by David Lodge
Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988) is an original and highly entertaining postmodernist variation on the Proustian autobiographical novel. The anonymous narrator recalls a trivial action that took place five years earlier, namely, going out in his lunch break from the office where he worked to buy a shoelace to replace one that had snapped. This exiguous story is expanded to the length of a short novel partly by long digressions and footnotes in the tradition of Tristram Shandy, and partly by the immense detail with which the narrator describes very ordinary objects and processes. For example:
Attempting to staple a thick memo, and looking forward, as you begin to lean on the brontosaural head of the stapler arm, to the three phases of the act—
First, before the stapler arm makes contact with the paper, the resistance of the spring that keeps the arm held up; then, second, the moment when the small independent unit in the staple arm noses into the paper and begins to force the two points of the staple into and through it; and third, the felt crunch, like the chewing of an ice cube, as the twin tines of the staple emerge from the underside of the paper and are bent by the two troughs of the template in the stapler’s base, curving inwards in a crab’s embrace of your memo, and finally disengaging from the machine completely—
but finding, as you lean on the stapler with your elbow locked and your breath held and it slumps toothlessly to the paper, that it has run out of staples. How could something this consistent, this incremental, betray you? (But then you are consoled: you get to reload it, laying bare the stapler arm and dropping a long zithering row of staples into place; and later, on the phone, you get to toy with the piece of the staples you couldn’t fit into the stapler, breaking it into small segments, making them dangle on a hinge of glue.66
Baker’s verbal descriptions of such qualia are remarkable for several reasons. They combine a scientific grasp of the mechanical with a poetic gift of metaphor, so they are both exact and lyrical, literary equivalents of pop-art’s celebration of consumer goods. And whereas in Proust the evocation of qualia is always a route to the recovery of personal emotions and personal history by association, in The Mezzanine the emphasis is insistently on the qualia themselves, on the repeatable sensations afforded by manufactured physical objects like staplers. The shoelace that breaks, the narrator tells us, belonged to a pair of shoes bought for him by his father some years previously, “so the breakage was a sentimental milestone of sorts” (see here). This offhand reference to the past is not followed up by a nostalgic portrait of the father, or an account of the narrator’s relationship with him. The narrator is much more interested in the fact that the other shoelace on the same pair of shoes had snapped the previous day—“the near simultaneity was very exciting—it made the variables of private life seem suddenly graspable and law-abiding” (see here)—and speculates about what causes laces to break: walking or pulling? “It was conceivable, though scary to imagine, that the pull-fray and the walk-flex model mingled their coefficients so subtly that human agency would never accurately apportion cause” (see here). There is a suggestion in the novel that the narrator is emotionally retarded or immature, but he could equally well be regarded as a kind of comic equivalent of Camus’s Outsider. Just as Meursault finally accepts his imminent and meaningless death and lays his “heart open to the benign indifference of the universe,” so the “I” of The Mezzanine realises that
I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development . . . I was the sort of man who stood in a subway car and thought about buttering toast—buttering raisin toast, even: when the high, crisp scrape of the butter knife is muted by occasional contact with the soft, heat-blimped forms of the raisins, and when, if you cut across a raisin, it will sometimes fall right out, still intact though dented, as you lift the slice. I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped to be. (See here)
In one sense The Mezzanine is a novel almost entirely about consciousness, since almost nothing happens in it; but the consciousness it reveals is totally absorbed by the surfaces of things, even the surface of a piece of toast.
I haven’t done any statistical analysis, but my impression is that a majority of literary novels published in the last couple of decades have been written in the first person. This first struck me in 1989, when I was chairman of the judges of the Booker Prize. We read (or partly read) over a hundred novels and finally chose a shortlist of six. Only after the shortlist meeting did I realise that five of them had “I” narrators: Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, John Banville’s The Book of Evidence, Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw, Rose Tremain’s Restoration, and the winner, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. (The exception was A Disaffection by James Kelman.) A. S. Byatt, writing recently about the historical novel, observed: “It is perhaps no accident that my exemplary ‘modern’ texts are all written in the first person—a first person preoccupied with the desirability and impossibility of objectivity and truthfulness,” and felt obliged to defend her own preference for the “unfashionable Victorian third-person narrator.”67
There does seem to be an increasing reluctance among literary novelists to assume the narrative stance of godlike omniscience that is implied by any third-person representation of consciousness, however covert and impersonal. Instead they prefer to create character as a “voice,” reporting his or her experience in his or her own words. Where third-person and first-person narration are combined, the latter usually has the last word. In Atonement (2001), Ian McEwan, who has tended to favour first-person narration in his previous novels and stories, seems to be telling his story in a rather old-fashioned way, entering into the consciousness of several different characters, and rendering their experience in third-person discourse that makes extensive use of free indirect style. But an epilogue written in the first person reveals that the whole book up to that point has been written by one of the characters, who is herself a novelist, and who admits to having departed from the “facts” in certain crucial respects. What seemed to be a conventional realistic novel turns out after all to be a postmodernist metafiction. Margaret Atwood performed a similar trick in The Blind Assassin (2000).
