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

by Lodge, David

  “No thank you,” said Persse.

  “I’ll be on my way, then. Thanks guv’nor.”

  Awed by this display of wealth, Persse picked up the new arrival’s suitcase, a handsome leather affair with the vestiges of many labels on it, and carried it into the lobby of Lucas Hall. “Have you really and truly come all the way from London by taxi?” he said.

  “I had no choice. When I landed at Heathrow this morning they tell me that my connecting flight is cancelled, Rummidge airport is socked in by snow. They give me a railroad ticket instead. So I take a cab to the railroad station in London and they tell me the power lines for the trains to Rummidge are down. Great drama, the country paralysed, Rummidge cut off from the capital, everybody enjoying every minute of it, the porters can hardly contain their joy. When I said I’d take a cab all the way, they said I was crazy, tried to talk me out of it. ‘You’ll never get through,’ they said, ‘the motorways are covered in snowdrifts, there are people who have been trapped in their cars all night.’ So I go along the cab rank till I find a driver with the guts to give it a whirl, and what do we find when we get here? Two inches of melting snow. What a country!” He took off his deerstalker and held it at arm’s length. It was made from a hairy tweed, with a bold red check on a yellowy-brown background. “I bought this hat at Heathrow this morning,” he said. “The first thing I always seem to have to do when I arrive in England is buy myself a hat.”

  “It’s a fine hat,” said Persse.

  “You like it? Remind me to give it to you when I leave. I’m travelling on to warmer climes.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “You’re welcome. Now, where do I check in?”

  “There’s a list of rooms over here,” said Persse. “What’s your name?”

  “Morris Zapp.”

  “I’m sure I’ve heard that name before.”

  “I should hope so. What’s yours?”

  “Persse McGarrigle, from Limerick. Aren’t you giving a paper this afternoon?” he said. “‘Title to be announced’?”

  “Right, Percy. That’s why I strained every nerve to get here. Look at the bottom of the list. There are never many zees.”

  Persse looked. “It says here that you’re a non-resident.”

  “Ah, yeah, Philip Swallow said something about staying with him. How’s it going, the Conference?”

  “I can’t really say. I’ve never been to a conference before, so I’ve no standards of comparison.”

  “Is that right?” Morris Zapp regarded him with curiosity. “A conference virgin, huh? Where is everybody, by the way?”

  “They’re at a lecture.”

  “Which you cut? Well, you’ve learned the first rule of conferences, kid. Never go to lectures. Unless you’re giving one yourself, of course. Or I’m giving one,” he added reflectively. “I wouldn’t want to discourage you from hearing my paper this afternoon. I went over it last night in the plane, while the movie was showing, and I was pretty pleased with it. The movie was OK, too. What size of audience am I likely to get?”

  “Well, there are fifty-seven people at the conference, altogether,” Persse said.

  Professor Zapp nearly swallowed his cigar. “Fifty-seven? You must be joking. No? You’re not joking? You mean I’ve travelled six thousand miles to talk to fifty-seven people?”

  “Of course, not everybody goes to every lecture,” said Persse. “As you can see.”

  “Listen, do you know how many attend the American equivalent of this conference? Ten thousand. There were ten thousand people at the MLA in New York last December.”

  “I don’t think we have that many lecturers over here,” said Persse apologetically.

  “There must be more than fifty-seven,” growled Morris Zapp. “Where are they? I’ll tell you where. Most of them are holed up at home, decorating their living-rooms or weeding their gardens, and the few with two original ideas to rub together are off somewhere at conferences in warmer, more attractive places than this.” He looked around the lobby of Lucas Hall, at its cracked and dusty floor tiles, its walls of grimy untreated concrete, with disfavour. “Is there anywhere you can get a drink in this place?”

  “The bar will be opening soon in Martineau Hall,” said Persse.

  “Lead me to it.”

  “Have you really flown all the way from America for this conference, Professor Zapp?” Persse enquired, as they picked their way through the slush.

  “Not exactly. I was coming to Europe anyway—I’m on sabbatical this quarter. Philip Swallow heard I was coming over and asked me to take in his conference. So, to oblige an old friend, I said I would.”

