. Saul Goldman presented a chapter in which his hero takes his father to a gay bar for the first time. Very funny. But the best thing about the session from my point of view was that Sarah Pickering attended it. She had been absent for the two previous meetings – ever since the showdown of last week – and I was beginning to fear that she was in a depression or sulk or had dropped out of the course completely, and that there would be a fuss in which the whole story would come out. But she reappeared today – not only that, but she actually contributed an intelligent remark or two. The metal stud on her tongue winked and gleamed inside her mouth when she spoke. I entertained some thoughts about its possible application as a sex aid, but these were satirical rather than jealous. I no longer have an overwhelming desire to scratch her eyes out.

  Altogether, things seem to be calming down. Ralph behaved himself impeccably on Wednesday, so I don’t have any qualms about joining him and Carrie at Horseshoes for lunch on Sunday. In the afternoon we’re all going to watch Marianne Richmond’s duck race at Bourton-on-the-Water. And I’m making a little excursion of my own tomorrow. Now that the weather has turned fine, and the days are longer, I’ve decided that I ought to get off the campus more often and explore some of the many interesting places there are in the locality. I’ve been reading a new collection of Henry James’s letters, and was particularly intrigued by one he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in the spring of 1870 from Malvern, which isn’t far from here. He went there for his health, after spending some time in Florence (it was his ‘Grand Tour’ year in Europe, paid for by his father). I was particularly struck by this passage:

  Yesterday morning if I had thought of Florence it would have been almost in charity. I walked away across the country to the ancient town of Ledbury, an hour of the way over the deer-cropped slopes & thro’ the dappled avenues of Eastnor Park (Earl Somers’s –) a vast & glorious domain & as immensely idle & charming & uncared for as anything in Italy. And at Ledbury I saw a noble old church (with detached campanile) & a churchyard so full of ancient sweetness, so happy in situation and characteristic detail, that it seemed for me (for the time) – as so many things do – one of the memorable sights of my European experience.

  A church with a detached campanile sounds very quaint and un-English an
d I am immensely curious to see it for myself, so I am going there tomorrow. Fingers crossed that it is still as James saw it.

  FRIDAY 11TH APRIL. A very extraordinary thing happened today. Just when I thought my life had settled back into a humdrum, unexciting routine, an event occurred that throws everything into question again, and makes me wonder whether anything in human behaviour is ever what it seems. Not the least remarkable aspect of the experience is that what began as a kind of Jamesian pilgrimage turned into a scene that might have come from one of his own novels. So let me record it with the ‘solidity of specification’ that the Master would have approved.

  Ledbury is a very simple journey by car from here: you just follow the A438 all the way from exit 9 on the M5. I caught a glimpse of the magnificent Norman abbey as I passed through Tewkesbury and resolved to stop and have a closer look on my way back. From there it’s a fast open road through pleasant rolling country (less lush and groomed than the Cotswolds) that in due course launches you up a long hill like a ramp into the town centre of Ledbury. This is, architecturally speaking, black-and-white country, and Ledbury has some fine specimens in its High Street – notably the Market House, a beautifully proportioned Tudor building balanced on stilt-like wooden columns, and ‘The Feathers’, a Tudor inn with a wonderfully irregular facade, which I mentally noted as a possible place for lunch. I called in at the little Tourist Information Centre and provided myself with some leaflets about the town. It turned out to have lots of literary associations far more rooted and substantial than James’s fleeting visit (which was not recorded in the tourist literature). John Langland is thought to have been born in Ledbury. John Masefield definitely was, and lived there until he ran away to sea. Elizabeth Barrett was brought up nearby, in an extraordinary house with Turkish minarets (since demolished, unfortunately, but photographs have survived), and there is a hideous Victorian red brick and timber Institute with a clock tower named after her, situated almost opposite the Market House. A plaque set in the wall records that it was opened by Sir Rider Haggard in 1898.