by David Lodge
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace – all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men – good! but thanked
Somehow – I know not how – as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech – which I have not – to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, ‘Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark’ – and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse –
E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
For the Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up – Hommage to David Lodge
by Philippine Hamen
The way that a reader can react to a story he read, and loved, can take different forms: in this case, it is a piece of furniture. For the Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up is a response addressed to the eponymous short story, and thanks to the enthusiastic initiative of David Lodge, this collaboration between literature and design has resulted in an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery of Birmingham, and in a new edition of the very book in which I encountered the story.
‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up’ tells the story of a man who is tired of life, tired of getting up every morning to live the same day indefinitely, and who one morning simply refuses to get up, after he realises that he ‘only loves this: lying in bed’. The hero, or rather anti-hero, eventually executes his plan, which is to stay in bed. He becomes a local but ephemeral celebrity, and when after months, or years, he finally wants to get out from his bed, it is too late: he is now too weak to get up.
The story had such a vivid impact on my imagination, and I could relate so well to the fictional man who wouldn’t get up, that it fed me with the desire to create a piece tailor-made for this character, who lies secretly inside each of us, and to overcome the lack in the furniture landscape of a surface from which one can read or work while comfortably lying down, equidistant between a bed, a chair and a desk. For the Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up is thus a hybrid piece of furniture, of a new type: a lounger cantilevered upon a desk. This ‘lounger desk’ (it needs a neologism) provides an appropriate ergonomic structure and uses the principle of the ‘face hole’, featured usually in massage tables, to allow the user to read or work lying face down, enabling him to ‘stay in bed’ and ‘be at the office’ simultaneously.
The lounger desk questions the long-held association of verticality with the activity of work, whereas horizontality is mostly associated with idleness, perceived in a very negative way by our capitalist societies which sacralise hard work. In that regard, ‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up’ could be seen as the visionary model of the anti-hero produced by service sector society. The temptation to stay in bed when we have to go to work or to school is universal; a miniature rebellion against the hyper-productive ideal of our system; a regressive drive to remain in a safe, warm, womb-like environment; but spoiled either by the resolution to get up or by guilt about not doing so. The lounger desk would be a solution to this dilemma as it aims to reconcile within a unique space the work sphere and the domestic sphere, the desk and the bed; and could be an artefactual response to French surrealist poet André Breton, who exhorted us to ‘overcome the depressing idea of the irreparable divorce between action and dream’ (Les Vases communicants, 1932).
For the Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up might be seen as a utopian piece of furniture, but it is a serious ergonomic response to the postural problems that our service sector society, coupled with the domination of the chair/desk, has generated. In a typical Western lifestyle, most of us spend daily, like the hero of this fiction, ‘eight hours’ drudgery in a poky office’, most of these hours spent sitting down, and mostly in a bad posture. Lower back pain, acute and chronic, along with many other disorders, is the natural consequence of bad posture, and one of the main reasons for absence from work.
The human spine is designed specifically to support the standing-up posture of man, not to sit down at 90 degrees. When we sit down on a chair, several things happen: the back and abdominal muscles that support the trunk relax, so in order to compensate for stability and to fight gravity, we soon get into a slouching posture, where lumbar lordosis (concave) flattens or even reverses into kyphosis (convex), but constantly keeping an ‘ideal’ upright posture to maintain the spinal curves would be very tiring for the back and shoulder muscles. Because, when we sit, most of our body weight rests on our two small sitting bones, we have to keep shifting from one side to the other to relieve pressure, resulting in an asymmetry of the spine. Lastly, when sitting down, our blood flow tends to be compressed by the thighs and to accumulate in the lower part of the legs, making us constantly fidget to avoid swollen legs. As we see, we have become very good at compensating for the shortcomings of the chair, which even the thickest upholstery can barely counterbalance, instead of questioning the validity of the archetype.
The design of the lounger desk is an attempt to solve these shortcomings. Its horizontality allows an even distribution of the body weight, stability is assured simply by gravity, the curvatures of the spine are respected (the angle of the chair, at 142 degrees, is approximately the same as that of the spine), and finally, the elevation of the feet prevents the blood from accumulating there. Just as on a massage table, we can lie prone and symmetrically, and while through the hole we can read a document placed on the ‘desk’ part, the arms hanging on each side at a comfortable angle, the hands resting, we can turn pages, write or type. If the purpose of sitting is to relax those muscles that are not involved in the task, then the lounger desk performs this function better than the classic chair. Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect chair, or a perfect posture, because we need to keep moving, otherwise we might end up like The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up!
For the Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up may be the bizarre fruit of a wonderful winter tale, full of poetry and dark humour, and of pragmatic, down-to-earth ergonomic considerations – but beyond that, as the subtitle ‘Hommage to David Lodge’ indicates, it is a tribute to the man behind the story, who had such an important effect on me as both reader and designer.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473546332
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Copyright © David Lodge 2016
Copyright © Philippine Hamen 2016
David Lodge has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Vintage in 2016
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784704681