Campus Trilogy : Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work (9781101577127)

by Lodge, David

  Robyn Penrose was not unemployed—yet. She had plenty of work: her teaching, her research, her administrative duties in the Department. She had survived the previous winter by surrendering herself to work. She drove to and fro between her cosy little house and her warm, well-lit room at the University, ignoring the dismal weather. At home she read, she took notes, she distilled her notes into continuous prose on her word-processor, she marked essays; at the University she lectured, she gave seminars and tutorials, she counselled students, interviewed applicants, drew up reading-lists, attended committee meetings, and marked essays. Twice a week she played squash with Penny Black, a form of recreation unaffected by the climate—or, indeed, any other aspect of the environment: swiping and sweating and panting in the brightly lit cubic court down in the bowels of the Sports Centre one might have been anywhere—in Cambridge, or London, or the South of France. The steady grind of intellectual work, punctuated by brief explosions of indoor physical exercise—that was the rhythm of Robyn’s first winter at Rummidge.

  But this year the winter term was different. Every Wednesday she left her familiar milieu, and drove across the city (by a quicker and more direct route than she had followed on her first visit) to the factory in West Wallsbury. In a way she resented the obligation. It was a distraction from her work. There were always so many books, so many articles in so many journals, waiting to be read, digested, distilled and synthesised with all the other books and articles she had read, digested, distilled and synthesised. Life was short, criticism long. She had her career to think of. Her only chance of staying in academic life was to build up an irresistibly impressive record of research and publication. The Shadow Scheme contributed nothing to that—on the contrary, it interfered with it, taking up the precious one day a week she had kept free from Departmental duties.

  But this irritation was all on the surface. The Shadow Scheme was something to grumble about, to Charles, to Penny Black, something handy to blame for getting behind with other tasks. At some deeper level of feeling and reflection she derived a subtle satisfaction from her association with the factory, and a certain sense of superiority over her friends. Charles and Penny led their lives, as she had done, wholly within the charmed circle of academia. She now had this other life on one day of the week, and almost another identity. The designation “Shadow,” which had seemed so absurd initially, began to acquire a suggestive resonance. A shadow was a kind of double, a Doppelgänger, but it was herself she duplicated at Pringle’s, not Wilcox. It was as if the Robyn Penrose who spent one day a week at the factory was the shadow of the self who on the other six days a week was busy with women’s studies and the Victorian novel and post-structuralist literary theory—less substantial, more elusive, but just as real. She led a double life these days, and felt herself to be a more interesting and complex person because of it. West Wallsbury, that wilderness of factories and warehouses and roads and roundabouts, scored with overgrown railway cuttings and obsolete canals like the lines on Mars, itself seemed a shadowland, the dark side of Rummidge, unknown to those who basked in the light of culture and learning at the University. Of course, to the people who worked at Pringle’s, the reverse was true: the University and all it stood for was in shadow—alien, inscrutable, vaguely threatening. 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.

  “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.”

  “What?” he said, looking up from his book, and marking his place in it with his index finger. They were sitting in Robyn’s study–living-room on another Sunday afternoon. Charles’ weekend visits had become more frequent of late.

  “Of course they don’t know what we do, but even if one tried to explain it to them they wouldn’t 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.”

  “So much the worse for them,” said Charles.

  “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?”

  “A what?” said Charles.

  “A monkey’s. It means you don’t care a bit.”

  “It means you don’t give a monkey’s fuck.”

  “Does it?” said Robyn, with a snigger. “I thought it was a monkey’s nut. I should have known: ‘fuck’ is much more poetic in Jakobson’s terms—the repetition of the ‘k’ as well as the first vowel in ‘monkey’… No wonder Vic Wilcox looked startled when I said it the other day.”

  “Did you pick it up from him?”

  “I suppose so. Though he doesn’t use that kind of language much, actually. He’s a rather puritanical type.”

  “The protestant ethic.”

  “Exactly… Now I’ve forgotten what I was saying.”

  “You were saying they don’t go in much for poststructuralism at the factory. Hardly surprising, is it?”

  “But doesn’t it worry you at all? That most people don’t give a… damn about the things that matter most to us?”

  “No, why should it?”

  “Well, when Wilcox starts getting at me about arts degrees being a waste of money—”

  “Does he do that often?”

  “Oh yes, we argue all the time… Anyway, when he does that, 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—arguments that old fogies like Philip Swallow trot out at the drop of a hat. Because if I said we teach students about the perpetual sliding of the signified under the signifier, or the way every text inevitably undermines its own claim to a determinate meaning, he would laugh in my face.”

