Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  It was my turn to cook the evening meal so I didn’t linger in the common room. It was exactly four o’clock as I made my way out of the building, and doors opened behind and before me, discharging salvos of vocal babble and the noise of chair-legs scraping on wooden floors. Students poured out of seminar rooms and lecture theatres, swarming on the landings, cascading down the staircases, swinging their rucksacks and briefcases, chattering and calling out to each other, releasing all the pent-up energy and frustration and boredom of the past hour, or perhaps, who knows, the awe and excitement of an inspiring educational experience. They carried me along like a river in spate, indifferent to my presence, oblivious of my identity. I floated on their tide like a piece of academic wreckage, until they spilled and spread out over the ground-floor lobby as far as the revolving door, which expelled me into the damp November air.The sun was already low in the western sky, sinking in an orange haze of pollution behind the Mech.Eng. block and silhouetting the workmen mending the leaky roof of our prize-winning Education building. I feel a fit of the third person coming on.

  It struck him as he walked across the campus towards the main gate that if he had carried on at the University until the usual retirement age of sixty-five this would have been the first term of his last academic year. He wondered nowadays, with increasing frequency, if he had done the right thing, taking early retirement four years ago. At the time it had seemed a very attractive proposition. He was finding teaching increasingly difficult because of his deafness - not just in seminars, but when giving lectures too, because he believed in interactive lecturing. It had always seemed to him that the typical humanities lecture - an uninterrupted discourse of about fifty minutes duration, often read from the page with lowered eyes in a dull monotone - was the most ineffective teaching method ever devised. There was some excuse for it before the invention of printing, but even the ancient Greeks used a dialogic form of oral instruction. Experiments had demonstrated that the average attention span for receiving continuous speech from one speaker is twenty minutes and that it diminishes the more closely the discourse resembles written prose, with its greater density of information and reduced redundancy. It was necessary therefore to break up the flow of information, to pause and recap and reinforce - and he didn’t mean by this the tedious practice, especially dear to management consultants, of projecting a summary of one’s lecture on to a screen and reading it aloud, as if the auditors were unable to read it for themselves. Q&A was the way to do it. He encouraged students to raise their hands in the middle of his lectures if they didn’t understand something, and he would ask them questions himself occasionally to keep them on their toes, but the method depended on his being able to hear them, so he used it less and less as time went on. In seminars he was aware that he was talking far too much himself because it was easier than straining to hear what the students were saying. Meetings became stressful too, for the same reason, and there seemed to be more and more of them in the 1990s - Departmental meetings, Faculty boards, Senate meetings, and subcommittees and working parties attached to all of those - as the bureaucratic octopus tightened its tentacles on academic life. More and more he found himself struggling to pick up the gist of an argument, falling silent, afraid to intervene in case he had got the wrong end of the stick, eventually giving up altogether and falling into a bored reverie - unless of course he was chairing the meeting himself.Then he would sometimes catch the ghost of a smile on someone’s lips or an exchange of amused glances across the table and realise that he had misunderstood something or made an inapposite remark, and some friendly colleague or the Departmental secretary would tactfully rescue him.

  So when he was offered early retirement it seemed too good an opportunity to miss: a full pension straight away, and freedom to do his own research untrammelled by the duties of teaching and administration. It came about because of one of the periodic organisational upheavals to which the University’s senior management had become addicted. It had been decided that the Linguistics department, of which he was Head, was too small to be cost-effective as an independent unit, and that it should be merged with English. Staff in Linguistics were offered the alternative options of transferring to another department if they could find one that was willing to have them, or severance on enhanced terms, or early retirement if they were old enough to qualify. His colleagues in Linguistics were up in arms about the proposal, claiming variously that it was a covert way for the University to shed staff, or a cunning plot devised by English to boost their submission to the next Research Assessment Exercise. But he told them resistance was useless. He recognised the logic of the proposal, because several people on the Language side of the English department did work very similar to that of himself and his colleagues. Personally he had no objection in principle to working in an English department. His own first degree had been in English Language and Literature, and although he had taken all the language options in the course, and switched to linguistics as a postgraduate, he had always made extensive use of literary texts in his teaching and research, and he still read poetry for pleasure, which couldn’t be said for many people, including some who taught courses on it. There was however a certain loss of prestige and independence entailed in the plan which made the prospect uninviting.Though he was finding the responsibilities of being the head of his department increasingly irksome, he was not sure he would relish being just one professor among several in English. As a newcomer he would be obliged to be cooperative and accommodating about what he taught, so probably wouldn’t be able to give his third-year seminar course on literary stylistics because that was the speciality of Butterworth, the youngish professor who was the rising star of the English Language sub-department. Putting all these considerations together the conclusion seemed obvious that early retirement would be the best option for himself, and accordingly he took it.

