by Lodge, David
How much should you tip? What’s the best way to get downtown from the airport? Can you understand the menu? Tip taxis ten per cent in Bangladesh, five per cent in Italy; in Mexico it is not necessary, and in Japan the driver will be positively insulted if you do. Narita airport is forty kilometres from downtown Tokyo. There is a fast electric train, but it stops short of the city centre—best take the limousine bus. The Greek word for bus stop is stasis. The Polish word for scrambled eggs is jajecznice, pronounced “yighyehchneetseh,” which is sort of onomatopoeic, if you can get your tongue round it. In Israel, breakfast eggs are served soft-boiled and cold—yuk. In Korea, they eat soup at breakfast. Also at lunch and dinner. In Norway they have dinner at four o’clock in the afternoon, in Spain at ten o’clock at night. In Tokyo the nightclubs close at 11:30 p.m., in Berlin they are only just beginning to open by then.
Oh, the amazing variety of langue and parole, food and custom, in the countries of the world! But almost equally amazing is the way a shared academic interest will overcome these differences. All over the world, in hotels, university residences and conference centres, in châteaux and villas and country houses, in capital cities and resort towns, beside lakes, among mountains, on the shores of seas cold and warm, people of every colour and nation are gathered together to discuss the novels of Thomas Hardy, or the problem plays of Shakespeare, or the postmodernist short story, or the poetics of Imagism. And, of course, not all the conferences that are going on this summer are concerned with English literature, not by any means. There are at the same time conferences in session on French medieval chansons and Spanish poetic drama of the sixteenth century and the German Sturm und Drang movement and Serbian folksongs; there are conferences on the dynasties of ancient Crete and the social history of the Scottish Highlands and the foreign policy of Bismarck and the sociology of sport and the economic controversy over monetarism; there are conferences on low-temperature physics and microbiology and oral pathology and quasars and catastrophe theory. Sometimes, when two conferences share the same accommodation, confusions occur: it has been known for a bibliographer specializing in the history of punctuation to sit through the first twenty minutes of a medical paper on “Malfunctions of the Colon” before he realized his mistake.
But, on the whole, academic subject groups are self-defining, exclusive entities. Each has its own jargon, pecking order, newsletter, professional association. The members probably meet only once a year—at a conference. Then, what a lot of hallos, howareyous, and whatareyouworkingons, over the drinks, over the meals, between lectures. Let’s have a drink, let’s have dinner, let’s have breakfast together. It’s this kind of informal contact, of course, that’s the real raison d’être of a conference, not the programme of papers and lectures which has ostensibly brought the participants together, but which most of them find intolerably tedious.
Each subject, and each conference devoted to it, is a world unto itself, but they cluster together in galaxies, so that an adept traveller in intellectual space (like, say, Morris Zapp) can hop from one to another, and appear in Amsterdam as a semiologist, in Zürich as a Joycean, and in Vienna as a narratologist. Being a native speaker of English helps, of course, because English has become the international language of literary theory, and theory is what unites all these and many other conferences. This summer the topic on everyone’s lips at every conference Morris attends is the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism, and who will get it. What kind of theory will be favoured—formalist, structuralist, Marxist or deconstructionist? Or will it go to some sloppily eclectic liberal humanist, or even to an antitheorist like Philip Swallow?
“Philip Swallow?” says Sy Gootblatt incredulously to Morris Zapp. It is the 15th of June, the eve of Bloomsday, halfway through the International James Joyce Symposium in Zürich, and they are standing at the bar of the crowded James Joyce Pub on Pelikanstrasse. It is a beautifully preserved, genuine Dublin pub, all dark mahogany, red plush and brass fittings, rescued from demolition at the hands of Irish property developers, transported in numbered parts to Switzerland, and lovingly reconstructed in the city where the author of Ulysses sat out the First World War, and died in the Second. Its ambience is totally authentic apart from the hygienic cleanliness of everything, especially the basement toilets where you could, if you were so inclined, eat your dinner off the tiled floors—very different from the foetid, slimy hellholes to be found at the bottom of such staircases in Dublin. “Philip Swallow?” says Sy Gootblatt. “You must be joking.” Sy is an old friend of Morris’s from Euphoric State, which he left some five years ago to go to Penn, switching his scholarly interests at the same time from Hooker to the more buoyant field of literary theory. He is good-looking in his slight, dark way, and a bit of a dandy, but small in stature; he keeps rising restlessly on the balls of his feet as if to see who is to be seen in the crowded room.
