Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  What can we know? Why is there anything at all? Why not nothing?

  What ought we to do? Why do what we do? Why and to whom are we finally responsible?

  What may we hope? Why are we here? What is it all about?

  What will give us courage for life and what courage for death?

  The Creed and the Catechism had their answers of course, but like many others I found them increasingly difficult to accept in a literal sense. I decided that the language of religion is essentially metaphorical or symbolic and therefore comparable to literary language, which creates a virtual reality always open to variable interpretation. On this basis I continued to immerse myself once a week in that discourse by attending Sunday mass, saying the responses, reciting the Creed, singing the hymns, listening to the scriptural readings and the homilies, but with increasing awareness of the cognitive dissonance between what was said or what I said in response, and what I actually believed or did not believe. There were personal, familial reasons for persevering. My wife Mary’s faith is deep and strong and not essentially intellectual. I did not wish to disturb it or place a barrier between us by questioning it; and I wanted my children to have a religious upbringing, so that they should know what it offered before they decided for themselves whether to continue with it, and would acquire some knowledge of the Christian elements in our cultural heritage. So it was not until a few years ago that I stopped going to mass regularly and publicly declared, when asked, that I was no longer a ‘practising Catholic’. But how that came about, and worked out, does not come within the time frame of this book.

  I started writing How Far Can You Go? in 1977, having spent some time previously making notes on subjects like the lives of nuns, modern biblical scholarship, liberation theology and the surprising emergence of a Catholic charismatic movement. In the same year I published a book of academic criticism, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, the writing of which had largely occupied me in the early seventies while Changing Places was making its painfully slow progress towards publication in 1975. The success of that novel did not weaken my commitment to the dual career of creative writer and academic critic, and in fact I published a novel and a book of criticism alternately for many years to come.

  Criticism, like literature itself, has a periodic need to renew and refresh its methods, partly in response to new developments in writing, and partly in order to find new meanings in familiar texts. In the late sixties and early seventies something called ‘structuralism’ exerted a growing influence on academic criticism and the humanities generally. It was a way of analysing literature and all forms of cultural production from surrealism to striptease, by identifying the systems of signification they used rather than by responding intuitively to their surface effects. Its lineage was Continental European and went back to the first decades of the twentieth century. One of its father figures was the linguist Roman Jakobson, who came of age in the fertile intellectual and artistic climate of post-Revolutionary Russia and ended his career in the United States. But the news about structuralism came to Britain and America in the 1960s primarily from Paris, where a brilliant generation of critics and theorists, of whom Roland Barthes was the pace-setter, challenged academic orthodoxy under the banner of the nouvelle critique. They had in common with the British and American exponents of the New Criticism a focus on the literary text as a verbal object to be elucidated by analysis rather than by reference to the historical and biographical circumstances of its composition, but the French approach was more theoretical, abstract and deductive.

  I am aware that some of my readers will not be much interested in literary and linguistic theory, and indeed their eyes may have already begun to glaze over at the mention of the word ‘structuralism’. If so, they may prefer to skip the next few pages, although this kind of intellectual activity was an essential part of my life for many years and therefore cannot be omitted from a record of that life. It also fed into several of my novels in various ways. One of the most successful readings I have given from my fiction is the scene in Nice Work when the young feminist lecturer Robin Penrose gives a structuralist analysis of a poster advertising Silk Cut cigarettes to the incredulous and scandalised managing director of an engineering company whom she is shadowing. I could never have written it if I had not first written The Modes of Modern Writing.

  As the teacher of an undergraduate course at the University of Birmingham called Comparative Critical Approaches and convenor of a weekly seminar for postgraduates on critical theory and methodology, I naturally took an interest in the work loosely bundled together under the label of structuralism, strange and difficult as it often seemed. The cryptic, declarative style of Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, for instance, one of the first examples of the nouvelle critique translated and published in Britain in 1967, was a shock to someone used to the reader-friendly conversational style of British criticism, while I found the same author’s Elements of Semiology, its title deceptively suggestive of a beginner’s guide, almost incomprehensible. I did however remember from that discouraging experience an intriguing reference to Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy which seemed worth following up when my friend and former Birmingham colleague Malcolm Bradbury asked me to contribute an essay on ‘The Language of Modern Fiction’ to a Penguin symposium called Modernism which he was co-editing. My starting point in trying to generalise about the language of novelists who wrote in very different styles was something I had often observed in reading early twentieth-century fiction, namely that the prose of the great modernists such as Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was notable for an abundance of metaphor, whereas the representative writers of the 1930s such as Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell and Graham Greene, who were consciously reacting against the older generation, preferred simile to metaphor when using figurative language derived from resemblances between things otherwise different. Barthes’ reference led me to a paper by Jakobson entitled ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, first published in 1956, which revealed a much more fundamental and illuminating distinction: between metaphor and simile on the one hand, opposed to metonymy and synecdoche on the other.

