by David Lodge
C. R. You wanted to shock his materialism, his confidence in Eros.
D.L. Yeah.
C. R. Do you think the value of Eros is increased by the idea of Thanatos? That sex is some kind of talisman against death? In Peter Nichols’s Passion Play the hero says: “fucking is all there is against death.”
D. L. I think that’s very much Ralph’s philosophy. I don’t entirely endorse it. It depends on your being rather healthy to start with, and not hideously ugly, or confined to a wheelchair. So it’s not an answer for everybody. But many people, perhaps men most of all, feel that. In Small World Phillip Swallow thinks he’s going to get killed in an air crash and when he escapes he has this erotic experience with the British Council wife. Telling the story to Morris Zapp, he says he was “fucking his way out of the grave.”
C. R. Two last questions. One is a tiny thing—on see here Douglass is flexing his glove after the party. On see here the doctor flexes the fingers of his gloves. Is there a reason for this repetition?
D. L. No, just a mistake. Any repetition that’s not motivated is a mistake.
C. R. It’s odd. Because, as a reader, you think, “ah, that’s interesting . . .”
D. L. You’re an incredibly attentive reader. Not many people would notice. They’re separated by about twenty pages.
C. R. Well, it’s very effective. It’s a very Joycean moment, a piece of observed ordinary behaviour which is brought home to you. You register it very powerfully so it’s not surprising you remember it, and ask why.
D. L. I can’t say it was intended.
C. R. What is the point of Ludmila Lisk—the bit on the side. She blackmails Messenger. Do you intend to say that all intimacy carries risk?
D. L. The reason for the whole episode in Prague was Ralph’s image as a media don, a guy always flying here and there, having adventures abroad. We have to see him doing it. That’s his image. That’s one reason. The other is that I wanted to prepare for the revelation that he has this dangerous liver condition. But I wanted something with good cover—preparatory, but you wouldn’t guess it at once. So in Prague he overindulges in rich food and comes back with what he thinks is merely chronic indigestion. And if he went abroad he had to have some kind of sexual adventure. But the adventure is merely going through the motions. His heart’s not in it. He’s the Don Juan type, trapped in his own philandering mould. And I wanted him to feel “I’m really getting too old for this.” To pile up circumstances against him, to put him to the test, because he’d been so arrogant and confident in himself, I would put him in jeopardy on several different fronts at once at the end of the book. He is really cornered, like a lion at bay, threatened with a mortal illness, the possibility that his wife would discover his affair with Helen, and finally that this groupie would turn up from Prague and cause a lot of additional trouble. I tend to do this. I like to accelerate a narrative as it gets towards the end, to turn up the tempo of increased complication. So most of my novels open rather leisurely and then things get more complicated and tense towards the end. Which is the right way round, I think.
* * *
fn1 Henry James knew and enjoyed Max Beerbohm’s famous parody of him, “The Mote in the Middle Distance,” in A Christmas Garland (1912), but that was more of an hommage than a satire.
fn2 I misquoted my own text. The wording of this fictitious source is actually “one of England’s finest contemporary novelists” (see here).
fn3 Not exactly “as fiction,” because she refers to herself by her own name, but in the style of fiction.
fn4 I misunderstood the question. By “information” C. R. obviously meant the information about consciousness, artifical intelligence, and so forth.
notes
1 CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE NOVEL
1. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Penguin, 1993), p. 210.
2. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (Touchstone, 1995), p. 003.
3. The Tablet, 25 June 1994.
4. Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1997), pp. 176–177.
5. David Lodge, Thinks . . . (2001), p. 042.
6. Francis Crick and Cristof Koch, “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness,” Seminars in the Neurosciences 2 (1990): 263–275.
7. Anthony Smith, “Brain Size,” in The Faber Book of Science, ed. John Carey (1996), p. 442.
8. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996), p. xi.
9. James Trefil, Are We Unique? (1997), p. 181.
10. V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind (1998), pp. 231–232.
11. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997), p. 092.
12. Quoted in John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind (1999), p. 047.
13. Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire; On the Matter of the Mind (1992), p. xiii.
14. Ibid., pp. 114–115.
15. Joseph Conrad, 1914 Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897).
16. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, pp. 162–163.
17. Antonio Demasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness (1999), p. 168.
18. Ibid., p. 188.
19. Ibid., p. 189.
20. Ibid., p. 217.
21. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 418.
22. Demasio, The Feeling of What Happens, pp. 190–191.
23. Ibid., p. 226.
24. Patricia Waugh, “Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value,” in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (Oxford University Press, 1999).
