David Lodge - Small World (45 page)

“No,” says Persse. “Who was she?”

“It’s a long story, and I must get my head together for the forum this afternoon. Look, the MLA executive are giving a party tonight, in the penthouse suite. If you wanna go, come along to my room at about ten tonight, OK? Room 956. Ciao!”

An immense audience was gathered in the Grand Ballroom to hear the forum on “The Function of Criticism”. There must have been well over a thousand people sitting on the rows of gilt-painted, plush-upholstered chairs, and hundreds more standing at the back and along the sides of the vast, chandelier-hung room, attracted not only by the interest of the subject and the distinction of the speakers, but also by the rumoured involvement of the event in the matter of the UNESCO Chair. Persse, sitting near the front, and twisting round in his seat to scrutinize the audience for a sign of Angelica, was confronted by a sea of faces turned expectantly towards the platform where the five speakers and their chairman sat, each with a microphone and a glass of water before them. A roar of conversation rose to the gold and white ceiling, until Arthur Kingfisher, lean, dark-eyed, hook-nosed, white-maned, silenced the crowd with a tap of his pencil on his microphone. He introduced the speakers: Philip Swallow, who, Persse noted with surprise, had shaved off his beard, and seemed to regret it, fingering his weak chin with nervous fingers like an amputee groping for a missing limb; Michel Tardieu, pouchy and wrinkled, in a scaly brown leather jacket that was like some extrusion of his own skin; von Turpitz, scowling under his skullcap of pale, limp hair, dressed in a dark business suit and starched shirt; Fulvia Morgana, sensational in black velvet dungarees worn over a long-sleeved tee-shirt of silver lame, her fiery hair lifted from her haughty brow by a black velvet sweatband studded with pearls; Morris Zapp in his grossly checked sports jacket and roll-neck sweater, chewing a fat cigar.

Philip Swallow was the first to speak. He said the function of criticism was to assist in the function of literature itself, which Dr Johnson had famously defined as enabling us better to enjoy life, or better to endure it. The great writers were men and women of exceptional wisdom, insight, and understanding. Their novels, plays and poems were inexhaustible reservoirs of values, ideas, images, which, when properly understood and appreciated, allowed us to live more fully, more finely, more intensely. But literary conventions changed, history changed, language changed, and these treasures too easily became locked away in libraries, covered with dust, neglected and forgotten. It was the job of the critic to unlock the drawers, blow away the dust, bring out the treasures into the light of day. Of course, he needed certain specialist skills to do this: a knowledge of history, a knowledge of philology, of generic convention and textual editing. But above all he needed enthusiasm, the love of books. It was by the demonstration of this enthusiasm in action that the critic forged a bridge between the great writers and the general reader.

Michel Tardieu said that the function of criticism was not to add new interpretations and appreciations of
Hamlet
or
Le Misanthrope
or
Madame Bovary
or
Wuthering Heights
to the hundreds that already existed in print or to the thousands that had been uttered in classrooms and lecture theatres, but to uncover the fundamental laws that enabled such works to be produced and understood. If literary criticism was supposed to be knowledge, it could not be founded on interpretation, since interpretation was endless, subjective, unverifiable, unfalsifiable. What was permanent, reliable, accessible to scientific study, once we ignored the distracting surface of actual texts, were the deep structural principles and binary oppositions that underlay all texts that had ever been written and that ever would be written: paradigm and syntagm, metaphor and metonymy, mimesis and diegesis, stressed and unstressed, subject and object, culture and nature.

Siegfried von Turpitz said that, while he sympathized with the scientific spirit in which his French colleague approached the difficult question of defining the essential function of criticism in both its ontological and teleological aspects, he was obliged to point out that the attempt to derive such a definition from the formal properties of the literary art-object as such was doomed to failure, since such art-objects enjoyed only an as it were virtual existence until they were realized in the mind of a reader. (When he reached the word “reader” he thumped the table with his black-gloved fist.)

Fulvia Morgana said that the function of criticism was to wage undying war on the very concept of “literature” itself, which was nothing more than an instrument of bourgeois hegemony, a fetichistic reification of so-called aesthetic values erected and maintained through an elitist educational system in order to conceal the brutal facts of class oppression under industrial capitalism.

Morris Zapp said more or less what he had said at the Rummidge conference.