“I hope I’m joking,” says Morris, “but somebody sent me a cutting from a London paper the other day which says he’s being mentioned as an outsider candidate for the job.”
“What are the odds—nine million to one?” says Sy, who remembers Philip Swallow chiefly as the author of a parlour game called Humiliation, with which he wrecked one of his and Bella’s dinner parties many years ago. “He hasn’t published anything worth talking about, has he?”
“He’s having a huge success with a totally brainless book about Hazlitt,” says Morris, “Rudyard Parkinson gave it a rave review in the TLS. The British are on this great antitheory kick at the moment and Philip’s book just makes them roll onto their backs and wave their paws in the air.”
“But they tell me Arthur Kingfisher is advising UNESCO on this appointment,” says Sy Gootblatt. “And he’s surely not going to recommend that they appoint someone hostile to theory?”
“That’s what I keep telling myself,” says Morris. “But these old guys do funny things. Kingfisher doesn’t like to think that there is anyone around now who is as good as he used to be in his prime, and he might encourage the appointment of a schmo like Philip Swallow just to prove it.”
Sy Gootblatt drains his glass of Guinness and grimaces. “Jesus, I hate this stuff,” he says. “Shall we go someplace else? I found a bar on the other side of the river that sells Budweiser.”
Pocketing their James Joyce Pub beermats as souvenirs, they push their way to the door—a proceeding which takes some time, as every few paces one or the other of them bumps into someone he knows. Morris! Sy! Great to see you! How’s Bella? How’s DÉSIRÉE? Oh, I didn’t know. What are you working on these days? Let’s have a drink some time, let’s have dinner, let’s have breakfast. Eventually they are outside, on the sidewalk, in the mild evening. There are not many people about, but the streets have a safe, sedate air. The shop windows are brightly lit, filled with luxury goods to tempt the rich burghers of Zürich. The Swissair window has a copy display of dumpy little airplanes made out of white flower-heads, suspended from wires in the form of a mobile. They remind Morris of fancy wreaths. “A good name for the DC-10,” he observes, “The Flying Wreath.”
This black humour reflects his sombre mood. Things have not been going well for Morris lately. First there was the attack on his book by Rudyard Parkinson in the TLS. Then his paper did not go down at all well in Amsterdam. A claque of feminists, hired, he wouldn’t be surprised to learn, by his ex-wife, heckled him as he developed his analogy between interpretation and striptease, shouting “Cunts are beautiful!” when he delivered the line, “staring into that orifice we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest.” Young McGarrigle, to whom he might have looked for some support, or at least sympathy, in that crisis, had unaccountably disappeared from Amsterdam, leaving no message. Then there was this report that Philip Swallow was being considered for the UNESCO chair—preposterous, but seeing it in print somehow made it seem disturbingly plausible.
“Who sent you the cutting?” Sy asks.
Morris doesn’t know. In fact it was Howard Ringbaum, who sp
otted the item in the London Sunday Times and sent it anonymously to Morris Zapp, guessing correctly that it would cause him pain and anxiety. But who inspired the mention of Philip Swallow’s name in the newspaper? Very few people know that it was Jacques Textel, who had received from Rudyard Parkinson a copy of his review article, “The English School of Criticism,” together with a fawning covering letter, which Textel, irritated by Parkinson’s pompous complacency at Vancouver, had chosen to misinterpret as expressing Parkinson’s interest in promoting Philip Swallow’s candidacy for the UNESCO chair rather than his own. It was Textel who had leaked Philip’s name to his British son-in-law, a journalist on the Sunday Times, over lunch in the splendid sixth-floor restaurant at the Place Fontenoy; and the son-in-law, who had been ordered to write a special feature on “The Renaissance of the Redbrick University” and was rather short of facts to support this proposition, had devoted a whole paragraph of his article to the Rummidge professor whose recent book had caused such a stir and whose name was being mentioned in connection with the recently mooted UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism—causing Rudyard Parkinson to choke on his kedgeree when he opened that particular issue of the Sunday Times in the Fellows’ breakfast-room at All Saints.