Even Philip Roth, who in his impressive trilogy American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain addresses the social and political history of postwar America with something of the scope and ambition of classic nineteenth-century fiction, prefers to use his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman as narrator, rather than claim direct authorial knowledge of the minds and hearts of his characters. Zuckerman reports, reconstructs, imagines the inner lives of the characters just as a novelist would—because he is a novelist. But he is also an alibi that the author can claim if held to account for any of the opinions stated in the text. Roth’s latest work, The Dying Animal (discussed below in Chapter 9), is another ingenious variation on the first-person novel, this time a dramatic monologue.
In a world where nothing is certain, in which transcendental belief has been undermined by scientific materialism, and even the objectivity of science is qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness. Of course in fiction this is just as artful, or artificial, a method as writing about a character in the third person; but it creates an illusion of reality, it commands the willing suspension of the reader’s disbelief, by modelling itself on the discourses of personal witness: the confession, the diary, autobiography, the memoir, the deposition. And it is not coincidental that the boundary between first-person literary fiction and autobiography is becoming increasingly blurred. Some of the most interesting and widely acclaimed books of recent years in Britain and America have been of a kind sometimes called “life writing”—memoirs or confessions that read like novels, that use many of the techniques of novels, that are often written by novelists, or writers who subsequently became novelists, usin
g material that in earlier times would probably have been converted into third-person fiction. Recent examples are Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, Nicholson Baker’s U and I, Martin Amis’s Experience, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius .fn2
“Postmodernism” is sometimes used in a very broad sense to include a whole range of cultural styles, attitudes, and arguments: deconstruction, post-industrialism, consumerism, multiculturalism, quantum physics, cybernetics, the Internet, and so on. Most of these phenomena and ways of thinking deny the existence of universals in human nature. They regard the concepts of “soul” or “spirit,” and even the secular idea of the “self” which humanism developed from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, as culturally and historically determined. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, for instance, says:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the world’s cultures.68
Well, maybe it is; but how many of those cultures have produced great novels that were not formally derived from the Western literary tradition? In a backhanded way, Geertz has provided an exemplary definition of “character” as we encounter it in the classic novel, and in most modern literary fiction.
This idea of the person, whether in real life or in fictional representations, has come under attack from both the humanities and science in recent times. There is, for instance, a certain affinity between the post-structuralist literary theory that maintains that the human subject is entirely constructed by the discourses in which it is situated, and the cognitive science view that regards human self-consciousness as an epiphenomenon of brain activity. Daniel Dennett discovered this when he happened to read a novel of mine in the course of developing the thesis of Consciousness Explained: “It is certainly an idea whose time has come. Imagine my mixed emotions when I discovered that before I could get my version of it properly published in a book, it had already been satirized in a novel, David Lodge’s Nice Work. It is apparently a hot theme among the deconstructionists.”69 He then quotes the following passage about the heroine of the novel, a young lecturer in English Literature called Robyn Penrose:
According to Robyn, (or, more precisely, according to the writers who have influenced her thinking on these matters), there is no such thing as the “Self” on which capitalism and the classic novel are founded—that is to say, a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person’s identity; there is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses—the discourses of power, sex, family, science, religion, poetry, etc. And by the same token, there is no such thing as an author, that is to say, one who originates a work of fiction ab nihilo . . . in the famous words of Jacques Derrida (famous to people like Robyn, anyway) “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” there is nothing outside the text. There are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our “selves” in language. Not “you are what you eat” but “you are what you speak” or, rather, “you are what speaks you,” is the axiomatic basis of Robyn’s philosophy, which she would call, if required to give it a name, “semiotic materialism.”70
Dennett observes that he doesn’t subscribe to all of these views: “I wouldn’t say there is nothing outside the text. There are, for instance, all the bookcases, buildings, bodies, bacteria . . .” This insistence on the objective reality of the material world defines an important difference between most scientists and the post-structuralist/postmodernist theorists who hold that all knowledge, including science, is provisional because culturally constructed. The former get particularly angry when the latter invoke quantum physics and the uncertainty principle to support their arguments, as a celebrated intellectual hoax recently demonstrated.71 Still, there is enough convergence between Dennett’s theory of consciousness and Robyn’s theory of the subject to constitute a formidable challenge to the idea of human nature on which most literary fiction is based.