  At first it was very enjoyable, like a long sabbatical, but after eighteen months or so his freedom from routine tasks and duties began to pall. He missed the calendar of the academic year which had given his life a shape for such a long time, its passage marked by reassuringly predictable events: the arrival of excited and expectant freshers every autumn; the Department Christmas party with its traditional sketches by students mimicking the mannerisms and favourite jargon of members of staff; the reading week in the spring term when they took the second year to a residential conference centre in the Lake District; the examiners’ meetings in the summer term when, sitting round a long table heaped with marked scripts and extended essays, they calculated and classified the Finals results like gods dispensing rewards and punishments to mortals; and finally the degree congregation itself, processing to organ music in the Assembly Hall, listening to the University Orator fulsomely summarise the achievements of honorary graduands, shaking hands afterwards with proud parents and their begowned children, sipping fruit punch under the marquee erected on the Round Lawn, after which all dispersed to a well-earned long vacation. He missed the rhythm of the academic year as a peasant might miss differences between the seasons if they were suddenly withdrawn; and he found he missed too the structure of the academic week, the full diary of teaching assignments, postgraduate supervisions, essay marking, committee meetings, interviews, and deadlines for this and that required report, tasks he used to grumble about but the completion of which, however trivial and ephemeral they were, gave a kind of low-level satisfaction, and ensured that one never, ever, had to confront the question: what shall I do with myself today? In retirement, he confronted it every morning as soon as he woke.

  There was his research, of course: he had envisaged that that was how he would mainly fill his days in retirement. But to his dismay he soon found that he had no real appetite to pursue it. He still found linguistics a fascinating subject - how could one ever lose interest in it? As he used to tell the first-year students in his introductory lecture of welcome, ‘Language is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from animals on the one hand and machines on the oth
er, what makes us self-conscious beings, capable of art, science, the whole of civilisation. It is the key to understanding everything.’ His own field was, broadly speaking, discourse: language above the level of the sentence, language in use, langue approached via parole rather than the other way round. It was probably the most fertile and productive area of the discipline in recent times: historical philology was out of fashion and structural and transformational linguistics had lost their allure since people had come to realise the futility of trying to reduce the living and always changing phenomenon of language to a set of rules illustrated by contextless model sentences often invented for the purpose.‘Every utterance or written sentence always has a context, is always in some sense referring to something already said and inviting a response, is always designed to do something to somebody, a reader or a listener. Studying this phenomenon is sometimes called pragmatics, sometimes stylistics. Computers enable us to do it with unprecedented rigour, analysing digitised databases of actual speech and writing - generating a whole new sub-discipline, corpus linguistics. A comprehensive term for all this work is discourse analysis. We live in discourse as fish live in water. Systems of law consist of discourse. Diplomacy consists of discourse.The beliefs of the great world religions consist of discourse. And in a world of increasing literacy and multiplying media of verbal communication - radio, television, the Internet, advertising, packaging, as well as books, magazines and newspapers - discourse has come more and more to dominate even the non-verbal aspects of our lives. We eat discourse (mouthwatering menu-language, for instance, like “flame-roasted peppers drizzled with truffle oil”) we drink discourse (“hints of tobacco, vanilla, chocolate and ripe berries in this feisty Australian Shiraz”); we look at discourse (those minimalist paintings and cryptic installations in galleries that depend entirely on curators’ and critics’ descriptions of them for their existence as art); we even have sex by enacting the discourses of erotic fiction and sex manuals. To understand culture and society you have to be able to analyse their discourses.’ (Thus Professor Bates, giving his introductory pep talk to the first year, throwing in a reference to sex to capture the attention of even the most bored and sceptical student, the one with indifferent A-level grades who had really wanted to do Media Studies, which was oversubscribed, so had switched to Linguistics at the clearing stage of admissions.)

  He had not lost faith in the value of discourse analysis, and he still had original ideas for doing it from time to time, but the thought of putting them into a form acceptable to the academic profession, of obtaining data, or setting up an experiment, and reading all the relevant literature, and writing an article with footnotes and references acknowledging the work of other scholars in the same field, and then sending it off to the editors of journals, and waiting weeks for them to have it refereed, and then emending it in the light of the referees’ comments, and then sending it back and correcting the proofs and waiting months for it to appear in the journal - just thinking of all the effort that would be required to complete such a project generated a kind of proleptic mental fatigue so overwhelming that he invariably abandoned it before he had properly begun. An article of this kind would probably be read by only a few hundred people, if you were lucky, which was incentive enough if you cared what they thought of it, if it enhanced your standing in your peer group and contributed usefully to your Department’s RAE rating (as Head of Linguistics he had felt obliged to give a lead in this respect); but once you retired, the professional incentive melted away. Needless to say there was no economic incentive: academic journals did not pay their contributors, and even if you were fortunate enough to have the article reprinted in a book the permission fees were modest.There had been a time when he made a little extra money as a consultant, acting as an expert witness in cases that involved linguistic evidence - interpreting covertly recorded conversations, determining the authorship or authenticity of documents, and suchlike - and he had enjoyed this work as well as profited from it. But since a humiliating experience in court in the first year of his retirement, when he had difficulty hearing the questions put to him by his own side’s barrister in a thick Scottish accent, and the opposing QC seized the opportunity to question his competence to give an opinion on a recorded telephone conversation which was at the heart of the case - since that occasion, which still made him twitch and grimace when he recalled it, he had received very few offers of such work, and those he had declined for fear of repeating the experience. Apart from his pension, the only income he received was from the steadily declining royalties of a textbook, which he privately referred to as Discourse Analysis for Dummies, first published some twenty-five years ago.