While they were speaking, Arthur Kingfisher looked more and more depressed, slumped lower and lower in his chair, and seemed to be almost asleep by the time Morris had finished. He roused himself from this lethargy to ask if there were any questions or comments from the floor. Microphones had been placed at strategic intervals in the aisles to allow members of the vast audience to make themselves heard, and several delegates who had not been able to insinuate themselves into any other session of the convention took this opportunity to deliver prepared diatribes on the function of criticism. The speakers made predictable rejoinders. Kingfisher yawned and glanced at his watch. “I think we have time for one more question,” he said.

Persse was aware of himself, as if he were quite another person, getting to his feet and stepping into the aisle and up to a microphone placed directly under the platform. “I have a question for all the members of the panel,” he said. Von Turpitz glared at him and turned to Kingfisher. “Is this man entitled to speak?” he demanded. “He is not wearing an identification badge.” Arthur Kingfisher brushed the objection aside with a wave of his hand. “What’s your question, young man?” he said.

“I would like to ask each of the speakers,” said Persse, “What follows if everybody agrees with you?” He turned and went back to his seat.

Arthur Kingfisher looked up and down the table to invite a reply. The panel members however avoided his eye. They glanced instead at each other, with grimaces and gesticulations expressive of bafflement and suspicion. “What follows is the Revolution,” Fulvia Morgana was heard to mutter; Philip Swallow, “Is it some sort of trick question?” and von Turpitz, “It is a fool’s question.” A buzz of excited conversation rose from the audience, which Arthur Kingfisher silenced with an amplified tap of his pencil. He leaned forward in his seat and fixed Persse with a beady eye. “The members of the forum don’t seem to understand your question, sir. Could you re-phrase it?”

Persse got to his feet again and padded back to the microphone in a huge, expectant silence. “What I mean is,” he said, “What do you do if everybody agrees with you?”

“Ah.” Arthur Kingfisher flashed a sudden smile that was like sunshine breaking through cloud. His long, olive-complexioned face, worn by study down to the fine bone, peered over the edge of the table at Persse with a keen regard. “That is a very good question. A very interesting question. I do not remember that question being asked before.” He nodded to himself. “You imply, of course, that what matters in the field of critical practice is not truth but difference. If everybody were convinced by your arguments, they would have to do the same as you and then there would be no satisfaction in doing it. To win is to lose the game. Am I right?”

“It sounds plausible,” said Persse from the floor. “I don’t have an answer myself, just the question.”

“And a very good question too,” chuckled Arthur Kingfisher. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, our time is up.”

The room erupted with a storm of applause and excited conversation. People jumped to their feet and began arguing with each other, and those at the back stood on their chairs to get a glimpse of the young man who had asked the question that had confounded the contenders for the UNESCO Chair and roused Arthur Kingfisher from his long lethargy. “Who is he?” was the question now on every tongue. Persse, blushing, dazed, astonished at his own temerity, put his head down and made for the exit. The crowd at the doors parted respectfully to let him through, though some conferees patted his back and shoulders as he passed—gentle, almost timid pats, more like touching for luck, or for a cure, than congratulations.

That afternoon there was a brief but astonishing change in the Manhattan weather, unprecedented in the city’s meteorological history. The icy wind that had been blowing straight from the Arctic down the skyscraper canyons, numbing the faces and freezing the fingers of pedestrians and streetvendors, suddenly dropped, and turned round into the gentlest warm southern breeze. The clouds disappeared and the sun came out. The temperature shot up. The hardpacked dirty snow piled high at the edge of the sidewalks began to thaw and trickle into the gutters. In Central Park squirrels came out of hibernation and lovers held hands without the impediment of gloves. There was a rush on sunglasses at Bloomingdales. People waiting in line for buses smiled at each other, and cab-drivers gave way to private cars at intersections. Members of the MLA Convention leaving the Hilton to walk to the Americana, cringing in anticipation of the cold blast on the other side of the revolving doors, sniffed the warm, limpid air incredulously, threw open their parkas, unwound their scarves and snatched off their woolly hats. Fifty-nine different people consciously misquoted T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker”, declaiming “What is the late December doing/With the disturbance of the spring?” in the hearing of the Americana’s bell captain, to his considerable puzzlement.

In Arthur Kingfisher’s suite at the Hilton, whither he repaired with Ji-Moon Lee to rest after the forum, the central heating was stifling. “I’m going to open the goddam window,” he said. Ji-Moon was doubtful. “We’ll freeze,” she said.

