David Lodge Thinks ...

In 1960, shortly before assuming a temporary post in the English department

ALSO SEE: Comedy and Criticism: the Books of David Lodge

at the University of Birmingham, David Lodge published a novel, The Picturegoers. He was 25 years old. One critic said that his novel revealed "unlimited potential." Another said that the young author had "enough material for a half a dozen books, and I have no doubt that Mr. Lodge will write them all and more."

And indeed he did. His academic novels alone -- the sometimes exhaustingly funny trilogy Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work -- now read like an epic documentary of the changes in academe over the past few decades. His work has appeared in some two dozen languages.

All this was beyond Mr. Lodge's imagining in 1960, for his immediate circumstances were pressing. A young author and fledgling literary scholar, he was also a newly married man and a recent father. More children were more or less inevitable, since Mr. Lodge and his wife were both young Roman Catholics with more faith than rhythm. Seated in his London apartment today, Mr. Lodge, now an emeritus professor at Birmingham, recalls the financial rewards of that first novel with a wry expression. The publisher gave him an advance of 75 pounds, paid in three installments.

"Like anyone else writing serious fiction in those days," he says, "I had no thought at all of great fame or fortune to be made. I don't recall ever being asked to give an interview during the first 20 years that I was publishing. Things started to change in the 1980s. After that, a young novelist might also be asked to do high-profile journalism, media appearances, and readings in bookstores, and so on."

That shift in literary economics has not left Mr. Lodge untouched. His new volume of essays, Consciousness and the Novel (Harvard University Press) is prominently displayed in nonacademic bookstores in the United States. It opens with a series of lectures Mr. Lodge gave last year at Emory University on the literary implications of "consciousness studies" -- the interdisciplinary zone where scientists and philosophers puzzle through the relation between circuitry (whether electronic or neurobiological) and awareness. Mr. Lodge's interest in the field also shaped his 12th and most recent novel, Thinks ... , which was an international best seller.

His gift for crafting well-made narratives that are infused with serious intellectual concerns -- often with pointed satirical implications -- has made Mr. Lodge perhaps the most popular novelist of ideas writing in the English language. Readers of the paperback edition of Thinks ... , appearing early this fall, will be provided with a set of questions for reading groups such as "Does the novel endorse Helen's belief that the privacy of our thoughts is essential to selfhood and civilization? Are Helen's actions consistent with her belief in privacy?" Even without such helpful prompting, philosophers and literary critics have long discussed his work with admiration.

"I like to think my books are for students of all ages and all kinds, formal and informal," he says.

'A Curious Game'

Well before Mr. Lodge mentions that he is at work on a new novel, a very definite impression forms within the privacy of my own selfhood: David Lodge would rather be writing his new book than talking to a reporter. His manner is neither shy nor aloof. On the contrary, he seems good-natured. But it is the geniality of someone who prefers to maintain control over the demands made on his mental energy. He spends much of the interview with arms crossed, making his already compact figure seem that much more like a tight knot of concentration. He does not so much sit in his chair as sink into it.

A passage from the essay on Charles Dickens in Consciousness and the Novel comes to mind. "He was lionised, feted, royally entertained, and at first delighted by all the attention," Mr. Lodge writes of the author's 1842 visit to the United States. "But soon the relentless glare of publicity, the intrusiveness of American journalists, and the impossibility of securing any peace and privacy for himself and his wife ... became too much."

Mr. Lodge has asked me not to reveal the location of his flat in London, nor to describe its interior -- precisely the quasi-novelistic details that any "intrusive American journalist" would normally use as a kind of shorthand to convey an individual's character. Like any author, Mr. Lodge is happy to be reaching an audience. (It should be no violation of trust to mention that his neighborhood in London implies decent royalty statements.) But he is anxious to subvert the false intimacies of celebrity. These entail (as he writes in the new book) "a certain collaboration and complicity on the part of the subject. It can bring great rewards and personal satisfactions -- but at a cost, a kind of commodification of the self."

He calls the interaction between author and reader "a curious game," one in which each side tries to rewrite the rules. "The fiction writer produces a version of experience, and wants the reader to enter into the illusion," he says. "And the reader thinks that there must be a reality behind that, if only they could get to it. So the writer finds ways to mask or disguise the empirical sources."

And the relation between life and fiction can grow even more complicated. "By the time the work is finished," Mr. Lodge continues, "the novelist doesn't necessarily know himself, or herself, what is real and what isn't."

Over the years, in essays and introductions to his own novels, Mr. Lodge has limned at least some of the autobiographical context of his own work. He grew up in "a drab 19th-century London suburb, mainly lower middle class and working class in social composition." His mother was a Catholic; his father "a 'non-Catholic,' as one said in those circles, implying that there was no positive form of faith outside the One True Church."

He received his B.A. from the University of London in 1955, and did two years of obligatory military service before returning to studies at his alma mater. His social and religious background placed him well outside the Oxbridge graduates who dominated the commanding heights of British literary life. But the 1950s were a good era for young writers born without a silver spoon. Fostered by the postwar Labor government's reforms that increased access to higher education, a literary current sometimes called "the Movement" (more popularly known as the Angry Young Men) had emerged. Writing in a style at once plain-spoken and bitterly ironic, authors such as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin declared war on pretentiousness and snobbery. Mr. Lodge read Amis's novel Lucky Jim as a student. "It wasn't out in paperback, so you had to read it in the university library, since you could never afford to buy it," he says.

He also recalls attending the lectures of Winifred Nowottny at the University of London, later published as The Language Poets Use (Oxford University Press, 1962), which introduced him to what was then called the New Criticism -- an approach emphasizing careful attention to the formal elements of literature. "Most of the New Critical work was focused on poetry and poetic drama," he says. "I was always more interested in the novel, both as a reader and as a potential writer, so I tried bringing the same kind of close stylistic scrutiny to prose fiction."

His early essays, while scholarly, were also partisan. Taking a New Critical approach to fiction was, he says, "in part an attempt to get away from the influence of F.R. Leavis and his school, which was very powerful in those days." An insightful but also sternly moralistic critic, Leavis had a very clear sense of which English writers were truly important -- and he dismissed many of Mr. Lodge's own influences, such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. The author of Lucky Jim was beneath Leavis's contempt. "His only comment on Amis was to describe him as a pornographer," Mr. Lodge says.

Besides running interference around the Leavisites, Mr. Lodge kept writing his own fiction. He was committed to literary realism, in which prose sought to mirror ordinary life -- in his case, the world of the lower middle class in which he had grown up. But as he became friends with Malcolm Bradbury -- a colleague at Birmingham and the author of Eating People Is Wrong (1959), a satire of academic life -- Mr. Lodge's fiction began to change.

His sense of humor, previously subdued, came to the fore in The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965). In it, Adam and Barbara, a couple in their 20s, have already had three children as Adam has been struggling to finish his dissertation on the Catholic novel in Britain. (Apparently he is unaware that David Lodge had already submitted one on that topic, well before becoming the father of three children). They can just barely make ends meet -- and then Barbara's period is late. As a day in Adam's life unfolds, the style shifts into deft parodies of Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, and other authors. The novel closes with a Joycean stream of consciousness from Barbara -- who proves rather more ambivalent about sex than Molly Bloom, for understandable reasons.

The New World

Mr. Lodge's criticism from the 1960s reveals a keen interest in authors such as Norman Mailer, John Barth, and William S. Burroughs, who went beyond the limits of the realistic novel. "In those days," he says, "American fiction seemed more adventurous in form than the British novel, though I daresay that situation may have changed since then." Besides reading American writers, Mr. Lodge and his family spent two periods in the United States, first at Brown University in 1964-65 and then at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969.

"Englishmen who came of age since World War II," he wrote in 1968, "have increasingly gone to America to discover themselves." Any epiphanies he reached while in the United States were well-timed. His visits coincided with the earliest effects of the Vatican II reforms within the church, and the first stirrings of Theory within English departments. And he was present during the battle between radical students and campus authorities over the "People's Park" at Berkeley.

It would take a few years for Mr. Lodge to give the experience literary expression. For one thing, he was busy absorbing the latest critical ideas. As a practicing novelist, Mr. Lodge had reason to be dubious about, say, Roland Barthes's declaration of "The Death of the Author." But he made an enthusiastic, if not undiscriminating, convert to structuralist poetics -- leaving behind his earlier New Critical focus on style, and taking up the models developed by French and Russian thinkers who showed that other elements of literature (such as narrative and character) could also be understood to possess their own grammar and syntax.

Then, beginning with Changing Places and continuing throughout what became the trilogy, Mr. Lodge found a way to turn the structuralist concept of binary opposition into fiction that was subtle yet boisterous. From novel to novel, a not-very-distinguished British academic named Philip Swallow repeatedly crosses paths with his alter ego: the rather more aggressive American academic Morris Zapp, a professor of literature from the State University of Euphoria. (To the long-circulating rumor that Zapp is based on Stanley Fish, Mr. Lodge responds, "Well, Stanley could play him in a movie.")

In the 1960s, Zapp tried to write a study of Jane Austen's fiction that would deploy every conceivable critical approach; when he was done, no other scholar would ever be able to publish another book on her novels. But by 1979 -- when he delivers his influential paper "Textuality as Striptease" at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association -- Zapp is a cutting-edge deconstructionist.

"Meaning is constantly being transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed," he says, which may explain why he could never finish the Austen book.

Meanwhile, Swallow rises -- almost in spite of himself -- to the top of the English department at the University of Rummidge. By the late 1980s, we see him as a beleaguered administrator, struggling with the budget cuts of Mrs. Thatcher while also losing his hearing. (Autobiographical subtext alert: When asked about his retirement from Birmingham in 1987, the author replies, "I was getting deaf, which made teaching more difficult. I also felt the quality of life in universities was deteriorating, due to Thatcherite policies.")

While compulsively readable -- they are books you put down only long enough to stop laughing -- Mr. Lodge's novels also offer a moral critique of recent literary scholarship. So argues Kenneth Womack, an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at Altoona, who devotes a chapter to the trilogy in his study Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community (Palgrave, 2002).

"You see it even in the title of Small World, with its suggestion that the interests of the people attending these international scholarly conferences are, in reality, small, small-minded," says Mr. Womack. He also points to the character of Kingfisher in Small World: a distinguished literary theorist who sits around his apartment in a Chicago skyscraper reading the latest critical quarterlies while watching pornography on television with a female graduate student. "He has the privilege to be able to do such things -- or not do them, I guess, since Kingfisher is impotent and can no longer write. But it's a hollow privilege, with no end to it outside itself."

Mr. Womack's interpretation seems to echo the remarks that the novelist himself makes in conversation. "For a couple of decades," Mr. Lodge recalls, "it was quite intellectually exciting -- the traditionalists slugging it out with the structuralists, and then with the poststructuralists. If you had a stake in the field, this was all intensely stimulating, but after a while it started to pale."

He put it more forcefully in 1980. "As an academic critic and university teacher specializing in modern literature and literary theory," Mr. Lodge wrote, "I spend much of my time these days reading books and articles that I can barely understand and that cause my wife (a graduate with a good honors degree in English language and literature) to utter loud cries of pain and nausea if her eyes happen to fall upon them."

Stories in Mind

Robyn Penrose -- the lecturer in English who appears in Nice Work, the last of the Rummidge novels -- embodies Mr. Lodge's sense of the plight of the literary scholar in the wake of the high tide of theory. She is young, bright, and soon-to-be-unemployed; and her clear understanding that romantic love is yet another discursive construct doesn't mean that her relationships are any less complicated and painful.

She also turns out -- surprisingly enough, even to her creator -- to have made the introductions between Mr. Lodge and researchers in the field of consciousness studies.

Daniel C. Dennett, the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, had been a fan of Mr. Lodge's fiction for many years. Having done his graduate work in philosophy at Oxford and then taken his first teaching appointment at the University of California at Irvine, Mr. Lodge's transatlantic contrasts between Rummidge and Euphoric State, "just sang to me," he says.

In Nice Work, Mr. Dennett came across a passage that riveted his attention. It reads: "According to Robyn (or, more precisely, according to the writers who have influenced her thinking on these matters), there is no such thing as the 'self' on which capitalism and the classic novel are founded -- that is to say, a fine, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person's identity; there is only a subject-position in an infinite web of discourses. ... There are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our 'selves' in language."

Mr. Dennett works in an area sometimes called "philosophy of mind" -- a specialty devoted to clarifying just what "mind" refers to (if anything), whether it may be distinguished from the brain, and how it is that we "know" when another entity "has" a mind. Few people in literature departments are familiar with such basic works in the field as Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind; and Mr. Dennett, for his part, was no enthusiast for poststructuralism.

He was astonished to find that he had something in common with Robyn Penrose. "I was struck by the fact that the character had a theory very similar to mine," says Mr. Dennett. "She was coming at it as a deconstructionist, and that was the last thing I saw myself as being, so it was amusing to see this convergence from two radically different perspectives."

Drawing upon work in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cybernetics, Mr. Dennett has furthered the critique of what Ryle dubbed "the ghost in the machine" -- the instinctive feeling that the mind and matter are different "stuff" (with our awareness seemingly lodged within the body, just behind the eyeballs perhaps). His work leaves as little room for a "unique soul or essence that constitutes a person's identity" as Robyn Penrose does. The notion of "self" is, he argues, one of the interesting effects of really complex brains.

In Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown and Company, 1991), Mr. Dennett quoted the passage from Nice Work with approval. "Robyn and I think alike," he added, "and of course we are both, by our own accounts, fictional characters of a sort, though of a slightly different sort." A few years later -- while reading The Tablet, an English Catholic weekly -- Mr. Lodge came across an article discussing Mr. Dennett's book and other recent work on the problem of consciousness.

He started reading not only Mr. Dennett's work in the philosophy of mind, but accounts of research in the fields of artificial intelligence and the study of the brain.

His explorations seemed to bring him to familiar ground. "Quite a substantial number of scientists see consciousness as crucially narrative in the way it works," he says. "They use literary analogies to describe how we generate and utter thoughts, how we create a sense of personal identity." He cites the work of Antonio Damasio, a professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, who describes storytelling as "a brain obsession" -- something that organisms do automatically, and all the time, as they interact with their environment. Mr. Dennett had made the same argument: "The brain spins a narrative," he says, "and that's what creates the self."

In Thinks ... , Mr. Lodge (or at least some element of his neurosystem) has transformed these ideas into a work of fiction, narrated by two very dissimilar organisms. Ralph Messenger, a scientist, is the director of a laboratory on cognitive science at the (imaginary) University of Gloucester. His research is pushing him to account for one of the most distinctive things about human awareness: its puzzling combination of spontaneity and order, the quicksilvery way our thoughts seem to break up and flow back together. Helen Reed, a recently widowed novelist who arrives on the campus to teach creative writing, ends up fascinated by consciousness studies -- and horrified by how coldly it discards familiar notions about the inner lives of human beings. (Her passionate ambivalence attaches, in due course, to Messenger himself.)

"I enjoyed it a lot," Mr. Dennett says of the novel -- adding, frankly, "I had expected to find it horrible. What's fascinating is that [Mr. Lodge] articulates the discomfort, the anxiety, that I have been feeling for years. There's a queasiness that people feel as they see the march of science into the brain and the mind, a fear that we'll be swallowed up and turned into robots."

The Supreme Fiction

Cognitive science and deconstructive theory may offer "a formidable challenge to the idea of human nature on which most literary fiction is based," writes Mr. Lodge in Consciousness and the Novel. The notion of "the autonomous human self is not universal, eternally given, and valid for all time and all places. That doesn't, however, necessarily mean that it isn't a good idea, or that its time has passed. A great deal of what we value in civilized life depends upon it."