Morris and Sy walk across the bridge over the Limmat. The bar that Sy discovered at lunchtime turns out to be in the middle of the red light quarter at night-time. Licenced prostitutes stand on the street corners, one per corner, in the methodical Swiss way. Each is dressed and made up in an almost theatrical fashion, to cater for different tastes. Here you have the classic whore, in short red skirt, black net stockings and high heels; there, a wholesome Tyrolean girl in dirndl skirt and embroidered bodice; and further on, a kinky model in a skin-tight leather jump suit. All look immaculately clean and polished, like the toilets of the James Joyce Pub. Sy Gootblatt, whose wife Bella is visiting her mother in Maine at this time, eyes these women with covert curiosity. “How much do you think they charge?” he murmurs to Morris.
“Are you crazy? Nobody pays to get laid at a conference.”
Morris has a point. It’s not surprising, when you reflect: men and women with interests in common—more than most of them have with their spouses—thrown together in exotic surroundings, far from home. For a week or two they are off the leash of domesticity, living a life of unwonted self-indulgence, dropping their towels on the bathroom floor for the hotel maid to pick up, eating in restaurants, drinking in outdoor cafés late into the summer nights, inhaling the aromas of coffee and caporals and cognac and bougainvillea. They are tired, overexcited, a little drunk, reluctant to break up the party and retire to solitary sleep. After a lifetime of repressing and sublimating libido in the interests of intellectual labour, they seem to have stumbled on that paradise envisioned by the poet Yeats:
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
The soul is pleasured in the lecture theatre and seminar room, and the body in restaurants and night clubs. There need be, apparently, no conflict of interests. You can go on talking shop, about phonetics, or deconstruction, or the pastoral elegy or sprung rhythm, while you are eating and drinking and dancing or even swimming. Academics do amazing things under the shock of this discovery, things their spouses and colleagues back home would not believe: twist the night away in discothèques, sing themselves hoarse in beer cellars, dance on café tables with flowers gripped in their teeth, go midnight bathing in the nude, patronize fairgrounds and ride the giant roller-coasters, shrieking and clutching each other as they swoop down the shining rails, whheeeeeeeeeeeee! No wonder they quite often end up in each other’s beds. They are recovering the youth they thought they had sacrificed to learning, they are proving to themselves that they are not dryasdust swots after all, but living, breathing, palpitating human beings, with warm flesh and blood, that stirs and secretes and throbs at a lover’s touch. Afterwards, when they are back home, and friends and family ask if they enjoyed the conference, they say, oh yes, but not so much for the papers, which were pretty boring, as for the informal contacts one makes on these occasions.
Of course, these conference affairs are not without their incidental embarrassments. You may, for instance, be sexually attracted to someone whose scholarly work you professionally disapprove of. At the Vienna conference on Narrative, some weeks after the James Joyce Symposium in Zürich, Fulvia Morgana and Sy Gootblatt find themselves in the same crowd in a wine cellar in Michaelerplatz one evening, catching each other’s eyes with increasing frequency across the scored and stained trestle table, as the white wine flows. At a convenient opportunity, Sy slides onto the bench beside Fulvia and introduces himself. In the din of the crowded cellar he only catches her first name, but that is all he needs. Their friendship ripens rapidly. Fulvia is staying at the Bristol, Sy at the Kaiserin Elisabeth. The Bristol having the more stars, they spend the night together there. Not till morning, after a very demanding night, which made Sy think wistfully of the Zürich whores (at least with them you could presumably call the plays yourself) does Sy get hold of Fulvia’s second name and identify her as the raving Marxist poststructuralist whose essay on the stream-of-consciousness novel as an instrument of bourgeois hegemony (oppressing the working classes with books they couldn’t understand) he has rubbished in a review due to appear in the next issue of Novel. Sy spends the rest of the conference sheepishly escorting Fulvia around the Ring, dodging into cafés whenever he sees anyone he knows, and nodding solemnly at Fulvia while she holds forth about the necessity of revolution with her mouth full of Sachertorte.
At Heidelberg, DÉSIRÉE Zapp and Ronald Frobisher find adultery virtually thrust upon them by the social dynamics of the conference on Rezeptionsästhetik. The only two creative writers present, they find themselves constantly together, partly by mutual choice, since they both feel intimidated by the literary critical jargon of their hosts, which they both think is probably nonsense, but cannot be quite sure, since they do not fully understand it, and anyway they can hardly say so to the faces of those who are paying their expenses, so it is a relief to say so to each other; and partly because the academics, privately bored and disappointed by the contributions of DÉSIRÉE Zapp and Ronald Frobisher to the conference, increasingly leave them to amuse each other. Siegfried von Turpitz, who invited them both, and might have been expected to concern himself with their entertainment, decided early on that the conference was a failure and after a couple of days discovered that he had urgent business in another European city. So DÉSIRÉE and Ronald find themselves frequently alone together, walking and talking, walking along the Philosophenweg above the Neckar or rambling through the gardens and on the battlements of the ruined castle, and talking, as professional writers will talk to each other, about money and publishers and agents and sales and subsidiary rights and being blocked. And although not irresistibly attracted to each other, they are not exactly unattracted either, and neither wishes to appear in the eyes of the other timidly afraid of sexual adventure. Each has read the other’s work in advance of meeting at the conference, and each has been impressed by the forceful and vivid descriptions of sexual intercourse to be found in those texts, and their common assumption that any encounter between a man and a woman not positively repelled by each other will end up sooner or later in bed. In short, each has attributed to the other a degree of libidinous appetite and experience that is in fact greatly exaggerated, and this mutual misapprehension nudges them closer and closer towards intimacy; until one warm night, a little tipsy after a good dinner at the Weinstube Schloss Heidelberg, with its terrace right inside the courtyard of the floodlit castle, as they totter down the cobbled hill together towards the baroque roofs of the old town, Ronald Frobisher stops in the shadow of an ancient wall, enfolds DÉSIRÉE in his arms and kisses her.
Then of course there is no way of not going to bed together. Both
know the inevitable conclusion of a narrative sequence that begins thus—to draw back from it would imply frigidity or impotence. There is only one consideration that cools Ronald Frobisher’s ardour as he lies naked under the sheets of DÉSIRÉE’s hotel bed and waits for her to emerge from the bathroom, and it is not loyalty to Irma (Irma went off sex some years ago, following her hysterectomy, and has intimated that she has no objection to Ronald seeking carnal satisfaction elsewhere, providing it is nothing deeply emotional, and she and her friends never hear about it). Unknown to Ronald, an identical thought is troubling DÉSIRÉE as she disrobes in the bathroom, performs her ablutions and fits her diaphragm (she has ideological and medical objections to the Pill). Getting into bed beside Ronald in the darkened room, she does not immediately turn to him, nor he to her. They lie on their backs, silent and thoughtful. DÉSIRÉE decides to broach the matter, and Ronald clears his throat preparatory to doing the same.
“What were you going to say?”
“No, please—you first.”
“I was going to say,” says DÉSIRÉE, in the darkness, “that before we go any further, perhaps we ought to come to an understanding.”
“Yes!” says Ronald, eagerly, then changes his intonation to the interrogative: “Yes?”
“What I mean is…” DÉSIRÉE stops. “It’s difficult to say without sounding as if I don’t trust you.”
“It’s only natural,” says Ronald. “I feel just the same.”
“You mean, you don’t trust me?”
“I mean there’s something I might say to you which might imply that I didn’t trust you.”