  The bar in Martineau Hall was empty except for the barman, who watched their approach through a kind of chrome-plated portcullis that stretched from counter to ceiling.

  “Is this to keep you in, or us out?” quipped Morris Zapp, tapping the metal. “What’s yours, Percy? Guinness? A pint of Guinness, barman, and a large scotch on the rocks.”

  “We’re not open yet,” said the man. “Not till twelve-thirty.”

  “And have something yourself.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you sir,” said the barman, cranking the portcullis with alacrity. “I wouldn’t say no to a pint of bitter.”

  While he was drawing the draught Guinness, the other conferees, released from the second lecture of the morning, began to straggle in, Philip Swallow in the van. He strode up to Morris Zapp and wrung his hand.

  “Morris! It’s marvellous to see you after—how many years?”

  “Ten, Philip, ten years, though I hate to admit it. But you’re looking good. The beard is terrific. Was your hair always that colour?”

  Philip Swallow blushed. “I think it was starting to go grey in ’69. How did you get here in the end?”

  “That’ll be one pound fifty, sir,” said the barman.

  “By taxi,” said Morris Zapp. “Which reminds me: you owe me fifty pounds for the cab fare. Hey, what’s the matter, Philip? You’ve gone white.”

  “And the Conference has just gone into the red,” said Rupert Sutcliffe, with doleful satisfaction. “Hello, Zapp, I don’t suppose you remember me.”

  “Rupert! How could I ever forget that happy face? And here comes Bob Busby, right on cue,” said Morris Zapp, as a man with a less impressive beard than Philip Swallow’s cantered into the bar, a clipboard under his arm, keys and coins jingling in his pockets. Philip Swallow took him aside and urgent whispers were exchanged.

  “I’m afraid you’re landed with me as your chairman this afternoon, Zapp,” said Rupert Sutcliffe.

  “I’m honoured, Rupert.”

  “Have you, er, decided on a title?”

  “Yep. It’s called, ‘Textuality as Striptease.’”

  “Oh,” said Rupert Sutcliffe.

  “Does everybody know this young man, who kindly looked after me when I arrived?” said Morris Zapp. “Percy McGarrigle from Limerick.”

  Philip Swallow nodded perfunctorily at Persse and turned his attention back to the American. “Morris, we must get you a lapel badge so that everybody will know who you are.”

  “Don’t worry, if they don’t know already, I’ll tell them.”

  “When I said ‘Take a cab,’” said Bob Busby reproachfully to Morris Zapp, “I meant from Heathrow to Euston, not from London to Rummidge.”

  “Never mind that now,” said Philip Swallow impatiently. “It’s no use crying over spilt milk. Morris, where is your luggage? I thought you’d be more comfortable staying with us than in Hall.”

  “I think so too, now I’ve seen the hall,” said Morris Zapp.

  “Hilary is dying to see you,” said Swallow, leading him away.

  “Hmm. That should be an interesting reunion,” murmured Rupert Sutcliffe, peering at the departing pair over his glasses.

  “What?” Persse responded absently. He was looking out for Angelica.

  “Well, you see, about ten years ago those two were nominated for our exchange scheme w
ith Euphoria—in America, you know. Zapp came here for six months, and Swallow went to Euphoric State. Rumour has it that Zapp had an affair with Hilary Swallow, and Swallow with Mrs. Zapp.”

  “You don’t say so?” Persse was intrigued by this story, in spite of the distraction of seeing Angelica come into the bar with Robin Dempsey. He was talking to her with great animation, while she wore the slightly fixed smile of someone who is being sung at in a musical comedy.

  “Quite. ‘What a set,’ as Matthew Arnold said of the Shelley circle… Anyway, at the same time, Gordon Masters, our Head of Department, retired prematurely after a nervous breakdown—it was 1969, the year of the student revolution, a trying time for everybody—and Zapp was being mooted by some as his successor. One day, however, just when things were coming to a head, he and Hilary Swallow suddenly flew off to America together, and we really didn’t know which couple to expect back: Zapp and Hilary, Philip and Hilary, Philip and Mrs. Zapp, or both Zapps.”