One must concede that the Western humanist concept of the autonomous individual self is not universal, eternally given, and valid for all time and all places, but is a product of history and culture. This doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that it isn’t a good idea, or that its time has passed. A great deal of what we value in civilized life depends upon it. We also have to acknowledge that the individual self is not a fixed and stable entity, but is constantly being created and modified in consciousness through interaction with others and the world. It may be, therefore, that every time we try to describe the conscious self we misrepresent it because we are trying to fix something that is always changing; but really we have no alternative, any more than the physicist has any alternative to bringing about the collapse of the wave function when he makes an observation, or the deconstructionist has any alternative to using language which she claims is bound to undermine its ostensible claims to meaning. My novels are the products of numerous revisions, and I know that I could have gone on revising them indefinitely, but a published novel is simply more useful as information than a collection of its various drafts would be, and certainly more useful than a novel which is never published because its author never stopped revising it.
* * *
fn1 E. M. Forster had some artistic aims in common with these writers, but does not quite belong in the same category, for reasons discussed in Chapter 4 below.
fn2 The most talked-about American novel of 2001, however, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, interestingly bucks this trend. In telling his story of the fraught relations between an elderly American couple and their three grown-up children, set against the febrile economic boom of the nineties, Franzen moves confidently between the five principal characters, rendering their divergent points of view with the authorial amplitude and eloquence of classic fiction, while drawing knowledgeably on the concepts and language of contemporary neuroscience to describe and defamiliarise mental processes. This ambitious and impressive novel, together with Ian McEwan’s Atonement, may conceivably herald, or encourage, a return to the third-person novel of consciousness in postmodern literary fiction.
chapter two
LITERARY CRITICISM & LITERARY CREATION
THE WORD “CRITICISM” covers a great many types of reflection on literature, from the most private and casual to the most public and systematic. It includes the activity of reading itself, inasmuch as reading a literary text is a process of continuous interpretation and evaluation. The mere decision to go on reading a novel or poem to its end is a kind of critical act. In this large sense, criticism is, as T. S. Eliot observed, “as inevitable as breathing.”1 But for the most part I am concerned here with criticism as the written articulation of the reading process in the form of reviews, essays, books, which may themselves take many different forms and have many different objectives: descriptive, prescriptive, polemical, theoretical, and so forth. Criticism covers a huge variety of discourses, and when generalizations are made about the relation between it and creative writing, or between it and scientific discourse, it is usually a particular type of criticism that is being referred to, implicitly or explicitly.
There are, I suggest, four main ways in which the relationship between creative writing and criticism has been perceived:
Criticism as complementary to creative writing.
Criticism as opposed to creative writing.
Criticism as a kind of creative writing.
Criticism as a part of creative writing.
The first of these perspectives—criticism as complementary to creative writing—is the classical, commonsense view of the matter. It may be expounded as follows. There are writers and there are critics. Each group has its task, its priorities, its p
rivileges. Writers produce original works of imagination. Critics classify, evaluate, interpret, and analyse them. This model usually accords priority to literary creation. The conventional bibliographical distinction between primary and secondary sources implies that creative writers could do without critics—indeed, they seemed to manage very well without them until the Renaissance—but that critics are axiomatically dependent on creative writers for something to criticise. Subscribing to this hierarchical distinction does not, however, necessarily make critics humble.
The absence of anything much resembling literary criticism before the Renaissance, apart from a few treatises on rhetoric and general poetics, does not imply that the critical activity, “something as inevitable as breathing,” did not go on then. Of course it did. But when the production of manuscript books was slow, costly, and laborious, few people felt it was worthwhile recording their responses to literary texts in permanent form. The invention of printing, and its development into a very cost-effective industrial process, encouraged the publication and circulation of literary criticism on a vast scale. Much of it has been trivial and ephemeral. But the invention of printing also encouraged the production of much trivial and ephemeral creative writing. In this situation good criticism is seen to have a vital cultural function, namely, filtering out the good literature from the bad, defining and preserving the literary canon. This has been the traditional view of the function of criticism in the academy.
Matthew Arnold was perhaps the first English writer to formulate in an influential way the idea of criticism having this high cultural mission. But he was not just concerned with policing the canon. He stressed the value of criticism in creating a climate conducive to the production of good new writing. In his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” he says:
