The Motif Of Crisis In David Lodge's Fiction

David Lodge is a distinguished contemporary British novelist as well as a critic. His literary creation represents the literary tendency of the post-war British neo-realism and his literary criticism reflects the successive impact of New Criticism, structuralism and Bakhtin's theory of fiction on British critical circle. The study on his works will definitely promote our study of post-war British literature.Most previous studies of Lodge's works have focused on literary-theoretical issues, and seldom touched upon his inquiry about the religious and cultural conditions in contemporary western society. Many scholars have noted Lodge's preference for binary structure, parody, pastiche, and the dominant features of polyphony, dialogism and carnival spirit in his fiction, but most of them have failed to seek the ideological reasons for Lodge's paradoxical attitude in constructing his fiction with these artistic forms. To make up for such a blank in Lodge's study, this dissertation intends to explore Lodge's religious and humanist concerns manifested in his fiction by elaborating on the motif of crisis in some of his important works. This critical effort will not only contribute to a better understanding of Lodge's writing, but also help to shed light on the source of constant crises characteristic of modern Western culture, meanwhile providing a frame of reference for us to understand and respond to similar crises concomitant with the modernization and globalization of China.The 20th century is an age of crisis and the way Lodge dramatizes this situation rounds off our survey of his four representative works. As a man in possession of multi-identities– a Catholic, a novelist, a critic, as well as a university professor, Lodge has been deeply concerned with various crises in modern western society: crisis of religion, crisis of literature, crisis of literary criticism and crisis of higher education. Accordingly this dissertation will explore the motif of crisis from these four aspects within six chapters, of which the central thesis is rendered in four chapters between introduction and conclusion.The introduction provides a critical survey of David Lodge scholarship both at home and abroad on the basis of which the subject is put forward, the scope of the subject is clarified, the approaches to the study are explicated and the main contents of the research are explained. Chapter One deals with the motif of religious crisis that recurs in Lodge's Catholic novels, represented by How Far Can You Go?. After a general sketch of the development of modern Catholicism in the 20th century, around Vatican II in particular, the thesis engages in a detailed reading of the novel to illustrate Lodge's attempt of presenting a panoramic view of religious crisis and Catholic reformation in the post-war British society. Lodge's treatment of the subject is distinct from others, as the conflict between religious belief and practical life is invariably the common starting point of his Catholic fiction. Instead of producing high spiritual drama by focusing on the eternal struggle between body and soul, good and evil, sin and salvation, Lodge is more interested in the subculture of English Catholics and their dealings with the rest of the world, and the living predicaments that British Catholics confronted in the days before Vatican II, the practical effects of Vatican II on the individual, and the liberalism along with"fear and trembling"in the post-conciliar era. The sense of being in the Church and at the same time something of an outsider can be traced in the novel from the mixture of omniscient objective narration and explicit authorial intrusion, which implicitly demonstrates Lodge's religious identity as an"agnostic Catholic."Chapter Two covers the motif of literary crisis in Changing Places. With the descent of religion in human life that results in the loss of authority, the breakup of institutions, and the erosion of tradition, the art and the literature are expected to take over the religious role of sustaining and assembling the society so as to fill in the tremendous spiritual hollow resulting from the"dissipation of religious impulse."But with the death of God, can anything else survive? Crisis of religion is concomitant with the crisis of art and literature. Literature, especially the novel writing has encountered the challenge from modern media as well as the commercialization of culture. The viability of realism has been interrogated, the literature of exhaustion has been proposed, the idea that the novel is dead has had a great deal of currency. Lodge not only invests his profound thinking on these issues into his writing but also confronts these challenges with the practice and success of his fiction as"a novelist at the crossroads."Chapter Three, with the close reading of Small World, explores Lodge's serious concerns over the explosion of modern literary theory and his worries about its extreme development and unhealthy effect on literary studies. Apart from being a productive novelist, Lodge is an equally accomplished literary critic. He has endeavored to maintain a balance between his literary creation and literary criticism until he finds it hard to keep when modern theory has gone too far. Small World, his most popular campus novel, best illustrates the crisis of modern literary criticism in which literary studies are bombarded by proliferation of modern theory, critical activity becomes a pointless game of playfulness rather than the pursuit of truth, and industrious literary scholars turn into merry-making knights wandering the ways of the world in quest of glory and adventure. Under these circumstances, one cannot help wondering: does criticism have much of a future? Lodge advocates"critical pluralism"as"both a liberal humanist and a formalist"and his constructive attitude towards theory is to"work with"it as he does in Working with Structuralism. For Lodge, theory's reason for being is to help explain and clarify the individual text; therefore when theory wants to replace the individual text, even to engulf it in abstraction, his response is to"more or less"give it up.Chapter Four centers round the motif of higher education crisis in Nice Work, the last of Lodge's campus trilogy. As a teacher on campus for 27 years, Lodge has witnessed the prosperity of British education with Robins Report in the 1960s and the decline of British education with Thatcherism since the 1980s. Therefore, crisis of higher education is another recurring motif in his fiction. The effect of economic depression on education, the opposition and interaction between town and gown, the decline of humanities in higher education are all scrutinized in this novel from Lodge's perspective of both an insider and an outsider of a canonic institution.In the conclusion some explanations on the crisis of modern western civilization from the perspectives of some sociologists are provided. David Lodge, however, has dramatized the crises of western civilization in his fiction from a novelist's perspective. With the decline of religion, art and literature have become the"secular religion"to provide meaning for human existence with literary criticism as"theology"and university as"cathedral."Nevertheless, the Christian tradition is so bound up with Westerners'history and heritage that religious crisis leads to the crises of other facets of culture. Doubt on God entails doubt on the signification of Word and the"presentation crisis"of language, which in turn leads to crisis of literature and crisis of literary studies since both are engaged in language. Therefore, religious crisis, crisis of faith is the primary crisis and initiates all other crises.David Lodge's fiction has given full play to diverse crises characteristic of modern Western civilization. These crises very often present themselves as the conflict between two oppositions: Catholicism and hedonism, tradition and experiment, humanism and Deconstructionism, university and industry. It has been agreed that the dual/binary structure is really Lodge's preference; yet only when we find out the motif of crisis that connects all his fictions, can we understand his preference. He often claims himself as"a compromiser"and"a negotiator"because he holds"double consciousness"towards all these conflicts. Crisis of religion does not necessarily entail loss of faith; the novel may be dying, but we need not fear for the future; literary criticism did prosper a while with the hit of Theory, but how far can it go when it is indulgent in the intellectual playfulness and burdened with obscure jargons?; education should go out of"Ivory Tower"and interact with industry and society, but can it operate as an enterprise? In a word, Lodge's suggested solutions to the conflicts and crises are dialogue and communication, a slogan put forward much earlier by E. M. Forster: only connect! Upon the impulse of reformation and innovation, let's bear in mind Lodge's warning: You can go very far, but . . .