  “You can’t explain poststructuralism to someone who hasn’t even discovered traditional humanism.”

  “Precisely. But doesn’t that make us rather marginal?”

  There was a silence while Charles pondered this question. “Margins imply a centre,” he said at length. “But the idea of a centre is precisely what poststructuralism calls into question. Grant people like Wilcox, or Swallow for that matter, the idea of a centre, and they will lay claim to it, justifying everything they do by reference to it. Show that it’s an illusion, a fallacy, and their position collapses. We live in a decentred universe.”

  “I know,” said Robyn. “But who pays?”

  “Who pays?” Charles repeated blankly.

  “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.”

  “Not in the absolute sense, no.” Charles looked exasperated. “Whose side are you on, Robyn?”

  “I’m just being Devil’s Advocate.”

  “They don’t pay us all that much, anyway,” said Charles, and resumed reading his book.

  Robyn caught sight of the title, and pronounced it aloud: “The Financial Revolution! What on earth are you reading that for?”

  “I told you, I’m going to write an article about what’s going on in the City.”

  “Are you really? I’d no i
dea you were serious about that. Isn’t it terribly boring?”

  “No, it’s very interesting, actually.”

  “Are you going to go and watch Basil’s Debbie at work?”

  “I might.” Charles smiled his feline smile. “Why shouldn’t I be a shadow too?”

  “I didn’t think you could ever get interested in business.”

  “This isn’t business,” said Charles, tapping his book. “It’s not about buying and selling real commodities. It’s all on paper, or computer screens. It’s abstract. It has its own rather seductive jargon—arbitrageur, deferred futures, floating rate. It’s like literary theory.”

  Pringle’s was definitely a business dealing in real commodities and running it was not in the least like doing literary theory, but it did strike Robyn sometimes that Vic Wilcox stood to his subordinates in the relation of teacher to pupils. Though she could seldom grasp the detailed matters of engineering and accounting that he dealt with in his meetings with his staff, though these meetings often bored and wearied her, she could see that he was trying to teach the other men, to coax and persuade them to look at the factory’s operations in a new way. He would have been surprised to be told it, but he used the Socratic method: he prompted the other directors and the middle managers and even the foremen to identify the problems themselves and to reach by their own reasoning the solutions he had himself already determined upon. It was so deftly done that she had sometimes to temper her admiration by reminding herself that it was all directed by the profit-motive, and that beyond the walls of Vic Wilcox’s carpeted office there was a factory full of men and women doing dangerous, demeaning and drearily repetitive tasks who were mere cogs in the machine of his grand strategy. He was an artful tyrant, but still a tyrant. Furthermore, he showed no reciprocal respect for her own professional skills.

  A typical instance of this was the furious argument they had about the Silk Cut advertisement. They were returning in his car from visiting a foundry in Derby that had been taken over by asset-strippers who were selling off an automatic core moulder Wilcox was interested in, though it had turned out to be too old-fashioned for his purpose. Every few miles, it seemed, they passed the same huge poster on roadside hoardings, a photographic depiction of a rippling expanse of purple silk in which there was a single slit, as if the material had been slashed with a razor. There were no words on the advertisement, except for the Government Health Warning about smoking. This ubiquitous image, flashing past at regular intervals, both irritated and intrigued Robyn, and she began to do her semiotic stuff on the deep structure hidden beneath its bland surface.

  It was in the first instance a kind of riddle. That is to say, in order to decode it, you had to know that there was a brand of cigarettes called Silk Cut. The poster was the iconic representation of a missing name, like a rebus. But the icon was also a metaphor. The shimmering silk, with its voluptuous curves and sensuous texture, obviously symbolised the female body, and the elliptical slit, foregrounded by a lighter colour showing through, was still more obviously a vagina. The advert thus appealed to both sensual and sadistic impulses, the desire to mutilate as well as penetrate the female body.

  Vic Wilcox spluttered with outraged derision as she expounded this interpretation. He smoked a different brand, himself, but it was as if he felt his whole philosophy of life was threatened by Robyn’s analysis of the advert. “You must have a twisted mind to see all that in a perfectly harmless bit of cloth,” he said.

  “What’s the point of it, then?” Robyn challenged him. “Why use cloth to advertise cigarettes?”

  “Well, that’s the name of ’em, isn’t it? Silk Cut. It’s a picture of the name. Nothing more or less.”

  “Suppose they’d used a picture of a roll of silk cut in half—would that do just as well?”

  “I suppose so. Yes, why not?”

  “Because it would look like a penis cut in half, that’s why.”

  He forced a laugh to cover his embarrassment. “Why can’t you people take things at their face value?”