25. Nicholas Maxwell, “The Mind-Body Problem and Explanatory Dualism,” Philosophy 75 (2000): 57–60.
26. C. P. Snow, The New Men (Penguin edition, 1959), p. 184. Page numbers for subsequent quotations are given in the text.
27. Page references in the text are to the HarperPerennial edition (New York, 1996).
28. Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain, p. 229.
29. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (1995). Quoted by Thomas J. Scheff, in “Multipersonal Dialogue in Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (2000): 3–19.
30. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (Penguin edition, 1986), p. 055.
31. Demasio, The Feeling of What Happens, p. 231.
32. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Penguin edition, 1963), p. 032.
33. Susan Greenfield, The Human Brain: A Guided Tour (1999), p. 149.
34. Quoted in obituary by Claire Messud, The Guardian, 25 July 2001.
35. The Guardian, 13 September 2001.
36. Unfortunately I have mislaid the reference for this quotation.
37. Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Home (2000), p. 360.
38. Reprinted in 20th Century Literary Criticism, ed. David Lodge (1972), pp. 086–91.
39. I have demonstrated this in The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), pp. 140–144.
40. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 534.
41. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996), p. 197. “Freudian Fiction” was a review of An Imperfect Mother, a novel by J. D. Beresford, published in the Times Literary Supplement, 25 March 1920, p. 199. Rather deviously, Virginia Woolf used the anonymity of the T.L.S. in those days to pretend that she was writing purely as a critic, and not as a novelist, in asserting that psychoanalytical theory, especially concerning the effects of traumatic experience in childhood on adult life, is a key that “simplifies rather than complicates, detracts rather than enriches.”
42. See Michael Shepherd, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Dr. Freud (1985).
43. Quoted in Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind, p. 223.
44. Rodney Cotterill, No Ghost in the Machine: Modern Science and the Brain, the Mind, and the Soul (1989), pp. 217–218.
45. Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain, p. 152.
46. Edelman, Bright Air, Brillian
t Fire, p. 145.
47. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton (1981), p. 183.
48. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 119.
49. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, vol. 2 (1972), p. 107.
50. Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (Uniform edition, 1947), pp. 176–177.
51. Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men (Fontana paperback edition, 1973), p. 049.
52. The Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (1983), pp. 057, 59.
53. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway (Penguin edition, 1972), p. 165.
54. Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (New York, 1955), pp. 072–73.
55. Reprinted in Evelyn Waugh, The Complete Short Stories, ed. Ann Pasternak Slater (1998).
56. The Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Gallagher, p. 058.
57. Jeremy Treglown, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (2000), p. 072.
58. Ibid., p. 051.
59. Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows (Signet edition, 1968), pp. 052–53.
60. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (World’s Classics edition, 1947), p. xxvii.
61. Graham Greene, Collected Essays (1969), p. 116.
62. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (Penguin edition, 1943), p. 242.
63. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “A Future for the Novel,” reprinted in 20th Century Literary Criticism, ed. Lodge, pp. 467–472. All quotations in the text are from this source.
64. Henry Green, Concluding (1978 edition), p. 055.
65. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels (New York, 1965), p. 398.
66. Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (Penguin edition, 1990), p. 014. Page numbers for subsequent quotations are given in the text.
67. A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories (2001), p. 102.
68. Clifford Geertz, “The Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” in American Scientist 63 (1975): 48.
69. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 410.
70. Nice Work (1988), pp. 021–22.
71. See Alan Sokal’s spoof article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” published as a serious contribution in Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217–252. For a full account of the affair see Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (1998).
2 LITERARY CRITICISM AND LITERARY CREATION
1. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays (1961), p. 013.
2. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism: First Series (1911), p. 006.
3. Ibid., p. 038.
4. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 024.
5. Ibid., p. 032.
6. Ibid.
7. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” reprinted in 20th Century Literary Criticism, ed. David Lodge (1972), p. 335.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 017–18.
11. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (1980), p. 134. There may be an allusion to a short story by Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet.”
12. D. H. Lawrence, “John Galsworthy,” in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beale (1961), p. 118.
13. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (1978), p. 051.
14. Ibid., p. 024.
15. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 024.
16. The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G. F. Maine (1948), p. 996.
17. Ibid., p. 979.
18. See Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” reprinted in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. David Lodge (1988), pp. 108–123.
19. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994), p. 016.
20. See “Milton I” in T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (1953), pp. 123–131; originally published as “A Note on the Verse of John Milton” in 1936.