“No, it’s a lovely day. Look—there are people on the sidewalk down there without topcoats.” He struggled with the window fastenings: they were stiff, because seldom used, but eventually he got a pane open. Sweet fresh air gently billowed the net drapes. Arthur Kingfisher took deep breaths down into his lungs. “Hey, how d’you like this? The air is like wine. Come over here and breathe.” Ji-Moon came to his side and he put his arm round her. “You know something? It’s like the halcyon days.”

“What are they, Arthur?”

“A period of calm weather in the middle of winter. The ancients used to call them the halcyon days, when the kingfisher was supposed to hatch its eggs. Remember Milton—’The birds sit brooding on the calmed wave’? The bird was a kingfisher. That’s what ‘halcyon’ means in Greek, Ji-Moon: kingfisher. The halcyon days were kingfisher days. My days. Our days.” Ji-Moon leaned her head against his shoulder and made a small, inarticulate noise of happiness and agreement. He was suddenly filled with an inexpressible tenderness towards her. He took her in his arms and kissed her, pressing her supple slender body against his own.

“Hey,” he whispered as their lips parted. “Can you feel what I feel?”

With tears in her eyes, Ji-Moon smiled and nodded.

Meanwhile, in other rooms, windowless and air-conditioned, the convention ground on remorselessly, and Persse paced the corridors and rode the elevators in search of Angelica, slipping into the back of lectures on “Time in Modern American Poetry” and “Blake’s Conquest of Self” and “Golden Age Spanish Drama”, putting his head round the door of seminars on “The Romantic Rediscovery of the Daemon”, “Speech Act Theory” and “Neoplatonic Iconography”. He was walking away in a state of terminal disappointment from a forum on “The Question of Postmodernism”, when he passed a door to which a handwritten notice hastily scrawled on a sheet of lined notepaper had been thumbtacked. It said: “Ad Hoc Forum on Romance.” He pushed open the door and went in.

And there she was. Sitting behind a table at the far end of the room, reading in a clear, deliberate voice from a sheaf of typewritten pages to an audience of about twenty-five people scattered over the dozen rows of chairs, and to three young men seated beside her at the table. Persse slipped into a seat in the back row. God, how beautiful she was! She wore the severe, scholarly look that he remembered from the lecture-room at Rummidge—heavy, dark-rimmed glasses, her hair drawn back severely into a bun, a tailored jacket and white blouse her only visible clothing. When she glanced up from her script, she seemed to be looking straight at him, and he smiled tentatively, his heart pounding, but she continued without a change of tone or expression. Of course, he recollected, with her reading glasses on he would be just a vague blur to her.

It was some time before Persse became sufficiently calm to attend to what Angelica was saying.

“Jacques Derrida has coined the term `invagination’ to describe the complex relationship between inside and outside in discursive practices. What we think of as the meaning or ‘inside’ of a text is in fact nothing more than its externality folded in to create a pocket which is both secret and therefore desired and at the same time empty and therefore impossible to possess. I want to appropriate this term and apply it, in a very specific sense of my own, to romance. If epic is a phallic genre, which can hardly be denied, and tragedy the genre of castration (we are none of us, I suppose, deceived by the self-blinding of Oedipus as to the true nature of the wound he is impelled to inflict upon himself, or likely to overlook the symbolic equivalence between eyeballs and testicles) then surely there is no doubt that romance is a supremely invaginated mode of narrative.

“Roland Barthes has taught us the close connection between narrative and sexuality, between the pleasure of the body and the `pleasure of the text’, but in spite of his own sexual ambivalence, he developed this analogy in an overly masculine fashion. The pleasure of the classic text, in Barthes’ system, is all foreplay. It consists in the constant titillation and deferred satisfaction of the reader’s curiosity and desire—desire for the solution of enigma, the completion of an action, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice. The paradox of our pleasure in narrative, according to this model, is that while the need to ‘know’ is what impels us through a narrative, the satisfaction of that need brings pleasure to an end, just as in psychosexual life the possession of the Other kills Desire. Epic and tragedy move inexorably to what we call, and by no accident, a ‘climax’—and it is, in terms of the sexual metaphor, an essentially male climax—a single, explosive discharge of accumulated tension.