  “What people are you referring to?”

  “Highbrows. Intellectuals. You’re always trying to find hidden meanings in things. Why? A cigarette is a cigarette. A piece of silk is a piece of silk. Why not leave it at that?”

  “When they’re represented they acquire additional meanings,” said Robyn. “Signs are never innocent. Semiotics teaches us that.”

  “Semi-what?”

  “Semiotics. The study of signs.”

  “It teaches us to have dirty minds, if you ask me.”

  “Why d’you think the wretched cigarettes were called Silk Cut in the first place?”

  “I dunno. It’s just a name, as good as any other.”

  “‘Cut’ has something to do with the tobacco, doesn’t it? The way the tobacco leaf is cut. Like ‘Player’s Navy Cut’—my uncle Walter used to smoke them.”

  “Well, what if it does?” Vic said warily.

  “But silk has nothing to do with tobacco. It’s a metaphor, a metaphor that means something like, ‘smooth as silk.’ Somebody in an advertising agency dreamt up the name ‘Silk Cut’ to suggest a cigarette that wouldn’t give you a sore throat or a hacking cough or lung cancer. But after a while the public got used to the name, the word ‘Silk’ ceased to signify, so they decided to have an advertising campaign to give the brand a high profile again. Some bright spark in the agency came up with the idea of rippling silk with a cut in it. The original metaphor is now represented literally. But new metaphorical connotations accrue—sexual ones. Whether they were consciously intended or not doesn’t really matter. It’s a good example of the perpetual sliding of the signified under the signifier, actually.”

  Wilcox chewed on this for a while, then said, “Why do women smoke them, then, eh?” His triumphant expression showed that he thought this was a knock-down argument. “If smoking Silk Cut is a form of aggravated rape, as you try to make out, how come women smoke ’em too?”

  “Many women are masochistic by temperament,” said Robyn. “They’ve learned what’s expected of them in patriarchal society.”

  “Ha!” Wilcox exclaimed, tossing back his head. “I might have known you’d have some daft answer.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so worked up,” said Robyn. “It’s not as if you smoke Silk Cut yourself.”

  “No, I smoke Marlboros. Funnily enough, I smoke them because I like the taste.”

  “They’re the ones that have the lone cowboy ads, aren’t they?”

  “I suppose that makes me a repressed homosexual, does it?”

  “No, it’s a very straightforward metonymic message.”

  “Metowhat?”

  “Metonymic. One of the fundamental tools of semiotics is the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. D’you want me to explain it to you?”

  “It’ll pass the time,” he said.

  “Metaphor is a figure of speech based on similarity, whereas metonymy is based on contiguity. In metaphor you substitute something like the thing you mean for the thing itself, whereas in metonymy you substitute some attribute or cause or effect of the thing for the thing itself.”

  “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “Well, take one of your moulds. The bottom bit is called the drag because it’s dragged across the floor and the top bit is called the cope because it covers the bottom bit.”

  “I told you that.”

  “Yes, I know. What you didn’t tell me was that ‘drag’ is a metonymy and ‘cope’ is a metaphor.”

  Vic grunted. “What difference does it make?”

  “It’s just a question of understanding how language works. I thought you were interested in how things work.”

  “I don’t see what it’s got to do with cigarettes.”

  “In the case of the Silk Cut poster, the picture signifies the female body metaphorically: the slit in the silk is like a vagina—”

  Vic flinched at the word. “So you say.”

&n
bsp; “All holes, hollow spaces, fissures and folds represent the female genitals.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Freud proved it, by his successful analysis of dreams,” said Robyn. “But the Marlboro ads don’t use any metaphors. That’s probably why you smoke them, actually.”

  “What d’you mean?” he said suspiciously.

  “You don’t have any sympathy with the metaphorical way of looking at things. A cigarette is a cigarette as far as you are concerned.”

  “Right.”

  “The Marlboro ad doesn’t disturb that naive faith in the stability of the signified. It establishes a metonymic connection—completely spurious of course, but realistically plausible—between smoking that particular brand and the healthy, heroic, outdoor life of the cowboy. Buy the cigarette and you buy the life-style, or the fantasy of living it.”

  “Rubbish!” said Wilcox. “I hate the country and the open air. I’m scared to go into a field with a cow in it.”

  “Well then, maybe it’s the solitariness of the cowboy in the ads that appeals to you. Self-reliant, independent, very macho.”

  “I’ve never heard such a lot of balls in all my life,” said Vic Wilcox, which was strong language coming from him.

  “Balls—now that’s an interesting expression…” Robyn mused.