  It was fortunate therefore that Winifred’s business began to be profitable at just about the time that he retired. A tax-free bond linked to the FTSE-100 index which her first husband had purchased in her name in some fit of generosity or remorse, or perhaps as a tax reduction device, matured and yielded a large lump sum which she used to start up an interior design and soft furnishings business with her Health Club friend Jakki, who had a diploma in textiles from Manchester Polytechnic, and some experience of spreadsheets and computerised accounting from working in the office of her husband’s Japanese car franchise before she divorced him (obtaining a generous settlement which provided her stake in the business). Winifred’s qualifications for the enterprise were more nebulous: one half of a Combined Honours degree in Art History, and an amateur enthusiasm for decorating and furnishing her own home, but in due course she showed an aptitude for retail trade that surprised Desmond. It was an opportune time to discover it. In the Nineties the northern city which had seemed so dour and drab to him and Maisie when they first came to it, and whose native citizens traditionally prided themselves on their frugality and thrift, was overtaken by the global craze for consumption. Shops with internationally famous names opened branches there, and new malls sprang up to accommodate them along with the national chain stores - rather too many malls all at once, in fact. Fred and Jakki were able to lease a spacious unit in the city centre at a very reasonable rent from developers desperately anxious to fill the space (nothing looks less inviting to punters than a row of vacant shops). It was on the ground floor, so that anybody who entered the Rialto mall from the street, enticed by gleaming vistas of stainless steel, ceramic tile and plate glass, or by the soothing murmur of muzak and tinkling water features, had to pass the frontage of Décor (as it was called - Jakki’s suggestion of ‘Swish Style’ fortunately having been discarded) on their way to the escalators which wafted them to the higher levels of the building. In spite of this location, however, Décor struggled to break even for two or three years, until a sought-after and very expensive hairdresser moved his operation into the mall on the first floor. His clientele - women from the affluent outer suburbs or green-belt villages, with time to spare and money to spend on beautifying themselves and their homes - were just the right kind of customers for Décor. Winifred and Jakki specialised in quality imported fabrics for curtains, blinds, cushions, bedspreads, etc., but they also displayed works of art by local artists - paintings, prints, ceramics, jewellery and small sculptures - which were available for purchase. If these sold the shop took forty per cent, and if they didn’t they contributed eye-catching decor to Décor for free. The posh suburban women would pause to glance with interest into the shop as they passed its front window on their way to have their hair done, and drop in on their way back to browse among the fabrics and objets d’art. Winifred and Jakki installed a small but perfectly formed Italian coffee machine to serve them with complimentary espressos and lattes, after which they invariably purchased something, if it was only a piece of chic costume jewellery or a unique handmade greetings card. The business prospered. Décor was featured in the local paper in a gushing article, illustrated with flattering colour photographs of its smiling proprietors. They were able to employ a young woman just out of art college to help look after the shop and came to an arrangement with a reliab
le self-employed handyman called Ron to provide a measuring and fitting service for their clients. The cutting and stitching of the soft furnishings was contracted out to a women’s cooperative of seamstresses made redundant by the decline of the city’s clothing industry. They did excellent work.

  While he was still employed himself Desmond was amused and pleased by his wife’s success in her late entrepreneurial career. If there was a slight decline in domestic comforts as a result of her busy life - more prepared food from the supermarket for dinner, an occasional shortage of clean socks and laundered shirts - that was a small price to pay for the satisfaction she obviously derived from it, and his own social life was enlivened by contact with new people and places through association with her. Winifred had presence and confidence, bred in the bone and polished by private education, which had been suppressed by her unhappy first marriage but now revived in her mature years. She became by tacit consent the senior partner in the business, although she and Jakki had invested equal amounts in it, by virtue of her maturer years and social poise: and in due course she became something of a figure in the local community, invited to sit on boards and committees connected with the arts, which in turn generated invitations to private views, first nights, charity concerts, festival openings, and parties and receptions connected with these events, in which Desmond was naturally included. Sometimes he encountered the Vice Chancellor or other senior figures in the University hierarchy on such occasions and observed that they regarded him with a new respect.The VC began to address him by his first name, and to ask after his ‘good lady’ when encountered on campus. They were invited to the occasional private dinner party at the VC’s residence.