He sounds, in short, like an old-fashioned literary humanist. And that is very much in keeping with the interpretation of his development offered by Bárbara Arizti, a professor of English literature at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. In Textuality as Striptease: The Discourses of Intimacy in David Lodge's "Changing Places" and "Small World" (Peter Lang, 2002), Ms. Arizti argues that the novelist has drifted from an openness to oppositional ideas in the late 1960s to a neoconservative position.

She points to the contrast between the first two volumes of his trilogy. In Changing Places, Swallow and Zapp end up swapping both lives and wives; the resulting transformation in intimate relations (and personal identities) is presented as a good thing. "But Small World ends with a kind of celebration of traditional marriage, a party where estranged couples are reconciled and new marriages announced." She argues that his later works are "affected by discourses that try to contain the counterculture and the sexual revolution." He longs for "a return to a fictional world free from the excesses of both theory and experiment." Mr. Lodge indicates that he looks forward to adding Ms. Arizti's volume to his collection of critical studies of his fiction, but that he does not read such books himself.

Whatever his ideological commitments may be, it is clear that Mr. Lodge is equally troubled by the excesses of media and market. Some essays in Consciousness and the Novel reflect his concern with how literary work may be threatened by the contemporary blurring of lines between public and private life.

A few years ago, a British journalist asked Mr. Lodge just how much firsthand experience went into the stories of extramarital adventure in his fiction. The novelist replied that he had always been faithful to his wife. In an essay, he once wrote that he had covered the struggle for sexual liberation "as a war correspondent, never a combatant."

Given Mr. Lodge's demeanor, it is easy to imagine just how irritating the reporter's question must have been. (In 1999, he published a short novel, Home Truths, in which a publicity-shy author plots an elaborate revenge scenario against a London columnist known for her intrusive and vicious profiles.) But he also makes clear that the novelist's effort to portray the workings of a character's consciousness always leaves open the possibility of confusion.

"Writers have developed all sorts of techniques -- pastiche and parody, metafictional games, jokes, intertextual references and all that -- in an attempt to make the reader receive fiction as something with its own imaginative life, rather than as documenting the real experience of the author," he says.

Totally Seduced

"I can see where he might chafe against his own success," says Richard Powers, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "But what's always struck me about [his work] is that it's not a subversion of realism but a triumph of realism."

In 1995, Mr. Powers published Galatea 2.2, a novel in which the narrator helps program a computer to read and understand literature, then falls in love with his creation. (Mr. Lodge discusses the book in Consciousness and the Novel; he indicates he is glad not to have read it when it came out, since he might have been discouraged from writing Thinks ... .) Where Mr. Lodge sees metafictional devices as a way to differentiate between the novel and its author, Mr. Powers has experimented with collapsing that distinction. The narrator of Galatea 2.2 is a fictional character named Richard Powers.

"What's lovely about David Lodge's fiction, from my point of view, is that it refutes the longstanding bias that the novel of ideas and the novel of character are somehow inimical," says Mr. Powers. "It's quite obvious when you're finished that these books are being driven by strong intellectual schemas. When you're in the reading experience, though, there's such a density at the character-eye level that you're totally seduced." With Mr. Lodge, he says, "Voiced idea is character by another name."

That leaves an interesting question in the air concerning the relation of idea and character in the case of Mr. Lodge himself. Some of his fiction has reflected, if not documented, a drift away from the religious faith he grew up within. He has called himself "a Catholic agnostic." How much of his interest in consciousness emerges from the ambivalence implied by that paradox? Does he think there is a ghost in the machine, after all?

"I'm no longer a totally convinced transcendental believer," he replies in a telephone interview. "But I find it interesting that in all kinds of contexts people still resort to the word 'soul,' and that it would be almost impossible to banish it from discourse. The idea of a unique, immaterial human identity may be something we create. Maybe it's a fiction, but it's a fiction without which we cannot do. The question, I suppose, is whether it's immortal or not."

Does he have any suspicions on that score?

"No." He pauses for a moment, lasting not much longer than a breath. "Well, none that I'd be willing to admit to a reporter by trans-Atlantic telephone."