  “What was Mrs. Zapp’s name?” said Persse.

  “I’ve forgotten,” said Rupert Sutcliffe. “Does it matter?”

  “I like to know names,” said Persse. “I can’t follow a story without them.”

  “Anyway, we never saw her. The Swallows returned together. We gathered they were going to give the marriage another chance.”

  “It seems to have worked.”

  “Mmm. Though in my opinion,” Sutcliffe said darkly, “the whole episode had a deplorable effect on Swallow’s character.”

  “Oh?”

  Sutcliffe nodded, but seemed disinclined to elaborate.

  “So then they gave Philip Swallow the chair?” said Persse.

  “Not then, oh goodness me, no. No, then we had Dalton, he came from Oxford, until three years ago. He was killed in a car accident. Then they appointed Swallow. Some people would have preferred me, I believe, but I’m getting too old for that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, surely not,” said Persse, because Rupert Sutcliffe seemed to hope he would.

  “I’ll say one thing,” Sutcliffe volunteered. “If they’d appointed me, they’d have had a Head of Department who stuck to his last, and wasn’t flying off here there and everywhere all the time.”

  “Travels a lot, does he—Professor Swallow?”

  “Lately he seems to be absent more often than he’s present.”

  Persse excused himself and pushed his way through the crowd at the bar to where Angelica was waiting for Dempsey to bring her a drink. “Hallo, how was the lecture?” he greeted her.

  “Boring. But there was an interesting discussion of structuralism afterwards.”

  “Again? You’ve really got to tell me what structuralism is all about. It’s a matter of urgency.”

  “Structuralism?” said Dempsey, coming up with a sherry for Angelica just in time to hear Persse’s plea, and all too eager to show off his expertise. “It all goes back to Saussure’s linguistics. The arbitrariness of the signifier. Language as a system of differences with no positive terms.”

  “Give me an example,” said Persse. “I can’t follow an argument without an example.”

  “Well, take the words dog and cat. There’s no absolute reason why the combined phonemes d-o-g should signify a quadruped that goes ‘woof woof’ rather one that goes ‘miaou.’ It’s a purely arbitrary relationship, and there’s no reason why English speakers shouldn’t decide that from tomorrow, d-o-g would signify ‘cat’ and c-a-t, ‘dog.’”

  “Wouldn’t it confuse the animals?” said Persse.

  “The animals would adjust in time, like everyone else,” said Dempsey. “We know this because the same animal is signified by different acoustic images in different natural languages. For instance, ‘dog’ is chien in French, Hund in German, cane in Italian, and so on. ‘Cat’ is chat, Katze, gatto, according to what part of the Common Market you happen to be in. And if we are to believe language rather than our ears, English dogs go ‘woof woof,’ French dogs go ‘wouah wouah,’ German dogs go ‘wau wau’ and Italian ones ‘baau baau.’”

  “Hallo, this sounds like a game of Animal Snap. Can anyone play?” said Philip Swallow. He had returned to the bar with Morris Zapp, now provided with a lapel badge. “Dempsey—you remember Morris of course?”

  “I was just explaining structuralism to this young man,” said Dempsey, when greetings had been exchanged. “But you never did have much time for linguistics, did you Swallow?”

  “Can’t say I did, no. I never could remember which came first, the morphemes or the phonemes. And one look at a tree-diagram makes my mind go blank.”

  “Or blanker,” said Dempsey with a sneer.

  An embarrassed silence ensued. It was broken by Angelica. “Actually,” she said meekly, “Jakobson cites the gradation of positive, comparative and superlative forms of the adjective as evidence that language is not a totally arbitrary system. For instance: blank, blanker, blankest. The more phonemes, the more emphasis. The same is true of other Indo-European languages, for instance Latin: vacuus, vacuior, vacuissimus. There does seem to be some iconic correlation between sound and sense across the boundaries of natural languages.”

  The four men gaped at her.

  “Who is this prodigy?” said Morris Zapp. “Won’t somebody introduce me?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Philip Swallow. “Miss Pabst—Professor Zapp.”

  “Morris, please,” said the American professor, extending his hand, and peering at Angelica’s lapel badge. “Glad to meet you Al.”