  All four words belong to the terminology of classical rhetoric and everybody who has a GCSE in English knows (or ought to know) what the first two mean. The third and fourth are less familiar, though speech and writing are saturated with them. Metonymy substitutes an attribute of a thing, or an adjunct or cause or effect of a thing, for the thing itself, while synecdoche substitutes part for whole, or whole for part. In the proverbial phrase ‘the hand that rocks the cradle’ the word hand is a synecdoche signifying ‘mother’ and cradle is a metonym for ‘baby’. These rhetorical figures can of course be combined with metaphor. In a sentence which I made up for illustrative purposes, ‘A hundred keels ploughed the deep’, the synecdoche keels is a part of a ship signifying the whole vessel, ploughed is a metaphor derived from a perceived similarity between the movement of a ship through the sea and the movement of a plough through the earth, and deep is substituted for sea because depth is one of its attributes. The similarity between keels and ploughs could have been expressed in the form of a simile, such as ‘A hundred keels cut through the sea like plough blades’, but not so elegantly. It might work for one ship, but applied to a hundred of them it summons up a rather grotesque image of a fleet of ploughs at sea. This is an indication that simile is more tightly bound to context than metaphor, which was precisely why the realist writers of the thirties favoured it over metaphor.

  What is the point of these substitutions? They call attention to the referents by transforming a literal descriptive word or phrase into something that needs a little more effort to decode. They are ways of ‘defamiliarising’ (a very useful structuralist term) an item in a discourse. ‘A hundred keels ploughed the deep’ is a figurative transformation of the dull referential sentence ‘A hundred ships crossed t
he sea’. Such metaphors and metonyms can become clichés, and then their effect is weakened because they require no conscious decoding. The creative writer is constantly challenged to find fresh ways of describing the world by using rhetorical figures of speech like metaphor and simile, metonymy and synecdoche.

  Traditionally the second, third and fourth of these tropes had been regarded by grammarians as variations on the first because they all substitute a figurative description for a literal one, but Jakobson saw the two pairs as structurally different, metaphor/simile being based on similarity, and metonymy/synecdoche on contiguity (e.g. a keel is not like a ship, it is part of a ship) and he applied this distinction to all discourse, including the fractured speech of people suffering from aphasia, and indeed to all forms of cultural production:

  The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or their contiguity. The metaphorical way would be the more appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic for the second. In normal verbal behaviour both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes over the other.

  The universal applicability of the theory captivated me. Cubist painting is metonymic (an assemblage of parts) and surrealist painting metaphoric (combining images belonging to quite different contexts). The cinematic close-up is metonymic (or more exactly synecdochic, part representing the whole) while cinematic montage of the kind invented by Eisenstein (e.g. soldiers being gunned down spliced with cattle being slaughtered) is metaphoric. Condensation and displacement in Freudian dream analysis are metonymic, symbolism (usually sexual) metaphoric. The theory is one of dominance, and the beauty of it is that it can be applied differently at different levels of generality. Thus poetry (verse composition) is dominantly metaphoric, emphasising phonological and rhythmical similarities as well as semantic ones, and prose is dominantly metonymic, connecting one topic to another according to their contiguity in space and time or logic; but there is poetic prose (in Virginia Woolf’s work, for example) and prosaic poetry (in Philip Larkin’s) in which the language is used contrary to generic convention for specific effect.

  I was particularly struck by Jakobson’s comment on the realistic novel as a genre, because it offered a way of accounting for the effectiveness of this kind of writing in terms of form rather than content, a project I had attempted with limited success in my first critical book, Language of Fiction. He says:

  Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realistic author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Karenina’s suicide Tolstoy’s artistic attention is focused on the heroine’s handbag.

  The importance of circumstantial detail, what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’, in creating the illusion of reality in novels is generally recognised, but in Jakobson’s perspective it can be seen as not merely an observant element in prose fiction, but also an expressive one. His remark about Anna Karenina’s red handbag made me revisit the scene with a fresh eye. A detail like that is a kind of synecdoche representing the multiplicity of items in her dress and appearance which would take pages to describe in full, and by being selected in this way and referred to more than once it gathers quasi-metaphorical associations and connotations without disturbing the realistic rendering of the situation. Anna’s choice of colour is expressive of her character: red is a colour associated with passion and blood and adultery (as in ‘scarlet woman’ and the scarlet letter of Hawthorne’s tale). But a handbag is also a woman’s most important accessory, one essential to the conduct of her everyday life, and when the weight of the bag on her arm hinders Anna from throwing herself under the first truck of the train, slowly passing her as she stands on the platform, it is as if life gives her a last opportunity to refuse death. She is reminded of her hesitation at the moment of plunging into the sea to bathe, and ‘for an instant life passed before her with all its past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the approaching second truck.’