21. Reprinted in 20th Century Literary Criticism, ed. Lodge, p. 650.
22. The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Maine, p. 959.
23. Graham Greene, Reflections, ed. Judith Adamson (1990), p. xii.
24. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 030.
25. “Adam’s Curse,” in W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (1936), p. 088.
26. Quoted in Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 245.
27. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” p. 335.
28. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 236.
29. Ibid., p. 241.
30. Ibid., p. 418.
31. Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), p. 114.
32. Ibid., p. 146.
33. Ibid., p. 176.
3 DICKENS OUR CONTEMPORARY
1. Jane Smiley, Charles Dickens (Lipper/Viking, 2002). The Penguin Lives series consists of short critical biographies of major literary, intellectual, and political figures by authors who are distinguished in their own right, usually for work of a different kind. Jane Smiley is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Moo.
2. Philip Home, ed., Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999), p. 038n.
4 FORSTER’S FLAWED MASTERPIECE
1. Daniel Born, “Private Gardens, Public Swamps: Forster and the Psychology of Edwardian Culture. Howards End and the Revaluation of Liberal Guilt,” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 141–159. Born makes some particularly interesting connections between Howards End and the arguments of the contemporary American pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty.
2. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 007–8. First published in 1869.
3. E. M. Forster, Howards End, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (Penguin, 1989), p. 072. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
4. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1979), vol. I, p. 028.
5. Ibid., p. 142.
6. Ibid., p. 165.
7. Born, “Private Gardens, Public Swamps,” p. 149.
8. Kay Dick, ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Penguin, 1979), p. 010.
9. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (Dent Everyman edition, 1912), p. 001.
10. Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 069.
11. C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England, ed. J. T. Boulton (Methuen, 1909), pp. 162, 164–165.
12. Abinger Harvest (Edward Arnold, 1936), p. 100.
13. Frederick C. Crews, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 007, 14.
14. Masterman, The Condition of England, p. 076.
15. Journal of Katherine Mansfield, ed. J. Middleton Murray (Constable, 1954), pp. 120–121.
16. F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (Penguin, 1962), p. 269.
17. Lionel Trilling, “Forster and the Liberal Imagination,” in Forster: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 072.
18. Aspects of the Novel, and Related Writings (Edward Arnold, 1974), pp. 102–116.
19. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Sewanee Review (Spring, Summer, and Autumn, 1945).
20. Dick, ed., Writers at Work, p. 015.
21. Aspects of the Novel, p. 055.
22. Quoted by Furbank, E. M. Forster, vol. I, p. 188.
23. Times Literary Supplement, 27 October 1910. This anonymous review was in fact written by Percy Lubbock. See Derwent May, Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (2002), p. 075.
24. The Daily News, 7 November 1910.
25. The Westminster Gazette, 19 November 1910.
26. Nation, 12 November 1910.
27. Furbank, E. M. Forster, vol. I, p. 131.
28. Ibid., vol. I, p. 190.
5 WAUGH’S COMIC WASTELAND
1. The Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (1983), p. 567.
2.
Ibid., p. 304.
3. Ibid., pp. 057–58.
4. D. H. Lawrence, “Morality and the Novel,” reprinted in 20th Century Literary Criticism, ed. David Lodge (1972), p. 128.
5. Essays, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Gallagher, p. 304.
6 LIVES IN LETTERS: KINGSLEY AND MARTIN AMIS
1. The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (HarperCollins, 2000).
2. Martin Amis, Experience (Cape, 2000).
7 HENRY JAMES AND THE MOVIES
1. Laura Jones, The Portrait of a Lady: The Screenplay Based on the Novel by Henry James (Penguin, 1996). All quotations in the text are from this edition.
2. See my essay “Hardy as a Cinematic Novelist,” in Working with Structuralism (1981), pp. 095–105.
3. Hossein Amini, Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove: A Screenplay (Methuen, 1998), p. vi. All quotations in the text are from this edition.
10 KIERKEGAARD FOR SPECIAL PURPOSES
1. Therapy (Secker and Warburg, 1995).
2. Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton University Press, 1970).
3. Helen Fielding, “Why Are We So Depressed?” The Independent on Sunday, 2 April 1995. The Samaritans is a voluntary organization in Britain that offers confidential telephone counselling 24 hours a day to people in despair.
4. Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Walter Lowrie (1942), p. 070.
5. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (1980), p. 009.
index
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edtion from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Adaptation of literary fiction for film, television, or stage are indexed under title.