  “That was marvellous,” said Persse to Angelica, later, at lunch. “The way you put that Dempsey fellow in his place.”

  “I hope I wasn’t rude,” said Angelica. “Basically he’s right of course. Different languages divide up the world differently. For instance, this mutton we’re eating. In French there’s only one word for ‘sheep’ and ‘mutton’—mouton. So you can’t say ‘dead as mutton’ in French, you’d be saying ‘dead as a sheep,’ which would be absurd.”

  “I don’t know, this tastes more like dead sheep than mutton to me,” said Persse, pushing his plate aside. An overalled lady with bright yellow curls pushing a trolley piled high with plates of half-eaten food took it from the table. “Finished, love?” she said. “I don’t blame you. Not very nice, is it?”

  “Did you write your poem?” said Angelica.

  “I’ll let you read it tonight. You have to come to the top floor of Lucas Hall.”

  “Is that where your room is?”

  “No.”

  “Why then?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “A mystery.” Angelica smiled, wrinkling her nose. “I like a mystery.”

  “Ten o’clock on the top floor. The moon will be up by then.”

  “Are you sure this isn’t just an excuse for a romantic tryst?”

  “Well, you said your research topic was romance…”

  “And you thought you’d give me some more material? Alas, I’ve got too much already. I’ve read hundreds of romances. Classical romances and medieval romances, renaissance romances and modern romances. Heliodorus and Apuleius, Chrétien de Troyes and Malory, Ariosto and Spenser, Keats and Barbara Cartland. I don’t need any more data. What I need is a theory to explain it all.”

  “Theory?” Philip Swallow’s ears quivered under their silvery thatch, a few places further up the table. “That word brings out the Goering in me. When I hear it I reach for my revolver.”

  “Then you’re not going to like my lecture, Philip,” said Morris Zapp.

  …

  In the event, not many people did like Morris Zapp’s lecture, and several members of the audience walked out before he had finished. Rupert Sutcliffe, obliged as chairman to sit facing the audience, assumed an aspect of glazed impassivity, but by imperceptible degrees the corners of his mouth turned down at more and more acute angles and his spectacles slid further and further down his nose as the discourse proceeded. Morris Zapp delivered it striding up and down the platform with his note
s in one hand and a fat cigar in the other. “You see before you,” he began, “a man who once believed in the possibility of interpretation. That is, I thought that the goal of reading was to establish the meaning of texts. I used to be a Jane Austen man. I think I can say in all modesty I was the Jane Austen man. I wrote five books on Jane Austen, every one of which was trying to establish what her novels meant—and, naturally, to prove that no one had properly understood what they meant before. Then I began a commentary on the works of Jane Austen, the aim of which was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle—historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, structural, Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, existentialist, Christian, allegorical, ethical, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it. So that when each commentary was written, there would be nothing further to say about the novel in question.

  “Of course, I never finished it. The project was not so much Utopian as self-defeating. By that I don’t just mean that if successful it would have eventually put us all out of business. I mean that it couldn’t succeed because it isn’t possible, and it isn’t possible because of the nature of language itself, in which meaning is constantly being transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed.

  “To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. But every decoding is another encoding. If you say something to me I check that I have understood your message by saying it back to you in my own words, that is, different words from the ones you used, for if I repeat your own words exactly you will doubt whether I have really understood you. But if I use my words it follows that I have changed your meaning, however slightly; and even if I were, deviantly, to indicate my comprehension by repeating back to you your own unaltered words, that is no guarantee that I have duplicated your meaning in my head, because I bring a different experience of language, literature, and non-verbal reality to those words, therefore they mean something different to me from what they mean to you. And if you think I have not understood the meaning of your message, you do not simply repeat it in the same words, you try to explain it in different words, different from the ones you used originally; but then the it is no longer the it that you started with. And for that matter, you are not the you that you started with. Time has moved on since you opened your mouth to speak, the molecules in your body have changed, what you intended to say has been superseded by what you did say, and that has already become part of your personal history, imperfectly remembered. Conversation is like playing tennis with a ball made of Krazy Putty that keeps coming back over the net in a different shape.