  What had started as an article on style in modern fiction rapidly grew into a book of ambitious scope which, though predominantly focused on the novel, also dealt with poetry and drama, and other cultural phenomena, applying Jakobson’s theory in close analysis and comparison of a wide range of texts. To give some continuity to the argument I returned repeatedly to several different descriptions of the same subject – execution: the report of a hanging witnessed by a Guardian journalist, Michael Lake; George Orwell’s putatively autobiographical essay ‘A Hanging’; Arnold Bennett’s use in The Old Wives’ Tale of a public execution by guillotine as the setting for a crisis in his heroine’s life; Oscar Wilde’s poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol; and the surrealistic hanging scene in William Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch. Surveyed in that order they illustrate the continuum that extends from the metonymic to the metaphoric poles of writing.

  I finished the book late in 1975, and sent it off to my agents, Curtis Brown, where Andrew Best was now exclusively handling academic and educational books, for onward transmission to Routledge & Kegan Paul who had published my two previous works of literary criticism, and Cornell University Press who had published the second of them. I was confident that Routledge would accept The Modes of Modern Writing, and even more so when Andrew informed me in February of the New Year that Cornell had received very favourable reports on the MS and were ready to publish it in collaboration with Routledge. But at the beginning of March I had a letter from him with ‘the somewhat astonishing news’ that Routledge had rejected the book, and that he had sent it to Edward Arnold, who had promptly accepted it. I was annoyed that he had acted without consulting me, but Arnold was a respected academic publisher and made a reasonable offer, which I accepted. Cornell teamed up with them. Nevertheless Routledge’s rejection continued to rankle until I discovered that it was the result of an internal blunder which they tried, too late, to undo.

  At about that time Jim Boulton, Head of the Birmingham English Department, put my name forward for a personal chair, i.e. a professorship not connected to an established post. The proposal was approved, and I gave my inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern English Literature in December 1976. Entitled ‘Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism’, it was a highly condensed version of Modes. The industrial strife that would give rise to the following year’s ‘winter of discontent’ was already extensive enough to cause power cuts, and I remember that the lecture theatre was freezing and many in the audience kept their overcoats on, but their reception was warm.

  The Modes of Modern Writing was published in the autumn of 1977 and received numerous reviews in academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic, most of them favourable. Its reception in the British quality press, where such books were still occasionally reviewed, was more mixed. Up till that point the methods of teaching and writing about English literature in British universities had been divided between historical scholarship and the evaluative interpretation of texts by ‘close reading’, and sometimes there were clashes between these two schools of thought. But now the battle lines were being redrawn by the impact of structuralism. Some close readers like myself welcomed the explanatory power of its ideas, but others recoiled in dismay, and displayed something like panic at its increasing influence. Some of the reviewers who admired my commentaries on particular texts claimed that I didn’t really need this theoretical apparatus and probably didn’t really believe in it. A young don at Oxford, Peter Conrad, went further and wrote an extraordinary tirade in the New Statesman accusing me of perpetrating ‘vengeful decreation’ on literature: ‘The nasty thrill with which Mr Lodge announces that he has reduced novels to figments of language “defamiliarising” (his word) the world we know and exterminating character, alerts us to the aggressive dislike o
f literature criticism of this kind often betrays … English empiricism, it seems from this book, has lost its nerve and … capitulated to the deconstructing, obfuscating hierarchs of what Mr Lodge calls the “nouvelle critique” … Things have come to a pretty pass.’ I wrote a letter to the New Statesman identifying five of his assertions about my book which were precisely opposite to the truth, and concluded: ‘Things have come to a pretty pass indeed, when something like this passes for a review.’ Peter Conrad did not reply.

  ‘Defamiliarising’ was of course not my word, but a term used by Viktor Shklovsky, one of the Russian Formalist critics who flourished in the 1920s, and was attributed to him in my book. It’s a translation of the Russian ostranenie, literally ‘making strange’. Shklovsky wrote:

  Habitualisation devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war … Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object as seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and duration of perception.

  This seems to me the best answer ever given to the question ‘What is the use of art?’, at least as far as the verbal and visual arts are concerned (music offers a different challenge to aesthetics). It was implicitly a defence of the radical innovations of modernism, but it applies to the great art, and the good art, of all periods.